the bad fight

so i've spent the past 6 months working on and off on rpgmaker games. mostly on, to my credit, and a lot of the off was spent writing. but in my mental task list, the rpg i started formally working on in december is my main endeavor, and everything else has been a side project. through all of this i've been holding onto this idea of making short rpgmaker games, really simple, straightforward ones i could complete in a week or two, that are just series of battles without story or context, just playing with different mechanical ideas within the confines of rm2k's default battle system. party dynamics, enemy balance questions, feelings of battle. ironically these supposedly lightweight, non-blocking rpg experiments have been blocked in my mental task queue behind the main rpg i'm working on - which was supposed to be short and lightweight itself, before i stepped into the whirlpool of adding a "simple" framing story. but they've remained on the horizon as something to do after, even if i find myself too busy with work to pursue larger projects. (actually, i think this idea came about whenever it was i played 50 short games)

well, finding myself with some free time yesterday evening, too late in the day for a more concerted work effort, i started sketching out ideas for some of these simple 'battle series' games. trying to lay out an interesting 2-person party dynamic i encountered some familiar tensions.

there's a notable difference between designing encounters to be completed in a specific order by a fixed party, and making random encounters to be fought in arbitrary order and number. the first invites question: why this fight, this way, at this time? why are the fights in this order? what makes this experience, which has been individually curated, worthwhile? there's a pressure to make it internally satisfying; it invites a kind of puzzle-designing approach. what is the solution? random encounters on the other hand have an answer handy to all these questions: it was chance. you weren't "meant" to have this specific fight at this specific time, under these specific conditions. the rules were written to define a possibility space, and this specific cadence of fights emerged from that space by the forces of randomness. it's essentially generative, in a simple way. the goal in writing this isn't to put internal meaning on individual fights, but on their sum total. to overdesign random encounters with narrow paths to victory creates formal repetition, which can feel like a waste of time. to leave them loosely designed creates only incidental repetition, which can be filtered out. it's easy to be angry at a scripted series of fights for being one fight too long, failing to end at the perfect moment and becoming a chore. it's harder to be angry at a random sequence for the same. the rng doesn't know better. the designer does.

it's scary to underdesign a fixed sequence of fights because if the purpose of an individual fight isn't clear, it feels like filler. it has no point, it's just there to artificially extend the game. it's harder to trust that it has a long-term purpose. even if it whittles you down, why wasn't it at least fun? why curate individual challenges if you're not going to make them good? this is the logic that spins in my head. i don't necessarily agree with it, but it's hard not to be give into it, consciously or not. i'm doing level design, which is like game design for levels, and it is right to make your game design good game design. prescriptive notions of quality haunt every step of the process, largely because i don't have any other logic available to turn to when it comes time to create something from nothing. i've seen "good game design", so i can attempt to imitate it inside the constraints i've created for myself through the decisions i could make on my own.

i feel unsatisfied as i do this because i know that it's limiting. in practice it reduces individual battles to math puzzles with optimal solutions built in. i fell asleep last night thinking about possibilities for a single-character battle series. i wanted fighting to be fast and impress a feeling of power despite being alone, but i didn't want battles to be trivial or repetitive. in order to stand up against superior forces, i'll give the main character a multi-target stun. ah, but why wouldn't i use that EVERY battle, trivializing any decision making process? well, maybe it doesn't work against everything, now i'll introduce a second enemy, one that necessitates a different response. maybe it's a hawk and it needs to be bound with gravity magic to neutralize it. now when you face a mixed group of enemies there's a meaningful decision to be made: do i disable the hawk with gravity magic, or stun the rest of its allies? that's "good game design" baby. but these meaningful decisions add up to something i think is boring. the end product for the player is a sort of internal algorithm, a mental decision tree for arriving at the right strategy for a given circumstance. i've written about this already - this is the ethos of lufia and the fortress of doom, and of my current rpgmaker project, which is concerned with the same concept. i'm not knocking this approach - it has important advantages over the even more repetitive model where enemy groups offer no resistance and the party's "algorithm" is exceedingly simple, or fails to make use of the whole breadth of their skillset. but i think it leads to me feeling like i'm making the same game over and over again. i don't want to just make better and better algorithm-builders. i want to go beyond the feeling of having one core approach and stretching it into new situations. as many good experiences as i've had from the angle of "if this fight is a puzzle, how do i solve it?" (lufia 1, into the breach, radiant historia...), it's a design ethos that i think leads to the same set of experiences. what other experiences are possible with the language of turn-based rpg combat? i like rpg combat systems so much - but what does it give me, what can it give me, beyond the satisfaction of using a fun toolkit to great effect?

