Couldn’t find a topic on Fire Emblem. This saddened me.
Anybody else play these games at all? Saw the footage of FE Warriors from E3… I mean I’ll be frank about it, not a fan of the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors games in general because, let’s face it, they’re not games, they’re genocide simulators for jimmie-rustled, Green Day/Naruto-loving children.
So the thought of Koei reskinning those games with the most generic characters from the latest entries in the FE franchise doesn’t exactly have me reaching for my wallet.
Eager to get my hands on Echoes: Shadows of Valentia though, that shit looks great. I’m a bit sad that the pair-up mechanic didn’t make it into the game. Okay, OP-unbalanced-as-fuck in Awakening, but the Fates system was well-balanced (really the only thing that let Fates down was the ridiculously bad writing, but these things have all been said many times) so I think Echoes is a step backwards, but maybe it makes sense because it is a remake of Gaiden.
One thing that can definitely be said for Echoes is that the artwork is sublime. I love the redesign of pretty much everyone. The pegs especially, hory sheet. The Zelda run-around-and-smash-barrels looks pointless because there’s not really any puzzle-solving to do in these platformer-intermissions between battles, but hey-ho.
Now, finally, we come to FE Heroes. Well, honestly, considering I work a lot, I find it very satisfying to have a Fire Emblem in my pocket. The system is simplified but I actually think they’ve done a really great job making a tactical RPG for mobile. It still presents challenges, just in more of a “achieve checkmate in 5 moves” sort of way rather than “invest hours cultivating relationships and reclassing/minmaxing” sort of way.
The artwork is, on the whole, gorgeous. Some characters have been unlucky, but nothing stands out as atrocious. Some of them look a bit… odd, and there’s one particular artist whose style really jars with the everyone elses (but it’s not bad in and of itself).
Only problem with Heroes is the fact that, while it’s F2P, you need stamina to battle, and stamina runs out pretty quickly if you’re playing Lunatic mode as most will as soon as they get a couple of good characters. You can find yourself wishing you had more stamina very quickly then. With other games of a similar nature, like Duel Links or Granblue, your stamina resets as your avatar character levels up or as you go up a stage, which tends to happen when you complete quests for that stage.
Heroes doesn’t reset your stamina, and you rely on handouts of stamina replenishment items or quest rewards to play beyond the 99 stamina limit. It kinda sucks but only if you sit there playing it for hours at a time as I do at the weekend.
Anyyyyyyway, on the whole, good game. Not something I’d pay to play, because there’s no guarantee that you get something good when you pay for the in-game currency. I gladly pay for a Fire Emblem game and DLC because that’s it, the game belongs to you, the DLC belongs to you, there’s no roll of the die to see whether you get what you want.
But I don’t care because Heroes will attract a lot of paying players and that means more real Fire Emblem games, which is never a bad thing.
D-does anybody else play Fire Emblem games?