I'm not sure I dig it. I like me some Fire Emblem and I expected this wouldn't be as deep as regular Fire Emblem, but it hasn't really been able to grab my attention at all. I'm looking at that Stamina meter thinking: 'I can't imagine a time where that thing would even be half empty. After three missions I am kind of done and 10 minutes later I'm at full Stamina again'. I'm also not sure what the purpose is of trying to get more 'anime kids' as Polygon called them. I have four good ones that work well together and haven't needed any others since. When they die, they don't die permanently, so it's more of a collection thing rather than needing them it seems like.

It has made me want to play Fates again though. I'm reminded Fire Emblem is fun. I'm just not so sure about this game. The 'loop' hasn't caught me at all. After 2-3 missions I have no desire to play it again until a few hours later. Couple days later, I feel like I'm not working towards anything really either.

Maybe it'll come later. What do you think of it?

Meh. I'm a few days away from dropping it. Might finish the campaign first.

Its not great. I just haven't had any desire to play past 10 or so missions. Probs gonna uninstall. And yeah, I really don't get the obsession with collecting certain characters either. I got some that work well and I've seen no incentive to switch it up tbh.

Same. I'll finish playing through on normal difficulty, but then I'll probably stop.

Diversity seems important in a team. Three of the four 4*+ characters I've received are spear users, and the other is a healer.

I'm already kinda bored. I'm not a huge FE fan in the first place (having only played one previously), and although it seems to have quality, it doesn't seem to have much quantity. I'll probably uninstall soon, there are far better mobile games worth ones time.

I kinda like tinkering with it when I get a few minutes. I'll probably play through the (vapid) story and delete it.

As a streamlined/watered-down mobile thing, I'll commend it for still being recognizable as Fire Emblem and requiring a basic level of strategy to do well. I think some of the character art is really good and it's nice to see some random deep cuts get some representation (though, Wendy/Gwendolyn from Binding Blade is a hilarious pick because she's literally the worst unit in that game)

That said... I've played for several hours at this point and the gatchapon grind and stamina meter are pretty good reminders that this is a Japanese-developed mobile game. It doesn't seem egregious, but I'm not sure how much more I'll play when I could very well just play a real Fire Emblem game with that time instead.

I have never been a Fire Emblem guy but I am really enjoying this game. Personally I don't like mobile games with a lot of complexity or depth so this is perfect. I just found out this morning that, according to someone on the internet, my favorite hero in the game is apparently the lowest possible tier of hero, and should not be used by anyone. But I'm still having a good time.

The story is so perfunctory and trivial I wish it wasn't even in the game. It's cool that all these noble heroes think a dude in his pajamas staring at his phone is some sort of interdimensional hero though.

@arbitrarywater: Yeah, as a FE fan from the GBA era, that seems to be my sentiment as well. I'd rather just play the actual games that this F2P stuff. The gachapon mechanics suck the fun right out of it.

I booted up Fire Emblem Fates. I almost forgot how awesome that game is. One of the more overlooked games in 2016. It's great.

To be clear, I'm not disliking it because it isn't complex or deep enough. It's a mobile game and I was prepared to take it as such.

My problem is more that there seems to be no point to any of it. First, the story missions. They appear to be very easy and they don't require you to engage with any of the other systems in the game at all. You don't need new characters, you have way more stamina than you would need and you're not scrounging to grind some levels. Why get new characters when I'm already curb-stomping the campaign? The core of this game almost feels like an idle-game. Yes, numbers are going up in places, but there doesn't seem to be a reason for me to get it there.

@zevvion: You've summed up my opinions pretty well. I get the feeling people should be compelled to collect maybe? Or maybe grind for the sake of grinding? But other than that there's just the async multiplayer which didn't seem that interesting from the couple times I played it. I don't even really find it as compelling as Rally Mode in Mario Run. But I kinda like the tactics-lite casual nature of it. I just like pulling it out and playing through a round without it taking 20 minutes and several restarts haha.

I'm pretty much done with it already. I was able to get to chapter 8 of the story by day 2 and I haven't bothered to continue that, I just pop in for some quick arena battles. I've got a few problems with it.

Upgrade resource cost: 20,000 (twenty thousand!) of those feathers to upgrade a four star character to five stars. I'm not saying that attaining a five star character should be easy, but it shouldn't take weeks of plugging away at arena battles to get enough feathers through rewards to upgrade one character. This is in addition to requiring 20 great badges which you can only farm starting from the sixth stratum of the training tower, of which you'll need a level 30 team to farm comfortably.

Orbs: After you finish the story on all three difficulties, it seems that the main method of gaining orbs without paying has pretty much dried up. After that I think the only other way is through quests, and checking through it now, the only quest I have that rewards orbs is one February mission for a grand total of 3.

No preparation phase: The unit placement on the map is determined by the order you have them placed in your line-up, with no way of moving them around before starting the mission. There's even maps where your units are isolated, spread across all four corners of the map. If your closest unit to an enemy archer is a flying unit, you're in for a bad time unless you can ORKO. If that enemy archer is Takumi, you're definitely screwed.

