Fire Emblem 15 Stray Thoughts

You know, I actually am finding that I really like these mini-rant collections quite a lot.  Most of my thoughts and criticisms about an RPG don’t necessarily amount to a full essay’s worth, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to say my piece about a game nonetheless.  This is turning out to be a really handy way to get this junk off my mind without having to pad it out.  And it’s handy for a game like Fire Emblem 15, a game which is fine, but not remarkable enough that most of my impressions about it have been particularly strong, but also juuuuuust dumb enough at times that I do want to poke fun at it a bit.



- Toward the end of the game’s prologue, Celica asks Mycen if he thinks she’ll ever meet Alm again, to which he responds, “I do.  So long as destiny wills it.”

Uhhh...so if I’m working with an adequate understanding of the definition of the word “destiny,” then what you’re saying, Mycen, is, “Yeah, I think it’ll happen, as long as it’s something that’s gonna happen.”  Yeah, uh, just as a heads-up: literally anything and everything that happens does so because destiny wills it.  That’s how destiny works.


- Nintendo made an interesting attempt in this game to add a more traditional battle encounter system with the incorporation of some (very mild) third-person POV dungeon-crawling.  It...doesn’t really work, honestly.  Generally speaking, Tactical RPG combat systems just make encounters take too long to get through for mundane run-into-enemy fights to feel like anything more than a chore.  Random encounters when you weren’t specifically hoping to grind some levels was easily the most annoying part of Final Fantasy Tactics for me, and FFT, at least, allowed for some proper leveling to come from them, whereas the capacity for unit growth in Fire Emblem games is pretty strictly controlled and thus these little battles generally don’t offer much reward for the time you put into them.  Additionally the actual process of navigating these dungeons is so rudimentary, and the dungeons themselves designed so half-heartedly, that the whole experience is bland and tasteless, even by RPG standards.

Still, it is kind of interesting that it happened at all.  Fire Emblem isn’t given to mixing up its formulaic gameplay elements with anything more than some benign window-dressing here and there, at least from what I’ve seen of it, so this approach did catch my eye.


- Hey, it turned out Mycen was right, the thing happened because it was fated to happen so it did!  What he didn’t realize, however, was that destiny also willed Celica and Alm’s reunion to be written by a goddamn pod-person whose only training at being human was reading tweets between feuding Youtubers.

Seriously, Alm and Celica’s reunion quarrel feels like 2 tabletop players were intentionally competing to see who could fail the most persuasion checks in a row.  I’ve seen incompetent writers artificially heap on the melodramatic short-tempered misunderstandings, but jeez.  We go from Celica tackle-hugging Alm so joyfully that she nearly sends them both tumbling over the balcony to their deaths, to stacking enough spontaneous accusations and truly absurd overreactions within a less than 3 minute conversation that Celica’s storms out in a huff at what a stubborn jerk Alm is, with him basically muttering “Nuh-uh, YOU ARE!” to her back.  If you programmed an AI to write scripts for 1 Life to Live and fed it nothing but dialogue written by George Lucas, this is the scene you’d get.


- Since we’re on the subject, the beginning part of that reunion isn’t handled much better.  Celica ecstatically exclaims that she’s finally found Alm after all this time, and it’s like...what do you mean, found him, and what do you mean, after all this time?  You’re only even on this continent for your own unrelated quest, Celica, you weren’t looking for Alm.  And if you had been, it wouldn’t have been all that hard; up until 2 weeks ago, the kid had been sitting in the same village you left him at for the past 7 years straight!  No “finding” was involved in this matter.


- Clair: “You think you can walk up to a woman and ply her with a few compliments?”
Me: “Clair honey are you aware of which franchise you’re in?”

Seriously, though, it’s a trite, cheap business that even after Clair properly and justifiably rejects Gray’s shallow wish to get into her pants, FE15’s ending tosses her to him like a piece of meat anyway.  Even if the writers want to completely disregard it, I completely agree with Clair’s proudly stated belief that the person she falls for should actually know her as a person before loving her.

In fact, I think I may agree with her sentiments a little more than SHE does, because her immediate, obvious, and skin-deep infatuation with Alm at the moment they met is exactly the behavior that she’s criticizing Gray for...


