In this, I’m going to talk about two games: Fire Emblem: Awakening and The Banner Saga. While a lot of the comparisons I’ll go on to make can be chalked up to being developed in an established game developing company in a well defined series that’s taken its time to find the right formula for a fun game and the other was entirely funded on Kickstarted and made primarily by former Bioware game writers, I still want to write about the concepts that work and don’t work.
Unfortunately, I only have experience with Fire Emblem’s Awakening and Fate so I’m not talking about the entire series, and I played Awakening more than Fate due to ending my Gamefly subscription after I sent back Fate.
Without any further ado…
Both games here are turn based role playing games. Awakening allows for the player to customize the appearance and gives a few choices in terms of story. The Banner Saga is more choice driven but does not allow for the player to assume ownership of the character, even though they are making decisions for them.
The Banner Saga accounts for many more variables than Awakening does. The number of fighters, how many non-combatants you have, what’s left of your food, and how injured your party members are your main concerns. In Awakening, while you might have to deal with permanent party loss if you play in a certain mode, you don’t micromanage your adventure. You have a choice in romance and, weirdly but fittingly for the concept of the game, you push your party members into relationships with your other party members. It makes for the ultimate battle couple video game.
Despite more choices that effect story in The Banner Saga, such as picking between Rook or Alette – father or daughter – for who you’ll play in the next two games, I’d argue that Fire Emblem: Awakening has a more compelling story. That’s not to say TBS is a lesser game. If you’re one to enjoy micromanaging your band of refugees, balancing morality with practicality, adding additional challenges to yourself during combat in order to save resources.
But where TBS works in micromanaging and giving you the tough decisions of leadership, it has to let go of story and characters. From what I’ve played, there’s extremely little variation in dialogue for your choices. In conversations, your options are typically limited to information, meaning you pick a dialogue option for information, not to make a choice. Often, you’ll go from the top choice and down, the last being the one that moves the scene along.
Fire Emblem: Awakening falls into the same problem to some extent but isn’t bogged down in fake choices or choices that only work in abstracts. It isn’t until the end of the third installment of TBS that these abstract numbers become a functional mechanic. Awakening focuses on characters, which is something I’ll always argue makes or breaks a story based game. You can have the best plot in the whole damn world. You can have the best concept and world building, but it won’t mean a thing unless we care about the characters and the relationships they have. This is a component of both storytelling in games but books, too.
Awakening works by placing characters are the forefront. Not just the playing character or the indispensable main characters but the minor characters and their time warped children. You managed to keep these characters alive and had them fighting with each other on the battlefield, you’ll be rewarded by watching them care for each other and coming to terms with the fact they’ll have a child from a darker timeline popping in and getting to know them as if they actually had them.
That leads into how we get to character content. For TBS, it comes as your progress the game. If you recruited someone that in another play through you missed by a series of choices, you’ll get a couple extra conversations worth of dialogue, but that’s about the only change. For Awakening, you get more conversations with certain characters interacting with others for how often they fight next to each other. This can challenge some player’s play style or having to adjust for having two spell casters side by side rather than paring them off with a tank, all done in order to see more dialogue.
Rather than progress leading to story, story is a reward to gameplay. You’re not assured all dialogue, even if you make all the right choices. You have to make the right decisions in the gameplay as well, step by step and turn by turn.
The reward system lends itself to the turn based system. In games with live action combat, story is inherently linked to the combat. It’s a seamless transition. For turn based, there’s a definitive difference between the visual novel-like delivery of story and the top-down combat. You’re given an objective and asked to accomplish it.
This could also be linked to how the two games treat defeat. For TBS, it’s considered a failure to repeat until you succeed. In Awakening, for the most part, you can fail your objective without failing the level, making your tactician skills a story mechanic.
Turn based RPGs are a great way for indie or small project games to make a decent game with a decent story, but it’s still a delicate balance that needs to be struck.
Video Games Deconstructed 