This is my third Fire Emblem game, I have also played Three Houses and Awakening, and I think this really hurt my experience of Fates because I couldn't not compare it to those two games.

For Fates I played Conquest, which is the Nohr side, and supposedly the more tactically challenging side. I also played on casual, as I just skum save anytime I lose a character in permadeath, so casual saves me the bother.

Conquest's story is painfully cliche and predictable. I don't quite get why our characters are too unaware to not see how awful the king of Nohr is until like multiple massacres on his part... It also takes FOREVER to go anywhere, which, with its predictable structure, was mind numbing. I found myself often tuning out during the cut scenes unfortunately.

Awakening had a none sense story too, but the characters really saved it for me. Here, the characters are ok, I even liked a few, but none of them had as much personality as the cast from Awakening. I think maybe the other side of the game, the Hoshidians, might have been more interesting, but im not buying that half to find out.

Some of this might have been because I wasn't as purposefully teaming characters together, so their relationships were not developed as much, so I just didn't get to know them as well.

Gameplay wise we have basically the same game as Awakening, which works well, but there are a few additions that I didn't love. Dragon Veins are chances for your main character and other royal family members to change the terrain of a map. But, in practice they are often just win buttons that you want to click frequently. There were a few maps they were used interestingly on, such as freezing endless waves of enemies while rushing up a massive stair way, but for the most part they don't add real choices.

There is also the odd addition of a castle, which seemed to have been mostly geared towards multiplayer. I developed it to buy gear, but other then that ignored it.

Conquest doesn't really have side quests, which makes the relationship building tough too.

There are some things I think were great from the game. The OST is really solid, with some real banger tracks. I also think the cut scenes looked top notch and the voice acting was done really well.

Overall, Awakening does the relationships better then Fates, and has a comparably cheesy story. Game play wise they are identical, so Awakening is just the better version of this game. While Three Houses is just an all around better game, if longer. Providing a story with a little nuance, better characters, more incentive to get to know party members, and gameplay that is actually interesting outside of the battle maps.

I was honestly pretty disappointed in Conquest. I think big fans of Fire Emblem might still enjoy it, but it's one I think most people are better off skipping.

Decided to finally give Lunatic Conquest an honest try many years after my initial playthrough of Fates on normal. Conquest is peak, it is unreal how well made the maps are. The game also feels completely fine-tuned on Lunatic - Enemy stat thresholds feel just right throughout the whole game.

In general, Fates did customization the best out of any recent entry - Planning out your supports to get units into their partners' classes, skill dipping and building the child units feels very rewarding due to how much of an investment it is for each individual character. It also fosters a lot of replay value - sometimes you'll want to give Silas an A+ with Kaze for Ninja, sometimes you might give him a S with Camilla for Wyvern Rider. (Sometimes you can do both and swap between them, depending on what the chapter needs!) This small example doesn't even account for potentially dipping into his default classline or Heart Seal line for unique skills that he can carry into his final class either. It's a multi-chapter long commitment to reclass, so two playthroughs will feel radically different as you play to get your characters online. This style of customization is much, much more fun to me than Three Houses and Engage, the former of which relied mostly on pretty boring Monastery busywork for customization, while the latter relied much too hard on the arena. (Both of those games are good in their own right, though!)

The map design as a whole is next to perfect, though Conquest isn't immune from the occasional chokefest or gimmicky map (Ch 17, 19, 20, and 24 come to mind...) Luckily, the fact that you're oftentimes accomplishing personal goals or interfacing with Fates' pretty deep mechanics means that even the lamest maps are still pretty engaging. Except for 19 fuck that one it sucks. I'd list the highlight maps of the campaign but I'd literally list almost all of them, so I'll just say that my my favorite earlygame map is 10, midgame map is 16 and endgame map is 26. As a whole, the earlygame is the strongest segment of the game, though I think all three sections are great, even including the fairly controversial midgame.

