Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest (2015)

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• INTRO

Fire Emblem Fates is definitely bold. In a time period where carving up games into small pieces to sell individually or releasing a full retail price game with bare bones content is becoming more and more common place, releasing a game in numerous pieces to where you need to spend a whole $80 to get the entire experience is not a safe move by any means. Making that game the follow up to a critically and commercially successful and very beloved predecessor, even less so. It's basic equivalent exchange. The higher the price you are charging for your product, the higher the quality that product is expected to be. Especially when I'm playing the same games 3 times over.

• PRESENTATION

Fire Emblem Fates is a turn-based strategy JRPG released by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo in 2016 on the Nintendo 3DS, and is the 14th in the Fire Emblem series, the most previous game being the commercially successful and beloved Fire Emblem Awakening. The story, is rather par for the course for Fire Emblem. Two massive medieval kingdoms are at war and it us up to you, the player, to bring about an end to the conflict. The interesting twist of the story, involves its protagonist. You play as Corrin. A prince of princess born in the peaceful kingdom of Hoshido, but kidnapped at a young age and raised in the royal family of the rival warrior kingdom of Nohr. However, upon discovering the truth about you lineage and the breaking out of war, Corrin is forced to chose between siding with his birthright family, and the family that raised him as their own.

This is the brilliance of Fates story telling. The entire story is essentially split into 2 main campaigns, Birthright if you choose to side with Hoshido and Conquest if you choose to side with Nohr. Each campaign is essentially an entire fully fleshed out story with their own twists and reveals along the way, and each providing a, maybe not fully complete, but still satisfying conclusion.

On a narrative level, the game spends the first 6 chapters introducing you to the key members of each family and their relationship to the protagonist, being careful to give you a compelling reason for siding with actually either nation. And the reason this IS so brilliant, is because neither side is the bad guy. Okay there is an overall villain to the story, but the nations themselves and more importantly, the two families that you have to choose between, are neither of them “evil”. They both have reasons for doing what they are doing, and, while one side may seem to have the more honorable approach to things, you still can't help but sympathize with the other side. And it doesn't meant that you won't have your heart ripped out being forced to chose one side over the other.

It's the kind of excellent story telling that only video games can offer. Because in either route, when ever say a character is hurt, or dies, or some sort of tragic event happens, you can't help but know in the back of your mind that, had you made a different choice this might not have happened. You genuinely feel the gravity of your decision, and the becomes your motivation to see the story through to the end.

It is a bit of a shame then, that not all campaigns are created equal. Now I need to say up front that if you do plan on playing all three versions of this game, which honestly that is the only way to fully enjoy it, then the order I would strongly STRONGLY recommend playing them in is, Birhtright, Conquest, Revelation. 1 – Because the progression of the story makes a lot more sense that way. 2 – Revelation is essentially the “true” ending so you should absolutely play it last. And 3 –, and I realize this may be a less popular opinion, when it comes to the individual versions of the game, Birthright is just...okay.

The story arc of birthright is a pretty straightforward good guys vs bad guys story. Which is fair enough. Awakening's plot was similar. My problem with Birthright's story is, I think the Hoshido story is a little TOO straight forward each individual campaign is 28 chapters long, and in the case of Birthright specifically, I felt that the plot could have been accomplished in half that time. There's way too much messing about with nothing much furthering the final goal. That's not to say there aren't some great moments peppered throughout. But here's the thing. I haven't played Fire Emblem Awakening since 2013, and I can still tell you almost beat for beat what happens in it. I finished Birthright just a few weeks back, and I've already forgotten a good half of the plot events. Then again, it's a bit harder to pin the blame fully on the story when your cast is the freaking dull.

I'll be the first to admit that Awakening may not have had the most complex characters ever, but the cast of Awakening had one thing, that the cast of Fates utterly lacks: charm. Excluding the siblings of the two nations which are pretty well defined, and 3 characters that don't really count for this game, I can count on one hand the number of characters that I ever really had any sort of investment or interest in. There was nothing in most of the characters that would make me go “Hey it's that guy. I remember that guy. That' guy is great.” It's definitely not the worst cast I've ever seen in a game, as lot of the supporting characters do have at least a little more to them than just a one note personality. But in a JRPG especially in a strategy game, your characters are you hook to keep playing, and this supporting cast is just kinda week.

Not helping matters is that every villain character are mustache twirler levels of badly written. You can point to any generic fantasy villain cliché and I guarantee you in some way or another, you will see it here. Now you could argue that the real “villain” of the game is the situation, and that these two sides of good people are being forced to fight each other. And that might work if it was a ideological difference between the two. However, that is not the case. While I said that neither side is really the “bad guy”, Hoshido is clearly in the right. The entire conflict basically comes from a unsympathetic greedy king wanting to take over the world because he's selfish and he sort of forces his children into it. Even in the Revelation story line when you find out what is really going one, the reveal of the true forces behind everything is so underwhelmingly simplistic. It also makes Revelation the most narratively uninteresting of the 3 stories.

The best of the 3 story arcs by far is Conquest. Aside fom having the best characters, it's also the one that wastes the least amount of time. Ultimately every action you undertake in one way or another furthers the final goal of the characters instead of delaying the inevitable. It's the most emotionally compelling. I won't say much due to spoilers, but the story beats and characters moments were far more compelling than in the other two arcs because there was a greater level of uncertainty and tension throughout, since you're effectively trying to change a corrupt nation from within without being called out on it. Conquest is every bit the game that I wanted out of Fates...and it's a shame the the other two campaigns don't quite live up to that consistent level of quality.