so i think i have two options for where to go from here. one is to keep leaning into the algorithmic strategy angle. i still haven't done it with non-fixed encounters, and i think it might work better there because without the fixed order i can see it feeling less like grasping for the right key for a lock. i would like to one day take on the challenge of designing combat for a longer game, with mix-and-match party selection, and more complex mechanics than rpgmaker 2000 supports, where i can play more with larger, more complex character designs and where every ability feels like it plays a role in the grand strategy. in this context the spectre of "good game design" will surface in other ways, but at least it won't result in the exhaustion pressure to curate every minor encounter to perfection.

the other option is to stick with fixed battle series but let go of the pressure to overdesign. what possibilities open up if i let battles not be fun or individually challenging? are there other core activities available besides optimization, or can rpg killing/survival mechanics only build experiences about killing and survival? many other feelings come up in playing an rpg that are just taken as chaff, a byproduct of bad design or else the cost of admission, swallow it and forget about it. but the feeling of (say) another unwanted battle getting in the way of what you wanted to do is almost universal in rpgs. the action of rpgs is all about clearing obstacles, which can be fun but is often a chore. much of rpg design has become about maximizing the fun of clearing obstacles through interesting systems, customization, etc... on the assumption that the fun part is good, and the choreful part is bad. good rpgs are good because of the fun parts, which design should maximize, and in spite of the choreful parts, which should be minimized by design and ignored by players inasmuch as possible. is there room for something else? where? this is where i'm held back by not being a greater consumer/imaginer/understander of art, i don't have much of a basis on which to envision other possibilities. all i know is that when i'm submitting to the dictums of game design i feel like i'm painting myself into a corner.

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afterthought 1: one place i can look for inspiration is 7th saga, a game that rarely let me feel powerful. when it did, it was only empowering me enough to feel safe, or to get by reliably. there was hardly one easy win in the entire game. the battles were about survival, it really leaned into that, and the non-combat elements of the game's design reinforced it. here mundane encounters felt weighty because they all really were existential threats that could wipe the party if things went wrong (and they so easily could), and your best defense was to take them very seriously. exhausting to play, but full of intention. but that was a much more fully developed context to explore these fights in. it would be hard to convey any of this in a context-free series of fixed encounters.

afterthought 2: these question apply particularly to mundane encounters. optimization isn't usually a concern in boss battles. these ARE meant to be highly curated, and have more room to make for memorable and rightly challenging puzzles than mundane encounters. i'm less interested in designing these. i feel like boss battles are well understood. as a matter of game design they tend to have clear goals, they're the highest stakes, highest tension test of the player's ability to speak the rpg's mechanical language. a lot of memorable rpg boss fights have been made already. if i have any interest in boss fights it's in making them exciting without using gimmicks or new mechanics, grounding them in the fundamental rules of the game. i love a good gimmick boss, and i think it's good and great to break the formal constraints of a system to reach higher emotional peaks and unexpected experiences, but at the same time it often feels like a lack of confidence in the game's basic toolset.

the temporality of support conversations in three houses

i succumbed: i didn't expect to love the characters of fire emblem: 3 houses so much. after the 3ds fire emblems i wasn't sure the series had anything left to offer me, but the students in black eagle house have won me over, and despite my grievances with the game in general, i'm still looking forward to playing the other routes just to get to know their characters better. their success is that they're fun and charming and well-acted and robust enough this time to justify the amount of time they spend in the spotlight. but most of their characterization happens in support conversations, which have a troubled structural relationship to the rest of the game. i don't feel this relationship has been very well considered. rather i feel like three houses has only heaped more weight on a structure that already undermined the potency of the stories the series uses it to tell

i'm still playing my first route but i wanted to record my feelings while they're loud in my mind. expect general spoilers up through the first couple post-timeskip chapters of the black eagles route


1. the sequestering of most character development in optional support conversations means that no character's growth or relationships are reflected in the main mission cutscenes. instead, when plot-inessential characters (ie everyone besides edelgard and hubert) appears in the main story, it's in the context of everyone in the house taking turns saying how they feel about the situation based on their one stable character trait - linhardt's sleepy, petra's not from here, and so on. i appreciate that some effort has been made to make characters respond directly to each other in these scenes, but such replies are the exception to the rule, and are still agnostic of whatever shared experience the interlocutors have been shown to have in their support conversations. the result for me is that, immediately, these 8-person conversations feel forced and formulaic, and more widely, so does the whole premise of the black eagle strike force. i'm not sold on anyone's reason for being here. whatever selfhood they're shown to have, it feels like their main reason for sticking around, for being generals in this war that didn't go anywhere until i showed up, is so that i (that's me!) can use them for video game stuff

the restriction harms in both directions. non-major characters are discouraged from growing in direct response to plot events as these developments can't be reflected in support conversations that were accessible before those events. the black eagles' lukewarm reaction circles are about the most they can affect each other without creating feelings that have to be addressed or reflected in the support side.


