Turn

The gameplay of battles in the Fire Emblem series is broken down into a series of turns, which themselves are divided further into phases, which occur in a consistent repeating sequence. An individual phase encompasses the gameplay actions of one particular army or side during the turn, with a turn consequently being the aggregate movements of all armies on the battlefield. With the exception of some multiplayer modes, a turn has no limit on the real time it takes to accomplish; on their phase, the player can take as much or as little time as they want in planning their strategy and choosing their actions.

Phase division and sequence

Across all titles, the flow of phase order in a single has always been consistent: the Player Phase is followed by the Partner Phase in games which feature it, which is followed by the Enemy Phase, which is followed by the Other/NPC Phase, which is followed by the Player Phase of the next turn, and the cycle repeats from there. If the map currently does not have any partner, enemy or NPC units on it at all, their turn is simply skipped entirely; as a result it is technically possible to end up in an "endless" sequence of Player Phases.

While almost all titles in the series have these singular phases, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War breaks them up even further: there can be multiple enemy, partner and NPC armies on the map, each of which has their own turn denoted by the army name (for example, "Belhalla Phase" and "Velthomer Phase" are both Enemy Phases in the Endgame). Technically this would apply to the player's army too, except in practice the player only ever has one army at a time, Sigurd's or Seliph's (their phases are also referred to as "Sigurd's Army Phase" and "Seliph's Army Phase").

Objectives

Main article: Objectives

Some chapter objectives are set to relate to a certain number of turns. These can involve simply surviving or protecting a certain unit for a set number of turns, or accomplishing other goals like escaping or defeating the boss with a turn deadline. In Three Houses, all maps have a hard limit of 99 turns to complete, ending in a loss if the player phase of that turn is completed.

Rewind

Main article: Turn rewind

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia introduced the ability to rewind turns; through Mila's Turnwheel, the player may rewind to a previous turn to potentially avoid an undesirable outcome. This ability has reappeared in each subsequent game—including the localization of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light—though each game has integrated the feature into its story through a different in-game artifact or ability.

Etymology and other languages

External links

• Turns, rounds and time-keeping systems in games on Wikipedia