Talking about Turnwheel vs Casual mode is kind of missing the point. Turnwheel is a compromise between Casual mode and Ironmanning, because there are people who like BOTH not having to miss characters due to unknown factors and RNG stuff, while still having some semblance of strategy. The thing about permadeath in FE is that it's punishing on a dual level; there's the story aspect of it (you lose potential content forever) and there's the tactical aspect of it (you lose combat potential permanently). Casual mode kills both punishment levels equally, but people who advocate for Turnwheeling are usually trying to only get rid of the story punishment of permadeath, but not entirely the tactical aspect of it (that is, you still need to value character life to an extent). Saying that Casual serves that purpose misses the entire midcore audience who is not looking to kill both aspects of perma-death, just one aspect of it. Because, to be frank, it sucks knowing that you're going to miss story content if that's a large part of why you enjoy the game. This is also a big reason why a lot of SRPGs which don't have perma-death recognize that human wave tactics are potentially a problem that may kill gameplay depth, which is why they introduce a replacement system to up player punishment for fallen characters instead (vs FE having to tune player punishment down from perma-death instead). Usually taking the form of limits on redeployment (such as in Unicorn Overlord), some kind of death limit (usually morale systems such as in Valkyria Chronicles), a "will perma-die if you don't take extra actions to save them" idea (think corpse death in Final Fantasy Tactics or rescuing injured allies in Valkyria Chronicles) or a currency cost for unit death (like in Super Robot Wars). Of course, there is an argument that Turnwheel does not serve both masters equally, depending on how it is tuned, and I agree that there is room to tune the balance up or down on it or iterate it. But it's a sliding scale, and to argue that Casual mode serves the same aspects of Turnwheel is to essentially divide up the audience into "casual" and "hardcore", when the reality is that most players exist somewhere in the middle. People have had multiple games to try Casual only as a way to serve all audiences, such as the Awakening/Fates era, and it just doesn't work for how a lot of people want to enjoy Fire Emblem.
Hey thanks for this comment. I think this is the best objection to my view I've seen yet, and I found it very convincing. When I said that casual mode has the benefits of turn rewinding, with none of the disadvantages, I primarily had in mind the second half of 3H where the player has so many rewinds that they probably won't ever lose, and even minor mistakes can be erased. In that sort of environment, where the player can afford to erase any mistake, it does seem to me that the player is experiencing something very close to causal mode. But you are correct that limited turnwheel uses would save players from missing out on support convos, while still encouraging them to value their units so that they don't burn rewinds on naive strategies, and come up with 0 rewinds when they need them the most.
@@lane3574 Yeah, in my opinion, true-permadeath with no recovery options works best in games where story is heavily de-emphasized such as XCOM. FE kind of started that way way back when, but has evolved away from that over time and that means a lot of systems had to have changed to fix it. I think a way to dodge this problem would be to have characters die in combat but not in story (like Azura in FE Fates), but the problem is that FE is kind of known for permadeath and has a bit of a reputation to uphold for it. It also has its own impacts on how that works anyway.
@@ancientspark375 Very well articulated and I strongly agree, most of us are in the middle camp. Indeed VC is one of the best examples here: I could save every time I make an action/end a turn, but that's a big interaction cost I'm not willing to pay. So 90% of the time if I'm restarting it’s a full mission restart, but because of the option of rescuing downed squadmates, I don't need to hit restart every time someone gets downed, which would get very frustrating on some missions and trivialise the difficulty on others. From a mechanical perspective, a great example of a game with limited rewinds is Invisible Inc, which has a lot of RNG elements, procedural levels and is a real cock-up cascade game where one mistake can quickly turn into game over. Having a few do-overs makes that a lot less frustrating and by the end of the game I felt confident enough to not use more than one or two (It's a shame that the game is so short and the ending is absolute garbage).
@@ancientspark375 I think this is a good bridge to another design tension in FE: permadeath means you can't integrate the "mortal" characters too tightly into the main story. Much like the arguments this video makes against the "it's optional" stance (arguments I agree with), permadeath can be said to influence the storytelling regardless of whether you directly engage with it. This is particularly notable in games like Three Houses, where you have deep character relationships that can't really be explored to the fullest because the developers can't be reasonably expected to plan for every possible combination of character recruitments and deaths. The argument from the original video that the possibility of permadeath with strong characters would strengthen the ludonarrative by increasing the weight of their deaths ignores the fact that it also creates a burden on the writers to e.g. account for Sylvain's reactions to Felix's death in various scenarios, lest his nonchalance sabotages the impact of this event.
I can see an argument for you having access to too many divine pulses, or at least it being too easy to get too many, but thats not an argument against them being in the game, thats just an argument for proper game balance. Divine pulses not recharging at all is just going to result in people reseting instead of using the pulse. Imo a better aproach might be you needing to expend other resources to regain charges. Interacting with Sothis in a similar way you do with the student might be a good way to achieve that, expending activity points to recharge the pulses. Another aproach as an easy quickfix would be something like a donation you make at the cathedral recharging the pulses.
i sevearly dissagree about Casual mode giveing the same advantages as turn rewinding. Turn Rewinding is a great learning tool. it's way easier to figure out what went wrong in your plan if you can make changes. Casual mode doesn't incentivise learning how to stratagise better, because your units come back anyway. Rewinding is a crutch that helps you to learn to walk instead of training wheels that do nothing. Casual mode is a compleately different game becuase you aren't Punished for not learning from your mistake.
People already said it but rewind is not the same as casual because casual allows for human wave tactics which rewind doesn't. Rewind just allows you to not have to restart if you screwed up or you betted on RNG and got a bunch of bad rolls. The problrm is that newer games expect you to invest way more into your units then earlier games making them less expendable makimg mot resetting less viable. That and generally less recruitment of units in second half of games like three houses where you literally can't really get more units after the half way point. Also it is useful fot the modern audience because I am 36 not 16 anymore, I don't have time to have to restart an half hour to hour long map anymore
I talk about many of these points in my previous video, but in short I agree with you on all of this. Casual mode definitely has disadvantages and rewinding saves time
I'd always like an undo button in case of a mis-input, but I feel like the more modern games are suffering from design choices that encourage rewinding. Especially FoW and enemies having perfect map vision while the player doesn't. It feels really cheap to lose a unit during a first playthrough because you had no idea what to expect. Maps that combine FoW and Flier spam are the worst example of this.
I know engage also does this, but this has been done in some of the oldest games that don't feature rewind options. The most prominent example is the map arcadia in FE6, which features a bunch of wyverns, dragons that can 1v1 most physical units, priest with status staves and ambush reinforcements, all in a FoW map in a desert.
As I'm writting this, I realise it's a textwall and the most important part is at the end, so feel free to just read that one if you loathe textwalls. The first time I started watching the video, I stopped at the part of the ammo comparison due to how outrageous it is and, as such, I didn't comment on the video directly (only replied to certain comments) because I thought it would be unfair to do it. It feels like saying a game is easy because the tutorial is easy, and I think that's unfair to whoever did the video. I have now watched the entire video, and I think it's fair to make a comment now. First of all, as you said, you played Three Houses in normal first, meaning you had prior knowledge of the chapters when you played maddening. This is really important because of a few reasons: -Same turn reinforcements. Since you had already played normal, you knew where the reinforcements were coming from, even if not the exact turn or trigger. This means you knew which were the risky spots, meaning you didn't need to waste rewinds in deaths to same turn reinforcements from unexpected spots. This can be avoided partially by not making same turn reinforcements a thing (standard reinforcements can still be a problem depending on your positioning if you don't know they're spawning). -You knew the class and skill system. My Byleth wasted several levels in a hybrid class because it was her personal promotion until I realised the growths were bad for what I wanted from her. Swords don't have a supreme class (well, mortal savant, but might aswell just be her personal class then), meaning, again, my Byleth had to spend time learning another weapon if I wanted her to be a supreme class. This means your units were stronger overall than they would have been in a blind playthrough. -Map and enemy composition knowledge. I played CF first, and when I did, I didn't know flyer killing would be such a huge deal. I wasn't prepared for so many strong flyers. In most other Fire Emblem games, peg riders can usually be one rounded by any well trained physical unit (or even oneshot), while wyverns can usually be easily handled with magic. This isn't the case in Three Houses, flyers are strong, very strong, and still as mobile as ever. I needed 2 units to deal with any flyer because I hadn't trained any archers, it had never been a big deal in any of the other FE games, so I expected them to not be either here. I was lucky Annette had flying effectiveness and Lysithea did ludicrous amounts of damage, but my Byleth and Edelgard couldn't one round flyers, and they were my carries. If you think they could, refer to the previous point. My archers were my best units in Engage btw, I did learn from my mistake. I'm assuming you didn't do your first maddening in NG+. If you did, I'm sorry you didn't get to play real maddening (I'm not saying playing maddening after normal is not real maddening, I'm saying that playing it in ng+ is not real maddeging). Now about the casual to rewind comparison: You're more right than I'd like to admit, but I feel like you just overstate how much better designed casual is to rewind because you either haven't played the harder games without rewind or you haven't actually played casual. A big difference you overlooked is simple: you can't throw units at a problem with rewind, you can with casual. In Engage for example, there was a chapter where all of my units except for my armored tank would die in 1 round to a boss if they failed unlikely dodges. I had to plan how to place my units to not have them attacked by that boss while allowing them to fight the strong enemies that came with the boss. If it had been casual, losing a unit in when there's few enemies remaining is essentially the same as no penalty. In oher chapters I had situations where a unit stopped gaining meaningful exp because of overleveling, which, in a casual playthrought, means I can just have that unit do suiccide strategies if that enables an easier chapter. This usually is not that big of a deal in most maps, but it is in the most challenging ones. Both casual mode and rewind are different systems to make the game less punishing, but stating that one is 100% better than the other is just biased. And last, but perhaps the most important of all, you're missing the conext of Three Houses maddening. Maddening wasn't one of the default difficulties, it might not have even been planned. The problem is that, with the addition of rewind, the game balanced around not having it became too easy (it wasn't one of the harder FE games to begin with). This made people complain about it and led to making a difficulty balanced around the rewind. This is really important when talking about rewind in Three Houses and most of the the people who complain about the game balance tend to not know or forget. The rewind mechanic was implemented as something optional without the game balanced around it and people complained about it being too easy, so they had to either remove the rewind (which most players liked as an idea and made game balancing easier) or design the difficulty around it.