Obviously the story sucks but that has all been said to death at that point and that isn't really what you play the game for anyways. It could be the greatest written thing ever and I'd probably skip it on every subsequent playthrough anyways, so who cares. Bad stories suck one time, and then you don't really have to bother anymore. Support conversations are hit-or-miss as well, but even the games in the series praised for their writing suffer that same issue, so whatever. Obviously, this stuff still matters, but I do think it's a little annoying how easy people are to brush off some of the best gameplay in the series because of it. The true weakest part of the game is how little information it gives to the player - This can range from pretty big things, like not telling you which classes give which skills, or pretty small things like Iago's staff rotation in Chapter 26 or the wind patterns in Chapter 20. It's especially annoying because many of the chapters and paralogues do explain their rewards and conditions, like the village requirement in Chapter 9 or how the Caltrops work in 17. These are mostly nitpicks and solved by trial-and-error, so it's not the end of the world. However, I do think people would be more receptive to the deeper systems or the more interesting map gimmicks in this if the game was just a little more open in how things work sometimes.

Good game. Worth playing. Despite what I said earlier, the story really does drag it down though. It didn't have to be super great or anything, even something competent-tier like Awakening or FE7 would have made this one my definitive favorite, and probably hailed as the best one IS ever released. From a pure gameplay perspective its the best in the series though, and that is worth a lot on it's own.

Oh no, big evil man #37 wants to take over the world or something, quick, get your holy sword of shiny light to defeat him !

The Gameplay remains at the height of what Awakening had brought, I have not much to complain about it, effective, a good duo system and a plasant progression system in general.

However , I find the story bland, manichean to the extreme, i don't know if it's just Birthright but there are no stakes, it was impossible for me to get really involved in the story with so little tension (don't even get me started with the deus ex machinas).

The maps are uninteresting, the objectives are very often the same, it's really a shame since i love the feudal japan aesthetics.

The characters are good, so good in fact that i think that's where all the effort went, the story's not all that original ? ehhh just throw in some waifus, they won't notice, YOU WON'T BUY ME WITH A TOMBOY GF !.... Well, not this time at least.

But overall, i can't really say that this game was a complete waste of time, it has it's moments but the story just drags it down. I think i'd need to play Conquest and Revelation to really give a definitive opinion on this(/these) game(s) but after Birthright, i can't say that i'm all that thrilled.

2.8 out of 5, would listen to Lost in thoughts all alone for the 15th time.

(Ps : But seriously, they really went all in with the waifus and the husbandos, mamma mia.)

The infamous Fire Emblem Fates! So much I heard about it before playing it, and I must confess some of the rumors were true.

With all honesty it is hard to judge Fire Emblem Fates as a single game, since the three routes are quite different and presented in a very different way within the game, so I will try to split it to add some comments about each route.

Birthright

In my opinion this route was really made for those who never played a Fire Emblem before – it is very easy (even in harder difficulties) and the story is presented pretty much as if you were stupid. The dialogues are veeeeery bad, and the plot… let’s say it is just there. However, the gameloop is every addictive. It really builds upon Awakening in a good sense. I enjoyed spending hours leveling characters, setting up new supports, trying new things. I do think a lot of story threads are just left unexplained so you can try the other routes, but that makes the route not to be strong enough as a stand alone as a result. It does feel incomplete in that sense.

Conquest

This was not only my favorite route but also one of the most challenging experiences I had with Fire Emblem in general. If you are a Fire Emblem veteran you will LOVE this route. The story isn’t much better, but since the cast is reduced due to how the story develops, you really get to connect with the cast. Some of these stages will forever stay in my mind – as nightmares, honestly. Special mention to stage 6, like, what the heck. And after Chapter 17 pretty much everything went crazy, I had no idea what to the game would through out me after. What I would add as a negative critic is that coming from Birthright the difficulty spike could be a little bit too much without previous FE experience, therefore it could make some people just abandon it without know what really goes on in this route.

Revelation

This route is kind of a middle point, it takes some gameplay elements from Birthright but adds some flavor Conquest-inspired. The result is a very entertaining route, which finally tells a full story of what is happening behind the scenes on the other routes.

When it comes to things for all routes: the OST is amazing, characters designs are beautiful, and it you can see they really went for Awakening 2.0.

