PixlBit

Really quick warning:  This post is LONG.  It's a review of a recently-translated SNES strategy RPG in the famous Fire Emblem series, but sorta morphs into something more.  I was going to throw in some pictures, but the entire thing is taking up too much space as is.  So apologies ahead of time for the lack of visual stimulation.

True story- I was just finishing up chapter 7 in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War for the SNES.  I had my army surrounding the final castle.  Only my main character and my second most powerful attacker were about  a round’s distance away; they were lagging behind due to some cleaning up they had to take care of on the other side of the map.  There was literally one enemy left- A Baron named Blume sitting in his castle with his really powerful weapon, unable to attack because I was sitting just out of range.  So I send my mages in for some long-distance damage; they both miss with their spells, and are one-hit killed when Blume counterattacks.   I send my archer in to take off a few HP; he misses two attacks and is one-hit killed as well.  I’m starting to get annoyed.  I need to reload a save game, of course (death is permanent in Fire Emblem games, as you know) but I’d like to see what my other heavy hitters can do against this guy first.  I send in my third and fourth best attackers.  They both miss two attacks and are killed in one shot by the counterattack.  Now I’m really getting frustrated.  I abuse the emulator save states and bring my main character and that other attacker over, wasting two rounds in the process.  Whatever; I may not get an A rank this battle, but that’s of little consequence.  So I take my time setting up these attacks, but as you may have guessed, neither could scratch the boss.  They weren’t killed by his counter, but still, I was unable to damage the fucking guy.  Now I’m really worried- my characters are well-leveled and possess all possible skills and attacks that anyone could hope to have obtained by this point in the game.  And I can’t hit the fucking boss.

I set myself up in this way: I have my two main attackers take a shot at the boss and then retreat afterward so they cannot be attacked next turn.  I have my dancer do a fucking dance so they get a second attack, and do it all over.  In between, I have my healers restore my heroes’ HP- even these guys cannot take TWO shots from Blume.  It’s as fool-proof a set up as you can arrange in a tactical RPG.  The boss cannot move to attack, and you can take potshots before running away.  But still, I can’t fucking hit the guy.  I check my character stats- they have high accuracy and attack.  I see that the game claims they have a 100% chance of hitting the boss if they do attack, and yet each and every time they miss!  Now I’m worried- if my two best characters cannot hit the boss, then I cannot possibly win this fight.  End of the game…..  To make matters worse, Blume heals every round because he’s sitting on his home turf.  I don’t know what to do.  So to make a long story short (too late?)- I try this round after round after round, and finally, four rounds after I begin this stupid song-and-dance, my secondary character manages to damage him just a little bit.  Blume heals at the end of the round, but he isn’t quite at max-HP.  The next round comes, and my characters miss again, but thankfully during the dancer-assisted second offensive, my character’s special multi-attack skill kicks in and he hits Blume with his FOURTH attack.  Still Blume is not dead, but he’s half way there.  Another round passes, I manage a single hit.  Finally, three rounds later, after some miracle, last-ditch effort from one of my mages, I am able to “kill” the guy.  I put kill in quotes because he just warped away to annoy me another day.

What’s the point?  It shouldn’t be that difficult.  There is no way that somebody who is playing without the aid of save states can possibly make it through that battle.  But somebody must’ve.  Not in this country, I don’t think- the only way anybody is playing this game in the US is with an emulator and a patched version of the game.  That patch was probably released a few years ago, and by 2005, we retro-gamers had probably reached a level of collective intolerance that rendered us incapable of playing a game WITHOUT save states.  With so many games in our ever-growing backlog, who has the time to play and replay five hour battles because the game decides that your fighter who has a 98% accuracy rating is going to miss four times in a row, failing to kill a boss, getting killed with the counterattack?  But maybe I should speak for myself?  I bet a shit-ton of Japanese gamers just sucked it up and dealt with the frustration.  I bet there are ever a few who have done it half a dozen times.  I just don’t have it in my to be one of them- to play the game the way it was meant to be played.