- They really oversold the whole conflict between Alm and Celica, to a degree so exaggerated that it ought to legally qualify as false advertising.  I mean, the title cinematic opens with Alm and Celica reading a book about how Mila and Duma fought each other, and, in just so natural a fashion, tell each other, “Oh well let’s promise to NEVER fight each other like that, how silly would that be, amirite?” which has never, ever been said by any children who weren’t 100% guaranteed to someday try to kill each other.  And then the game opens with a spoiler of the scene near the end of the game where Alm’s stabbed Celica with the Falchion.  The game’s selling you HARD on the tragedy of war pitting 2 people in love against each other fatally.

And it’s all just leading to this wet fart of a narrative payoff.  Yeah, Alm and Celica have a battle to the death--because Celica is under a villain’s mind control.  Yeah, Alm’s forced to kill Celica during the battle--a death she is immediately resurrected from; I’m talking from corpse to opening her eyes and striking up a conversation in 1.5 minutes.  Nintendo, you tremendous nincompoops, there is not the slightest element of epic tragedy nor irony in Celica and Alm taking up arms against each other if 1 doing it out of mind control instead of choice!  And there is likewise not a shred of weight or pathos to the idea of this fight leading to Alm unwillingly killing Celica if she’s gonna pop back right as rain in less time than it takes Hulu to run a commercial break!  Alm and Celica never willingly clash, Celica recovers from death at a rate of literally, mathematically more than 10,000 times the rate at which I recover from the mere inconvenience of a poison ivy rash, their armies are not marching in conflict with one another, and the one and only time they don’t get along, EVER, is, as mentioned above, so absurdly unnatural that I have to assume that it was actually penned by a bowl of yogurt.  The grand, dramatic tragedy of fate and circumstance turning cherished loves against one another that was implied and as good as promised is nowhere in Fire Emblem 15.


- So Alm and Celica were, at least for a little while, raised by the same grandfather figure.  And when they were reading that story about Mila and Duma’s conflict, their promise not to fight as did Mila and Duma draws a clear symbolic parallel between the pairs.  Similarly, in a few other ways late in the game and in the ending, this idea that Alm and Celica symbolically represent Mila and Duma is reinforced.  Alm and Celica, the main couple who get married in the end.  And Mila and Duma, the dragons, who are brother and sister.

Oh Fire Emblem, you are just incorrigible.  Even when you don’t actually have incest, I can tell you’re thinking about it, you rascal.


- I know that, by this point in the story, Berkut is certifiable for a stay in the looney bin or a stint as the CEO of Gearbox Entertainment, but I nonetheless cannot help but wonder about the logistics of his proposal to hold his and Rinea’s wedding atop Alm’s funeral.  How do you see this happening, exactly, Berky?  You gonna get down in the grave and balance on Alm’s casket, exchanging vows as the pallbearers start shoveling clumps of dirt down onto your tux?  Is there gonna be 1 preacher guy saying “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” while another preacher guy sits on the first one’s shoulders and starts up with, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today,” each of them passing a Bible back and forth between them and hastily flipping between relevant passages?

Or maybe you see yourself climbing up on top of Alm’s funeral pyre--finally got to be king of that hill, buddy, congrats!--and exchange rings with Rinea as the mourners hose you and the pile down with kerosene and toss a match?  I mean you’ve already made Rinea into some eternally-burning witch, so I guess roasting yourself is in the spirit of the whole “what’s yours is mine” marital thing.


- I guess reasoning out how one conducts one’s wedding atop a funeral is a moot point when the intended deceased soundly whups your ass, though.  But at least Alm’s final victory over Berkut gives us this equally stupid gem to mull over, as Alm despairs over having been forced to kill his last blood relative: “Don’t you get it?  I’ve spent enough of my life alone!”

Oh, yeah, buddy, for sure.  Yeah, you were really spending your life alone, alright, what with the grandfather who raised you, and the 4 steadfast friends who were always there for you and even marched off to fucking WAR solely for the sake of supporting you.  Yeah, no, you’re right, I guess none of them fucking count because they don’t happen by dumb chance to share your genetics.  How fucking tragic, Alm, that you only had people who loved you and stood by you in your life, when you could have had Berkut instead.