Definitely agree on "optional" not meaning "above criticism." It's not the player's job to balance the game. Not to mention, there is a real psychological difference between not doing something, and not being *able* to do something. The former hangs over your head and requires sustained attention, while the latter becomes a non-consideration, leading to very different experiences.
people are too extreme about those things I remember when I posted about a feature in casual mode that few people remembers: permanent mid chapter save files. the response was very negative. People saying that casual are different than classic and other extreme arguments, when my purpose for the post is talking about saving during the middle of the chapter and the feature being locked to casual mode in Fates. After few months, Engage released with mid chapters save on normal and hard mode. Playing Tear Ring Saga, Berwick Saga and Vestaria Saga, I noticed how just implementing rewind is an easy and lazy fix for bad design (3H maddening). I'm fine with Engage because hard mode is challeging enough and show you how the maps works, training the player for maddening on the next run. TRS has 18 uses save staff that allows you to save anytime, and you can get more by getting well protected chests Berwick and Vestaria has mid chapter saves each 5 turns. They don't trivialize the game, but teach the player about their maps. I can say the same about rewind in Engage, but not in 3H. Mistakes in 3H are more punishable than in Engage, because I can use the emblem ring with another units, while in 3H I don't have a trained unit to susbstitute the lost one. It's not like other FE have "unfair" things. FE5 and FE6 have some bullshit here and there, but we can still play them because they were made with mistakes in mind. Of couse you can softlock if you play really bad, but those unfair things aren't cutting our resources, because the game still have tools for the player. What makes me dislike 3H is all the bad designs combined. Sure, we only have our house, some extra students and the church people for run, but the time we spend making them ready for the mid-late game are too big , we can't replace them easily, and the game expect us to have a full trained team on maddening, considering how strong the enemies are. The inflated difficult makes the game too simplistic, it is player phase build with the blow skills and combat arts or enemy phase build with vantage wrath retribution. Played each rout on maddening and noticed the difficulty isn't well done, specially silver snow final map with a bunch of enemies. Verdant Wind is still fine. The rewind being used poorly in the story, unlike echoes. I'm fine with adding rewind in older FE or making them optional like in Engage, because I can still ignore it and play normally. What happened to 3H is all of their designs, while making 3H unique, don't match well with permadeath.
I don't think that casual mode is comparable to playing with rewind. Casual mode is far too forgiving IMO. In casual mode, you can just sacrifice 3-5 of your units against a tough boss or something to pull through. Even if someone had unlimited use of rewind, they still need to find ways to defeat enemies without exposing themselves to too many counter attacks and the like. I know that this is an extreme example, but to grind out supports in Three Houses I just played on easy casual mode and spammed auto battle. Such a "strategy" does not work with classic + rewind.
You've got a good point there - that seems like an advantage rewind has over casual. Overall, I think a very limited use of rewinds, or just making it an option that the player can enable at the difficulty screen would be best.
@@EnigmaticMrL The idea of rewind is to not start over from start every time you mess up. If you get a reward for not using it, you can just as well not have it at all because people will restart the chapter over miss out on the reward.
@@GrandArchPriestOfTheAlgorithm Valid, I can see myself doing that for a gold or item reward, but you could also encourage lower divine pulse usage in small ways like in a new take on the FE7 star ratings system. Or showing how many times you used time rewind on each map next to your turn count after you finish the game. I might even give the player a legendary weapon or lord prf that uses durability to rewind time, making it a resource to manage across an entire play through! You could even add side objectives to get repair material for that weapon/staff/consumable that rewinds time. You can get very creative with it
@GrandArchPriestOfTheAlgorithm You're under the assumption that all people care to get the reward in the first. Some players just want to experience the game and don't care about the reward. Some play the game with reset once. And then play again with a better knowledge of the game, replay to get the reward. Triangle Strategies has something similar if you beat the game without losing a unit, but I never felt the need to reset to get the reward, cuz I just wanted to experience the game normally.
Great video. This is always an interesting discussion when it comes up, there are many nuances to consider for both sides. -It's the dev's responsibility to ensure that the optimal (within reason) way to play their game is also the most fun way to play. Therefore I find it acceptable to include bad minigames and the like that don't interfere with the main game, but the second I need to go fishing to be fully prepared for the upcoming battle, I'm upset. Setting the number of rewinds to a sensible number is a given. So is putting in guardrails, liking instantly saving the game upon death to prevent resetting, and saving the RNG seed to prevent save scumming. -True permadeath ala XCOM has, to my knowledge, never actually been implemented in an FE game, because Lords and MCs cannot be allowed to die. This means even without resetting manually, you can force the game to reset if someone dies by making these key units commit suicide, or failing the mission objective on purpose. Even if we ignore this tactic, the knowledge that certain characters will definitely be alive at the end of the game dispels some of the tension that permadeath brings. Because the Lord/MC are also typically your strongest units, AND the most important characters story wise, this lessens the importance of your other units, and therefore lessens the impact of their deaths. Since FE is narrative driven, it doesn't make sense to continue a playthrough where the Lord/MC is dead, which means for FE to have true permadeath, the game would need to delete your save file if either dies. Are hardcore FE fans ready for that? -Player time and player fun are complicated aspects to weigh against each other. Fire Emblem's characters are core to the experience; if there aren't any whose deaths I find intolerable, then the game is doing something wrong. But this means sometimes permadeath asks players to pay a price for their mistakes that is too high. Instead of rolling with the punches and adapting as intended, they either quit the game or resort to breaking it to get their way. In these cases, permadeath is harming the player experience and immersion, instead of enhancing it. I find a small, non-renewable number of rewinds to be a good middle ground. Punishing the player's mistakes with the nuclear option instantly is excessive, and isn't a good fit for a game whose characters are front and center. -Playing around 1% crits is possible, but tiresome and unintuitive. Generally a 99% bet is a smart one to take, and punishing a player to an extreme degree for this is something I can't get behind. The punishment should fit the crime. Crit rates should be higher and deal less damage, if they're to be present. -Justifying rewinds in-universe is a terrible idea that must never come back. Every single time someone died in a cutscene, the only emotion I felt was confusion and frustration at why Byleth wasn't spamming rewinds. The player should believe that at least in-universe, life and death are hanging in the balance. Ultimately, unmitigated permadeath is a better fit for games in which you're expected to churn through generic units. Fire Emblem's units are unique, named, and an hour+ of support conversations outside of combat. I think permadeath tempered with rewinds is the right choice for the average FE player. That said, I see no reason why an ultra hard mode can't exist. Baldur's Gate 3 has honor mode, which is basically exactly what FE should offer to those looking for a harsher experience.
Personally I think that the turn wheel is a useful tool for teaching players actual strategy. It's like how on most chess simulators it allows the player to go back move by move to determine where they went wrong, and see what would happen if they try something else. I'm bad at visualising far in advance, so it took me a while to learn how to play strategically. My first FE game was Fates, and I just charged through on casual while barely using healers (since they are the only ones with weapon durability). Then trying to replay on classic would get incredibly frustrating and I'd reset tonnes because I made a mistake. Having to go through the whole process of reloading and making all my early moves again could get really annoying, and is definitely something I don't have time for now as a working adult. In contrast, reversing moves can help me see how to improve the formation, change the order of attacks, or take a different route. I agree that there is a question of balancing, but I honestly think that Mila's Turnwheel in Echoes did it well. Start off with only three, and then the others are rewards for exploring dungeons; therefore, while it's easier with more rewinds, the game is designed with an understanding that players will have different numbers. And personally I'm more willing to accept a character death after a few rewinds because it's not just a random RNG moment but having clearly made a mistake
This is a better argument than your last video but still fun policing. If the games supposedly hardest mode is too heavily skewed towards using one specific mechanic, then that's a 100% valid balance issue, not an issue with the feature and isn't an argument for taking it out.
I was with you until you started arguing about the mechanic being a problem even if it was optional. Because it's like playing older fire emblem games but if you use an emulator then the game is too easy because you have the option of save states. Not directly implemented in the game but still a resource that the player could use to trivialize the game. But most don't.
If turn rewinding was optional in the way that Phoenix mode and Casual mode are optional, then this video would not exist. Turn rewinding is different (in 3H anyways) because the game is literally built around the mechanic. Because of this, turn rewinding effects gameplay even if nobody uses it. Iron-man runs on 3H kinda suck because the devs obviously expect the player to use turn divine pulse. I've heard engage is a lot better about this, but I haven't played it so that's why I didn't talk about it here. Also your emulator analogy is flawed for the reason you bring up - emulated save states are an addition to the game made by players, so there's no reason for me to critique it because the original game did not feature them.
@lane3574 it seems like your problem is really with the game design then. Would you have a problem with optional divine pulse if it was in say Conquest or FE10?
@@lane3574 Do you have an opinion on map saves? FE12 is essentially unbeatable on the hardest difficulties without abusing map saves to rig critical hits. Does that mean that they are also a bad design because of that? Or is the reason that the enemies are just so overtuned that the only way to effectively win is by getting lucky? Going even further, most of the FE games on their hardest difficulty aren't realistically beatable without prior knowledge. You accidentally trigger too many wyvern lords to charge you in chapter 3 of FE12? Instant loss. A generic pirate in chapter 1 of FE11 gets a low% critical on you? You have no real way of playing around that. You didn't build your team correctly for the conquest endgame, so you can't clear it in 1-2 turns? Prepare to get slaughtered or even softlocked.
