The biggest changes to the series, however, occur between battles. While its novelty mechanics make for challenging fights, the battles in Fates never really need to be “cracked ” you simply figure out how survive long enough to complete them. Strategy games, like any kind of puzzle, make you feel clever for pulling off a complex maneuver or figuring out a loophole that turns the tide of a battle. This seems doubly damning in light of the fact that game rarely uses many of the devices that Fire Emblem games have used and reused to great effect for “spicing up” levels, such as late-arriving allies or split formations. While a magical sigil explains, canonically, why a character might be able reach a spot on the map and heal every character, the dragon vein is used, and overused, as a catch-all for “switch.”įor every interesting level designed around them, there’s another that feels propped up, and that, with a little more time and care, might have been more enjoyable without them. Many of these conceits revolve around specially marked squares called “dragon veins,” which certain characters can trigger to alter a level in some way, such as freezing a lake to make it passable, or cast a large, area-based spell. While Fates returns with those core mechanics intact, the game uses flashy mechanical conceits to bolster levels that do not feel as polished or intricate as past games have. Traditionally, the stakes of those battles have been heightened with a potentially heart-wrenching combination of a relationship mechanic, where characters become friends and even fall in love based on how often they’re paired in combat, and the fact that characters who die in battle stay dead.
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Players control a cadre of soldiers, navigating them through a series of turn-based battles with increasingly difficult odds. Though they have separate stories, the two parts of Fates form a single game built on the strategy RPG core that has defined modern Fire Emblem games for more than a decade.
Conquest offers a tougher, more spartan strategy game that expects players to make calculated decisions in and out of battle. Mechanically, Birthright gives players more characters, resources, and, like Awakening, offers random battles so players can earn money and experience. The narratives for the two versions of Fates, called Birthright and Conquest, follow Corrin’s campaign based on whether he or she chooses to fight for one side or the other.Īside from its double-sided narrative, the two versions of Fates serve both sides of a potential rift in the series’ fanbase that’s grown out of the series’ evolution towards a more forgiving, RPG-style experience. In Fates, players control Corrin, a hero whose complicated genealogy and childhood amnesia plays directly into starting a war between neighboring nations of Hoshido and Nohr. However, in attempting to make a bigger, flashier Fire Emblem, developer Intelligent Designs weighed down the game’s core pleasures with bloated new features and unrefined mission design.
Bolstered by the surprise success of 2014’s Fire Emblem: Awakening, Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems have literally doubled down on the franchise, offering not one, but two inter-connected games under a larger banner. Fitbit Versa 3įire Emblem: Fates feels bigger than the games that came before it.
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