2. the flexible timing of support conversations means that they aren't guaranteed to occur at a time that makes any sense narratively or emotionally. in an effort to mitigate this many are locked until (or after) certain story events have happened, but not necessarily because the supports refer textually or emotionally to those events. the weirdest example of this is that my b-rank with leonie was locked until jeralt died, after which i was prompted to view it almost immediatey. but the conversation made no reference to her mentor's death whatsoever. in fact, it almost read as a bitter taste of dramatic irony, except that the tension never resolved. it was just a weird angry exchange about my not appreciating jeralt enough. oh, my god.. has no one told her yet? in the following explore phase, i found leonie gloomy with grief but seemingly completely oblivious of our recent conversation. it's possible to read this as an intentional writing choice, if a clunky one, but mostly it feels like an unresolved problem proceeding from a desire to make both these conversations available to you in any order

other common disconnects include: supports locked until after the timeskip that would have made at least as much sense beforehand, or that refer to the events of previous supports as if they had happened last week and not 5 years ago (caspar and ashe a-rank comes to mind here); and c-rank conversations potentially available before the timeskip but not accessed until after. in addition to discordantly preserving the goofy high school energy of the first half, these scenes' continued availability limits the degree of change characters (much less their relationships) can undergo during the five year gap, lest these late-viewed c-ranks paint an inconsistent character picture. the effect in all these cases is a kind of chronological incoherence - compounded with contrivance of basing the second half of the game in garreg mach again (who's grading these certifications now, by the way), it feels like there's no distinction between the past and present, between the black eagles as starry-eyed students and as hardened war generals. it turns out the (honestly moving!) sadness edelgard expresses in edge of dawn was unfounded - high school never has to end after all!


3. the nonlinear and nonexhaustive consumption of support conversations means that basic character information may be repeated frequently because you might miss it if it's only available once. how many times has shamir explained that she's from dagda, and she's a mercenary, and she joined the knights because she owed rhea a debt, but that's all settled now so actually it's totally whatever that she's here with you? this is a particularly egregious case; in others, the game is willing to hide unique lore and character background (i'm thinking of alois and leonie's supports) and i'm more allured by the prospect of seeing a differently incomplete picture of each character in each run


4. when you come back from the timeskip, all your old teammates stand in a circle again and tell you how much they missed you, while showing a glimpse of how they've changed since you last saw them 5 years ago. sort of. the best reintroduction you get is actually in the explore phase, when you can talk to each character one on one. but the explore phase is optional, and even if you take it at the earliest possibility, a week of time passes first, during which time prompts may come up for any of byleth's supports that had their requirements met before the timeskip but were plot-locked until after. after that, you're given a chance to view any other unlocked support conversations through the menu (and if you were serious about raising support levels, you'll have a lot of them unlocked). but these supports are, crucially, not intended as reintroductions to these characters. they're written as though reintroductions have happened, or rather as though they aren't necessary as all (see item 2). the existing framework of plot-focused main story cutscenes and character-focused optional support conversations and explore phases doesn't make room for character reestablishment that isn't optional to view or prone to being mistimed.


fire emblem's vision is of many complex, well-rounded characters having lots of characterization and lots of unique relationships with each other. the way they've chosen of making character content bountiful but not overwhelming in having sequences of one-on-one conversations between characters and making them optional. the amount of dialogue written for three houses is staggering. it's inevitable compromises have to be made in order to reconcile all these different pieces with each other and with the main story. and clearly the narrative team is to some degree aware of the challenges of this approach as new efforts have been made in 3 houses to restrict these conversations in time and tie them to events in the main story. i can understand and respect the task before them - it's an achievement what they've made work.

but in choosing what compromises to make, what values have been prioritized? even more than past titles three houses is designed to indulge player control of their experience. support conversations by their nature are about providing narrative rewards that are responsive to the player's choices about which characters to use and which to pair up, and their expansion directs energy and emphasis away from the main story's fixed cutscenes (which feel really slim in 3h). meanwhile additions like the explore phase only add more pieces for the player to opt into or out of or to reorder - to say nothing of grander choices like which house to teach or whether to join or oppose edelgard. all the unsynchronized story avenues are a pleasure individually but when added up they muddy the trajectory of character development, bloat it and disrupt its pacing

three houses best resists these issues when it anchors scenes to points in narrative time and says, you can't view this anymore, it doesn't make any sense. the aforementioned leonie b support could so easily have been a home run if it had committed to being a direct reaction to jeralt's death. instead three houses buckles to a fear of denying content to the player and affords them as much control of what events are viewed and when and in what order, neglecting to consider how the structures that afford this control affect storytelling in favor of the brute force addition of even more content to address combinatorial possibilities