So I forgot to come in here to mention that I played Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War last summer. The fan translation patch is high-quality, although some of its character names are years out of date from incorporating updates revealed through Fire Emblem Heroes, since it hasn't been updated since a late beta. That game is incredibly good - gotta be among the best games on the platform. It got me thinking about several ways in which its design incorporates elements that produce an effect that has fallen out of favor in recent decades.
First, the player's power level never regresses to the mean. Skills and legendary weapons are ridiculously powerful, and most of them are missable. A modern game would nerf or otherwise limit them in order to keep the difficulty balance predictable (this approach is taken in Three Houses, where the optional heroes' relics are rarely best-in-slot even for compatible characters), or else make them unmissable and move them closer to the center of the design (this approach is taken in Engage, which is all about the fabulous abilities of the emblems). Genealogy instead just lets the player's power snowball all the way to the end if they're proactive about securing optional objectives. It's one thing to let a player really feel the strength of a powerful tool in something like a roguelite where they'll be starting over often to chase that dragon, but in a sixty-hour RPG it's unheard of.
Second, it makes inventory management a tactical feature. Not just who has which weapon, but how to get it to them, is a question with friction. Characters can't share: they can only sell weapons to the pawnbroker, which other characters can then buy at twice the price; and they have to pay to keep them repaired as well. Giving a weapon to a character who can't afford to fix it when it runs out of uses, or letting money go to waste by earning it with a character that hits the cap because they don't have enough to spend it on, or even simply being indecisive and wasting money transferring an item to someone who doesn't need it, are all things which you'll be thinking about. The logistics mechanics are a bona fide opportunity for a player to show their skill - but in a way that feels distinctly unmodern, because there's no attempt to narratively justify why it works in that specific way (why can't I just give my buddy this extra magic sword I got?) and it's so amazingly mundane. The story doesn't reinforce how important it is.
Finally, script length limitations mean that the writing is tight and efficient in a way that is conspicuously absent in a lot of recent story-heavy games. They've got a dozen text boxes and they've got to explain the current political situation, including the goals of every involved party, and also establish the new player characters' personalities, their relationship to each other, and the drama of their backstory. Under such limits, the writers had no choice but to advance the development of not just one but two details in every single line. It also forced them to try to express dramatic situations implicitly through the level design, with the result that there's some weirdly iconic scenarios. Modern-day game writers often prefer to luxuriate in their unlimited storage space and generous voiceover budget, and choose to express the story in great detail. A solid premise and a compelling character does indeed make the player want to see more about them, so it's an understandable impulse, but there's nothing to stop it from turning into too much.
I also realized something that's surely obvious to Japanese players: Fire Emblem games released after it are constantly calling back to it in various ways. I was particularly struck by how the "lore" of Three Houses riffs very directly on the setting concepts of Genealogy of the Holy War, with problematic elements reframed so that they can be interrogated more directly, or reconfigured so that it shakes out with less fairy-tale logic and more realpolitik.
Anyway, I'd be happy to talk about Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War all day, but I've also been playing Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 recently. Not finished yet, but I am far enough in to see how this game runneth over with clockwork-intricate game design. But I've written enough tonight, so you'll have to wait to hear all about it.
