REVIEW: Fire Emblem Fates

You wait ages waiting for a new Fire Emblem and...well, y'know. After Awakening, planned to be the series' last game, sold like a packet of cornflakes with Justin Beiber or whoever's fingerprints on it, Fire Emblem is considered a major Nintendo Franchise! And considering how good Awakening was, the upcoming three (three!) Fire Emblem games had a lot to live up to.

The Fire Emblem Fates games are split into three games, and unlike Pokémon, I could only go with one game - games, these games each have their own unique campaign. Because my wallet isn't infinitely argue I decided to go with Birthright, in the hopes that I could start of with something easy before going on to the harder Conquest and then, hopefully, Revelation, to complete the story.

Nobody can accuse Intelligent System of having run out of ideas. Because Awakening excelled in so many areas, it was always going to be a hard follow-up. The accessibility of Awakening, its modernised anime style and its *gasp* option to play without permadeath, riled veterans because it led to an influx of weebs n' squeebs who didn't appreciate what the series was previously known for - its difficulty and permanent death. So perhaps it isn't surprising that Fates is split up into three games - Birthright being easier and offering grinding opportunities, Conquest scrapping grinding and being deliberately weighted against players, and Revelation finding that sweet middle ground.

Fates' story deals with the warring kingdoms Hoshido and Nohr. Protagonist Corrin is a Hoshidan prince, kidnapped by Nohr ad raise as one of their own. When Corrin learns the truth of his origins, he must decide who he fights with - Hoshido strives for peace, while Nohr has its eyes on conquering the world.

But, if you're a boring goodie-two-shoes like me, you've got eyes on Birthright! As for the specifics of Birthright's stories, there really isn't much more I can right compared to the other versions - you're the good guys and you're trying to put an end to Nohr's evil deeds. Naturally, there's extra plot threads and character development I really can't elaborate further than that.

Fates' gameplay at its very core is unchanged across all three entries. It's classic Fire Emblem - you lead an army into battle on a fixed map, and you generally have to wipe out all the enemies on the map. The main kicker is that if your characters die in the game, they're gone for good. You'll not enjoy any of the strengths they add to the team, and you'll be a soldier short for your next battle - you'll have to work to earn new soldiers! I think the mechanic keeps battles tense and exciting throughout. It reiterates just how valuable each character is. The pain you feel wen you lose your favourite character is punctuated by the fact that you know it's going to make the next battle that much harder. You only lose a battle, however, when the a key character, generally the player character, dies.

Anyone familiar with Fire Emblem can skip this paragraph - Fire Emblem's combat revolves around a rock-paper-scissors mechanic involving swords, lances and axes. Lances Swords best axes, axes beat lances, and lances beat swords. The mechanic is simple, but it keeps you thinking about how you organise weapons and troops. Adding to the gameplay is partner system. You can place troops adjacent to each other so you can tag-team in battle against enemies. This is a valuable tool that lets you get an edge over enemies when you're in a tight spot. However, you can also move two troops int a single tile on the battlefield so that one adds to the other's stats. Think about this option as being more defensive.

Between battles is where Fates really changes Fire Emblem's gameplay, with the My Castle feature. Before each battle you rest at your castle, which you can customise with your own castle - laid out like any other map in the game - with various buildings and trinkets designed to give you items and buffs before each battle. It's basically a big hub for sidegame content. You can watch relationships grow and nurture them, or visit and upgrade shops for new weapons. You can battle various players who visit your castle via Streetpass, which is entertaining for all the little small things that make Streetpass so much fun in other games. You can publish your castle online for others to visit, and visit others.

Oh yeah! As per Awakening, efforts have been made to make this once-cult series more accessible to newcomers. There's multiple difficulty settings , naturally, though for the average noob they're all respectably challenging - which is represented in the difficulty being as such: Normal < Hard < Lunatic. Playing properly without turning off Permadeath (or resetting when one of my beloved troops dies; take note scrubs), Normally was certainly one of the easier difficulty settings, so I went with hard approaching the end of the game, I would not dare try Lunatic.

