If you have never played a Fire Emblem game allow me to fill you in on what I'm talking about real quick. Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs that has been running since the NES with stories focused on warring nations and their armies and such. Unlike something like Advance Wars though each unit in a Fire Emblem game is its own character with dialogue, story beats, personalities etc. and if they fall in combat they are usually gone for good. Some Fire Emblem games have methods of reviving dead party members in extremely limited capacity but generally speaking if someone dies in FE, they are gone for good.
What a lot of players have been doing for years and years, then, is to reset a mission as soon as a single character falls and in the case of the later games the perma death has become a toggleable feature that can be turned off entirely so a fallen unit just "retreats" from the battlefield and can be re-deployed again next chapter. People do this generally for two reasons. The first being that they have sort of grown attatched to the character either for mechanical or story reasons and the idea of moving on without them fills the player with such dread that they would rather hit reset and tediously do an entire mission over than carry on without them. The other reason is fear of "softlocking" themselves by losing either a character they feel is proficient or losing too many characters in a single chapter. They worry that by losing certain characters they will be totally unable to clear the next chapters and thus have to restart at an earlier save or, in the worst case, the entire game.
Well on both fronts this is completely stupid because these games are designed with player loss in mind.
The softlocking thing generally speaking will not happen on a normal play through of a Fire Emblem game almost no matter how many units you lose. In each game you are given a lord character and if this guy or gal falls then you are met with a game over and are forced to restart the chapter. If you're losing bad enough on a map to get more than 1 or 2 characters killed, chances are your lord is going right down with them so progressing past a massacre like that is probably not going to happen. But even if it does, what Fire Emblem has been doing even since the NES is constantly giving you a stream of replacement units that you can use if the worst case scenario happens. If you play a Fire Emblem with the perma death turned off or you reset upon a death you will generally find your roster to be filled with tons of duplicate classes. The units you get later are probably not going to be quite as good as ones you get early that you can train for an entire games worth of maps but if you press on through every death, the chance of you making the game unbeatable are EXTREMELY low.
Just to really hammer the point home here is a video example of how hard it is to softlock a Fire Emblem game in this manner. The amount of effort this guy has to go through to get a handful of maps to be in an unbeatable state would never happen in normal play (also sub to this guy he's very cool)
The idea that being able to turn off perma death "for new players" in complete nonsense because Fire Emblem has ALWAYS been kind to new players. All you're really doing is allowing for sloppy strategy in your STRATEGY. WAR. GAME.
But then there's the other more personal reason of become attatched to the cast and not wanting to continue if someone you like bites the dust. Well I also think you're being silly by resetting or toggling to off because you are sort of undermining the entire point of these games' stories and removing any and all tension from individual story beats. These games are about war and war is both brutal and unpredictable. What the perma death does in a Fire Emblem game is really make you feel the weight of what these characters are going through and adds a lot of immersion to you, they player and supposedly master tacticain, as you work as hard as you possibly can to keep all these indviduals safe.
Here's an example
In Fire Emblem 3 Houses there is a mission when you're looking for a kidnapped person inside a spooky basement. As you're going through the mission a guy on a horse weilding a schythe with a skull mask on turns up and starts threatening to push your shit through your nose if you don't get lost. His stats are very high for that point in the game and you are supposed to be intimidated by this guy. If you have the perma death turned off for this mission you are sucking every last part of the tension out of this scene. If you screw up and get one of your students in range of him, he will just bonk them on the head, they will say "owie zowie see you next mission" and vanish off the map. Only with the perma death turned on do you get the intended effect of this enemy. With it on you'll probably want to stay well away from him to stop that scythe from dicing your cute mage waifu into little pieces or cutting your handsome lance boy right down the middle and thus you must also play smarter and be more creative with how you play. It's the difference between having a story about war and having a story about a paintball match with swords.
I think the best sort of half way point that has been devised by the developers in the pulse system thing found in 3 Houses on the Switch. In that game your lord character has a power to rewind time a little bit. What this translates to for the missions is that if something goes wrong, you can pulse and reset a few turns and try to re-jig your strategy to not get someone killed or get a more favorable position. This allows the player to still make mistakes or try risky strategy but not get punished too hard for it. Do it too many times and your pulses run out so after that you're up shit creek so the tension is still there but you still have to play smart. It then goes and ruins it by ALSO having the death on/off toggle but at the very least I have to give it credit for trying a solution more involved than just a lazy on/off switch. The best thing about the pulse system is that players who were turned off by the perma death but still wanted to be a little brave and play with it turned on now have a title in the series to help them realize that it's not as punishing as they might think, and as a way of gathering new eyes for the series that's a good thing.
But whatever, if you enjoy FE as a reset-fest or you want to play with it turned off, then power to you. These are single player games either way so just enjoy them your way. All I'm saying is that I feel you might get a little more of these games if you played with it turned on. Greater stakes equals to greater satisfaction when you win which equals greater amounts of fun.
