Pantsless Marth stands ready. As of March 31, 2021, this game is no longer available in English.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Anyway, I’ve been having some thoughts lately, and I thought I’d share the here on the blog.
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, the first Fire Emblem game for the Famicom/NES (hereafter FE1) is respected as the originator of the now-popular Fire Emblem series, but it is generally regarded as clunky and outdated compared to newer entries, especially from the Game Boy Advance onward. For a while, I regarded it this way too, seeing it as a barebones game hobbled by the limitations of an 8-bit system. To me, the games from the GBA onward had it right, since they had better-developed characters, better gameplay, and lots more content thanks to the relentless march of computer technology.
During the holiday season, I purchased the official English translation of FE1 from the Nintendo Switch online store; unfortunately, it became unavailable after March 31, 2021. That said, the game can still be played in Japanese on the Famicom app (which you need a Japan-region account to acquire, but once you have it, you can play it on your US account just fine.)
Like I said, I thought of FE1 as an obsolete old clunker. Then I started reading commentary from Jeffro Johnson, author of Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons and Dragons. He points out that “storygaming,” the dominant mode of play for tabletop RPGs, is very different from the way such a game was built to be played:
New school games typically give the players latitude to play whatever type of character they want. This ranges from GURPS where classes and levels are dispensed with and every conceivable character ability is broken down into point values all the way up to recent editions of D&D where there are a bewildering range of races, classes, feats, and so on. The newest of new school games emphasize elaborate player character backstories that the Dungeon Master is expected to somehow tap into in his campaign story.
[…]
Old school games in contrast give the players very little choice in character creation. You roll your attributes, pick a race and/or class, roll your hit points, buy equipment and you’re done. There is, for example, only about a 1-in-9 chance of someone qualifying for the paladin class. There is no guarantee that there will be one in a party and if there is one, there is no telling which player will be the one that gets to try it out! Playing an old school character is thus more about looking at what the dice give you and then making something out of it. Someone in the group is liable to be stuck with a “hopeless character” while someone else gets to play the best character they’ve ever rolled up. It happens! Dice are like that.
[…]
One more factor exacerbates these two difference and that is of course the frequency of player character death. New school players can be expected to play their character effectively forever, so they require a lot of choice (and balance) in character generation because this one choice will pretty well be set in stone. Old school players are playing a game. If their pawn is “killed” they have a chance to come back with a better character or perhaps one that is more suitable to the current strategic situation. Balance between each player’s characters can emerge over time due to the law of averages, but only if death is allowed to level the playing field and cull the herd.
In short, in traditional D&D, there are no “special snowflake” characters. Anyone can die, and somebody else replaces them. The story is emergent from player choice, not pre-determined in some guidebook; thus, the players are more engaged.
And with this and several other pieces of commentary by Jeffro, I saw FE1 in a whole new light. The technological limitations of the Famicom/NES were accounted for when the game was made.
Aside from Prince Marth, FE1 has no indispensable characters; even if Caeda, Marth’s main squeeze, kicks the bucket, the game goes on as usual. Most people, including me, reset whenever any character dies; it’s pretty much the standard way to play FE games. This is a storygaming mindset, and it’s not the way FE1 was meant to be played. You’re supposed to let characters die and keep going, replacing your fallen men and women with new soldiers as you go — the rough equivalent of rolling up a new character. There is a story, but it’s very spare: kill the evil dragon and restore your kingdom. One could say that the “story” emerges from the actions you take with your characters, though not too strongly — there are some pre-scripted things, and your characters aren’t faceless units. It’s as if FE1 was forced to have storygaming elements by the format. In this way, it is similar to the first Final Fantasy and the first Legend of Zelda, borrowing from the conventions of tabletop roleplaying to create a completely new experience (By contrast, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the most recent entry, embodies the exact opposite approach, with snowflakes aplenty and a means to reset during battle.) Do note, however, that FE1’s immediate sequel, Fire Emblem Gaiden, is more of a storygame, and the storygame aspects multiply with each new installment.
So thanks, Jeffro Johnson: you helped me appreciate the very first game in my favorite game series.
On Friday, May 14, Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 3 PM Eastern, I will livestream a game. I won’t say which, but it won’t be an RPG.