@@FiboSai I think that map saves are a good way to give the player a safety net without giving them too much leeway or opportunity to do things like RNG abuse. To be honest with you, I don't really enjoy playing FE games on their hardest modes. I understand that many people do, and I think that IS should tune the game for people like me and people who crave a steep challenge. I would say that a difficulty mode that requires you to rig critical hits is not properly balanced. Idk if every highest difficulty mode in every FE game is like that (because I haven't played every FE game), but I sure hope they're not.
@@lane3574 Rigging critical hits or skill activations is not strictly necessary for the hardest difficulties. But this is often the easiest an least painful way to beat them. If you don't want to rig crits, you need a very precise setup, which means you have to plan your whole playthrough around getting the required stats, weapons, classes and skills for the endgame. I would even say that at least in FE12, the enemies all having 0 luck is a way to prevent people from getting softlocked. If you didn't know to invest into the right forges, or train the right units in the right classes, you can at least hope to win with a decently reliable critical hit. The point of my post is more to give a different perspective on games with no rewind feature vs. games with one. Rewind gives makes the highest difficulty a lot more forgiving. You don't have to replay the entire chapter if you run into something unexpected. I quit FE12 on lunatic because beating that difficulty requires precise knowledge of enemy AI and when reinforcements show up. I kept getting screwed by enemies suddenly deciding to move towards me, trapping me in an unwinnable situation. A rewind feature is useful to make these difficulties more accessible to players. I'd guess many people wouldn't have finished a 3H maddening run without divine pulse. Whether this is good design is a different question. If rewind features felt mandatory to use on the regular difficulty, I would strongly agree with you that they are partially responsible for the bad gameplay. But on the highest difficulty, which is designed to be played by experienced players, often on a repeat playthrough, I'm not that concerned if they are somewhat encouraged.
Not letting anyone go down is an intended challenge of the game. If it's not shadow dragon, you were never actually intended to accept permadeath. That's why casual mode is a sin that shouldn't have been invented, but rewinding feels fair, especially now that it's being balanced around as of the most recent rendition of Maddening
I think the infinite ammo and the idea of an optional divine pulse is comparing apples to oranges. Infinite ammo makes the game much easier where as divine pulse undos mistakes. Youre still handling the same difficult chapter. Similarly to restarting and replaying chapter up until that point except more instantaneous. A closer comparison would be endless ammo and casual mode imo.
Not so sure about this: playing with divine pulse is not like restarting because you get to attempt each individual turn with the benefit of hindsight, which is easier than playing the chapter again from the start with no rewinds. Obviously infinite ammo is easier than that, but in my hypothetical I didn't say infinite ammo, just an unduly large amount of it. I also think casual mode is different because in casual mode, you can't undo unit deaths within a chapter except by restarting.
@lane3574 true if you have too many rewinds then you can just pick any turn and play with hindsight. But if it was optional and had a more scarce amount then you'd have to be diligent with what turn you reset to otherwise you'd end up with the same outcome. This way it's seems less tedious rather than easier. Also perhaps a better comparison to lots of ammo would be Phoenix mode then. Overall i believe the mechanic should be rebalanced but stick around. Personally some chapters in for example fe6 sacae route would be less frustrating my first playthrough if I was able undo at most like 2 mistakes.
Maybe using a shooting game to compare to fire emblem is a little weird because i feel players would approach having tons of ammo in say resident evil a lot more differently than having divine pulse properly implemented. Like when would I decide that I have used too much ammo? Sorry I'm being 🤓 lmaooo
I have left this under another comment already since it had a good bridge into this, but I'd like to repeat at the top level: one of the big concerns I have regarding permadeath is its interaction with deep characters, and not just in the sense of player FOMO, but rather in its impact on narrative design. Early Fire Emblem narratives didn't afford much screentime to side characters, and so it was easy to build plots that wouldn't be greatly impacted by their deaths. The ludonarrative took precedence over the "curated" written narrative. These days, it is increasingly common for major characters to be "unkillable" even in Classic Mode, because the story can't account for the possibility of their death. Ultimately, this means that side character influence on the main story needs to be minimized because they can't be relied on to be alive at any given moment, which means that their "curated" narrative has to be segregated into limited and static Support Conversations. Yes, you can just add more content to compensate for it, but that creates an even greater pressure on the development team to keep delivering ever more content to keep the world responsive to gameplay events. Meanwhile, leaving things as they are can undermine the impact of unit deaths if you do "choose" to take them, since you can't expect other characters to properly react to them even if, like in the case of the Blue Lions in Three Houses, their character arcs fundamentally revolve around dealing with death. This problem is already prominent in Three Houses in the character endings for Felix and Lysithea. Since the character endings cannot reasonably react to the whole gamut of possible recruitments and deaths, these endings are written to not take other characters into account at all. As a result, out-of-house Felix will always be depressed regardless of how many of his friends also join your army and survive, while Lysithea's own survival is entirely contingent on whether you pair her with one of the characters who can save her, with no regard for whether those characters survive if unpaired. Permadeath impacts Fire Emblem's narrative, regardless of whether the player chooses to engage with it. A different form of "death penalty", like permanent stat reductions, temporary unavailability etc. could be used to reduce this problem without eliminating the impact death has on tactical gameplay. Alternatively, Fire Emblem can embrace the design philosophy of Valkyria Chronicles and make the roster more explicitly two-tiered, with the "minor" characters being fully exposed to permadeath but also more fully disconnected from the main story and characters.
Both videos on this subject are well reasoned and presented. I agree with many of your points. I think a more limited number of DP would add another strategic deminsion to 3H. Before this video though, I never realized how redundant turn rewinding was when considering casual mode. This might change how I play! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and helping to expand my e gagement with these games!
My problem with optional mechanics that reduce the challenge is that, depending on the game, the developers will take into account that the player will utilize those mechanics and end up not taking in consideration those that don't. In the case of Fire Emblem, that means spam ambushes of enemies that spawn at the start of the enemy phase and move right away, killing your units when you had no chance of knowing this was a possibility to begin with. In a casual playthrough that is no big deal, since the player can just rewind the turn, but that also means players that want a more traditional experience get punished for not using the cheat ability! It's a similar problem I have with Hyper Mode in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Enemies become bullet sponges when entering Hyper Mode and deal a crapton of damage, forcing you to use your Hyper Mode as well, but in that mode you cannot engage with the combat's most fun gameplay (switching visors to spot weak points on the enemies and kill them with a well placed shot, for example, because enemy HM disables your visors), you just charge your beam and kill stuff as your HM makes you invincible for 25 seconds and can be reactivated immediately as long as you have Energy Tanks (and given MP3 is plentiful in the health drops department, you'll never run out of Energy Tanks as long as you keep killing). And since most enemies in this game can and WILL enter Hyper Mode, the only way you can defeat them is to either engage in HM yourself and trivialize combat or wait 25 seconds to finally start fighting them and just hope no other enemies enter HM as well). Sure, those mechanics are "Optional", the player can choose to not engage with them if so desired, but in doing so you are being accidentally punished due to the devs overlooking the consequences of not using said mechanics. That's different from the Bonus EXP from FE9 and 10. Now THAT is an optional mechanic you can just ignore if you want to. Your units will get plenty of EXP if they take part in battle, the bonus is mostly used for bringing weaker units up to par, but that can also be done with stat enhancing items, luck in your level ups and the game doesn't punish you for not having a super powerful army by throwing unfairly powerful enemies at you at any point. In fact, FE10's part 4 has the strongest enemies, but they can all be killed by your units with proper planning and give a crapton of EXP per kill to get your weaker ones up to speed (you can even get a class change in those chapters for Tormod, who should be severely underleveled, if you set him up to kill enough enemies in the chapter he's reintroduced). The Megaman Zero 3 series also has optional mechanics that don't detract from the experience. If you want to survive spikes or be rescued from pitfalls, there are Cyber Elves that will do that for you. You need to find them in the levels by killing enemies or exploring, then raise them with Energy Crystals you collect throughout the levels and drop from enemies, which forces you to become accustomed with the gameplay before trivializing the death traps, but once you do, you are rewarded for your efforts. But the game never throws a situation where not having those elves equipped is detrimental or unpassable (like Mega Man X6 and the infamous Jumper part requirement for some of X's armors in the Gate stages), you are never accidentally punished for not engaging with that mechanic to begin with! In fact, you get higher scores if you don't! Now those are examples of good optional mechanics.
To me, a game that requires rewind / saves, would mean the game artificially hides information from the player for cheapshots. This is quiet literally, antithetical to what makes FE good. Plenty cheapshots (ambush spawns, FoW, undisclosed tile gimmicks) can be trivialized using outside guides. Requiring the use of a guide is major evidence that the game in question, is trash.
Do you consider Thracia 776 a trash game as well? Because that should be consistent with this opinion. I'm not intending to single you out, since I don't know your opinion. For all I know, you could dislike this game too, if you have played it at all. But it is unfortunately pretty common to criticize the modern games for certain features, while praising old games despite them having those exact features.
@@FiboSai yup. Additionally, I don't like its maps, the crusader scrolls annoy me and I hate prf weapons and even more so prf staves. FE5 is pretty much tailor made to make me dislike it!
It sounds like most people who commented these things were not actually listening to any of what you were saying. Big of you to address them and not just copy/paste the last third of your previous video, which also answered literally all these same counter arguments.
