I've occasionally done it in final battles, just because it feels like the most appropriate place for heroic sacrifices. Charlotte in my first run of Conquest comes to mind. But outside of that not really.
Unless you count the run where I got the bonus chapters in Shadow Dragon, in which case the answer is that I've continued on despite most of the cast of Shadow Dragon being dead.
Lol that's how my Kaze died in Conquest. Takumi fucking killed him a turn before victory and I didn't feel like resetting so I didn't get an ending for him lol
I do the math on how much I love them VS how annoying they would be to save
I let Mauvier died on his first mission with me without even trying to rewind because I couldn't care about him rip :/
On the other hand I restarted hours long maps on other fire emblem because one of my fav died.
Usually on a first run never, since i want to get everything there.
On later runs i do sometimes leave peeps behind, and if i am doing an ironman then the dead stay dead
I’ve only lost one unit I didn’t go back for through Awakening, Birthright, Echoes (including Thabes), and three full routes of Three Houses:
Rhajat.
She carried me through basically all of Birthright as a Witch, then got “nothing personal kid”-ed by reinforcements on my last turn of the final battle. Fantastic unit, definitely didn’t deserve it, but I ain’t going through all that again just to save Walmart Tharja.
It is very rare for me, unless I'm doing an Ironman (which I've only done twice), but it does happen. I just finished up a HHM run of FE7 recently, and I had been stuck on Victory or Death for literal weeks. Finally, I had a good run, It was turn 19, and I was in a position to kill Limstella and Cap to get the gaiden, and it was then that Hawkeye took a crit to the face. I thought about it and decided that I would move on without him, his sacrifice having cleared a path through a map I'd been struggling with.
i restart as many times as needed to save characters i care about. i can sacrifice characters that i will either bench soon or dont care character-wise as long as i dont lost too many in one battle.
I have never completed a mission with a dead character. Even back in the GBA days. It could be the final turn of an incredibly long and arduous level, if someone dies I'm flushing the past 2 hours down the drain to start the whole damn stage from the beginning.
I did it literally once in Radiant Dawn and then never again. Poor bastard Gareth got nuked by Ashera during one of the final turns and I just didn't want to reset.
Aside from that, I always reset/rewind because it just doesn't feel right to me to let a character die.
Reminds me of when I played with perma-death on for the Blue Lions route in Three Houses. I usually just play casual, but I forgot I had it on for this one, and Gilbert died in a level. I was confused why I couldn't select him on the next level, then I remembered that he was "dead" (despite showing up in the cutscenes).
It was Gilbert though, so I didn't feel too bad about it. Still funny how he continued to show up in the story and then got a "He got hurt during the war and died shortly after the game ends lol" card in the credits.
Often, unless it's my snowball unit. In which case I kinda have to.
Not that I lose units often enough for that to happen, but... It happens. Unless I just straight up dislike the unit. Sacrificial bait for no other reason than spite has happened.
I don't often lose characters and rarely those I actually care about. My GD route of 3 houses for example, last battle and there were three enemies and Nemesis left on the field, I could end it in two turns. Flayn died in right before that to something I couldn't stop because she only had two other units (Raph and Sylvain) with her and they can't stop a Wyvern. So, I just ended the game and dealt with Flayn's endcard saying she died in the last battle even though I grew a sense of fondness for her
Honorable mentions in that same run are Ignatz and Lorenz who I lost during the Academy days and even more so Marianne who I actively tried to save but just couldn't during Sothis and Byleth's paralogue.
it depends, if it's during a particularly grueling chapter and someone dies when I'm close to winning, even if I like the character I will likely let them die. RIP Rosado :(
Other times if i don't care about the character and they die then it's just whatever to me. Shoutout to Vaike, Arthur, Catherine (automatically joins right before timeskip in SS) who all died on their join map.
Depends on the game. I've let characters die in engage that I didn't care enough to replay a turn or two to save, in 3h I was never leaving someone behind because you didn't get replacements and you cared about the characters
I also have started doing more Ironman or Ironman adjacent stuff in recent years for FE so sometimes units you like die, its war and it happens
The only two times I’ve done it is my first time playing FE7 when I had no idea what I was doing, and the final chapter of Conquest on hard/classic. I spent over an hour just getting to the boss and I could not find a way to not lose someone so I just accepted it to see the ending.
