An essay on Thracia 776 for which I was given an A

	Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is a part of the Fire Emblem series of strategy role-playing games (RPGs) known for its difficulty. However, the first six Fire Emblem games were released only in Japan—Thracia 776 being the fifth. This offered players outside of Japan two options: they could either a) purchase a Japanese Nintendo console to play these games, or b) download an emulator that could play games, saving players time and money. As emulators were widely available and also free, they would become the preferred option for most Fire Emblem fans.

	One of the mechanics that endlessly annoys Fire Emblem fans is ‘permadeath’. Permadeath occurs when a character dies in battle and cannot be resurrected. Most other role-playing games allow for the resuscitation of player characters that are void of hit points, making many Fire Emblem games particularly difficult in stark contrast. Emulators can render permadeath useless thanks to emulator mechanisms such as save states that restore a game to previous states or cheat codes that play around with code. Later games that are officially released globally even provide options that disable permadeath, known as ‘casual mode’.

	Permadeath factors into Fire Emblem: Thracia 776’s high level of difficulty. However, emulators can disable permadeath—altering not only the game’s difficulty, but also player perception of its narrative. The narrative of Thracia 776 is characterized by tension, drama, risk, and above all, mortality. Such a narrative requires each player to take gameplay very seriously, encouraging them to play well in spite of permadeath. This allows for a highly effective presentation of the journey in which protagonist Prince Leif restores the kingdom of Leonster, and this narrative presentation risks losing efficacy the moment that the player disables the permadeath mechanic.

	The mechanic of permadeath compels players to care for each playable unit. In an April 1994 interview with Famicom Tsuushin magazine (translated by Shmupulations), Fire Emblem series creator Shouzou Kaga writes that permadeath makes players “empathize with the characters or story” in FE games. As human players can die at any moment, they understand playable character’s mortality. In my opinion, it is for this reason I take my gameplay in Thracia 776 seriously. Players, at this time, become engaged with the tense in-game story and take risks to ensure characters emerge unscathed by devising complex strategies for each map to prevent ‘casualties’.

	Stakes represent the risks that players of Thracia 776 take to ensure each playable character’s survival—the greater these risks, the greater the possible prize or punishment.  In his text “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”, anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that play deepens with an increase in the game’s stakes. Cockfighting is “a simulation of the social matrix” (Geertz) that defines Balinese society, and two birds battle in order to vilifying or affirming the opponent’s social status. The more money bet on the battle of birds, the greater the vilification or affirmation of societal power. In the context of Thracia 776, the effort poured into developing playable characters forms the stakes of your game.

	This means that the further you move into the game, the higher the stakes become as you pour more resources into developing playable units. If Geertz had examined a Thracia 776 skirmish, he would say that wagering of your friendships and the lives of the people with which you share them deepens the play experience. Players then become ‘one’ with each playable character and thus maneuver carefully to avoid permadeath, using skill and wits to vanquish each tense skirmish. “Through the force of their greed” (Geertz) in saving lives by disabling permadeath during emulation, players no longer empathize with the characters as they face less pressing circumstances. By doing so, they instead distance themselves from the game’s dramatic story and put the efficacy of its narrative presentation at stake.

	If Thracia 776 were treated like a Balinese cockfight, then emulator play would be like betting small sums of money on a rooster—in Geertz’s terms, these players are parsimonious “vulgarians who simply miss the point”. By lowering your stakes, gameplay depth rises to the top. You lose the drive to avoid permadeath by eliminating it, along with the tension you ‘share’ with your characters. If Geertz examined Thracia 776 players strategizing carefully, he would say that they “put their money where their status is”, like cockfighters betting larger sums of money on roosters that represent the owner’s societal status and put that status at stake during play.

