On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 37

I like to point out of the bad kind of difficulty These games are turn-based,
tactical, top-down RPGs—normally, the kind of game that would inter-
est me. However, there are too many little silly things required to actually
succeed in the game. For instance, characters are easily killed (often after
just two or three combats), and once they're dead, they're dead forever
(unless you reload the game, which you will do often—another problem).
There are random critical attacks, which often mean the difference be-
tween winning and losing a combat. Finally, the overmap doesn't always
make it obvious what kinds of attacks a given character can carry out.
“Oh, there's an axeman,� you may observe. “I can hit him with my archer
from a safe distance and not take a counterattack.� But wait! Some axe-
men have a special ability to attack from a distance. You can find this out
by scrolling over to the axeman and opening up his inventory to see what
items he has. This means, of course, that you have to do that every time
you see a new unit.
Combining a huge impact from randomness with a saving/loading
system, as Fire Emblem does, makes no sense. The games are generally
quite difficult, too, which means that a significant part of being good at
a game is simply playing, rolling the dice, and reloading if you get a bad
result. This is a bad kind of difficult
Balance
What exactly does it mean to balance a game? It means that all pos-
sible actions are placed on the same levels of value to the player. A lot of
people get thrown off by this statement because they think that I mean
something like, all punches in Street Fighter should deal a damage of 10.
What I actually mean is that if one punch deals 10 and another deals 50,
there has to be something about the 50-damage punch that provides bal-
ance. Often this takes the form of a long cooldown (a period of time after
you attack in which the animation is still playing and you're vulnerable
if you miss) or a long warm-up (which allows players to see it coming). 2
Sometimes the balancing factor is cost. In StarCraft , for instance, a Bat-
tlecruiser is obviously a lot stronger overall than a Wraith. However, not
only do Battlecruisers cost a lot more minerals and vespene gas to pro-
duce, but they're also farther up the tech tree. This means that there
is both a resource and time cost to getting Battlecruisers that Wraiths
don't have. It should be noted that players who spend all of their money
on Wraiths late in the game will actually dominate players who spend
all of their money on Battlecruisers, since Wraiths have excellent anti-
2 Note that sometimes, moves are “balanced� by making them hard to actually execute. I
think this is a mistake, as players will eventually get over that execution barrier and then
the game will become unbalanced.