In addition to all that, I was lucky enough to get my favorite character right away, so I don't really have much motivation to pay any money to roll for more heroes. All this game really made me want to do was start up another file on a proper Fire Emblem game.

Collecting characters seems unnecessary, the combat and maps seem dumbed down more than necessary, and the unskippable dialogue is UNBEARABLE.

I like mobages and this one's easy to play on a train without thinking about it too much so enjoying it.

Isn't there a big fat skip button on the top right when there's a story dialogue?

So far, this one seems way too easy. Except for unlocking the potential for 4-5* units.

I'm really enjoying it. I'd say I was a casual Fire Emblem fan before as I've played a bunch of them but never finished any due to them getting too difficult for me (and I lack patience with strategy games) but this has kept me interest. I also don't really ever play games on phones before this (and Pokemon Go), so I'm not desensitised to the genre of character-collecting phone games.

So I'm having a lot of fun, just like I did with Pokemon Shuffle. I'll probably play it for a while, then put a little money in to keep its appeal (and as a small tip) before putting it down in a few months. Still waiting to get Lucina though (one of my favourite female characters in all of gaming).

Played for about 3 hours over the weekend, had a good first impression but I'm extremely bored of it at this point.

It's OK. FE Fates is a better FE game, and Record Keeper is a better mobile nostalgia trip. We'll see if they build it out over time, I guess.

it needs more meat from the dabbling ive done so far. presentation is well done at least. wouldn't mind a phone game with this interface and design if it at least was somewhat close to proper fire emblem games, but i guess you cant ever really get that with any phone game.

it does make me want to finally get one of the fire emblem fates games, but having a bit of a time choosing between birthright or conquest.

It's not the worst Gacha style f2p game I've played for sure. I finished the campaign and I'm working on clearing hard mode and lunatic mode of it now. Still hasn't made me wanna invest real money in it as the amount those orbs cost is a bit much for me to justify for what you get. No clue with how long I'll stick with it though.

As a nut who played through all 3 Fates campaigns last year, I could probably help with this. I really enjoyed Conquest as a "We're going to make a crazy hardcore game for people who hate themselves" kinda thing, and indeed it's one of the most strategically satisfying games in the series especially if you thought Awakening's wide open maps and infinite grinding were too lax. It actually might go a little too far in a handful of maps, if the literal half-dozen hours it took me to get through that damn ninja cave (playing on Hard/Classic) are any indication.

Birthright, on the other hand, is basically Awakening 2.0: yo you have Samurai. That's not to say that it's a complete walk in the park or anything, but playing that thing right after Conquest was like a nice cool-down where I could get through maps on the first attempt and not have to worry about insidiously awful enemy skill combinations. Being connected to two other campaigns means that it's not as cohesive an experience as Awakening, but if you liked that and are down for some more pressure-light Fire Emblem it's not a bad pick.

Oh, and it's probably worth mentioning that the story for all 3 Fates games are sort of garbage. Like, Awakening's plot can only generously be described as "coherent" but at least it has some pathos and an arc, whereas the plot of each campaign in Fates is uniquely terrible. Conquest's plot is a standout for bungling its own morally grey premise in a way that comes off as really stupid and lazy, but the other two aren't much better. The supports are still (mostly) good though!

I friggin' love this game. I've been playing FE since the first western release and this pretty well distills the experience down into something that maps to mobile monetization schemes well. Later maps actually require some strategy and planning, and the use of the debuff mechanics introduced in Fates is very solid. I definitely recommend giving this a shot if you're at all into the standard Fire Emblem gameplay experience.

I feel like the game does get a fair bit harder as you level up, especially if you don't have a well rounded team. I wish there was more to the Arena though. Still enjoying the game and I've already spent a bit of money on it.

@arbitrarywater: Weirdly enough I thought Birthright had the most coherent and slightly better story than the other two. The consensus seemed at first that Birthright was the worst overall. Conquest's story is appalling how badly it is written and Revelations is a mess of plot holes and half-baked ideas. Though I've never played any FE for the story.

For me I do enjoy this game but the mobile gatcha aspects are pretty frustrating. I'm the kind of person that would want to collect most characters, but they made orbs incredibly limited to obtain beyond just paying for them, which really sucks. I just want Lyn ;_;

I definitely see how there's not a lot here for the more casual FE fan or newbie. I'll probably stick with it, I don't really play anything else on my phone so it'll occupy lunch breaks nicely. Plus I really want to see how they roll out additional sets of characters, especially ones in games that never made it west.

It seems fairly par for gacha games as far as how engaging it is. I like it because of the FE flavour.

Also it's nice how they're giving out free side characters via the special maps (Donnel!). Although, I'm definitely struggling with using more than a few of the characters that I have (I have the same problem with most games in this genre)

@theblue: Not to hijack this thread, but I thought Revelation was the worst of the 3 Fates campaigns by a decent margin. Just some really tedious map design and poor character balance, definitely felt a lot more "thrown together" than the other two. Someone compared it to a fan ROM hack, and that's something I think fits pretty well. I'll also cop to Birthright having the best plot of the 3, but only because it's forgettable rather than infuriating.