Of course, you can turn off permadeath if you really don't want the gameplay's traditional difficulty shoved in your face. While I would revolt as such a thought, there is no harm in making the game accessible to those who don't care for difficulty. Phoenix mode even has the gall to revive all of your troops upon the beginning of each of your turns. So in essence, they don't. Madness! But hey, it is all optional. That's one thing I love so much about Intelligent System's new approach to the series; they're trying very hard to make the game appeal to the core ans casual series fans, and it's paying off handsomely. You choose the difficulty of Fates.

Speaking of online play, there's also a multiplayer battle mode! You can pit a team of five against others online in short PvP matches for funsies. I wish I could write more, but despite my excitement, I must admit that it doesn't add a lot the experience. It's essentially one big cockfight to see who has the most high-level troops The matches apparently aren't made by team strength so in my experience I was frequently crushed by the opposition. Basically, when it works, it works, and when it doesn't, it doesn't.

A more prominent mechanic in the recent Fire Emblem games has been the support mechanic. Characters that back each other up in battle via the partner system grow closer, which leads to them being stronger when they back each other up in battle. The bigger draw is the unlockable dialogue between the two characters that opens up between battles. The characters are all unique in design and personality, and as such it's a joy seeing these incredibly unique characters interact. If you get certain characters close enough they will even marry one another! And as such Fire Emblem draws you even more with its shipping metagame - provided that enough characters remain alive at least. Most of my main folks are dead and there's nobody I can ship with one another now. All is not fair in love and war, after all. Each of Fates' three games has one same-sex option - which I find to be a weird way of introducing homosexuality into Nintendo's videogames, but I'd rather not go on about it because this is a review, not a political soapbox.

Yes, shipping is fun - but it would be more fun if the localisation was better. It hurts to say it, but Nintendo's localisation of this game is rather inconsistent. A small but nonethelless substantial characters have had their personalities altered as a result of dialogue changes from English to Japanese. That hurts, man. I could write a lot about Nintendo's somewhat tragically inconsistent localisation policy, but let's just judge the English story for what it it.

And what is is a boring A to B journey. Frankly, Birthright's story has a really unimaginative structure. Don't get me wrong, the setting and characters are original indeed, but Birhtright isn't pushed beyond the most simple theme - objectively good guys versus objectively bad guys. The character development from support dialogue doesn't manifest in-campaign, there are no extra interesting messages communicated in the game, and the characters' broad personalities don't deepen. To show you how bad the situation is, let me explain to you that Fates and Conquest both have the same archetypes of main characters - the Player Avatar, the Badass, the Protective Sister, The Loli Girl (um, yeah), and the Jealous Older Brother.

Fire Emblem: Awakening wasn't the pinnacle of interactive storytelling, but it was still good. The characters had depth, development, and themes that Birthright doesn't even are touch. Now, for all I know, this could all have been remedied in Conquest and Revelation, both of which have infinitely more interesting story premises. Clearly, developer Intelligent Systems thought story was important enough that they had to hire prolific manga writer Shin Kibayashi to pen the three different stories. Birthright makes me wonder if Kibayashi's story suffers because he doesn't primarily work with videogames, or whether Intelligent Systems hiring Kibayahsi is a sign of the studio's writers' fear of their own potential ineptitude in taking on a project as ambitious as Fates.

I want to reiterate that while Birthright's localisation and plot are mediocre, neither are game-breaking. They are simply disappointing considering the creativity displayed in the plots of previous Fire Emblem Games. For all I know, conquest and Revelation could be brilliant games, but I am more cautious considering how the plot of Birthright doesn't go very far beyond its simple premise.

(Camilla's character depth can be measured scientifically by how large her boobs are.)

Fates was an ambitious project, seeing the only way to go from fates being 'up'. Birthright doesn't live up to its story's full potential, sadly, and its writing is also quite poor, I'm afraid. But can anyone deny what has been achieved in terms of gameplay? I'd even go so far as to say that Fates has the best gameplay in series history! The difficulty is customised to the player's own desires and can be played in as simple or compelx a manner as you wish. There's tons of content in Birthright alone, both in the campaign and in the sidegame. If it's good gameplay you're after, Birthright is a pretty damn solid choice

This May, a remake of NES game Fire Emblem: Gaiden appears on 3DS as Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. While its major gameplay shake-ups mean I'm excited to play it, I still need to get through the three Fates games! Compare this two two years ago when I was famished of Fire Emblem games after Awakening, and things are clearly on the up for this special series of games.

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