Player’s choice is incredibly important to any game especially if you are looking for replay value. For me player’s choice is most prominent when I am playing a Fire Emblem game but the more I think about it player’s choice is present in nearly every game I play to some degree. Player’s choice isn’t only present in video games either, when I am playing a board game or any other type of game I end up changing a little bit of the rules at my house or conforming to someone else’s house rules.

Like I said, Fire Emblem immediately jumped out at me as my game of choice for player’s choice, or at least player’s choice that wasn’t intended for the game. In Fire Emblem you’re given a smallish cast of characters that complete the 30+ levels of the game and if they die in any level, then they are dead for the rest of the game, no bringing back the dead or re spawns. This means when I’m playing a Fire Emblem game I normally only send out people whom I think could survive the level and strategically place other people if I want them to gain experience. Player’s choice comes in with no death runs, where you don’t let a single character die and recruit all possible characters. This isn’t the most difficult rule to impose on yourself since most people will restart a level if one of their favorite characters dies anyway but it does force you to recruit the people you don’t like and protect them on the level they are recruited. Another, far more difficult, rule is an iron man run where you are forced to live with your choices if one character dies, no restarting the level, just keep pushing forward. These runs are especially difficult since if the main character, generally the lord class, dies then you normally would be forced to restart the level by the game but you actually have to restart the game. Restarting the game makes it so that if a character you like dies then you can’t just kill the lord character to restart the level, also the game forces you to deploy the Lord each level and they start of as a bad character who normally has good stat growth rates. Also the Lord is generally targeted by the enemy so you have to force them to level up so they don’t get taken out. The final part of my personal player’s choice in these games comes from character supports. Certain characters, if they fight together enough, become “friends” and give each other stat boosts if they are close to each other. As the player you get to choose who pairs up with whom, although you can’t pair anyone to the whole cast. Furthermore this gives the paired characters an altered ending which is important for the characterization of much of the cast. Since you aren’t required to play by any of the rules above each rules adds a new dimension to the game that alters how you play and tests your commitment to how you play. Furthermore, since it’s always the same story in each game it adds incredible replay ability to the game, always making it more fun.

Probably the game that is easiest to implement player’s choice is any Elder Scrolls game since the game is basically based on your decisions and how you want to play, but it can also be incredibly difficult since you get into the rhythm of playing a certain way until you reach an obstacle. For instance I always seemed to play the sneaky character with a bow in Skyrim until I reach a dungeon boss, then I try to beat it, fail, and eventually use a magic scroll to beat if I have one. It takes quite a bit of determination to figure out how to beat the boss with your previous tactics of getting through the dungeon when you have a “solve all of your problems” scroll in your pocket. Another problem I had in Skyrim regarding player’s choice was not being the sneaky character since that would be boring to play through for so many characters. To solve this I downloaded mods that basically made me Link from Legend of Zelda and then I was able to play through the game.

Outside of video games whenever I go to someone else’s house and play a board or card game there are almost always house rules that you have to conform to. For example at my house we don’t start Settlers of Catan the same way everyone else does where all of the tiles are face up, we make everything as random as possible and try to make it as fair at the beginning as possible. It takes a little bit of explaining to visitors but they quickly understand the rules and start playing by them in the end.

I’m not going to say that the perfect game needs to have a lot of options for a player at every turn since each game is going to be taken differently by people, but for me there certainly needs to be some options in a game for it to be great. A good game could have a great story driving the gameplay and never force me, as the player, to choose how I want to play it, but if the game is going to be remembered and played again it should have more going for it than a great story. There are exceptions that I can think of, such as the Metroid Prime trilogy, but Fire Emblem games do not have a great story behind them, and yet I have replayed them more than almost any other series, changing character endings and gameplay decisions each time I play through them. Most games that I enjoy replaying have some options for me the second time around and these choices are what drive me to come back to the game and tend to make the game memorable, regardless of how hard the home made rules can be.