Erik_Twice wrote:Permadeath means the player must play in such a way that no unit may be killed which is more interesting, more challenging, a better thematical fit and keeps the difficulty of a map constant through its whole duration instead of being harder at the beginning and a cakewalk once your units outnumber the enemy.
I understand what you're saying, and I understand why permadeath matters from a tactical standpoint. But everything you just described there is a moot point compared to simply restarting when you screw up. Which is what most folks do.
MrPopo wrote:You're right that restarting gets around permadeath, but it's a pain in the ass to restart all the time. So you learn to play in a manner where your units aren't getting killed in the first place (proper checking of enemy ranges and drawing them out with the appropriate units).
My only real experience with Fire Emblem was the 17 or so hours I put into Binding Blade, the first GBA one. I did not finish that game nor did I enjoy it much. Now, keep in mind I was an FE newbie. What I did was just roll with the deaths as they happened. That meant I lost my flying units and healers and magicians early on. As the AI always gravitated to the weaker units and gang banged them to death. This especially happened when droves of bandits would appear out of the ether. All too often I would clear an area of the map, move my weak units there for safety, and then continue marauding with my strong units onward. Yet the bandits would appear out of the blue and kill them before I could get back to save them. And these bandits would appear from off screen, away from the primary map, not just ruins or forest. It was cheap shit. So what I ended up with was about six tank units who could take endless beatings and just chainsaw through the enemy. The problem was that at the end of the game on the final missions, Binding Blade started spamming wizards at your ass that would cast sleep and berserk on your units from literally three screens away. Since I had no Pegasus knights or wizards of my own I could not kill those wizards from far away, thus I could not stop them. I reached an impasse with Binding Blade and put it away. My situation was created by doing what the game wanted me to do, lose units and keep on trucking. The AI was clearly designed to exploit weak units and create the situation I ended up in. The only way to get around this was to replay missions endlessly until you got lucky enough to survive with your key units. Which was clearly a cheap method of forced grinding to artificially prolong the gameplay. And clearly shitty design thanks to the loss of Shouzou Kaga. And don't even get me started on the demonic RNG in that game ALL OF MY RAGE.
tl;dr Binding Blade sucks despite I played it wrong, but I'm sure certain other FE games are hippity hop.
