RAGTAG REVOLUTION
play notes on thracia 776, part 2
thracia 776 continues to explore the experience of resisting empire, painting a specific vision of it through its game design. while i'm still skeptical about it saying anything meaningful in the end, i'm appreciating the way the design so far has created a distinct feeling of resistance from genealogy of the holy war. instead of a messianic crusade where the ultimate victory of light over darkness is prophetically assured, every battle in thracia is hard fought, with uncertainty and precariousness befitting a small local force fighting not to get crushed under the heel of a hulking empire. here are some of the ways thracia 776 realizes that vision.
small victories. of the 8 chapters we've played so far, 4 have been about breaking out of prison. where seliph in the last game marched from castle to castle steamrolling armies and leaving a chain of permanently liberated fiefdoms in his wake, leif struggles hard just to keep things going. at the end of chapter 3 you're captured and jailed by the empire. the next 5 maps are all "escape" maps, where the goal isn't to rout the enemy or seize their castle but to simply get everyone out alive as you break out of jail and scramble for a safe haven. you don't meaningfully harm the empire or liberate cities by these victories, you just ensure the resistance gets to survive another day.
separation between cause and effect. breaking out of jail in chapter 4, you open the doors and clear the path for other prisoners to escape, some of them children. they flee off the edge of the map and that seems to be the end of it. fleeing through the town outside the castle in chapter 6, you can visit the homes of the locals, where grateful parents thank you for saving the children we had forgotten we set free three weeks ago. i didn't see this coming at all - at the time i assumed freeing the kids was just freeing the kids. i think there's something true to life about being so preoccupied with the problem in front of you you forget about the seeds you've been sowing along the way. as thankless and tiring as our struggle feels, it's making room for other actions to happen out of sight, reminding us that the world is bigger than just the good guys and bad guys on screen. long-term cause and effect is a big theme in genealogy of the holy war as well and i think this is a very fitting way to reinterpret it for the zoomed in setting. combined with the previous point, the picture of victory that i get isn't winning the battle and neatly resolving the problem in one go, but buying a little more time for your allies to keep fighting and for the seeds you've planted to grow.
the game plays dirty. a common complaint about fire emblem: awakening was that late in the game, enemy reinforcements would spawn unexpectedly and attack in the same turn, killing vulnerable units and "forcing" you to restart the chapter. this was unusual for the fire emblems i had played at the time. but in thracia 776, enemy reinforcements appearing and immediately acting is a core part of the design vocabulary from early on. of course it feels totally unfair here, too - but we're up against the empire. the unfairness of the trick becomes their characterization. the good news is that it's consistent, so you can anticipate it and try to plan around it. the hypervigilance in turn characterizes the resistance...
ambiguous signals. thracia 776 makes it really hard to tell if you're doing good enough. one recurring trick is that you we'll meet a character who "looks recruitable" but can't find a way to get them on our side. when we fail to recruit a seeming potential ally or a comrade leaves the party, we look back and wonder, was there another outcome possible here? did we mess up without realizing it? should we have tried harder to prevent this? this is another way thracia denies us the satisfaction of a neatly resolved victory, instead prompting us to look back on our choices and question our power. the outcome is never acknowledged in-text in a way that would relieve our doubt; i would welcome a bit more dialogue between these chapters but appreciate that you can't always spare time to stop and process everything while you're on the run.
material insecurity. we've completed 8 chapters now there has only been one source of gold so far: selling weapons captured from enemies. no wealthy sponsors bankrolling the uprising, no stumbling into treasure chests full of gold, no raking in piles at the arena. stripping captured units is where the bulk of the weapons we use comes from too, so our ability to arm ourselves depends to some degree on facing enemies that are carrying the types of gear we need. capturing enemies is more dangerous than killing them outright because your stats are lowered during the attempt as you pull your punches, and then you're weighed down afterward by carrying their body. in this way our rebels are risking their lives, often quite literally, keep the engine running. in addition to this mundane gear, we also have a handful of powerful unique equipment, mostly brought by units as they joined. unlike genealogy of the holy war, there's no paying to repair worn out weapons, so these precious tools that go so far to helping us even the odds are for a limited time only. there's a scrappy, precarious feeling to fighting a war using secondhand weapons you picked up on the battlefield and grandma's antiques you found in the attic, all of which are constantly in a palpable state of decay. even if we have what we need to keep going right now, there's no guarantee we will tomorrow... (finite weapon uses is a series mainstay, so this sense of precarity aren't entirely unique to thracia 776, but it takes on extra resonance in this context).
the joy of stealing. thieves can yoink any item an enemy is holding as long as it's not too heavy. if your constitution is high enough, you can take an enemy's weapon right out of their hands and render them powerless. this feels incredible when you can pull it off. but even stealing little things like vulneraries feels really good, because in light of the above point, we didn't have any money to buy them either. on several maps, because we had no healer available, stolen vulneraries were our main source of hp recovery.
background diversity. i alluded to this in the last post, but it's more than just axe users. whereas in genealogy of the holy war nearly every playable was of a knightly or noble lineage, in thracia 776 commoners outnumber the upper classes in your squad about 2:1 (so far). while there's still a decent number of knights on deck, the predominance of local thracians grounds the resistance struggle in the lives of the people who actually live here (recall how seliph in genealogy was always just "passing through"), who are fighting chiefly for the people and places that they love rather than the fate of all jugdral. there's also a considerable degree of variation in starting power and level (read: experience) among the team, especially in the first few chapters before your party gets split up. it's traditional for fire emblem titles to give you one strong paladin right off the bat to help take care of your weaker units. thracia goes even farther gives you a roughly even split between rookies who struggle to kill anything without assistance and veterans so powerful they risk hogging all the kills (and thus experience) for themselves. added to the uneven and unstable equipment situation described above, leif's army takes on a sort of "ragtag" texture. we may not have the right tools for the job, or all the resources we need, or the training, or any immediate evidence that our efforts are accomplishing anything. but everyone's willing to commit what little they have just for a chance to make things better.