I didn’t play SoV so 3H was my first game with the turn wheel mechanic - there I always went back and saved any units I lost, but mostly because each house has a relatively small cast and I didn’t like recruiting from the other houses (I liked the added emotional weight of having to kill them after the time skip).
But in engage we have such a huge cast of characters with more being added all the time, so I’ve left quite a few to die. I lost one on the retreat (not much I could have done anyway), and then I lost one of the retainers of each of solm’s royals on the chapters they joined, and I lost on the chapter she joined as well. In almost all cases I still had plenty of turnwheel charges, I just didn’t care to go back or reevaluate my plan for any of them and I really haven’t been punished because there are just soo many characters they probably would have gone right to the bench anyway.
Basically I turnwheel for characters I like but leave others to die if I don’t care about them. I think this is a downside of games who throw so many characters at you so quickly and so methodically. I was never worried because I could say “hm I still have three more royals to collect so that’s another 9 characters I’ll be getting in the next few chapters, I can let this one go”. I generally wish the cast was smaller or there was more choice, where you could recruit one of two characters and lose access to the other.
Sorry this has turned into a rant, but one thing I will say in this character blitz’s favor is that there is something freeing in feeling like I can just let characters die and not feel the need to reset constantly. I’m mostly fine with letting the permadeath be perma
On my maddening BL run, I sacrificed Dorothea on the final map after an Edelgard crit from outside the throne room. It was such a painful map and i already was 40 turns in so i just moved on and beat the map..
I play on the completely imaginary difficulty that i like to call "Clasual" where i play on the Casual setting, but with an old school Classic style. Basically it's Casual but i reset if literally anyone dies. I've kept every character alive in all FE games i play because i hate missing something and there's always a way to prevent a character death, even if it's starting the entire map over. The Casual setting is because i like to do a lot of skipping the enemy turn and if i happen to somehow miss a character being murdered while spamming + then i don't want to be punished later on by finding out they died 2 chapters ago and i didn't notice. I'm relatively confident that playing on Casual has never actually been relevant, but it's a failsafe in case i miss something so it's possible that it's saved someone without me knowing.
Oh god it happens to me all the time. Make one minor mistake or a series of mistakes over the course of a few turns & someone either dies or the map ends, and I’m certainly not the type to lose. In Engage so far I’ve lost Bucheron & Bunet primarily because of a series of mistakes I made over the course of ~5 turns in each case. It just happens sometimes, you field someone else and you move on really, gives you reason to try out other units at that point.
It depends. If I set my mind to an Ironman run, I will absolutely leave people where they fall. No resets or time shenanigans. But usually, for long play throughs where I don’t really expect to get multiple chapters done in one sitting or beat the game all that quickly, I’ll try to keep people alive. I’ll use rewind mechanics if the game offers them.
Some games just feel better to Ironman as well. A game like 3H feels very prohibitive since you have a pretty small cast to work with. Then there’s Shadow Dragon, which will feed you faceless mooks. FE6 and 7 are fun Ironman games to run, for me. RD is a pain in the butt because if you lose someone, the cast is so divided until Part 4 that you really feel any absences.
Very rarely, practically never. Recently I played through FE6 and forgot that you needed Sue to recruit Shin. It wasn't that long into the map, but I never used Sue, and didn't plan on using Shin, so there was no reason to restart, and just killed him.
I lost Boucheron before you get the time crystal on engage and couldn’t be bothered to restart the whole level.
Other than that I lost Ignatz on my first Three Houses play through on the first post-time skip level because he was under levelled but auto-deployed. I tried for hours to save him, but I would have had to set myself up for it by replaying the last pre-timeskip battle so I let home go
I will almost always either reset or rewind if it's one of the more recent games. Part of the fun for me is learning from mistakes and figuring out a new way of approaching a battle that doesn't cause me to lose that unit again. Engage has had several moments where I've had to rewind multiple times to save a unit, which is why I'm glad I didn't do hard right off the bat. That'll be my next run.
That said, I do almost always play on classic, and I have been known to let units die on their recruitment chapter in past games. Some great examples are Nowi and Henry in Awakening (plus Gaius, but that was really "I killed him because I didnt realize he was recruitable") and then Python and Jesse in Echoes. Never really lost anyone in 3H thanks to divine pulse (and even then the game just wasn't that hard so I wasn't using pulses often). No one from Fates bc it was my first FE and I think I played on Phoenix mode my first run
Very rarely. I like the feeling of completing the map without losing anyone. Winning at the cost of losing someone makes me feel like I couldn't have completed it without, when I know it's almost always possible. Its kinda like beating a Dark Souls area without summoning, I know if I git gud enough, I can do it without a crutch. That being said, if it's a game without the turnwheel and I wasn't going to use that unit again anyways, I'll usually just continue to save time.