It’s not like I’m a strategy idiot.  I have good strategies.  I’m often very proud of my strategies, when I know I’ve set things up in just such a way as to maximize my units’ efficiency and minimize my opponents’ counter-efficiency.  I’ll check how far the enemies can move, position my strongest unit just within their range to draw them in (while making sure to leave the boss just out of attacking range), take pot shots and enemies who have broken from their group and then retreat to safety.  I keep my mages and priests two units behind the front line, ensuring that some dragon knight, or some bulky armored guy with a spear can’t bypass my warriors to sneak in with the one-hit kill.  I don’t put my flying guys anywhere near archers.  I’ll pincer enemies and trap them, making sure that I’m in no danger while simultaneously setting up a gauntlet of pain for them the next round.  We’ve all gotten that rush that comes with enacting the perfect strategy, and I’m happy to say that I am as good as most at coming up with these byzantine setups that guarantee the best payoff.  But then one of three things invariably happens:

1)       Everyone starts missing.  There is no reason I can see for this- I regularly check the percentages before I attack; everybody has an accuracy rating that is, I can tell you now that I’ve pretty much beaten the game, completely inaccurate and seemingly arbitrary.  Sometimes they just miss….. four or five times in a row.  I’ve run up to bosses who have five hp remaining, only to see my fastest attacker miss eight times (EIGHT!) in a row.  Of course, the boss counterattack connected and killed the character immediately.  I checked out that boss’ stats, and my character was fairly superior; it was a baffling and unavoidable death. 

2)      I have such an airtight strategy, and the enemy is so weakened that I send in a shitty character like the thief or an underleveled warrior to kill an enemy with three hit points.  Said shitty character will miss once and take away 1 with his second attack, leaving him vulnerable to the one-hit kill.  There is no other way to level up some of these characters than to whittle an enemy down to one or two hp before sending in the weakling for a cheap kill.  These shitty characters can’t even handle that responsibility most of the time.

3)      My strategy has worked like gangbusters, and I’ve eradicated an entire enemy platoon…..save one crappy axe-knight who has like eight hit points because one of my characters missed a bunch of times.  The axe-knight will be surrounded on three sides by my best warriors, and he will be nowhere near any of my vulnerable characters.   You know how this story ends-  the knight slips the surly bonds of my party and does some zig-zag maneuvers around the army to somehow find his way to the lone healer that is at the end of his range.  Instant death.  Or the guy manages to make it back to his home town, guaranteeing reinforcements next round.  Some insane, improbable bullshit that always seems to happen when there is only one enemy remaining.

So it’s shit like that that makes me very angry.  That makes me never want to play a game like this again.  And I’m using save-states!  I can’t imagine how frustrating this crap must be for somebody who literally must replay entire chapters if even the slightest thing goes wrong, and they save themselves into oblivion.  Do you know what I mean by that, saving yourself into oblivion?  You know, when you set up a bunch of little saves after taking minor actions….. you hit a boss, you save, you bring over your thief to steal something and are successful, you save.  Eventually, you have ten save states in the queue, and they are all within fifteen minutes of each other.  Because you are either careless or because you think you are in absolutely no danger, you save it at a point where any unforeseen threat will leave you with no save state that occurs previously.  An enemy ambush the next round, and no save state from before you walked your confident characters into the middle of that valley.  You are screwed- no choice but to start over on the game’s terms- and that means restarting an entire chapter.

 As you well know, the Fire Emblem games feature perma-death, and once you lose a character, you lose him or her for good.  When I played the older (older in the sense that I was younger when I played them) Fire Emblems on the GBA, I remember making it to the end of these protracted battles only to lose my healer to a stray arrow.  As a completionist of sorts, I reset THE ENTIRE BATTLE just to make sure that I kept every character alive.  So many times I said “I’m never playing this game again.  I like it a lot, but it frustrates the hell out of me.”

And here’s the thing about Genealogy of the Holy War- the battles are LONG.  Longer than any strategy role-playing game I’ve ever attempted.  Now I obviously haven’t played every game out there, but I’ve played enough to say that these are some frigging long battles.  Like five hours for one battle.  Battles with multiple objectives.  Battles with so many moving objects that it’s difficult to process all of the information.  Sprawling, epic battles that are memorable and filled with little moments that are some of the best in the entire series.  You might start by taking a simple castle, only to find that your enemy is sending dragon knights to lay siege to your home town while at the same time spreading its forces to the other end of the map to slaughter innocent civilians who are fleeing a tyrant.  You have to split your forces, plan way ahead, and make every move count.  This is what a tactical RPG should make you do.  It’s a shining example of why this type of battle system is so compelling.  I’m not even doing it justice- there is just so much to love about the battles in Fire Emblem that they trump every single frustration that you might feel while decrying the cheapness of some of the systems.