The biggest issue is why rewind, at least to me, exists. The three games that have it, all have very high difficulty imo (debatable on echoes, but there’s areas where it’s hard) with maddening difficulty being meme tier levels of difficulty, with power building being a necessity to survive. Three houses in particular has a paralogue with a ton of wrath warrior reinforcements that ambush spawn you, only when you get close to the ambush point. Your only two options there are to use a guide to know it’s coming, or flip a coin on unit deletion. If you fail the coin toss you just lost a unit with little actual input on your part. A classic player would restart the game, either because they lost a unit they like, or because the lord was the victim. The same can mostly be said for engage, there are titanically difficult situations the game throws at you. If you’re the type of person who plays maddening, you’re not the person who plays casual. People are going to reset anyways, it’s simply how it is. By implementing a rewind mechanic the developers can make the game harder for the dedicated fans, with it still being a reasonable challenge because of the reinforcement jumpscares being of lower consequence. As you said, maddening is designed with divine pulse in mind, so it’s an essential resource to survive the onslaught while also making the lower difficulties more casual friendly. I’m not saying it’s a good game mechanic, or a perfect solution, but it solves a problem that the players made for themselves while allowing them to make insanely difficult maps for the hardcore players. I agree in a way, the difficulty of older FE being more fun with stakes, but also, I’m never playing Thracia without save states unless it’s a specific challenge because of the bs in that game. So many people play for the characters despite still playing on hard difficulty and with classic, so it’s a way to slap an all purpose blob of flex seal on our own self made issue.
Eh.. I think you're really overstating the difficulty of the games. There is way more room for error in those games than you think there is, even on maddening difficulty. I would say that most of the recent games (on maddening difficulty) fall into the area of being able to be won with garbage tactics if you use an OP build or being able to be won with good tactics with any random assortment of characters/builds, but never really requires both of them at the same time (you can almost always replace the tactics side of the game with having stronger characters and vice versa)..
@@asdfqwerty14587 I strongly disagree with that point, as for three houses, the existence of certain enemy skills makes it difficult for one unit to solo, and for engage, the punishingly specific stat caps in certain classes and minimum one damage (as well as backups) make it borderline impossible.
I agree that the number of resets can get excessive later on. I think there should be fewer divine pulses in general, however I've also never been bothered by their presence. Mostly, I'm glad they're there. I don't necessarily want to play casual mode because that feels like encouraging bad tactics to brute force a map, but I also don't believe that an enemy turning an 8% hit chance with a 2% chance to crit into the death of one of my favorite characters is my "mistake". It's just bad luck, and I don't really want to reset an hour long run because of it. Divine pulse, regardless of anything else, helps facilitate the style of play that I want to enjoy while mitigating the inherent frustrations of it. No matter how you look at it, balance is important, both in terms of the number of rewinds available and in regard to basic mechanics and stage setups. A quality of life feature that is meant to mitigate the unfun frustration that can come from a game featuring random chance is not the core problem at play here. I do agree that it is a mistake to design a game around that feature though. Ideally, I think a Fire Emblem game should be designed from the perspective of not having a turn rewind feature, and then granting a few divine pulses to mitigate frustration. All of that's just my opinion though, and if someone else was in favor of having more divine pulses to facilitate the way they enjoy the game, I couldn't and wouldn't really want to say that's wrong. All the better if they can play the game in a way they enjoy. So it's a balancing act, and it's more complicated than one or two perspectives. If I'm being completly honest though, I feel like Three Houses made the right choice, even if it's not wholly the one I would personally prefer. I think Three Houses did a lot right to help the series reach more people, and I think the Divine Pulse mechanic was a part of that. I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, but overall I think it's a choice that paid off.
for the modern way we have today of creating games to go back to thinking exclusively about perma death/limitated resource could be simply a mere regression of game systems given the fairly complex and faceted design rules that are used today, maybe you meant that + the permadeath you should go back to designing the game where it is expected that you to get ahead you have to have some death on the team. .. and there with the design rules we have today it could be an evolution (This thing I told you even though we had it in a low budjet FE last time was on echos) then the time rewind speech originally even on echos at high difficulty was meant to be used mostly for the stupid crit that was there (in the end it's a mechanique imported from echos but 3h a game designed on that mechanic I would say not at all) I don't want to sound too agressive but it doesn't seem to me you have very clear what it means to design a video game...
For me Darkest Dungeon was such a different experience from Three Houses because it was designed with perma-death baked in. New replacements for each class showed up every week, each character had little personal depth and many flaws and you always had to have a duplicate of the good classes on the bench in case they died in a dungeon, which was frequent and irreversible because of the brutality of the battles and the autosave mechanic. I agree that in the same way that being able to infinitely heal your dungeon crew or rewind their deaths would ruin the tension, Three House's tension is lost because of the rewind system. I've had so many characters die in my Hard Classic run that if I couldn't rewind I would be floored because I have their whole career path mapped out on a Google Sheet and am trying to fill out my compendium for their Support conversations. Still, hearing all of this is making me want to try a Hard Classic no rewinds run for my third playthrough. I feel like it would enhance the organic story telling a lot and make me feel like my gameplay counts.
"All of the advantages that are brought by Turn Rewinding are also brought by Casual mode, but Casual mode has none of the disadvantages of Turn Rewinding." Very much disagree. To me, Classic mode and Casual mode have a very different "feel" to them. Casual Mode is where "I just want to play this game and experience the story." Classic Mode is where "I want a challenge and for my actions to have consequences". Even if I can rewind my turn and do things differently, my actions still have consequences on Classic Mode. That unit still died. I still need to find a way from preventing this from happening. Whereas with Casual Mode, that unit "died", but it doesn't matter. I can still keep going on. There's no punishment. It's "whatever". Classic Mode asks for an additional level of perfection. It's like solving a puzzle. Turn Rewinding just gives you a few hints. I would absolutely accept your fixes however. I'd prefer Less charges per map (like 3 maybe?) but restricted throughout the entire game could work as well.
I will never understand why folks don't understand that Fire Emblem is and always had means to undo mistakes. It's starting over from the beginning of that map. All that turn rewinding does is remove some of the time sink that goes into that and thereby removes frustration. Somewhere along the FE devs finally realized that some players will never like perma-death and that perma-death was honestly holding back the series. Doing a very long map in Radiant Dawn (as an example) just to lose a character and then either accept that or start over sucked. I know there's a hardcore set of FE players that love that, but that's not for everyone. I honestly have only played the earlier games once or twice because of this while I've played all the post Awakening games dozens of times. Turn rewinding is there to lower the time sink, it doesn't trivialize anything. It's not analogous in any way to unlimited ammo. Turn rewinding let's you experiment and be bold without having "mistakes" penalize you with a 30-60 minutes time sink. Turn rewinding allows you to invest in characters both in resources and emotion without having an ambush that you didn't know would occur remove all that investment or force a tedious redo of the map. Turn rewinding doesn't cause the developers to build around it. Playing the Judgral or Tellius games should disabuse anyone of that since many of those unfair mechanics have been around a long time. What turn rewinding does is allow them to have those ambushes and other "unfair" mechanics without the players getting annoyed and giving up on the series. Which let's be honest is what happened before Awakening. Once they provided options, FE became much more successful and a cottage industry of FE hardcore fans have complained ever since. It's simple, if you don't like it, don't use it. Restart a map instead if you don't want to lose a unit. Recognize that not everyone wants to play the game the way you do.
1) I understand that a benefit of turn rewinding is that it lowers time spent - I mention that in this video. That's part of why I say that I'm okay with turn rewinding sticking around as long they don't give you too many uses by the end of the game like in 3H. 2) I never said "unlimited ammo" in this video. I said "so much ammo that combat is trivialized". If you have so many rewinds that any mistake can be erased, then combat has effectively been trivialized. This is what happens by the end of 3H (if you're not on maddening). 3) 3H was absolutely built around divine pulse which is part of why there are no recruits in the second half of the game - they expected the player to rewind every time a unit was lost. 4) I am not a "hardcore" fe player or whatever. I typically play on normal or hard difficulty, and I tend to stay away from the most difficult modes because they are not fun for me. Three Houses was my first strategy game ever. Even with my incredibly low skill level at the time, combat was boring by the end of the game because I could just rewind any mistake. 5) I think those "unfair" mechanics are not somehow forgiven by turn rewinding. Rewinding to prepare for an ambush spawn just wastes time. If ambush spawns or similar mechanics are bad, then they are bad with or without turn rewinding. They should just be removed. 6) I recognize that people don't want to play iron man runs. This is why I explicitly say that I support causal mode, and a modified version of the rewind system. I even support bringing back Phoenix mode for younger players. I am not trying to force people to play through players deaths.
3:38 While I agree that this is a metric that I would use for myself to define "enjoyable" in combat scenarios, there are people who do enjoy games where combat is a core feature AND they are able to set the difficulty to something like 'cinematic.' Conversely, some games have outlandish difficulties where, outside of using every available online resource to go into every scenario over-prepared, a player is unlikely to survive their first (or several) brush-ups with the game, but people do find it enjoyable. One of my friends played DMCV on the easiest difficulty and had a blast just mashing autocomplete combos. My enjoyment of the game came from executing on combos intentionally. I played Stranger of Paradise on the hardest difficulty available at launch and only by consulting the combined experience of people who had played Team Ninja games before was I able to find the fun, but all of the DLC difficulties are beyond me- I can't have fun because, to me, they feel arbitrarily fucked up, grind-dependent, and yeah, just about everything in the game can 2-touch you. Are the people posting maxed out armor sets and build guides just masochists engaging in time-wasting? Maybe, but the easier answer is that they find it fun.
Honestly I feel like FE is in an impossible situation when it comes to death and turn rewinds. I’ve been a resetting person since GBA, it just feels so bad to lose a person especially since you know it was entirely your fault since you put them in a position where they could get killed. But then I end up shooting myself in the foot because there’s not enough weapons/money/upgrades for everyone and I can’t keep track of the entire student body that I moved into my single classroom much less have any idea what class I want them to be 20 levels from now. Maybe something like Genealogy where your entire army eats it halfway through the game to clear the way for a second cast?
I think if Divine Pulses made Byleth lose stats or gain a negative status effect and lasting the duration of a month , that would be cool. Kind of like having PTSD from watching allies fall. Of course it would compound the more it is used
I feel like that's legitimately worse than just taking the reset. Which is the alternative. Ironmanning is an unintended playstyle and I will die on that hill.
I will say as a New player i have found the rewind useful for identifying mistakes and figuring out how to not make those mistakes without having to do a full reload, I do believe that it would be reasonable to add a toggle for the rewind like Classic vs Casual to hard disable it or like you said limit the rewinds to ease new players into the game without it becoming a crutch.