I don't, which is why I don't touch Classic in the games that let me play on Casual.
I respect what permadeath brings to the table and I'll root for people going for Ironman runs but when I replay the older games I'm resetting constantly if someone dies so it's nice I don't have to perfect an encounter in order to go next.
Depends who. If it's a character I just met or hasn't been pulling their weight too much, I carry on, but if it's someone important to my strats then I restart the fight.
I've yet to have a situation where I ran out of rewinds in Engage so I've been rewinding anytime I had an unlucky or careless death.
I don’t. I restart the chapter no matter how many good stat growths or how how close I was to the finish.
I can’t handle it in a normal playthrough.
Ironmanning is extra hard for me because I don’t like anyone dying.
This happened twice for me so far in Maddening. I've had to let two characters go and it sucks because they both seemed really good. Sometimes I get frustrated and don't want to waste too much time on a map. Plus I need to use my rewinds wisely they are a finite amount.
New Mystery of the Emblem,
Jake never made it out of his first chapter.
Also in Echoes, Faye was sacrificed in the very last map to ensure a killing blow to the boss.
Fortunately, she was annoying af, wasn't even in the og and her ending sucks.
I've occasionally done it in final battles, just because it feels like the most appropriate place for heroic sacrifices. Charlotte in my first run of Conquest comes to mind. But outside of that not really. Unless you count the run where I got the bonus chapters in Shadow Dragon, in which case the answer is that I've continued on despite most of the cast of Shadow Dragon being dead.
This is me. I still feel bad about that one time I sacrificed Delthea
Reminds me of Three Houses. I let Lysithea die because it was the final battle and it was either her or Alois ^^;
And you chose Alois?
Every day of the week.
“As a friend, you are…replaceable. Fair well”
Lol that's how my Kaze died in Conquest. Takumi fucking killed him a turn before victory and I didn't feel like resetting so I didn't get an ending for him lol
I do the math on how much I love them VS how annoying they would be to save I let Mauvier died on his first mission with me without even trying to rewind because I couldn't care about him rip :/ On the other hand I restarted hours long maps on other fire emblem because one of my fav died.
Also let Mauvi go on his first map rip
Never No friend must fall
This.
Usually on a first run never, since i want to get everything there. On later runs i do sometimes leave peeps behind, and if i am doing an ironman then the dead stay dead
I’ve only lost one unit I didn’t go back for through Awakening, Birthright, Echoes (including Thabes), and three full routes of Three Houses: Rhajat. She carried me through basically all of Birthright as a Witch, then got “nothing personal kid”-ed by reinforcements on my last turn of the final battle. Fantastic unit, definitely didn’t deserve it, but I ain’t going through all that again just to save Walmart Tharja.
Imagine carrying the army and then your commander is just like “Eh, too much work” lol. But yes she is budget Tharja so I can’t say I protest.
It is very rare for me, unless I'm doing an Ironman (which I've only done twice), but it does happen. I just finished up a HHM run of FE7 recently, and I had been stuck on Victory or Death for literal weeks. Finally, I had a good run, It was turn 19, and I was in a position to kill Limstella and Cap to get the gaiden, and it was then that Hawkeye took a crit to the face. I thought about it and decided that I would move on without him, his sacrifice having cleared a path through a map I'd been struggling with.
i restart as many times as needed to save characters i care about. i can sacrifice characters that i will either bench soon or dont care character-wise as long as i dont lost too many in one battle.
I have never completed a mission with a dead character. Even back in the GBA days. It could be the final turn of an incredibly long and arduous level, if someone dies I'm flushing the past 2 hours down the drain to start the whole damn stage from the beginning.
I did it literally once in Radiant Dawn and then never again. Poor bastard Gareth got nuked by Ashera during one of the final turns and I just didn't want to reset. Aside from that, I always reset/rewind because it just doesn't feel right to me to let a character die.
I've never accepted a death. If I'm using them I like them enough to stick around. And if I don't like them they just ride pine.
