Weapon vs. Unit Decay

Intelligent Systems’ approach to balance in both the Fire Emblem series and the Advance Wars series are rather similar, but the tiny difference in weapon decay vs. unit decay vastly changes how the games are designed, how the stories are told, and how the player the makes choices.

Fire Emblem is notorious not only for its well-written and notable characters, but for the relationships between characters, and that Intelligent Systems implemented permanent death completely shapes and defines the series. Losing a character (especially a player’s favorite character) is devastating and often leads the player to restart the mission. Character favoritism coupled with RPG elements like a character’s stats are reason enough to protect a handful of characters from death, and Fire Emblem limits the amount of total units you can choose from and the amount of units you can have per mission. And in order to ensure your units/characters can keep fighting and to keep them from dying, the player needs sufficient resources (weapons, healing, et cetera) to beat the level and move the narrative forward. Weapon decay is therefore a very tiny element that the player has to keep in mind in order to achieve the best possible victory. A player who fails to keep enough weapons in stock will eventually run into problems if they did not visit a shop in the previous levels (however, newer games in the series add a Shop in Mission Preparation). All in all, Fire Emblem balances what a player values both in character selection and in weapon availability.

On the other hand, Advance Wars allows the player to continually produce new units so long as the player controls the proper structure. The main characters in Advance Wars, however, are not susceptible to permanent death. While Commanding Officers can make an impact on the battlefield, and while COs are just as likeable, charming, and well-written as Fire Emblem characters, death is not an issue. This ultimately comes down to unit decay where a weakened unit will not only do less damage, but it will also be easier to destroy. If COs were to share the same fate as the unit they board, it would be likely CO’d units would hardly see combat or be sent to the front lines unless their ability provided some sort of passive, multi-tiled buff to surrounding units (which some would argue is innately non-interactive, and therefore “hinders” gameplay). While in Fire Emblem a weapon’s durability is not visible unless the player intends to investigate a unit’s items, in Advance Wars the instant a unit loses decays even one point, that unit’s durability will remain visible unless it is fully healed. When playing Fire Emblem I always have to open up a unit’s info page (and I am met with the character’s portrait, their name, HP, XP, et cetera) to check their stats and do some quick mental math to see if s/he could endure a fight. In Advance Wars that same mental math could be done just by decoding a screenshot, understanding unit advantage, terrain advantage, an such.

I could say so much more about how this tiny difference between the games make them so unique from each other, but there’s much more than simply weapon/unit decay.