 There were times when a scenario seemed so frantic, there’d be no way I could possibly accomplish all that the designers set for me to do.  There were fifteen enemy soldiers surrounding a small group of my low-level warriors that were forced to defend a castle dictated by story purposes.  My main force was on the other side of the continent dealing with an enemy general and his troops as we advanced toward each other.  This was no normal skirmish, as the general was one of those good-hearted guys who knew he was playing for the wrong team.  So I had to maneuver a small contingent of my army around the guy (he was, of course, situated in a choke-point of sorts, surrounded by mountains and dense forest that hindered movement) to liberate a castle all the way across the map because his son was being held hostage, and was the only hope of recruiting the sad general.  While this was going on, I had to leave some of my troops behind to “keep him occupied”, else he would follow the contingent, and stop us (accidentally, I’m sure) from rescuing his kid.  These troops had to be able to withstand his assault while at the same time lacking the power to kill him with a counterattack.  You see, when you don’t want to kill one of the enemies, they will often “suicide” themselves against your strongest characters, attacking and getting killed by the counter.  This was bad enough, but then there were the bandits who were racing across the map, looking to lay waste to some faraway cities.  So basically the army is split into four parts, each with its own task and set of dangers. 

A frantic set of circumstances for sure.  Juggling all these moving parts, setting things up just so- that’s the heart of a strategy game, right?  And this Fire Emblem gets that SO right….. it all just clicks.  When I triumphed over my enemies, turning a no-win situation into complete victory, that’s when I saw the true potential of the genre realized.  That’s when I saw how those Japanese teenagers back in 1995 could sit through an hours-long scenario again and again, refining their techniques, learning from their mistakes, making choices just so, guaranteeing that some sublime strategy be played through to its successful fruition.  How they might overcome temporary frustrations in the pursuit of something greater- that moment when the marriage of developer intention and player perseverance and intelligence coagulates into something that is transcendent of the medium itself.  This is something we all try to reach when partaking in any art form- and something that only the greatest of games can give us.  We just don’t all get there in the same way.

As stated earlier, I abused save states.  Abused in the worst way.  It started innocently enough, saving after each successful round, but as the lure of power grew and the difficulty increased, I started saving after successfully completed mini-strategies in the middle of each round.  It got worse from there.  I’d save after moving a few characters, or after a round in the coliseum, just to avoid the tedium of having to do it again should something go horribly wrong.  Again, given all that I’ve written up to this point, I’d have to be a glutton for punishment to even attempt to try these battles without saving constantly.  I love the game, but damn if it isn’t cheap sometimes.

Abusing save states brings its own set of challenges, believe it or not.  You sometimes save at the wrong time, and it gets you into trouble.  No more trouble than having to restart an entire battle from scratch, but I’ve already written about how that isn’t an option for me.  So yeah, I’ve saved myself into nearly unwinnable situations, and I’ve had to load and reload some of those states up to twenty times, trying over and over again to avoid the single ignominious death that comes from leaving my fucking archer just within range of the single undemolished bad guy.  It didn’t matter that I demolished an entire battalion of baddies in the most elegant and efficient fashion; if you leave a single enemy standing, he will wend his way through your ranks to kill that archer.  And the computer knows who is vulnerable and who isn’t.  You might freak out at the end of a round that one of your mages is within enemy range, only to watch as the bad guys bypass him to attack your lance-knight, killing him after twelve attacks.  Makes you wonder why the computer thought that he was the vulnerable guy, and not the mage- my guess is they would’ve missed if they tried to attack the magic user.

And there is something to be said for the challenge that arises from rampant use of save states.  It’s not the same kind of challenge the game normally offers.  Instead, it releases the player from the paralyzing fear of continuous death, and allows a refinement of strategy that would otherwise be impossible.  See what happens if you send in the warriors first, and let the thief clean up afterward.  That might leave your thief too close to enemy lines, guaranteeing a hasty death at the start of the next round.  But you’d never know that if you were playing normally- you’d never let your thief get anywhere near those bad guys.  Maybe your falcon knight can critical a boss, netting a huge experience reward.  Maybe your main character can run into a group of enemies, standing firm as they throw themselves against his sword.  Maybe you can move a mage into an enemy wizard’s blast range, hoping their innate resistance will keep them alive.  It’s interesting to see what the game is capable of when you try out these strange, counter-intuitive strategies, to see how the computer deals with unorthodox threats, who they will target and who they will ignore.  Of course, you won’t see any of these things in a regular playthrough; you won’t be brave enough to try anything that might force you to restart one of these massive battles.  The new challenge comes from finding the best way to handle each situation.  Survival is still tantamount, but the punishment for failure is marginal- a quick reset and an interesting new strategy.  The punishment is almost like a reward, a new way to experience the game.