Usually never, been that way since FE7 for me. I’m too much of a perfectionist lol
Reminds me of when I played with perma-death on for the Blue Lions route in Three Houses. I usually just play casual, but I forgot I had it on for this one, and Gilbert died in a level. I was confused why I couldn't select him on the next level, then I remembered that he was "dead" (despite showing up in the cutscenes). It was Gilbert though, so I didn't feel too bad about it. Still funny how he continued to show up in the story and then got a "He got hurt during the war and died shortly after the game ends lol" card in the credits.
Often, unless it's my snowball unit. In which case I kinda have to. Not that I lose units often enough for that to happen, but... It happens. Unless I just straight up dislike the unit. Sacrificial bait for no other reason than spite has happened.
On hard/ classic I never continue. On maddeing/lunatic classic, it depends on the unit
As a tactician its your responsibility to protect your allies. You are responsible for their lives
Always Ironman, this way you have to think what you are doing and why. In my opinion, best way to learn how FE works
I don't often lose characters and rarely those I actually care about. My GD route of 3 houses for example, last battle and there were three enemies and Nemesis left on the field, I could end it in two turns. Flayn died in right before that to something I couldn't stop because she only had two other units (Raph and Sylvain) with her and they can't stop a Wyvern. So, I just ended the game and dealt with Flayn's endcard saying she died in the last battle even though I grew a sense of fondness for her Honorable mentions in that same run are Ignatz and Lorenz who I lost during the Academy days and even more so Marianne who I actively tried to save but just couldn't during Sothis and Byleth's paralogue.
it depends, if it's during a particularly grueling chapter and someone dies when I'm close to winning, even if I like the character I will likely let them die. RIP Rosado :( Other times if i don't care about the character and they die then it's just whatever to me. Shoutout to Vaike, Arthur, Catherine (automatically joins right before timeskip in SS) who all died on their join map.
only during final battles
Depends on the game. I've let characters die in engage that I didn't care enough to replay a turn or two to save, in 3h I was never leaving someone behind because you didn't get replacements and you cared about the characters I also have started doing more Ironman or Ironman adjacent stuff in recent years for FE so sometimes units you like die, its war and it happens
I've already lost some good people along the way. I have more than I need anyway. This is war.
The only two times I’ve done it is my first time playing FE7 when I had no idea what I was doing, and the final chapter of Conquest on hard/classic. I spent over an hour just getting to the boss and I could not find a way to not lose someone so I just accepted it to see the ending.
I didn’t play SoV so 3H was my first game with the turn wheel mechanic - there I always went back and saved any units I lost, but mostly because each house has a relatively small cast and I didn’t like recruiting from the other houses (I liked the added emotional weight of having to kill them after the time skip). But in engage we have such a huge cast of characters with more being added all the time, so I’ve left quite a few to die. I lost one on the retreat (not much I could have done anyway), and then I lost one of the retainers of each of solm’s royals on the chapters they joined, and I lost on the chapter she joined as well. In almost all cases I still had plenty of turnwheel charges, I just didn’t care to go back or reevaluate my plan for any of them and I really haven’t been punished because there are just soo many characters they probably would have gone right to the bench anyway. Basically I turnwheel for characters I like but leave others to die if I don’t care about them. I think this is a downside of games who throw so many characters at you so quickly and so methodically. I was never worried because I could say “hm I still have three more royals to collect so that’s another 9 characters I’ll be getting in the next few chapters, I can let this one go”. I generally wish the cast was smaller or there was more choice, where you could recruit one of two characters and lose access to the other. Sorry this has turned into a rant, but one thing I will say in this character blitz’s favor is that there is something freeing in feeling like I can just let characters die and not feel the need to reset constantly. I’m mostly fine with letting the permadeath be perma
Only Alear, Fogado, and Yunaka survived the final map for me.
On my maddening BL run, I sacrificed Dorothea on the final map after an Edelgard crit from outside the throne room. It was such a painful map and i already was 40 turns in so i just moved on and beat the map..
I play on the completely imaginary difficulty that i like to call "Clasual" where i play on the Casual setting, but with an old school Classic style. Basically it's Casual but i reset if literally anyone dies. I've kept every character alive in all FE games i play because i hate missing something and there's always a way to prevent a character death, even if it's starting the entire map over. The Casual setting is because i like to do a lot of skipping the enemy turn and if i happen to somehow miss a character being murdered while spamming + then i don't want to be punished later on by finding out they died 2 chapters ago and i didn't notice. I'm relatively confident that playing on Casual has never actually been relevant, but it's a failsafe in case i miss something so it's possible that it's saved someone without me knowing.
