This is a context taken from a TBS game series called Fire Emblem: it's sort of a proto-typical story-heavy Japanese strategy game in which you control characters with name as you progress a campaign to save the kingdom/day with their strength and your brain. There are some cool quasi-RPG aspects, from weapon variety to character interaction where, by having various people fight together they'll become friends with these people and not those. At some points, how you fight your battles can even dictate parts of story progression: if you recruit this person, you can't do that one. If Character A has Best Friends/Love Interest status with Character B, then character C will die in the future rather than A who would have been the normal death.
That sort of thing. I won't say it's a must-play series, and some of these are cooler in nostalgia than on their own grounds in the present, but it has some good elements that convinced me that character and story driven TBS games could eventually become a sort of RPG sub-genre.
Anyways, one of the things I liked about the earlier Fire Emblem games was that they gave the player an explicit role as The Tactician. Default name Mark, you were a silent protagonist but the other characters addressed you and in general recognized your existence. You also came up in the epilogue: main characters naming you god parent for their child, things like that.
One of the interesting points of the ranking system is that it dictated how your Tactician would be remembered. At the lowest ranking, historians are confounded at how your strategies actually succeeded, meaning you were brilliantly stupid or possibly just byzantinely brilliant. At the highest, though... two countries actually go to war in a struggle to secure your services.
That's a pretty cool testimony for how awesome the player is at the end of a successful campaign, and unfortunately was never carried forward. But, if it had...
Here's an idea that could taken from any character/story driven TBS game, or rather it's sequel. Pretty simple, honestly.
The first game is Establishing the Legend. The PC, as the involved Tactician, makes their friends, gets invested in the setting, and after rising from zero to hero walks into the sunset as the mightiest of nations look to procure your services, no matter the cost.
The second game is that struggle. At first it seems much the same as the first: you are a novice Tactician who, by chance and fate, finds yourself with a new cast of heroes rising forth. As you go across the game, you meet groups of adventurers being led by their own Tacticians, similarly gifted and skilled and history-less like you, as well as beginning to realize the presence of a shadowy, mysterious organization with unclear aims. Initial triumphs are slowed, and even reversed, as the enemy begins to target your friendly rival bands of mercenaries, kidnapping the tacticians and killing the rest.
As more of these groups are targeted, the enemy becomes more confident, more aggressive... and more skilled. In a sudden reversal, the Big Established Guardian Power is decisively beaten. As the castle falls and the enemy banners are raised, the one behind this reversal of fortunes is... the Legendary Tactician! With the Legendary Tactician siding with the Evil Empire, could things go worse?
You and your band of mercenaries fall back and regroup, recruiting the scattered remnants of the fallen Guardian Power and linking up with other mercenary bands, you resolve to fight on and investigate just how or why the Legendary Tactician has joined with the Evil Empire. Old War Buddies can't believe the LT would do such a thing, while others realize that they have only escaped to a... mistake? Trick? Gambit?... something that should not have worked on the Legendary Tactician. Either the Legendary Tactician has lost their skill, or this was a deliberate escape as part of some larger strategy.
Well, it's actually a bit of both. There is a Brilliant Trap that is set... but it was a trap that was in reaction to your escape, not Just As Planned. Also not Just As Planned is your escape from that trap. Successfully thwarting the Legendary Tactician, the experienced realize that while you're good... the Legendary Tactician isn't what he/she used to be.
Because, and this is the revelation, the Legendary Tactician isn't there willingly: the Legendary Tactician has been forced into compliance. There's magical brainwashing involved, and the idea that if you can free the Legendary Tactician you can break the Evil Empire's strategy becomes the gambit for winning the war. You and your allies set forth, trying to figure out just what foul magics and threats have coerced the Legendary Tactician. And, well... the Legendary Tactician has already implemented a strategy to break free.
By splitting their soul.
The Legendary Tactician was captured, but wouldn't surrender: when the Dark Magics were being used to try and enforce obedience, the Legendary Tactician was able, by friends and cleverness and trickery, to trick the Dark Magics into splitting his/her soul into X number of pieces, which scattered across the map. These soul fragments woke with no memories of their past, no history, and each had a fragment of the Legendary Tactician's brilliant mind and soul... and the Evil Empire has been working ever since to try and recapture these soul fragments, to boost the abilities of the Tactician they control.
Yes, those soul fragments were your fellow rival-friend Tacticians who have steadily fallen and been kidnapped by the Evil Empire. The Tactician split himself so that one of you would be able to foil the Evil Empire, but as the Evil Empire regains more of you the captive Tactician's abilities grow. If all of you fall, the Legendary Tactician really will regain all his abilities, and the Evil Empire (and the Dark Forces behind the Tactician's enslavement) will be unstoppable. The only one who stands a chance against the Legendary Tactician is, well, the Legendary Tactician... you.
And so, with the realization that you are -R-e-v-a-n- the Legendary Tactician, it's up to you to save the world (again), only this time from your own legend.
Of course you do, and the how and why and outcome of the Climatic Battle can be left to player Choices and Consequences.
When you free the Legendary Tactician, maybe you sacrifice yourself to rejoin the soul: the Legendary Tactician returns, only one person, and while he/she has a certain fondness for the friends you've made along your way you remain strangers. The Legendary Tactician returns to his own friends from his own adventures, and goes on to do more Legendary Things, and your Mercenary Company regretfully disbands without you to drive them.
Or maybe you re-sunder the Legendary Tactician's soul, destroying the Legend forever but bringing back the friends/rival tacticians that you met and who were lost over the war. The last chapter of the Legend is closed, you and your fellow soul fragments and fellow companies part ways but vow to meet again, and your friends and Company stay together to go on and do slightly more modest Great Things.
Maybe, if you get the super-duper ability rating, a third option opens up: having developed your own abilities to Legendary Levels, it's no longer an either-or of giving up your soul or the tactician's. By pooling your abilities you can split the difference: the Legendary Tactician, though perhaps no longer so legendary in ability, is able to return to his/her friends and companions. You yourself, perhaps no longer so legendary, are able to keep your Company together. The fellow Tacticians you lost along the way, they too are able to return and bring back a fraction of what was lost.
And so the legend of the Legendary Tactician ends...
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Meta-wise, I like this idea because it plays into the player's feelings of accomplishment (and vanity) by playing their successes in the first game into the challenge to be surpassed in the second. The sundered souls idea, besides giving you a 'you are the Legend' moment, offers a bit of a rational for why the game gets progressively harder: the more souls recovered by the Evil Empire, the more the enthralled Legendary Tactician becomes.
I think it's an appropriate Epic Quest that plays nice with the feeling of 'the player is great' that games encourage, and that end-game choice in particular could offer an interesting way of setting players against themselves: if you identify with the original of the First Game more, sacrificing yourself to revive the Legendary Tactician in full is a 'good ending' because it allows 'you' to go back to those you cared for more. Same with the Sundered ending: you get to stay with your new friends instead. And the idea for a Third Way... well, given that it would be an accomplishment of skill, and thus not particularly easy to metagame, I think it's an appropriate reward for the 'you are a legend of equal standing' idea.
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