To sum up

If we sum up the number of hours for each route I think you can really get around 80-100 hours depending on your playstyle. At the end of Revelation I was really done with the whole thing so I tried to stick to the main chapters only. However, you can see the game has much to offer and you could really spend hours on it without moving a single minute forward in the story.

In regards to the Support system, I think they used it wisely to tell not only each character personality but also add layers to the plot. One thing that that all routes suffer is this this whole Corrin-centered story, but well, who cares, the game does state very early you are kind of a self-insert so you just gotta role with it.

Overall, loved the game. If you can overlook its flaws you are in for a ride!

LIT ON THE SPOT REVIEW

Fire Emblem Fates is divided into two titles: Birthright and Conquest, with a DLC called Revelation. Birthright serves as a terrible example to justify such division, bringing a story that is not only shallow but also incredibly stretched – like butter scraped over too much bread – to form a whole game, besides making some troublesome changes to the franchise’s classic gameplay structure.

The protagonist of Fates is called Corrin. The character, despite having her own personality, serves as an avatar for the player, who can modify her name, appearance and gender. Corrin, a member of the royal family of the kingdom of Nohr, is sent by her father, King Garon, on a reconnaissance mission into Hoshido’s enemy territory, where she’s kidnapped by her opponents. Taken to Hoshido, the protagonist discovers that actually this is the kingdom in which she was born and that Garon kidnapped her as a baby after murdering her real father. Convinced that Nohr has gone to war unfairly, Corrin has to decide whether to form an alliance with the brothers who helped raise her or the strangers who claim to be her true family. Choosing to help Hoshido leads to Birthright’s story.

The beginning of the game contains its most intense moments. In six chapters – there are 28 in total – it introduces the main characters on each side of the conflict, exposes what they are fighting for, establishes their friendly ties with the protagonist, and imposes a difficult choice on her in the middle of a battlefield: betray her foster brothers or support Garon’s tyrannical regime?

Since these chapters are present in the two titles that make up the entirety of Fire Emblem Fates, the fact that they are Birthright’s best part is symptomatic. After the alliance with Hoshido, the whole dramatic power of the narrative is quickly drained and replaced by a one-dimensional conflict, in which good and evil are clearly defined. Corrin’s new family is virtuous, while Garon is a monstrous king who sees not only his subjects as pawns in a board game but even his closest relatives.

The only element of the narrative that is not binary involves the protagonist’s former brothers, Xander, Elise, Camila and Leo. While the king is one-dimensional in his wickedness, they only keep fighting for Nohr because of their notion of duty. They are soldiers who receive terrible orders and are forced to execute them, even if they feel that they are going against everything they believe. Elise, the youngest sister, is the exception among them, acting like a child who is watching her parents fight: her only wish is for them to stop and for everything to return to normal.

Therefore, Birthright’s most interesting characters are the antagonists. The inhabitants of Hoshido are being unfairly attacked and must defeat a villainous tyrant. Nohr’s are being led by the villain and have to decide what to do about it, falling into the same crucial choice of the protagonist. No wonder the most intense, though overly melodramatic, moments of the climax involve their actions rather than Corrin’s new friends.

However, it is disappointing that Xander, Camila and Leo seem to be immune to argument, only understanding Corrin’s point of view after losing a fight. This certainly comes from the game’s need to contextualize a battle scenario, but it eventually conveys the morally objectionable message that the best way to convince someone is with violence; that there is nothing like a good beating to fix a person.

In addition, the story falters with its lack of answers and development. About Azura, a Nohr princess kidnapped by Hoshido, for example, it is not revealed the nature of the strange forces that she activates when she sings, and why her melody – which will be stuck in the player’s head for being sung a thousand times – paralyzes people. This is a problem because the character plays an important role in the main action scenes, using the song to save the group on numerous occasions: since it is not explained, instead of being an element connected to the story, Azura’s music emerges as a kind of “Song Ex Machina”. Even the villain’s motives fail to be properly developed. It is not known why Garon wants to invade Hoshido: whether it is for revenge, for natural resources, due to some prejudice or if he simply doesn’t like them and is bored. Garon simply invades Hoshido because that’s what Garon does.