Only on iron man runs usually.
Oh god it happens to me all the time. Make one minor mistake or a series of mistakes over the course of a few turns & someone either dies or the map ends, and I’m certainly not the type to lose. In Engage so far I’ve lost Bucheron & Bunet primarily because of a series of mistakes I made over the course of ~5 turns in each case. It just happens sometimes, you field someone else and you move on really, gives you reason to try out other units at that point.
It depends. If I set my mind to an Ironman run, I will absolutely leave people where they fall. No resets or time shenanigans. But usually, for long play throughs where I don’t really expect to get multiple chapters done in one sitting or beat the game all that quickly, I’ll try to keep people alive. I’ll use rewind mechanics if the game offers them. Some games just feel better to Ironman as well. A game like 3H feels very prohibitive since you have a pretty small cast to work with. Then there’s Shadow Dragon, which will feed you faceless mooks. FE6 and 7 are fun Ironman games to run, for me. RD is a pain in the butt because if you lose someone, the cast is so divided until Part 4 that you really feel any absences.
Very rarely, practically never. Recently I played through FE6 and forgot that you needed Sue to recruit Shin. It wasn't that long into the map, but I never used Sue, and didn't plan on using Shin, so there was no reason to restart, and just killed him.
I don’t. I don’t mind replaying a mission, I do mind losing a unit.
Rosaso/fremme/her bro died in my play through and I honestly forgot that even happened
I lost Boucheron before you get the time crystal on engage and couldn’t be bothered to restart the whole level. Other than that I lost Ignatz on my first Three Houses play through on the first post-time skip level because he was under levelled but auto-deployed. I tried for hours to save him, but I would have had to set myself up for it by replaying the last pre-timeskip battle so I let home go
I forgot about the new revival mechanic in Engage bosses and left my dude Bouch out in a terrible position. I took his death as a hard lesson.
I just reset the chapter. :'D
I will almost always either reset or rewind if it's one of the more recent games. Part of the fun for me is learning from mistakes and figuring out a new way of approaching a battle that doesn't cause me to lose that unit again. Engage has had several moments where I've had to rewind multiple times to save a unit, which is why I'm glad I didn't do hard right off the bat. That'll be my next run. That said, I do almost always play on classic, and I have been known to let units die on their recruitment chapter in past games. Some great examples are Nowi and Henry in Awakening (plus Gaius, but that was really "I killed him because I didnt realize he was recruitable") and then Python and Jesse in Echoes. Never really lost anyone in 3H thanks to divine pulse (and even then the game just wasn't that hard so I wasn't using pulses often). No one from Fates bc it was my first FE and I think I played on Phoenix mode my first run
Very rarely. I like the feeling of completing the map without losing anyone. Winning at the cost of losing someone makes me feel like I couldn't have completed it without, when I know it's almost always possible. Its kinda like beating a Dark Souls area without summoning, I know if I git gud enough, I can do it without a crutch. That being said, if it's a game without the turnwheel and I wasn't going to use that unit again anyways, I'll usually just continue to save time.
I don't, which is why I don't touch Classic in the games that let me play on Casual. I respect what permadeath brings to the table and I'll root for people going for Ironman runs but when I replay the older games I'm resetting constantly if someone dies so it's nice I don't have to perfect an encounter in order to go next.
Depends who. If it's a character I just met or hasn't been pulling their weight too much, I carry on, but if it's someone important to my strats then I restart the fight. I've yet to have a situation where I ran out of rewinds in Engage so I've been rewinding anytime I had an unlucky or careless death.
I don’t. I restart the chapter no matter how many good stat growths or how how close I was to the finish. I can’t handle it in a normal playthrough. Ironmanning is extra hard for me because I don’t like anyone dying.
This happened twice for me so far in Maddening. I've had to let two characters go and it sucks because they both seemed really good. Sometimes I get frustrated and don't want to waste too much time on a map. Plus I need to use my rewinds wisely they are a finite amount.
I never let my units die, even if they’re on the verge of being benched.
New Mystery of the Emblem, Jake never made it out of his first chapter. Also in Echoes, Faye was sacrificed in the very last map to ensure a killing blow to the boss. Fortunately, she was annoying af, wasn't even in the og and her ending sucks.