	Regardless of whether or not emulator play cheapens the value of Thracia 776’s story by affecting the stakes of the game that produces its tension, it cannot be argued that emulator play was influential on the Fire Emblem fanbase. Emulator play planted the seeds for such a fanbase outside Japan—growing into a robust community of people that play highly dramatic strategy role-playing games. Without this community, the international official release of subsequent installments—in which the rules are immutable without emulation—would never occur. In fact, there are those that accept the rules of the game and emulate by challenging themselves not to use save states (which I prevent myself from doing) and/or cheat codes (which I never do anyway) as they understand the difficulty of Fire Emblem games and play in spite of that.

	Author Bernard De Koven of the book called The Well-Played Game: A Player's Philosophy writes that only those who have “accepted the conditions of the game completely” (p. 129) actually play the game. These sort of players “play to win” (De Koven, p. 129) by working towards victory by using the rules, mechanics and limitations of the game. These players also understand that that they can lose, using loss to inform their playstyle—for example, I felt encouraged to create better strategies because permadeath exists, thus allowing me to fully experience Thracia 776 and its narrative thanks to steps that I took to ensure a hard-earned victory.

	Players who choose to emulate and use their software tricks like save states may be seen as disingenuous players as a result. These sort of players might be known in De Koven’s text as players that “have to win” (p. 129), meaning that these players are believed to have no concern for the quality at which they play “unless it happens to help your game” (p. 129). Players that have to win reject the limitations of the game to ensure flawless victories, like disabling permadeath. This echoes the perception established by Geertz that these players cheapen play experiences by belittling the rules of the game.

	One can say that De Koven assumes that victory is something that all players want to pursue. This is true of most competitive non-digital games—like cockfighting, basketball or poker, in which there exists a clear winner and one or more clear losers. However, like many other video games, the only real victory earned in Thracia 776 is really just completing the game, and even then, this is what Kaga defines as victory. The closest approximation of losing would be getting a game over, and after that, one can play the game again and inch closer to becoming a ‘winner’.

	One way Thracia 776 pursues storytelling is through “environmental storytelling”, as phrased by Henry Jenkins in his text Game Design as Narrative Architecture. An “immersive environment we can wander through and interact with” (Jenkins, p. 4) becomes the avenue through which players obtain narrative information. As Thracia 776 is a strategy role-playing game, it relies on the coordinated movement across space demarcated by grids based on the information given to us by said space to move further into the game. Some of these “evocative spaces”, meant to evoke a certain feeling or thought that may be familiar to the player.

	In Thracia 776, one map called “Chapter 4: The Prison” lets us know that even enemy placement can make use of evocative spaces. In this prison, enemy guards are stationed directly across the cells in which Prince Leif other playable characters are held up. This exact placement evokes the memory of early play in which we learn of Leif’s exile and his role of ‘royals on the run’, with Leif being the target of rival nations that seek power over the continent of Jugdral—represented by the armed guards. As we are targets—in other words, objects, we are unarmed and unable to make our mark on Leonster society.

	It is when we break out of the prison cells that we are pursued by these guards to no end. These guards chase us just like how Leif. had been living his life being pursued almost everywhere he had gone—only this time, Leif has no weapon with which to defend himself. This punctuates the anxiety of going around a map with no weapon in a game where all character deaths are final, forcing players like me to feel the tension that Leif and his company had felt in previous chapters. It is during this event that we now know what Leif goes through, giving another level of personal importance to the matter of rebuilding the decimated kingdom of Leonster.

	To conclude, an effective presentation of the narrative of Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is delivered by getting players to feel the tension, drama, anxiety and mortality that punctuates the story just as much as characters ‘do’. However, this effective narrative presentation risks losing luster once the player turns off the mechanic of permadeath with the use of emulation. Permadeath is a mechanic by which tension, drama, anxiety and of course, mortality is created as the player risks wasting the time poured into developing characters by allowing them to die. By strategizing in such a way that these characters make it out alive, players thus gain skill, play ‘better’ and appreciate the story better than those who cheapen the story and remove value from the gameplay by disabling permadeath.