If you came to the Fire Emblem franchise at a certain point in its life cycle, it’s either a tremendously punishing series of Japanese strategy role-playing games in which death is permanent for your characters, or it’s an anime matchmaking simulator where you pair your soldiers off into happy couples who then have time-travel babies with even more charming personalities than their parents. Both are a pretty valid way of enjoying the games, but if you wanted more of the latter in, say, XCOM 2, now you can.
RealityMachina has released two mods for the PC edition of the game which significantly expand the social dynamics of your XCOM squad. The first, “Squad Cohesion,” adds a Fire Emblem-esque support system in which units who fight alongside one another develop a rapport, which in turn grants them combat bonuses (because strategy games). The second mod, “Bonding and Time Travelers” goes the whole Fire Emblem: Awakening hog in allowing your friendly soldiers to hook up and, through some fantastical narrative hand-waving, results in fully-grown progeny showing up at your base’s doorstep, having traveled back to their parents’ time Terminator style.
It’s amazing. It’s perfect. All we need now is for the soldiers to have complex support conversations where we discover their cooking proficiencies, weekend hobbies and emotional insecurities, and we will have successfully transposed all the best parts of Fire Emblem into a sci-fi shooty game with boob snakes. This is the convergence of so many splendid things.
To get going, simply install both mods linked above (the author is presently working to get “Bonding and Time Travelers” working as a standalone, but until then, you’ll need “Squad Cohesion” as well), get a couple soldiers to cozy up on the battlefield, and then:
Go to a soldier in the Armory, click on Find a bondmate. If anybody meets the requirements, click on them, click through the resistance communications thing (it’s basically a dummy alert to do all the magical kid stuff), then exit out of the armory.
You’ll notice the number of soldiers has gone up, go back, and find the new kid waiting to be promoted to Squaddie in the menu, with two additional cross class abilities from their parents (or psionic/lightning reflexes if the parents weren’t the base 4 classes) by default.
“But does it have Galeforce?” someone asks in the comments. Of course.
(h/t Kotaku.)
Kris Ligman is the News Editor for ZAM, and seriously just finished a 120 hour campaign in Fire Emblem Fates Revelation last night, and now this. Please send help. Twitter: @KrisLigman.
