Inside the game shop, everyone watched in complete silence as the teenager before them took his turn.
When Miyazaki had first waved his floppy disk and announced that he wanted to challenge the shop owner, no one had taken him seriously. But the moment he displayed his roster, every single one of them fell silent.
Damn, his units were trained unbelievably well!
"Did he raise this save file himself? Every unit's still alive!"
"Did you see his equipment? Everyone's geared up so well. My Alan still didn't have a Javelin by Chapter 10. Haha."
"Quiet! Let him concentrate. He might actually have a chance."
Ignoring the chatter around him, Miyazaki kept his eyes fixed on the screen. Fog of War was truly a stroke of genius. Its inclusion transformed the game into something completely different.
Miyazaki had never imagined that adding a single mechanic could completely revolutionize an entire game. He moved the Pegasus Knight in his party, flying directly across half the mountain range to reveal part of the map.
"Information is everything. Without knowing the shop owner's strength, the information gap is what determines victory or defeat."
A collective gasp suddenly erupted from the crowd gathered around the shop owner's screen. His Mercenary had spotted Miyazaki's Pegasus Knight!
Everyone knew that Shanna was wielding a Silver Lance. While it dealt considerable damage, she would still suffer heavy punishment against axe-wielding units.
But that wasn't the real reason everyone gasped.
Even in that situation, Shanna was still standing atop the mountains, where her high Avoid gave her a good chance of surviving.
The truly dangerous threat was the Sniper following close behind.
The natural nemesis of Pegasus Knights.
If that Sniper landed its guaranteed hit against her, she would quite literally be unable to escape, even with wings.
Yet the atmosphere among the spectators standing behind Miyazaki was strangely different. They wanted to laugh but didn't dare.
Looking at the two enemy units that had entered Miyazaki's vision, they quietly turned their eyes toward the three-man squad behind him with A-rank supports.
Shanna had perfectly fulfilled her role as bait. Once this turn ended, the shop owner's main force was going to be in serious trouble. It looked like the winner of that MSX computer had already been decided.
....
"Fog of War?"
Steve nodded in understanding.
"That really is an unexpected design. It's a shame Fire Emblem is too large to be ported onto the NovaPocket handheld. Otherwise, if you could use its communication functions to play a mode like this…"
He sighed.
With gameplay like Fire Emblem's, handheld devices were clearly the perfect platform.
Being able to pull it out anytime, play a match whenever you wanted, and even connect with fellow fans for multiplayer battles, it would be absolutely amazing.
"But this mechanic is really brilliant, Ethan. It gives Fire Emblem yet another completely new way to play."
In the traditional Fire Emblem experience, multiplayer was essentially a contest of perfect information.
Just like the match he had just played against Ethan, both sides viewed the battlefield from an omniscient perspective with completely transparent information.
Real strategy revolved around precise calculations, but when played using the dedicated hardware, it became an asymmetric war, so the importance of reconnaissance and risk assessment increased dramatically.
Both players had to do everything they could to infer the enemy's position and formation from limited information before deciding their next move.
Even detailed equipment and stats remained unknown until the two armies actually clashed. That added an entirely new dimension to tactical gameplay, and it felt almost like a real battlefield.
"We'll be adding Fire Emblem as an official event in the next EVO Evolution Championship. This Fog of War mechanic is also one of the little experiments we're conducting."
Now that he had already created the terrain generator, there was no way Ethan would overlook such an important feature.
Whenever strategy games were mentioned, real-time strategy was always an unavoidable topic. Although current hardware simply wasn't capable of supporting it yet, laying the groundwork in advance certainly wasn't a bad idea.
Steve wrote the final word into his notebook before quietly summarizing everything with a single concise remark.
"Ridiculous."
"Well then, thank you again, Ethan, for accepting today's interview. It looks like I'll have to go back and do a lot more homework."
Today's interview had completely reshaped his understanding of this game. A masterpiece whose skill floor was incredibly low, yet whose skill ceiling was unimaginably high.
And not a single element had been wasted, within a mere 1 MB of storage, every kilobyte, even every single byte, had been utilized to its absolute limit. He even found himself thinking:
The storage medium is what's limiting GAMENOVA's talent. If they had just a little more storage capacity, who knew what else they could have added.
"Hold on."
Once again, Ethan stopped Steve, who was preparing to leave. In his hand was a floppy disk whose cover art differed from that of the main Fire Emblem game.
Two weeks after the release of Fire Emblem, a brand-new floppy disk appeared on store shelves, displayed right beside the original game.
Fire Emblem Expansion Pack No. 1: Trial of Wisdom
Contents 1: Expands save slots to 4.
Contents 2: Adds the Map Editor.
Description:
Players can design and play their own custom maps.
Custom maps can be saved to the save file and shared with other players through data exchange.
Maps can also be exported as password codes for sharing.
…
On the same day, Electronic Games also published coverage of the expansion pack in its game review section.
When I received this preview copy, I was naturally thrilled, and after trying it out, I've also prepared an extremely challenging custom map for all our readers.
If anyone can clear it using only the starting roster, send a letter to the Electronic Games editorial office, and a special surprise gift will be waiting for you.
The map password is as follows:
Holding the latest issue of the magazine, Sam entered the printed password into the game one character at a time. A remarkably well-designed map was immediately generated.
"It's a little cumbersome, but it's surprisingly well suited to printed media like magazines."
Comparing the generated map with the screenshot in the magazine, Sam couldn't help admiring how ingenious the system was.
Although players could theoretically recreate the map tile by tile simply by following the picture, entering a single password was vastly more convenient.
"So, tell me. How did you do it?" Ethan, who had been writing something at his desk, paused his work.
"Just some simple compression. Each row is treated as a unit. Consecutive terrain tiles are abbreviated. For example, ten consecutive Plains tiles can be represented as p0A."
…
Fortunately, Fire Emblem maps weren't particularly large. Even completely random maps would never produce outrageously long passwords.
Any reasonably designed map could be compressed to a considerable degree.
"Hexadecimal? I see."
After thinking about what p0A represented, Sam immediately understood.
Since Fire Emblem maps were no larger than 32×32, a single digit was enough to represent the terrain type, while at most two hexadecimal digits were needed to represent the length, covering virtually every practical use case.
Especially on maps containing large stretches of oceans or plains, the compression ratio improved even further.
"Well, that's basically how it works."
Ethan quickly saved the code he had been writing before reaching over and picking up an envelope from the desk.
The sender's name read:
National Basketball Association
"By the way, would you like to go watch a basketball game? The NBA sent me two tickets to a Lakers game."