And yet the situation described feels like deja vu. Anyone remember the original Mechcommander? Pilot death was just as severe after passing the early levels, there was no in-mission save feature, and it was quite likely that a pilot would be splattered by a single shot from a heavy weapon (PPC, Gauss Rifle, I’m looking at you). Worse, it was real-time, so you could also get your pilots killed by slow reaction time in your orders. I don’t recall how many times I restarted a level and I don’t think that I ever finished the original campaign.

Yet the fact that your pilots mattered really did add to the feel of the campaign. I remember the game fondly, despite the level of frustration that I went through while playing it. They just never got the balance quite right in that franchise (in Mechcommander 2, I breezed through and almost never had to worry if my pilots bought the farm). The holy grail is the tactical game that does hit that perfect balance.

That said, I’m looking forward to saving at the boss, on the Wii.

I think there’s two different arguments with Fire Emblem’s design. One argument is that Fire Emblem is not well balanced, in that if an average player loses a character occasionally and doesn’t reload then they can’t finish the game. That wasn’t my experience, at least in Sacred Stones, and I’m not some uber-gamer. But maybe it’s not well balanced and is a little too hard. You could imagine that being tuned.

The other argument is that the core mechanic of Fire Emblem is itself broken. That death-with-consequences makes for a bad tactical strategy game. I really disagree with that; I loved the added element that death brought to the games. I like that you have to take risks in the middle game to level your characters, because those risks are even more fun since they have significant consequence. Again, I’m assuming with good design the consequence isn’t “I can’t win the game” but rather “I have to find a different way to win with the abundant resources I have”.

The bit about taking characters away from you is pretty cheap, though. I agree on that score.

I’ve only played the GBA versions, so maybe I’ve missed something.

A fair point, although IIRC on my first Normal playthrough of PoR I did concentrate mainly on Titania and another couple of Paladins and never had much trouble: things like “Rescue” and that character with the ability to untap other characters come in very useful. It’s only in hard mode that you have to be really careful. Presumably on Easy mode it’s much more forgiving.

(1) Death has “meaning”, which improves the drama in the game.
(2) If you’re good at the game, your characters will never die, n00b.

Both of these statements can not be true.

In addition to being a per-mission strategic puzzle, Fire Emblem also has a long-term training element. Characters who do not come into proximity with the enemy (I’m ignoring a few exceptions), don’t gain levels. I have certainly encountered situations in every Fire Emblem game where the only way to kill a given strong enemy unit was to take a risk: if this weak unit hits the enemy, the enemy will die. If this weak unit misses, the enemy will retaliate and the weak unit will die.

In other words, the claim that one can waltz through the middle levels of the game risk-free assumes that one already knows all of the things you learn from gamefaqs (and that are not even hinted at in the in-game tutorials): Don’t use the pre-promoted “strong” unit in the early battles, work hard to ‘exercise’ your archers and priests, don’t use these characters here because they’re going to disappear after mission 4, and so on. So for example, a player who takes the obvious path through Path of Radiance and spends the first few missions heavily relying on Titania, Gatrie, and Shinon, is going to reach the midgame and be utterly and completely screwed.

Combine those attributes with permadeath and no (reasonable) in-battle saves, and the only way to make the games playable would be to add a new feature: an in-game web browser that pops up an overlay window bringing the player to the Gamefaqs “turn by turn walkthrough” so he can make sure he plays it “right.”

I am perfectly comfortable taking the addition of the in-battle quicksave as an admission by Intelligent Systems that they were completely wrong, and they sincerely apologize for their utter perfidy.

Apology accepted.

It’s pretty easy to level up weaker characters without exposing them to danger – whittle down an enemy’s health with ranged weapons or stronger characters first, then use the weaker character to finish them off. The GC game gives you bonus XP as well you can dish out to any character.

Personally, I like the Fire Emblem games because they become essentially logic puzzles on the later levels. For those that don’t like that kind of thing there’s simpler strategy RPGs like FFTA.

Worst game mechanic ever.