I appreciate your well-articulated stance, but I disagree with your conclusion that casual mode still has consequences that keep the game engaging like classic + rewind: if you can throw your units away but get them back next chapter, that massively affects gameplay choices. Rewind is just a shortcut for resetting the chapter on death, which is what any classic enjoyer has done many times when a favorite character dies. I feel that gameplay being balanced around rewind meant that the devs could balance around forcing the player to replan multiple times for the same map. Its an answer to having the entire map be visible from turn 1 trivializing the strategic load of the game, which becomes more of a probability as freedom to manipulate your character strengths grows (reclassing etc).
Rewind is mandatory if permadeath is a thing. There should only be a "real" difficulty that is a developers intent, no casual easy etc, and a ng+ lunatic difficulty or whatever that becomes almost unfair. If you want ironman just don't use rewind. Reminds me when I played the piece of shit that is called radiant dawn and accidentally did a wrong move after a 50minute map and had to reload because I wanted to use that unit. Engage did it well, a limited amount of rewinds per map (where as 10 is too much if you do paralogues). If you were to only do the main chapters, no DLC stuff or bonuses used via mods, 10 rewinds becomes almost necessary if you avoid the cheesiest of strategies. That's what a ng+ difficulty should look like.
Note that I didn't see the original video, I'm only responding to this one. I 100% agree that something being optional doesn't mean it's above criticism...but that's about where it ends. I think turn rewinds are the best "forgiveness" mechanic the series has ever had, I far prefer it to casual mode, and it's the only reason I continue to play classic, despite that I've been with the series for 20 years. The only issue I have is that I do think the amount should be lowered on higher difficulties. I find it strange that you list losing a unit for the rest of a map as an "advantage" for casual mode. Like, I think I get what you mean by it, but that's not an advantage to me, that's a disadvantage, and a big one. You miss out not only on exp, but also support points. There's one important factor to me, and it's the true value of classic mode: classic incentivizes the player to not lose units (this is done in FE via permadeath, though it doesn't need to be that). Turn rewinding keeps that incentivization intact far better than casual mode does, because I still have the potential of losing units permanently without the fear that it'll irreversibly happen seemingly out of nowhere. I still have to clear the map with all my units alive.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Losing units on casual is a disadvantage for the player, of course. It's not like the game gets easier as you lose more units, as you pointed out. I should have been more explicit about this in the video, but I was trying to compare casual mode to the end game of 3H where you have around 14 pulses. By that point in the game (if the player is not on maddening, anyways) it's very unlikely the player will ever lose a unit, because they have enough pulses to erase even the most minor mistakes. At this point in the game, I felt myself becoming bored with the combat, because it didn't have any stakes (bear in mind that 3H was my first ever strategy game, I don't think that I felt this way because I was a seasoned player or something like that). When I compare that sort of context to casual, they seem pretty similar. If you're just going to rewind away every mistake, you're basically playing casual, except at least on casual mode (with no rewinds) there is a chance you'll have to complete the map without a unit, which encourages you to keep units alive. I'm totally with you on the merits of classic, and I think you're right that rewinds don't have to erase the player's incentive to keep units alive.
@@lane3574 I also found Three Houses combat boring, but for me that's just because Three Houses has boring combat, not because of rewind (fwiw I don't like Three Houses, it's one of my lower rated FEs). Engage has a static ten rewinds per map and combat in that game is still really fun.
While I fundamentally agree with the idea that optionality does not exempt something from criticism, I think rewind systems in FE isn't a good example of the idea. I would rather a rewind system exist than needing to reset the whole map when I take a gamble with a Lord and lose, or if I lose too many units to still feel satisfied with a map clear (I may play Casual, but that doesn't mean it's just a Zerg Rush to me!). If it really bothers you so much and you actually like wasting the time resetting and repeating the same actions that worked up to that point, just don't use rewind features! There is literally no fundamental difference to gameplay between using it and not using it outside of how much time I have to commit to redoing shit, which is very much something that _should_ be up to player preference! Where I might instead see your argument is a case like Pokemon BDSP. In those games, what many would term "the affection bonuses" due to the name of the old mechanic these bonuses were originally tied to, activating in battle was, technically, entirely optional on the player's part! Where that started to fall apart, however, was the fact that it's rendition of having Pokemon follow you, which had been a long-desired feature to return in the series, would allow those bonuses to start activating if you used it enough, so if you truly wanted to refrain from those bonus effects in battle, you had to also refrain from a fan-favorite feature in order to do so. That's more of something to cry foul over.
I would like it if the game offered some kind of option like to either take Divine Pulses as a new power OR give all allies something like a 20% bonus to all stats forever. Then you could do a Classic run where your units' strength compensates somewhat for your mistakes but if you make a bad one it's irreversible.
I kinda get the point of it preventing misclicks, but if turnwheel only undoes the last move or two on this player phase, it can cover that without beign too strong (Although def could still be abused to check if something hits, crits etc...) and like accesibilty options exist, let me opt in to turnwheel and how potent I want turnwheel to be myself, If it is designed as an accesibilty option, it should not be expected to be used as part of the core experience.
I had a gun idea about this once, so listen. What if using DP cost a ressource? Or more specifically, you had to pay Gold every time you used it? Introducing Anna's Turnwheel! For just 2.000 Gold you can rewind time! Better be careful though, that money could go toward forges and stat boosters otherwise! Of course, this assumes that the ressource spent, in my idea Gold, actually has some kind of other value. The specific numbers would have to be worked out in game around whatever specific economy the game has, but the point is that this would discourage spamming Divine Pulse while still giving the option to do it if you need to. Heck, you can even adjust the numbers on different difficulties. Maybe it doesn't cost much on Normal Mode, but on Maddening Mode you better save up!
I think this is another great idea, so thanks for your comment. Anything that limits the amount of rewinds the player has access to is probably going to make the game more fun, and tying it to gold seems like a simple way to make rewinds accessible while rewarding players who forgo rewinding. There seem to be a lot of ways to make turnwheel more tactical, and I'll be curious to see if Intelligent Systems implements any of the fanbase's ideas!
I dont think it being optional is equating it to being good, i also dont think DP being implemented is causing balancing issues, it really helps with higher difficulties especially for a game where RNG can screw you over. Even if it was not in the game people would simply save scum which never makes for a good experience. Almost every time this argument is brought up its by veteran players who have isssues wirh a mechanic that is not forced but an optional aid which honestly suits this kind of gameplay not to mention it makes it easier for newer and casual players to enjoy. Optional does not equate to good but it doesn't equate to bad either.
your last video was only controversial with non-fans of fire emblem , this is what happens when you don't gatekeep the franchise's core defining feature has all but been completely removed to appeal to non-fans of the game , have you figured out yet that trying to a appease these casuals is a exercise in futility?.... and i've never played a fireemblem game....
i'm someone who thinks challenge is the core of gaming. i'm not saying that every game needs to be Dark Soul's level of hard but they should have some degree of challenge to overcome because that is a big part of what makes games fun. on the subject of turn rewinding i wasn't sure what to make of it at first but overtime i came to the conclusion that it trivializes too much of the challenge. so i believe it needs to be either nerfed or removed. now as for your True Classic mode idea, i think it's a terrible one. i do think resetting should be discouraged but not in a way that trivializes the consequences of a character's HP dropping to 0. with casual mode if a character falls at the start of a chapter they'll miss out on experience which becomes less and less of a consequences as the chapter progresses. at the same time classic is very punishing and thus alienating for anyone but the more hardcore players. this True Classic mode would only be appealing to the absolute most hardcore of the fanbase, the about 3% of the fanbase that already do ironman runs. what would they need of a mode that forces ironman when they already do that with just the regular classic mode. with so few people that this could appeal to and the fact they can already achieve it with the currently existing game mechanics it would be just a waste of time and effort on the developers to make this. instead what i would do is add a new mode called Cleric mode. the way this would work is that when characters fall in battle they are sent to a new area in the base camp called the Clinic. the player then has to spend gold to bring them back. with this there's an incentive to strategize well to prevent characters from falling since you can't just get them back for free but there's also an incentive to not reset since there is still a means to get them back.
I fully agree I had the same argument and raised very similar points. I honestly don’t know why this is controversial. It would be fine if this was an easy mode feature that you could turn on at the start of the game and the game wasn’t balanced around it. But the way it is it actively makes the game less fun and challenging and encourages bad design
Three Houses just kinda sucks interms of this, completely outside of rewind existing. If you steamroll the game by taking advantage of NG+ or the cheeses, then you don't need it. If you are stugglingm it does not particularly save you. Of course, the rewind itself kinda bothers me anyways. Unlike Echoes, your game over-unit dying is not ripperoni, you are pushed into the menu by default. And of course, whatever they were smoking with Maddening Rogues. Edit: Also that the plot would be straight up be better without it.
My first time i beating Three Houses i played on Hardmode and in the last battle i beat the last map without loosing one unit just with zero pulses left.🙈 I proofed it, you can run out of rewinds xD But i have to say, i played the game not as intended i think and switched to much students and build them not correct as i should and thats why they had trouble to get not 1-Hit KO and stuff. I love Three Houses but compared to other FEs it´s sandbox-"Build your Characters like you want" was "too complicated" for me, without looking into guides or something else. Also i collected all students and switched them often, so that i was ending up with not useless, but to weak charakters i guess. I think without the wheel i had not finished the game, yet. But it was still fun because with my useless(er) students i was in a time travel loop situtation sometimes. I could rewind one turn and try different things and had a more disastreous outcome or the same (how ever). Then i tried to find the greater mistake in my turns before this mess and why i ended up that way and so on. I know that you can build unbelievable strong charakters in Three Houses and i think that if you (can) do you don´t need the rewind function, but for everyone else it feels right that it is part of the game. I see also why it is useful in Shadows of Valentia, because if you use the AI orders to speed things up, it could get you in trouble while you just do a little grinding or just killing the spawning enemy troups in the overworld on your way. In Engage, well i played it also in hard mode and sometimes it feels a little unfair especialy in skirmish maps against spawning armies. I didn´t need it in Awakening, Fates (any) and Geneology of the Holy War or Blazing Blade (which are all fire emblems i played so far), even if i reset my games and start the map anew or load the autosave file in FE4... so it´s not that i would miss it if future FEs not using a rewind tool.