And the thing is, even without having to retry a single battle, I probably put as much time into the game as somebody who played it through under the constant threat of permadeath.  I’d keep resetting and seeing if I could find a better way to do things.  Over and over and over again.  And there would be times that, no matter how frequently I tinkered with my setup, I’d find one of my characters dying at the end of the round.  I’d load up older and older save states, turning back the clock further and further until I found myself in a position where I was completely safe.  Then I’d start the process all over again.

Full disclosure- I save stated myself into an unwinnable situation and had to stop playing.  This was in the final battle, right before the final castle.  It was pretty cheap, actually.  There was an entire army that had me trapped in a canyon where there was little maneuverability, but I was ready for them.  I set my characters up perfectly to take them down without damage to my units.  There were four bosses in there, including a fierce female warrior who had nearly decimated me a few battles earlier.  It didn’t matter- things were going so well that I killed her with ease and focused my energy on the lesser bosses.  And that’s when the missing began.  No matter what I did, my characters could not make contact with them.  They were not supposed to be particularly fast enemies, but try as I might, I couldn’t hit them.  In the end, I could only kill two of the three.  I had destroyed an army of twenty, their main general and two lieutenants, but left a single one of the minor bosses alive and within range.  Sure enough, during the enemy turn, that mini-boss killed one of my characters.  Reload, try things differently.  That boss just kept dodging, then killing one of my soldiers during the next round.  I attempted more unorthodox strategies….. taking the weak characters out of range; leaving some of the more harmless enemies alive as a result.  Hitting and running, warping characters to my home base to avoid counterattack.  It didn’t matter.  Every single time, there’d be that one mini-boss left alive, and she would kill one of my party members.

So that was the end of my game.  I watched the last fifteen minutes on Youtube, and I felt a little shitty about it, but not really.  There wasn’t anything left to experience in the game except for the final blow against the final bad guy. 

If I had been more invested in the story, maybe I would have further regretted not finishing the job myself.  But Fire Emblem is never really about the story.  That’s not to say that it isn’t well told for what it is.  Unlike some of the other games in the series, there are no interludes between battles, and thus any exposition is delivered on the battlefield.  Your characters will speak with each other about trivial things, and there will be cutaways to scenes inside an enemy’s castle as they twirl their mustaches and torture innocent children.  There is political intrigue of sorts, as many countries vie for power over each other, and there are betrayals and unlikely friendships and all that.  It’s fun, and it’s rendered in the series’ typical faux-anime style.  It doesn’t fully embrace all the Japanese stereotypes, but the characters are all stock.  That doesn’t mean you won’t like them, or that you won’t have your favorites; of course you will.  There are slow and lumbering knights, lecherous ladies’ men, loyal manservants and saucy pirate wenches.  They spout cutesy dialogue and banter with each other in mostly natural ways.  It’s cute and inoffensive and enjoyable, but it won’t make or break the experience.  The overarching story is about a dragon tribe and resurrected god of…... tell me if you’ve heard that one before.

So the story is whatever, and the graphics and music are okay, but sorta just there….. but that’s not really the point, right?  The game is about the sweeping battles, and Genealogy fully delivers on that front.  To the point that if there was nothing else to the game but window dressing, you’d still have a blast playing it and feel as though you’d gotten more than your money’s worth.  I’ve written a bunch of negative things about the game, but again, that’s not really the point.  I’ve written 3600 words about a video game, and that doesn’t happen unless that particular video game inspires some sort of passion in you.  I’m a jaded guy, and a jaded gamer, but despite its superficial similarities to other games in this already stellar series, there was something refreshing about Holy War that made me want to keep playing.  It was infuriatingly cheap at times, and yet I never gave up on it (a small lie), and enjoyed it more and more as I pushed forward.  It’s a game that knows what it does well, and delivers its strengths often.

 

Final Score: 36/40 (Transcends a mere Number)