Birthright‘s worst problem, however, is its incredibly repetitive narrative structure. Corrin will meet her former brothers in battle and more than once try to convince them of the king’s wickedness, begging them to drop their weapons and help her. And this will happen over and over again. She will face numerous random bad guys without any connection to the plot. She will beat the same villains, who will always flee at the end of the battle to participate in the next. Things only start to really happen in the last three chapters and there are twenty-eight of them. By comparison, the previous title in the franchise, Fire Emblem Awakening, was able to, in less time, tweak the direction the narrative was taking twice (Awakening spoilers) allowing the protagonist to defeat the evil king in the first act, to present as a major enemy a milder medieval version of Donald Trump, and finally conclude with a clash with an ancient god.

In an attempt to insert some kind of tension in the narrative, the writers include not one but two traitors in Corrin’s group. However, when there is only one character entering Hoshido’s army and not becoming playable, the player’s suspicions inevitably fall on them – eliminating any surprise from the revelation. Invariably repetitive, the writers make this mistake not once, but twice in Birthright, achieving the feat of surprising the player the second time not with the twist, but with their disregard for the story.

Intelligent Systems also makes the mistake of killing a playable character midway through the game, causing unnecessary frustration: yes, this makes the player, like Corrin, feel the loss of the character, but the death doesn’t work because the events leading to it are not caused by villains or any particular conflict, but by an accident. Suddenly the character is no longer there and the player just wonders “Why?” There is no connection to the rest of the story and the event is no longer mentioned. There is a way to avoid this result, but the player is not warned beforehand and the solution is as arbitrary as anything that leads to the death in question.

Corrin doesn’t help matters by proving to be an unremarkable protagonist: she doesn’t work well as an avatar because the game does not allow the player to shape her personality or project their own onto her. And she doesn’t work as a full developed character, because she’s superficial in her beliefs: her only moment of doubt is the big question in chapter six. After this point, she is a pit of altruism and virtue, showing compassion and mercy foolishly: it is not enough to allow an enemy captain to live, advocating against death penalty; she must leave the guy free in her camp without even arresting him. There is compassion and there is stupidity, and Corrin has a bunch of both.

Also problematic is the justification for the characters’ children to accompany them in battle. The idea, introduced in Awakening, is that when two characters get married (reaching level S in Support Conversations) they have a child, who becomes a playable character. In the previous title this worked because the story involved time travel and the children came from a post-apocalyptic future to try to prevent it from ever materializing. There is no time travel in Fates and the explanation offered is simply absurd: after getting married, the female character in question immediately becomes pregnant, gives birth within a few weeks, puts the baby into a kind of shelter in another universe where time passes faster; and then the child grows older – even older than their parents in some cases –, and happily leaves their private universe to participate in the war between Nohr and Hoshido. The moral repercussions – and they are many – of such grotesque situation are never discussed and they all treat the existence of these shelters outside of time and space naturally, although they are never mentioned in the main plot.

The game’s only saving grace regarding story is the Support Conversations. In them, all members of Corrin’s group talk to each other, exposing their longings and passions, which helps make even the flattest of characters more engaging. The knight Sophie, for example, is unable to control her mount, losing control of the animal all the time. She is defined by this trait, which is always mentioned whenever the character is in a scene. Advancing in supportive conversations – ranging from C to S – gradually developed the reason for her problem, while opposing it to her main quality: despite destroying everything with her horse, Sophie inspires her colleagues with her energy, always giving her all to fix whatever is broken. With more complex characters, these conversations are even more fundamental to the narrative, showing some character growth that the main story never touches upon, such as working with Azura’s feeling of loneliness, which makes her tragic while explaining her omissions and sacrifices in the main story.