Your previous video did come off as an angry rant about the mechanic ruining the series and by your words in both that and this video, even if it's not your intention, it does come off as you wanting people to play the series in the way you like. Which is definitely not going to happen, 3 houses was Awakening 2.0, its impact on the series' sales is too big to be ignored (yes I know Echoes introduced rewinding first but it didn't have the big boom as 3h) Instead of forcing every player to minimize the uses of the mechanic with downright cruel methods (like the rewinds uses not refreshing for the entire game), IS could do something pretty cool, an arcane and apparently incomprehensible technique called: reward players that play well. Here's what I mean In Tactics Ogre Reborn there is an uber turn rewinding which is infinite. However as the game goes on, there are secondary missions which ask you not to rewind and that happens in the hard dungeons or the hard story fights. One of the hardest story fight to complete without KOed units nor rewinding offers you a staff that restores 100 MP per use should you manage to win without the rewind. Sometimes you get cool equipment, sometimes stat boosters and so on, basically the game pushes people to improve not by sticking to ancient and outdated NES rules but by actually making people want to play better.
I think we need casual mode removed instead of rewinds. The lowest difficulties are extremely easy nowadays to matter and rewinds would be enough for unfortunate outcomes. Note that I would rather not have any and have a game designed around not having it. To let you know, Engage lowest difficulty have infinite rewinds, which is offensive, and very few maps without it. It's true the amount of maps I had to reset, not just rewind, is a 1 digit number, the same goes for 3Houses but I had much more previous experience with it. I highly doubt, however, I'd used many unreliable strategies to consider rewinds a cheat mechanic like Casual would give me.
"Note that I would rather not have any and have a game designed around not having it." The problem with this, is that you'd have to remove RNG from the game for this to work, otherwise, bad luck is always a factor that can force you to reset. About the lowest difficulty having infinite rewinds: The easiest difficulty setting in a game is rarely suposed to be a challenge in any game. I'm not exactly sure what says in engage specifically, but in most FE games, the easy difficulty is described along the lines of: "intended for players new to Fire Emblem". If it was your first game and you got baited into playing it in easy, then I'm sorry, otherwise, the game is intended to be played in normal or above for anyone who has played FE before.
Infinite rewinds is insane lol. I think that a small number of rewinds per map (1-3) is definitely harder than casual overall. When it comes to the late game in 3H where you have 14-16 pulses, I do think the player is basically playing something close to casual mode at that point (if they're not on maddening, anyways).
@@hillnor6812 I appreciate your answer/reading this comment. I used the "not design around it" because it was what the author of the video used. I had trouble understanding this part and would be subjective the amount of turnwheels acceptable. There are other ways to make unfortunate outcomes not that punishing, giving the player plenty of deployment slots so they can have more back up units in case some attacks missed would be a way. As for Engage, I still believe the lowest difficulty is a joke. The intermediate difficulty should have been the easy mode, enemies are still weaker than your units, even without emblems, until very late in the game. It would start teaching the player the basic threat that is sending a unit to a bunch of enemies. Engage isn't the first one doing this, 3 Houses and Awakening suffer the same, though Hard mode Awakening actually have strong enemies. For the record, I should say that my Experience with Engage was maddening first, easy second, both without the Well update.
@@ghable23 "There are other ways to make unfortunate outcomes not that punishing, giving the player plenty of deployment slots so they can have more back up units in case some attacks missed would be a way." More deployement slots aren't always good, you don't want your experience too spread and having weaker units that you have to protect can be a liability (I mean, you could let them die, but in modern games you don't get so many replacements). Anyway, when I meant bad luck, I didn't mean player phase as much as I meant enemy phase. Sometimes a unit gets hit 3 times in a row by 20% hit and even one of those unlikely hits crits (even with 30% crit, having to get the hit roll first and then the crit roll is really unlikely) and they die. Some people will tell you that you should account for that possibility, but you gotta draw the line of "basically impossible" at some point, otherwise playing becomes a nightmare. Some will tell you to just let the unit die and continue playing, but no matter how hard I tried, the game wouldn't let me continue without Alear... But the important part of the wheel imo isn't even that, you could calculate every move beforehand and make sure your chances to die are low or nonexistant, not needing the wheel for the most part and turning the game into a slog. The best part about the wheel, is that it encourages you to play agressively, be active on the map instead of turtling and waiting for things to be safe. I still remember the first time I did RD on the hardest difficulty, having to make sure no unit was in range of enough enemies to die and pray that those who were would dodge, it was slow and painful. Maybe RD is not the best example as part of the slog is the fact that you don't get to see enemy movement and have to count squares, but the fact is the same, not having to reset every time things go wrong, opens up to other playstyles.
@@lane3574 How do you get that many charges? It's 3 starting, +3 from canyon paralogue +4 from statues and I think that the chapter of kronya gives another 3 for a total of 13. It may seem like too many, but I think they probably assumed you wouldn't get them all (considering only 6 are mandatory to get). Either way, I only played on maddening and, if they wanted you to be able to beat the game blind with same turn reinforcements on first try, they clearly weren't too many. If the intention was to force restarts so that you had to manage the pulses, then yes, you had too many.
You have redeemed yourself in my eyes since that last video. I can see where your points are coming from. I still disagree though. I'm not sure of an exact ratio, but I'd almost be willing to bet that it is close to 2:1 or higher on the side of more casual compared to those wanting the hardest challenges. As long as Fire Emblem can make the turn rewinding fit in story wise I never want to see it gone. Unless they bring back map save points like in Mystery of the Emblem or Shadow Dragon as examples.
Never played Three Houses, but if the final map of a particular route is ruthless and very hard to do deathless...why does it matter? There are no more levels to gain, no leftover supports, the game is finished afterwards, no?
It's not just that particular map - I was just using that as an example of how certain sections of the game clearly assume the player is going to use divine pulse. People say divine pulse doesn't effect the game if you don't use it, but when the game is built around it's use, that's just false. Intelligent Systems knew that players would use divine pulse, and that changes the entire approach to level design. If divine pulse was just an afterthought that got slapped onto an FE game at the last minute, then it's inclusion would really just be optional. That is not what happened with 3H.
The huge number of divine pulses is a problem for sure. By the time I was finished with 3H, I had definitely decided you got too many uses. But I wasn't sure if not using it at all made the game better, for the reasons you already stated: it seemed like some maps were balanced on the assumption that you could rewind. So I thought, what is the most fun amount of divine pulses to limit myself to? I didn't come up with a good answer, because I'm not a game designer and I also don't have time to play through the game several more times to see how different numbers feel. If the devs want to include rewinds, then finding the number of rewinds that feels fair without being too generous is also something they should do, and it doesn't seem like they really tried. It seems like they wanted to make sure you had so many that you were unlikely to ever restart a map.
This is the EXACT experience I had playing 3H. Some people have suggested that you will only have this experience if you're a seasoned player, but I don't think so. 3H was actually the first strategy game I ever beat, and even I felt like the amount of divine pulses was overkill.
Good analogy with the ammo - if all consumables (healing items, weapons, ammo etc) were unlimited, it should be the same as having rewinds because they are still optional.
Making it cost something and lowering the amount you get based on difficulty totally makes sense. It keeps in line with the tactical/strategic mindset you need to develop for these games while providing a generous mechanic for newer players to learn that mindset in a tangible way.
Turn rewinds are just a crutch for Fire Emblem's janky crit and permadeath mechanics. So many other games have handled permadeath better like XCOM and Valkyria Chronicles, but Fire Emblem is still relying on cheaply one-shotting/one-turning your characters without giving you an opportunity to respond or recover.
hello, I am unfimilar with fire emblem except for the nintendo comics. I agree optional is not an excuse because handful of games had paid cosmetics and the justification was its optional. The thing is that the choice is still there. I am also planning on getting into fire emblem.
I completely agree. I'd also like to add that rewinding time is an insanely powerful ability canonically, and it is affecting the story heavily imo. The last two protagonists were literal deities. I think you can't have a low to the ground, fallen prince or a ragtag mercenary anymore that can just rewind time like this, but maybe I'm wrong cuz I guess Echoes did it (never played echoes)
Too many pulses is a strawman argument. Most people who like pulses don't like 3H maddening's number of pulses, and the number of pulses wouldn't be too much if every map is AM endgame level difficulty.
I don't think you know what a strawman argument is. A strawman argument is where you intentionally misrepresent another person's argument in order to make it appear weaker than it really is. The claim that there are too many pulses in 3H is MY claim - by definition it is not a straw man argument because it's not a representation of somebody else's argument. If you disagree fine - I'm not straw-manning anyone's argument.
@@lane3574 You are addressing the other side by attacking a less-defensible position the other side is not making, therefore a strawman. It would not be a strawman if this is not a response video.
@@lane3574 I think the misunderstanding here is nothing you say in a response will be viewed as "just your opinion" and not addressing the other side. Imagine a isreal guy say "antisemitism bad" when addressing protestors. It doesn't mean the decent opinion described by the two words, it means the protestors are antisemitic.
@@mintx1720 In claiming that there are too many pulses in 3H, I am arguing for my own position. If I am correct, then the view that "the amount of pulses in 3H is fine" is false. In this sense, I am indirectly attacking "the other side". Even if my position is wrong - even if it's false that there are too many pulses in 3H - I would not be committing the strawman fallacy. In order to commit the strawman fallacy, you have to MISrepresent ANOTHER person's argument. In uttering the sentence "there are too many pulses in 3H" I am not representing somebody else's argument. You may find my position weak, but that does not mean I am committing the strawman fallacy. In the specific section of the video where I claim that 3H has too many pulses, I don't attack a "less defensible position". I attack the very position that my opponents hold - that there are NOT to many pulses in 3H.