- Duma’s final words are to advise Alm and Celica to let his and Mila’s “grave mistakes be warnings of where not to tread” as Alm and Celica lead the world into the future.  Um, weren't your "mistakes" just the fact that after enough time had passed, each of you lost your minds?  So...your advice boils down to "don't go violently insane."  Uh, yeah, thank heavens you mentioned it, Duma, doubtless that was at the top of their to-do list.


- Arguably the biggest point of Alm’s character development in the first half of the game is the fact that he’s proving that all men are equal and that social status does not dictate ability, as a peasant who achieves martial and leadership prowess that surpasses the nobles he’s surrounded by.  The game seems very intent on setting him up to be an icon of the idea that greatness is within anyone’s reach, and assuming importance based on circumstances of birth is foolish.

And then the writers go and reveal that he’s actually the son of the Rigellian emperor.  They throw 70% of the development they’ve given Alm over the course of the game, along with every single argument he’s ever made on the matter of merit through ability rather than birth, out the window.  They just rip up their own script, drop it in the toilet, take a big steamy dump on it, and slam their fist down on the flush lever like it owes them money.  There is now absolutely nothing whatsoever to say that all the villains’ sentiments in the game’s first half about nobles being the only individuals qualified to lead were in any way wrong.  Great fucking work, Nintendo, you really brought your goddamn A Game to this installment.


- So Faye is a woman who’s in love with Alm, but she never even stands a ghost of a chance of being with him because when filling out his Generic RPG Hero Application, he checked the “Path of Least Resistance” box under the Love Interest section.  And so this is the ending Faye gets:

“Unable to get Alm out of her mind, Faye returned to her old life in Ram Village. Eventually, she met and married a suitor who claimed he did not mind her pining for the king, though her habit of vanishing without notice for days at a time continued to worry her new family.”

Wow, awesome.  So Faye never gets over her love of Alm, lives a life so joyless that she frequently has to call in sick to her own marriage, and as a bonus, the innocent sod who married her gets to live the rest of his life knowing that he’s what his wife settled for--and it’s a transaction she regrets.

Faye wasn’t even in the original Fire Emblem 2, you know.  She was made exclusively for this remake.  Nintendo made the conscious, specific choice to invent Faye just so she could be miserable forever.


- You know, on that note...a lot of people criticize the direction that Fire Emblem has gone with its character interrelationships, making the games a veritable fleet of possible ships where each cast member has multiple potential romantic mates for the player to choose among.  And to be sure, it’s crassly indulgent pandering, it’s usually skewed unrealistically heavily and often even unfairly in favor of heterosexual pairings, it in large part caused the catastrophically idiotic Deeprealms Babysitters Club of FE14, and it frequently becomes a very troubling Eugenics 101 course for its audience.  Critiques of turning the series into the equivalent of a preteen giggling and mashing her dolls and action figures into each other in pairs according to whatever mad whimsy enters her head are quite fair.

But I’d like to point something out here: giving the player no agency over the romantic destinies of the cast of Fire Emblem 15 sure hasn’t done Clair, Faye, or Rinea any favors.  Especially Rinea, Jesus Christ.  I mean, not for nothing, but a more pandering Fire Emblem title would have meant that the player potentially could have saved Clair from a guy, one whom she’s outright and fervently said she has no romantic interest in, managing to brute-force his way into an off-screen marriage to her.  There might, after all, have been some options for Clair with someone whose romantic history with her could be summed up by more than just “Durr priddee gurrl hurr” and “Durr priddee gurrl yell at me and say she no like me? Even better!”  And excessive fanservice might at least have meant that Faye would get some love interest options written by an intern or a janitor or a guy who accidentally wandered into the wrong room or something, just anyone in the building who wasn’t a writer whose ex-girlfriend by suspicious coincidence also happened to be named Faye.

Rinea, not being an actual party member, would of course still be completely screwed and stuck in 1 of the Worst Romances in RPG history.  Look, it’s not a perfect solution.  But still, multiple romance options, even if motivated solely for juvenile and pandering reasons, at least means less chance of a decent character having her romantic fate railroaded without recourse by a writer whose subconscious resentment toward women seems to underscore a lot of the game.


- Let me see if I’ve got this right, Nintendo.  So in addition to everything else that makes Edelgard just truly, sincerely awful...you’re telling me that she’s not even a character in her own right, but rather a more gullible knock-off of Emperor Rudolf, from the Fire Emblem that directly preceded hers?