I have been thinking about this since Thursday of last week -- the day I picked up Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. If anyone has been following my Twitter feed then they will know that I really like it. I would say that I'm almost at the point where I like it so much, I want to go back and finally beat Path of Radiance on the GameCube and even look into Radiant Dawn on the Wii. We shall see how far this goes.
Anyway, there is one moment at the beginning of the game which caused a bit of personal controversy for me. If anyone is looking for an entirely non-spoiled game, I would skip down a bit. I won't try to spoil much as this is a major part, but I know there are people out there who like going into a game knowing as little as possible about it. Which is fine.
Shadow Dragon offers a prologue for anyone playing the game through on the normal difficulty and though it is bogged down with tutorials, it does contain quite a bit of story to it. Needless to say, it's worth playing through. During part 3 (or maybe 4, can't quite remember) where you are forced to have to kill one of your players. Your team gets to a point where a load of very powerful enemies are on their way and on the other side is a locked door. Your choice from here is either get your whole team slaughtered and try again to just get slaughtered again or sacrifice someone as a Decoy in order for the door to open. The only way to proceed is loosing someone.
The issue here is in a Fire Emblem game, when someone dies, they are gone for the rest of the game. Not many games do this considering there is usually some way to bring back someone. In Final Fantasy we have Phoenix Downs for example. So whoever I lost, I would not get to use from then on.
What troubled me so much about this is I have made it my own goal to go through each available Fire Emblem game without loosing someone. Up till this point I was doing fine. I went through both the GBA games and half the GCN version while maintaining a full party. This not only makes the game harder, but it makes me need to think more strategically -- which is what should be done with a tactics game such as this. It can also lead the game's play time to be longer as I would have to retry various stages.
Being forced to lose someone on purpose was quite a weird experience. I found myself searching through many online websites and forums looking for some way around it. When I realised there is no hope of getting through with everyone, my next concern was who of my units would I need to sacrifise. I spent around 45 minutes searching for reasons why people were losing who they did. In the end, it was really quite hard for me. Seeing that I wouldn't be able to get the perfect game I had saught after for so many years with the previous installments was crushing. TO make matters worse, after the chapter, they show your man being captured and sentenced to death. It was quite hard to watch.
This made me wonder why I reacted in such a way. After all this is only a game character and I had only had him for a couple tutorial-based prologue chapters. It wasn't like I was losing someone I had grown attached to. Or maybe I was? Was my past experience with the franchise causing me to grow attachments to every character from the minute I receieved them? The majority of people playing this game probably didn't not feel this emotion release during the point. Though it does draw parallels to the time when Aeries was killed in Final Fantasy VII. A key difference to that event was that we had grown a relationship with the character for several hours and discs of gameplay, we were losing quite a bit more. This however was a meer 20 minutes.
Do any of you feel some sort of uncomfortable feelings when losing a character in these games? Do you not care about them at all and just want to finish? Let me know in the comments. This will also be this weeks poll on the side bar: Does losing game characters permanently cause an emotional response in you?
I also plan to add images to each of my posts from now on, it makes the site look more alive.
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