Casual or classic mode, getting a game over and having to restart an entire map if a low percent crit or miss happens to a main lord is bad game design. Engage limited time pulses more than three houses and maddening engage will often have people burning through several time pulses if its classic mode on a multitude of maps. If you think times pulse removes any challenge in fire emblem because there are "too many of them" then you definitely haven't played maddening classic of engage. People like the challenge of classic mode while not being harsh enough to restarting an entire map if some unlucky rng happening. Arguing for less rewinds is much more reasonable than removing them all together but removing them entirely is just a negative for game designers, casual players, and players looking for a challenge. Time pulse also allows for more challening maps to be done without frustrating the player into constantly resetting hours of progress. Game devs can feel at ease knowing that they can increase the skill ceiling with harder maps for veterans while making the barrier to entry easier for newer players. Limiting rewinds is reasonable but removing them entirely is nonsensical. Personally though I think the amount of rewinds is perfect for higher difficulties in engage spefically.
"If you think this, then you definitely haven't played engage" - yeah that's because I haven't played engage and I say that in the first minute of the video. I explicitly stated that my comments are limited to three houses.
@@lane3574ill admit I did make a mistake forgetting what you mentioned at the start regarding not playing engage, but the problem is that you argue for removing turnwheels in future fire emblem games despite not playing other fe games in which the wheel better implemented. My prior points about reseting an hours worth of progress if your main lord dies to a low percent crit or miss being bad game design still stands and its also still true that casuals, veterans, and game designers all benefit from turnwheel, the reasons why being highlighted in my prior comment.
@@Cayden.1This might seem nitpicking, but my exact words at the end of the video were that I want rewinding to be "removed or de-emphasized" and that if future games feature rewinding, I would be okay with that as long as "iron man runs are viable" and the game isn't designed around turn rewinding as a mechanic. I understand that many like turn rewinding, and so I would be okay with keeping them around as long as some changes are made.
@@lane3574 that is fair to want iron man modes to stay valid. Personally i think a critique video about a gameplay mechanic affecting future entries should have up to date experiences. Your suggestions about how to adjust the turnwheel the game more friendly could've been addressed in engage. Its like making a video titled "dragon types are ruining pokemon" and not playing the entries with fairy types, the criticms of dragons were already addressed in those pokemon games not played just like your critisms of the turnwheel could've already been addressed in engage. For example, you mentioning that turnwheel makes some fire emblem maps not iron man friendly, I do agree that Three Houses is not iron man friendly. For half the game you literally cannot recruit anyone, meaning if you lose any student both early game, mid game, or end game, the game becomes disastrous to complete, especially since 3 houses maddening has ambush spawns. Maybe intelligent systems did this deliberately since most people can rewind to save them? Maybe not, no one but them knows for certain but lets pretend that's their rarionale. Intelligent systems then fixed that issue of the fire emblem game not being iron man friendly by making recruitment more classic (recruiting new units every few chapters like in the older titles) in terms of structure. Through this,Intelligent systems fixed the iron man viability problem caused by the turnwheel just like game freak addressed the issue of dragon type being overcentralizing by adding the fairy type. Both of these topics of critism become harder to argue for if you are not up to date since your problems could've been addressed in the latest entry.
There is never a circumstance in which something optional that may improve some players' experience is ever a bad thing. It _literally_ does nothing if you don't use it. If it is _truly_ optional, as in if all of the game's challenges can be reasoned out on the first go and don't force the player to undergo trial-and-error to find a viable solution, then they _cannot_ be a bad thing because they don't prevent the game from doing anything or force the player to engage with anything that they don't want to.
I just disagree that (in 3H anyways) it does nothing if you don't use. I understand that many players like the turnwheeel (even I enjoyed it on my first playthrough of 3H because I was new to the series and scared to death of softlocking myself). That's why I say at the end of the video that as long as future games aren't built around the use of turn rewinding, I'll be happy.
I'll say it again i think the turn rewind should be very stingy like 3 uses at most though I'll also say it again i want the save point system from shadow dragon and new mystery instead of the turn wheel.
If fire emblem was like unicorn overlord, where there is no luck involved, I would agree. But so many times, my unit is killed by a 1% critical or misses two 90% + in a row. I hate losing to awful rng, and modern fe games make permadeath so much more awful than older titles. So, the optional turn wheel is welcome.
I think rewinds encourage a much more aggressive and sloppy play style. You don’t need to think as much about positioning or strategy if failure just lets you try again for free.
I have not seen the OG, but only 4 min in and this is one of the worst videos about this topic I have ever seen. The false equivalence of getting infinite ammo and turn rewind in a game where ammo literally exist in weapon durability is laufable and showcaes how this argument wasnt though out at all. For not talking the ability to only go back means its basically a fast reset where you skip the actions you would have perform in the exact same way. Turn whells makes the game less punishing but thats because the punishment it removes is tedium. Turn whell is more than just optional, Its not a part of the game core combat/movement system like Ammo is. An actual equivalent would be if a survival horror allow you to return to a previus part of level when you make a mistake. *Which totally doesnt sound awfully similar to automatic save points.* Also saying Maddening can only be beaten without rewind by elite players is a mayor underselling of the avarage player skill levels and the tools 3Hs gives to the player to trivialise most maps. Edit: I got to the 6 min mark, Im losing my shit over how bad this is. I find comical you compare casual mode and turn whell, when the latter only allows to return to a player a point they can archieve without it and casual mode, a mode that removes the main punishment of losing units. Which enables new strategys in sacrifises that break the balance of the game since losing units is the main way of negatively imoacting the player in FE. Its like saying Checkpoints in a Mario game should be remove because Assist mode does its job better anyway. Edit2: The fact you mention casual mode "punishes" you because you have to play the map without the unit yet Turn Whell doesnt despite it literally undoing your progress by definition. Edit3: Your "fixes" are terrible, finite Turn whells just incentivises the player to straight up reset rather than using it. And giving them less charges just makes the tedium mitigation lesser. This is one of the worst and funniest videos about this topic I have seen.
I watched my video again to make sure - I did not say "infinite ammo" in this video. I said "so much ammo that combat is trivialized". I'm not sure where you got "infinite ammo" from. In comparing a finite amount of ammo to divine pulse, I am comparing two finite resources. You can run out of both, and you can willfully restrict your use of both. A game can give you too much of a powerful resource. That's why getting more pulses costs renown - it's a substantial upgrade to the player's arsenal. My issue is that by the second half of the game, the player has too many pulses. 3H was the first strategy game I ever completed and even I felt like I had too many pulses by the end of the game. Any mistake I made could just be undone. Turn rewinding does more than just allow the player to skip rewinding: it is so abundant and reliable that there is little to no tactical consideration about when it is used. As soon as a mistake occurs, you just hit the rewind button. Because you have so many of them, and because they recharge after each battle, there's no reason for the player to conserve their uses, which means that even minor mistakes can be erased. This allows the player to employ very risky strategies with little thought, because there is no consequence if things don't pan out the way you wanted them to. It is absolutely fair to compare rewinding to ammo - they are both finite resources the player can use to overcome challenges. I have no idea how ammo could be part of the "core gameplay", yet rewind could not be. Rewinding is literally more powerful than ammo, and your own comparison between ammo and durability shows that. A new rewind is more powerful than any added durability to a weapon. In any case, you're wrong that rewinding is not a part of the "core game". Three Houses was clearly designed with resetting in mind, hence no recruits in the second half of the game, and certain missions that are absolutely brutal with no rewinds, as well as specific encounters in missions, like the ambush spawns in mission 5, that clearly call for the player to rewind. Many other people that like rewinding a lot more than me have pointed this out, like Adam with FED. As far as auto-save features go, there are several differences between those and divine pulse: 1. The player chooses when to use divine pulse, whereas auto-saves are placed by the developer. This automatically makes rewinds more powerful, because they let the player choose which mistakes to erase and when. This is part of why emulator save states are more powerful than in game save-states. 2. Action and survival horror games have much stricter failure states than FE - if the player-character dies, it's game over. FE lets the player control many characters, and most of them are not essential to the story, so a character death is not necessarily a game over. Auto-saves are welcome in many survival horror, and action games for this reason. The lack of auto-saves in FE creates tension, because your mistakes may have long-term consequences. 3. If you think that auto-saves are truly equivalent to rewinds, then you should be okay with giving the player infinite rewinds, because there is no limit to how many times the player can reload an auto-save. Something tells me that most players would be puzzled by this decision. Infinite rewinds would clearly be overkill. I am not underselling the average player's skill at all. Adam with FED, a very skilled FE player, tried for a very long time to get a successful iron-man no-rewind run if 3H on maddening, and he said that it was absolutely miserable - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_6evqWqbIL0.htmlsi=37t0bPnwWhayzPQE (around 18:32). He even questions if it's optional on that difficulty, at least in certain chapters. This is coming from a guy who enjoys challenging runs and loves lunatic reverse. Regarding casual mode - if you're just going to rewind any time a unit dies anyways, I really don't see how classic with rewinds is any harder than causal (unless you're on maddening, of course). Rewind alao enables cheap and goofy strategies like RNG abuse. In my last video, one of my main criticisms of both rewinding and causal mode is that they enable these goofy strategies. I think perma-death works against these, but perma-death is basically a formality at this point, considering he amount of rewinds we're given. Having to replay a turn with the benefit of hindsight is not a "punishment" because you lose progress- it's a benefit because you have a much higher chance of success and the time loss is insignificant. A finite turn wheel would be a good fix as long as it is stocked with the proper amount of uses. As long as the player can use it at least a couple of times each map, then rewinding would be preferred to resetting because of time loss disparity, but the player would be encouraged to be diligent in their use of rewinds because they could run out. If the game have the player 50 rewinds up front, I seriously doubt players would just reset every time something went awry.
