KindestWeapon
@KindestWeapon

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Trails of Cold Steel (1-4)

Soul Hackers 2

Xenoblade Chronicles 3

What do they all have in common? The core cast of characters and party members are all there from the beginning of the game.

Historically, some games you have party members joining you throughout the entire game and it's silly when a dude who joined in the second to last chapter just inserts himself into casual, personal conversations as if he's been there the whole time or gives a long speech about the hardship everyone went through to get to that point. Then mechanically, you likely have your party sorted out by that point, do you really want to experiment with a new party member? Often no, you stick with your party loadout from the beginning of the game unless you run into difficulty and have to reconsider. And I've definitely played games that asked me to learn a whole bunch of new party member mechanics, that I had no reason or time to engage with before, at the end of the game. I've dropped games due to that.

The thing the previously mentioned games have though is all the core party members are around from the start. They may not join your party until later (in FE3H's case when it comes to recruiting) and you may get temporary party members jumping in and out for plot reasons (Xenoblade 3 and the Cold Steels), but the core is there. Bonding, interacting, and working together throughout the game.

In Fire Emblem's case, it feels natural when you recruit a student or faculty member; they fit right in. They've been there the whole time and of course you'll slot them in alongside your friends. A lot of players get stressed about recruiting them all. The fact that they have that drive, that amount of care for those characters, speaks for itself.

Xenoblade 3, you have all 6 core party members from the start. They all bond and grow from the beginning. The temporary party members that join them along the way all serve to help further grow the core cast. Being able to just swap the player controlled character seamlessly, both in and out of battle, also encourages the player to engage with them on a level. It's a long 100+ hour game, but the mechanics introduced from the beginning encourage you to mix it up constantly. Switching up everyone's class, experimenting with new skills and moves, etc. They manage to keep the gameplay fresh throughout. I could go on about the game design of Xenoblade 3, but I'll try to refrain.

The Cold Steel quadrilogy may be the weakest Legend of Heroes subseries in terms of cast (since they leaned hard into "anime"), but the fact that those kids are all around from the start, similar to Fire Emblem, you want to use them. They're friends, they're familiar, you know their drives and motivations, they weren't just shoved onto you.

Soul Hackers 2 gives you your entire ragtag crew by the end of the prologue. Not only does this avoid the common Atlus issue of giving you a party member wicked late that rarely anyone uses or knows well as a result (Haru from P5), but let's you do all your experimenting up front. Figuring out which composition and roles you want to give every character.

I want more games that do this. Tales is getting better. Tales of Berseria and Tales of Arise gave you everyone in the first quarter of the respective games; Berseria at least introducing all of them in the first chapter before two of them f off for a bit.

By breaking up the larger game, and by limiting your party members in certain sections, the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series may be accomplishing this to an extent.

I just think it's neat that a lot of games aren't just constantly throwing characters at you anymore only for some to be unloved or underused. It's real neat.


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in reply to @KindestWeapon's post:

i feel this a lot with xenoblade 3. even playing XCDE, i toughed out most of the game using shulk sharla and reyn bc it was rare that any of the other party members gave me an edge that i needed.

fast forward to XC3 and you're asked to manage everyone's classes and how best to combo them together. you're swapping out your heroes either to give yourself a boost in one way or another or bc you're interested in playing out their respective quests. and it works! it's compelling and it creates a genuine attachment to the characters. i've still yet to complete it but i'm having a good time

Xenoblade 3 did it so well. Every character is compelling and I love them all.

And totally agree with earlier Xenoblade games. With Xenoblade Chronicles 1 on the Wii, I also mainly did Shulk, Ryen, and Sharla. When I replayed Definitive Edition a decade later on Switch, it was only then that I experimented and tried to include newer player members in more because of my previous attachments to them.

I controlled Melia and Seven (we're still calling them that, right?) so much more in Definitive Edition and was able to just constantly mix up and discover new party combos that worked well. But it was only on a replay where I felt comfortable doing that. Xenoblade 3 has you doing that at the start on your first playthrough and it's so good. I can't wait for the expansion, I just want more.

Yeah, having most of your team around from practically the word go has been nice for the games I've seen with it. Though in Trails of Cold Steel 1+2's case it did lead to some characters having an issue of just barely getting any focus but that's really a separate issue due to how many characters they had.

Also trying to think of some older games that did this and the main one coming to mind is Dragon Quest 8, you have all of you party members rather early in the game(Not counting the 3DS additions) and the characters in that stick with me rather well.

In regards to Cold Steel, yeah. I think the major problem, in 1 and 2 at least, is almost the entire core cast orbits around Rean. Other Legend of Heroes subseries characters got to f off and do their own things, have their own motivations, and goals etc. Whereas the cast in CS1/2 were waiting around for Rean. And honestly, they did almost all the major women characters dirty by making them all potential romantic interests for Rean, for the sake of dating-sim-esque gameplay, despite clearing pushing a canonical love interest.

As far as Dragon Quest 8 goes, that's great to hear. I was never able to get into a DQ, so I'm curious, did they manage to keep the gameplay fresh without introducing new characters throughout? How did they do so back then? Cause from a game design perspective, keeping players engaged for a long game is a challenge, so I wanna know, haha.

Yeah, for Cold Steel writing with only a single love interest in mind would've been an improvement.

I don't know if I'd say it kept it fresh, but DQ8 was the first one where they introduced the Skill Point system. Which honestly did a good job giving the player a choice in how to develop the characters in their own way, even if in the end there are some clearly better choices than others once you know the system. The only big issue with said system was how you didn't have any idea what you were getting for your points, and the 3DS version addressed that issue of not knowing what you were getting out of the skill trees.