These conversations are unlocked by having two characters fight together in the battlefield. Fire Emblem is a turn-based tactical RPG in which the player moves characters on a square-based grid to eliminate other units in combat. In Fates it’s possible to place two characters of your team in adjacent spaces, making them attack at the same time – the second with a reduction in damage so as not to unbalance the fight. Before Fates it was only possible to unite two characters in one unit, increasing their defense instead of attack. Since the bonus received is proportional to the bond between the characters, the developers encourage the player to not only take into account the attributes of each other in battle, but also their friendships outside it, seeking to position them together.

Combat in Fire Emblem has always been simple, consisting of a “Rock, Paper, Scissors” system: swordsmen beat axemen, who beat lancers, who beat swordsmen. Outside this triangle, archers defeat flying units, which in turn have movement bonuses. Fates enhances this system by adding new weapons such as the Shuriken and inserting both archery and magic into the main triangle – now defined by color for simplicity. These are probably the only welcome additions to the franchise brought by Fates.

A problematic change in gameplay is that weapons no longer break, reducing character attributes instead. This becomes a problem when it enters in contact with other systems in the game. That are some equipment that reverse the weapon triangle, for example, and because they no longer break they will remain in each character’s inventory forever, leaving them prepared for any situation – thus rendering the weapon’s triangle irrelevant. Forging equipment also allows the player to increase the strength of originally weaker weapons, virtually eliminating any downside of using them forever.

The available online mode also allows the player to circumvent the limitations of character classes. Achieving skills that are different from a character’s class-specific skills normally takes work: you need to spend an expensive item to change the unit’s class and then train them. However, after beating an opponent under certain conditions in an online match, you can purchase one of their team’s abilities. Players, then, can upload whole teams whose characters are unarmed to ensure the victory of anyone facing them. If it is possible to acquire skills without any challenge online, why does Intelligent Systems make the process so laborious normally? It is true that this is only optional, but it is the duty of developers to make every effort to maintain game balance and avoid making so easy for a player to break their game.

Now, a well-crafted aspect in Fates, but not specifically in Birthright for being present in Conquest and the DLC as well, is the design difference of each kingdom. Hoshido is characterized by warmer colors, especially red, which highlights the nobility of Corrin’s new family. Nohr, on the other hand, is marked by an opposite palette of energy, full of cold, lifeless colors – and it is also appropriate that the royal family is defined by purple, since it reflects Garon’s evil purposes. Still on the purple (spoiler alert) it is interesting to notice how the only character on Hoshido’s side to present the color in his garb is precisely the one who can die randomly in an accident.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright, then, ends up being one of the franchise’s weakest titles, featuring a poor story and some gameplay changes that are more troublesome than they worth.

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I really tried to like this game. I'm a big Fire Emblem Fan and I loved Awakening and the way Nintendo went with the genre, so I was obviously super hyped for Fates. The setting sounded great, the characters looked awesome, so I should absolutely like this game, right?

Well, no. Actually, not at all. I don't even really know why. Maybe because the story is such utter nonsense, like "oh, this guy is totally not the most mainstream villain I've ever seen, I'm sure he is totally a good guy" all the way, and your main character man... I absolutely hate Corrin. Everything is beautiful and we can all stay together and everything is rainbow and flowers, we trust everyone, even if he already stabbed us several times from behind... in a game with freaking permadeath? Sorry, but that doesn't work at all.

So basically, this game is selling us a completely uninteresting story with dialogues that make it seem like this game is made for 10 years old (while especially on the conquest part, you have some incredibly tough maps to deal with) from 3 different perspectives, where you do almost the same thing, just with other characters. And the conquest path is absolutely ridicoulous, you work with the villain who desperately wants to show you what an asshole he is and laughs his ass off when he sees Corrins Naiveity, while you go and murder the people that raised you and that are the absolutely stereotypical good guys.

So yeah, I guess my opinion will receive a lot of hate, since this game is extremely hyped to my surprise and is even considered a "masterpiece" by some. I totally disagree. Maybe I'm just a bit saturated by the Genre or whatever, but this story just doesn't make me wanna play this game at all. So I'm gonna put this game on hold for now, maybe some day I'll get that immense craving for fire emblem again, but oh boy, this day seems reeeeally far away right now.