@@lane3574 1. "Infinite" and "so much combat can be trivialise" are a superfluous diference in this conversation. Both indicate the player will never run out without trying. 2. Turn whell is not a resource in the games economy, it doesnt alter combat or gold or any of these systems. What is does is preventing the player for having to redo the entire map if they make 1 mistake. Because here is the problem with your entire argument, if your strategy is fundamentally flaw, turn well will never make it work since you are just walking into the same lose state. Turn whell makes a dif when the lose state was cause by a singular action, which in a context without it results in the player redoing everything the exact same way. This is why turn whell just cuts tedium, it doesnt make bad strategys work, it prevents small mistakes or missclicks in strategys that work from sending the player into repeating a lot of their actions. 3."In any case, you're wrong that rewinding is not a part of the "core game". Three Houses was clearly designed with resetting in mind" Ambush spawms, traps and perma death have been in the series since forever and their apereance in 3Hs arent a result of Turn whell. Its more accurate that turn whell was created to make this mecanics less punishing on the player while still using them because they are game design crutches IS likes to fall back on. The lack of recruitable units was clearly a result of the school setting requiring a mostly trainable units rather than a design decision cause by turn whell since this isnt the case in the next game which has even more liberal use of turnwhell. "Many other people that like rewinding a lot more than me have pointed this out, like Adam with FED." IDK who this is, and I dont care, since base on your comment I clearly do not think Turn whell are a good mecanic for the same reasons as them. 1. "The player chooses when to use divine pulse, whereas auto-saves are placed by the developer. This automatically makes rewinds more powerful, because they let the player choose which mistakes to erase and when. This is part of why emulator save states are more powerful than in game save-states." ... You know the load comand in the menu of most games exist for a reason? 2. "Action and survival horror games have much stricter failure states than FE - if the player-character dies, it's game over. FE lets the player control many characters, and most of them are not essential to the story, so a character death is not necessarily a game over. Auto-saves are welcome in many survival horror, and action games for this reason. The lack of auto-saves in FE creates tension, because your mistakes may have long-term consequences." Says the person that says Casual mode is stricly better than turn whell, which removes any long term consequence the player might suffer... 3. "If you think that auto-saves are truly equivalent to rewinds, then you should be okay with giving the player infinite rewinds, because there is no limit to how many times the player can reload an auto-save. Something tells me that most players would be puzzled by this decision. Infinite rewinds would clearly be overkill" Yes I would, because you still have to figure out the map. "I am not underselling the average player's skill at all. Adam with FED" Ok I just check who this guy was and now I remember him and... We make fun of him in the comunity a lot for being really bad at the game and having bad takes regarding unit balance. So this is ackwards... "He even questions if it's optional on that difficulty, at least in certain chapters. This is coming from a guy who enjoys challenging runs and loves lunatic reverse." Lunatic Reverse isnt some insane archievement only the very best have, while it isnt universal its not exactly hard to find multiple people that have beat it. I myself had beaten it multiple times years before I even knew what efficient play was, and using memes multiple times because the game isnt that hard once you understand your resources and the benchmarks you need. "Regarding casual mode - if you're just going to rewind any time a unit dies anyways, I really don't see how classic with rewinds is any harder than causal (unless you're on maddening, of course)." This is a comunity that defaults to higher dificulty when discussingf everything, I really think you are underselling the avarage player skill level. "Rewind alao enables cheap and goofy strategies like RNG abuse." It does not, it certantly makes them less tedious, but hitting your head aggaist the wall until it breaks is something you can with rewind or just resseting and repeating everything over and over (what people do to rig stuff in games without turn whell). " In my last video, one of my main criticisms of both rewinding and causal mode is that they enable these goofy strategies. I think perma-death works against these, but perma-death is basically a formality at this point, considering he amount of rewinds we're given. Having to replay a turn with the benefit of hindsight is not a "punishment" because you lose progress- it's a benefit because you have a much higher chance of success and the time loss is insignificant. " This mecanic is a result of people insisting in reseting until they beat maps deathless because they wanted to overcome the punishment of Permadeath. This mecanic porpuse is literally to complement permadeath. "A finite turn wheel would be a good fix as long as it is stocked with the proper amount of uses. As long as the player can use it at least a couple of times each map, then rewinding would be preferred to resetting because of time loss disparity, but the player would be encouraged to be diligent in their use of rewinds because they could run out. If the game have the player 50 rewinds up front, I seriously doubt players would just reset every time something went awry." The nature of rewind would make this run out before chapter 5 rendering the entire thing useless. This really just comes off as you completly missunderstanding how Turn Whell is a result of the playstyle this comunity has had for years and IS seeking to enable their fanbase to keep that playstyle with less tedium.
@@lane3574 "A finite turn wheel would be a good fix as long as it is stocked with the proper amount of uses." I'll go with an example of why this is bad. In your 50 uses example, you're on chapter 18 of a FE game you are playing blind. You have 15 uses remaining. If your reference of how many chapters a fire emblem game has is 3H, they you're good, a few chapters to go with more than 1/3 of the wheel uses. If your reference is FE7, you're fucked, you're about halfway through the game (a bit more, but early chapters are easier) and you barely have above 1/3 of your wheel's uses. If you have no reference, good luck guessing how many you should use. Conclusion: you can't properly manage the wheel uses without knowing the amount of chapters left, then you'll either hoard them just in case and end up reseting a lot or have them all used too early and not have them for later in the game, being forced to play without wheel and having to reset a lot or resetting the game entirely as starting over is faster than trying to do the later chapters without wheel. Either way it defeats the purpose of the wheel, to not need to reset so often. Having them in a per chapter basis, allows you to have some resource management without expecting you to look up external information. If the uses per chapter are too many or too few, that's another topic we could discuss. About ironman runs: it's not the intended way to play the game, if you decide to self-impose a challenge, go for it, but you shouldn't expect the developers to balance a game around self imposed challenges. I'm going to explain this with nuzlockes, which are essentially the pokemon version of irnomans (you can easily find the basic rules for a nuzlocke online if you don't know what it is). If you had to design pokemon around nuzlockes, you'd have to make sure every pokemon is obtainable through nuzlocke rules (they aren't for the most part), this is not the case, and nuzlockers don't say it should be, they know it's a self-imposed challenge and they deal with it. I'm also going to put a more extreme example: If you decide to make a challenge where you can't use flyers, do you expect the developers to not make playable flyer units because they wouldn't be used since your challenge doesn't allow them? Of course not, you decided to make that challenge for yourself. If Ironmans were the intended way to play the game, why let you replay chapters at all? You're gonna reset if your lord dies anyway. So, until ironman ruleset is something that appears on the difficulty settings in some form, using it as a reference for how the game should be designed is absurd.
I think you know this is a bad argument. Save states exist because very few people have enough time to finish the game in one sitting. Turn rewinding exists for a totally different set of reasons. Giving a player infinite rewinds would just break the game and would be no fun. I'm assuming that you think 0 rewinds would also be bad because it's too unforgiving. Somewhere between infinity and 0 is the correct amount of rewinds. All I'm saying is that 3H gave the player too many rewinds - that is not the same thing as saying that the player should never be able to save any progress and you know that.
@@johannesgutenburg9837 Yeah because a person who wants to waste other people's time would totally advocate for the inclusion of casual mode, phoenix mode, and an optional turnwheel, right? Get real.
I've told more than a few people that if they're going to rewind for every mistake they make they should just play casual mode instead, because you don't have to consider what's worth rewinding for, and that if you never accept the consequences of your actions then there isn't really a point in playing on classic mode in the first place. There's no shame in choosing casual mode, and anyone that says otherwise is just a butthurt elitist that forgets battle saves were around long before the turnwheel ever was. That being said, if you burn through 11 uses of divine pulse and STILL lose a unit please don't reset you kind of deserved it, that's a lot of retries. I want the turnwheel to be abandoned because I agree that it's a mechanic that detracts from the experience by simply existing and that people should just more readily select casual mode. Also, how about we rename it from casual mode to something like relax mode? Part of the point of casual mode is that it's less stressful because you're punished at a much lower severity than on classic mode, so "relax" is somewhat fitting, and it removes the negative connotation that "casual" can have for some people.
Nah casual allows for human wave tactics they are not the same. I can literally throw all my units and chip it down in casual because they will be back on the next map. I can sacrifice a unit to lure a wave of enemies for no cost. Rewind just let me not have to restart a hour long map because I accidentally left a vital unit in range of a meteor because I am tired from working and being a functional adult or restarting because I screwed up a map gimmick I didn't understand.
I feel like my greatest hatred of this mechanic comes from their blatant abuse of enemy design, from as early as the red canyon. Pass. Enabled. Thieves. The f*** were they thinking when every classmate is still in the noob class state. It's just an excuse to make the hardest difficulty impossible without the turnwheel.
maddening difficulty in three houses is piss ez if you are an even remotely good player, there is this guy called "atano" who has ironmanned all routes on maddening with extra challenges at least a dozen times at this point... and constantly does it without losing any units i checked your last video, and the gameplay says it all... using battalion-less leonie and petra that far into the game, giving petra a sword and putting her on assasin, you just need to learn the basic mechanics and git gud before you talk smack
That's not my gameplay, its Typhoon Artifice's. I asked them if I could use their gameplay for the video. It says that the gameplay is his in the video description. I'm not very good at FE, so there's that. In any case, there are skilled players who disagree with you here. Adam with FED is a very skilled FE player who said that his no-pulse maddening runs were absolutely brutal. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_6evqWqbIL0.htmlsi=37t0bPnwWhayzPQE - around 18:32 I think.
@@boredomkiller99 three houses was my first ever fire emblem game or such tactical game in general, i started with hard mode, did the other 2 houses in maddening NG+, then went maddening NG from then on all i had to do was learn to read the resources the game gives me, putting battalions on people after ch3, using bows (for linked attacks and range) and the good combat arts, and recruit the good units at the right time playing this game on normal, especially on subsequent playthroughs, is pokemon sword/shield levels of LOL