The marriage and children mechanic from Awakening also returns, but the way it is implemented, without spoilers, is...well there is no two ways about it. It's really forced and just kinda stupid. It just makes you scratch your head ans go “well why doesn't that thing get done more often.” Small complaint but worth addressing.

• GAMEPLAY

Okay so the plot and characters of Fates aren't the most stellar thing ever. What exactly keeps this game from falling into okay territory? Surprisingly, it's the game play. Combat in Fates plays almost identical to how it did in Awakening. It's turn based strategy that focuses on a specific weapon triangle and stat system that puts simple yet balanced tactics over a most robust or complicated system that you may find in say the Xcom games. That said there are a few notable differences to things. Aside from having a completely revamped weapon triangle, weapon durability has been almost entirely removed, meaning (aside from healing staffs) you are no long limited in how many times a certain weapon can be used before it breaks. I like this. It takes the focus off conservation and having to constantly restock you weapons and instead makes you concentrate on finding the best way to a approach any given combat scenario with the tools you have.

There are also elements of traditional JRPGs added as well. Status ailments allow different attacks and weapons to increase or decrease the stats of an enemy, restrict their movement, or cancel out their attacks entirely. Turrets allow specific units to attack more enemies over a larger period of space before delivering the final blow. And a new mechanic called Dragon Veils can be used to alter various parts of the environment to either assist the players team, or cause problems for the enemy. These may not seem to significant on their own, but they add up to allowing the player more ways of approaching combat.

And you'll be needing as many ways as possible, because this game is HARD. Fire Emblem has always been know for its perma-death mechanic, Meaning if any given character is defeated in battle, they die for real in the story and are permanently removed from your army. This alone adds an extra layer of tension and challenge to the game. But even without it, the missions are no walk in the park, considering how smart the AI is. In some cases one false move can really mean the difference between wining and loosing any given battle.

It should also be noted that Conquest is vastly more difficult than wither of the other two story lines, mostly due to the fact that you have no real way of grinding outside of the story missions, but also because the objectives within the Conquests missions are more complicated than the others, usually having you seize or defend a specific location for however many turns, you in some cases simply survive for long enough. This adds much needed variety to keep missions from becoming too repetitive and always a fresh challenge.

It's not necessarily the absolute greatest strategy combat system, but it's more than good enough to keep you on your toes and thinking the whole time

• VISUALS/AUDIO

Visually the artistic direction is actually rather impressive. Now being a mostly 2D top down perspective, there isn't much appealing in the way of area or world design, so I can't give a lot of credit there. I can, however, give numerous props to the character designers for what they came up with. While a few of the characters do stand out as rather generic in design, the majority of them have highly distinctive designs making it easy to tell who is who at a glance, and in most cases denoting at least some of the characters personality in the process. Add to that the detailed and pretty artwork, and you have an overall pleasing visual aesthetic to the whole thing.

Voice acting is very sparse and, while by no means bad, it just isn't prevalent enough to really be worth saying much about. However, the music of the game is where I must one again become negative. It's really easy to underestimate how important good music to visual medium such as games. But, especially in video games when it's not there, you notice it a lot more. The best soundtracks needs to do one of 2 things. Either it needs to stand on it's own where you can listen to individual tracks apart from the story and enjoy them. Or else, the music needs to be so well suited for the visuals and tone that they elevated any given seen to the point where that scene simply would not work as well without that musical accompaniment. While the music did it's job to fit the fantastical tone, there isn't really anything that stands out as particularly impressive or memorable...with one very notable exception. The song “Lost in Thoughts All Alone” essentially acts as the games main theme with several remixed versions of it played throughout the story. And this song is nothing short of utterly fantastic. It has feeling. It's got a great melody. And it just, fits the melancholic, regretful, yet simultaneously hopeful tone of the story. The game also evokes one of my favorite musical tropes of reusing the main theme's melody in the final boss theme. It always sounds wonderful whenever this is done, so major props to them for that.

• FINAL THOUGHTS

And see, that's the thing. As negative as I may have come off in this review, I do give this game a lot of props. It's a good..no scratch that...it's a VERY good game. I liked some of the characters, I wanted to see where the story ended up, and I enjoyed the combat that forced me to use my brain over quick button mashing actions. But that said, with an ambitious releases of 2 (technically 3) different versions of same game, do you not feel it wanted to make each version on par quality? At the end of the day, the only one of the three routes that I really loved was Conquest. Birthright had it's moments but was a bit too simplistic in it's overarching plot. And as for Revelation, after it removes the one element that kept Birthright interesting, that being facing your old family and the emotional elements that come with it, I found myself continuing on simply for the sake of the destination, and not caring really at all about the journey. Overall, though, I think the biggest issue is that for the mot part Fates just feels like...Awakening minus. I couldn't help but think how I was playing a technically improved but overall somewhat less compelling Fire Emblem Awakening. But you know, considering how brilliant Awakening was, if my biggest complaint about a game is that it was slightly less impressive than that...I guess I'm not really being that negative after all, am I?