Fire Emblem: Awakening (Revival)

[Skyblade]

Do you think so? You get to choose a class, equip a couple items as weapons, and maybe select a few secondary skills if you've classed them enough times to fill up the spots (I wasn't able to on my 60 hour playthrough).

But other than that? No armor, accessories, customizing actives and passives or multiclassing. It's really about the same as Shining Force and that was 20 years ago.

This is the "major problem" I mentioned.

There is actually a ton of customization in the game.

But it's hard to get to. Reclassing in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics is easy, where you can change classes freely. In Fire Emblem Awakening, you need to earn levels in each class before you can shift again. So reclassing and recustomizing is slow.

Then too, the Skills are another huge part of customization. And to get them, you need to level up in the various classes. So, again, there's a huge investment to the customization.

And the game itself, especially on the lower difficulties, doesn't really reward this customization. If you don't enjoy it for it's own sake (which I do), or take on the few fights and DLCs that require it (Apotheosis, Future Past, and a couple of the StreetPass Paralogues), you probably aren't going to engage in the customization.

It's why I said that there are almost two different games here. The standard game, with the leveling and combat that we're familiar with from the series, and the endgame, with the all-max-stat characters and variable skill and class load outs.

I'm not sure of the best way to correct this. Perhaps allow class changes to happen more freely (as in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon or Final Fantasy Tactics), and only use Second Seals for reverting levels? Either that, or we need more of the game built to handle the customization that the game allows, at the current pace.

The issue is that being able to easily acquire many of the skills present in this game would completely destroy it in terms of difficulty. To work around this they need to build off of lunatic+ and its broken mechanics to make them work. As in, enemies you face should also have some pretty decent skills to match about what you should have so you dont steamroll everything, but it also shouldnt be so ridiculous that every core strategy simply turns into a turtle-fest.

Actually, allowing free class changing wouldn't change much in terms of abilities. Since you only get new abilities upon leveling up, each character would still only be able to get 4 abilities before hitting the max level and needing to use a Second Seal to reset. One at level 1, one at level 10, one at level 5 promoted, and one at level 15 promoted. Allowing free class changes would just allow more freedom to set up characters for particular fights (or for particular growth bonuses), and more freedom to experiment (which the current system punishes by not letting you revert changes easily).

The staple of FE, that being the permadeath makes things quite difficult to work with. In a game like Disgaea it doesnt need to be afraid of throwing insane enemies at you because of how the character system in that game works. In FE its hard to balance the enemies to be just enough of a threat to kill you if you're stupid, but not so hard as to just permanently kill off your favorite characters in a couple hits (or it turns in to an elite skeleton crew turtle-fest like Lunatic+).

This may make balancing more important, but I don't think it makes balance any harder than most other games. Most Tactical RPGs can kill a character if you're stupid, but very few are unfair about it.

I love the perma death so I dont want to see it gone, but it definitely makes balancing more of a challenge, especially when new mechanics are added to the game. Heck, one could even possibly argue that FE was better off in its more simple times. I'm not sure if I would agree with that notion, but there is definitely some validity there.

No, Fire Emblem was definitely not better off in the older days. I'll point out again: Weapon Weight. We are well rid of the dark ages of the series.

Balance is not a problem because of perma-death, balance is a problem because of the game's other new mechanics. The complete revamping to the Rescue systems, skill systems, class systems, class stats, Support bonuses... There were a lot of changes in this game, and accounting for all of them is not easy.