Also, I just got my first bunch of feathers and realized that it'll take literal weeks to bring any character up from 4* to 5*, which has... deflated my enthusiasm for taking this game seriously.

@arbitrarywater: I feel like even if they were to cut the feather requirements in half it would still take a little too long for this game to hold my interest for the long haul. I think I'll put it down soon and check back in when they update it with the Tellius crew.

Also my least favorite shared map in all of Fates is that one where you have to take the staircases one character at a time, and it felt like Revelations was full of tedious gimmicks like that which made me bump it down in difficulty just to rush through it.

@zevvion: To address some of your questions on where the game goes and the point of it:

When would you run out of stamina? Get to the last chapter on normal and it will cost you 10 points per mission. That's normal. There's still hard and lunatic which increases it further. I can barely do a few missions before I have to get more stamina. The training tower is even worse. It's half off on stamina for a launch event, and everything above lvl 20 is still a lot of stamina to run.

Why would you roll for more heroes? Every hero has different skills, stat averages, and quite frankly why wouldn't you want to use your favorite fire emblem people. Its fun to make different compositions and strategies. The stars also make a big difference. If you plan on running lunatic maps with your starting 2* people you'll be in for a rough time.

Where's the difficulty? Lunatic. If you're only on normal (I'm assuming you are since you think there's more stamina than you could ever need) then the game is easy enough to turn auto battle on. Normal is easy because the game has to have content that people who only have just the starting characters can complete to earn orbs. Once you move on the game will expect you to have spent some orbs and can push the stats a bit more. And to be fair even the main Fire Emblem games are stupidly easy on normal mode. Lunatic is where the challenge is there as well.

I'm not saying this game is as in depth or complicated as a main title, but like I said your confusion makes me think you probably haven't reached the point where it gets tougher. Not tough like a main game of course. Mainly just not a thoughtless faceroll.

As for the topic, I like it quite a bit. It's fun to pick up every few hours to run the stamina out for a few minutes and then put down again. Arena pacing seems kind of nice too. Doesn't feel like I have to sit in arena all day to compete since I'm restricted in the number of uses anyway. There are some big flaws due to its simplicity (no prep phase, no preview of enemy teams in arena, stamina being static with no improvement possible). But it's excusable because the overall package feels enjoyable.

Also, Fates is amazing fun. My game of the year last year. It got me playing it again too, so their marketing has apparently worked!

I'm enjoying it. The game, despite being so scaled down, still feels like Fire Emblem. It's decent strategy for a game where missions last 1-2 minutes.

I'm in Chapter 7 but I started to hit a wall there where I had to grind a lot more to get my heroes to be able to do the next mission, would spend orbs on better units, train them from level 1 to 20, get further, hit another wall... The weird thing is that I feel like there are A LOT of times in a single mission where I'll encounter a fight where the enemy is incapable of doing damage to my unit, and then a later encounter will have a different unit of mine unable to do damage to a different enemy. This happens when I'm properly leveled and happens regardless of where the units are on the weapon triangle, so I'm pretty baffled as to what's up with that.

I think Heroes is a fun and simple Fire Emblem-ish experience. I like how scaled down it is and I really enjoy controlling units via touch. There's just enough from the 3DS games to make Heroes feel familiar while still working well on my phone.

Is it a replacement for the 3DS games? Of course it isn't. It's not trying to be. But I think it's pretty impressive that they condensed the Fire Emblem formula into a free phone game. Definitely my early front runner for toilet time killer of the year.

@donutfever: There are usually mixtures of enemies with very high Def or very high Res on a map to encourage you to use both magic and physical damage in your teams. Could be your first unit was good against the what the first enemy was packing and your second unit wasn't good at fighting what the second enemy had stat-wise. There's also some varying degrees of challenge when it comes to the units on the map in general. Actual people are usually tougher and higher level than generic class named units.

This game seemed kinda nifty, however

• I don't think the 2 space movement works well. It seems to cramp up strategic positioning decisions and turn fights into scrambles. It seems like wider areas and movement on the order of 5+ spaces, as found in "real" FE games, tends to make for a deeper experience. Either that, or half the maps in this game are garbage.
• It looks like I just got burned hard by the star system, in that all my early-game EXP has been funneled into the 2* starters before I ever understood how the star system worked. It seems like they expect you to grind story levels that you've already completed for far less EXP than you get on the first clear, to get your dudes up to level 20, so that you can "unlock potential" and watch them plummet to the ground again? That seems like a real enthusiasm killer. Like, aren't these games meant to use your sense of achievement and progress to keep you invested in the game? I get that they want to delay empowerment until you spend some money, but I'm about to uninstall this game not out of an act of defiance to being shilled by a cunning addiction model, but out of the kind of despair you feel when your game save gets deleted. Maybe this stuff really ropes in Japanese schoolkids or something, but I think they got their addiction model wrong.

Those points made, it seems better than the kinds of mobile games that dominate the app stores at the moment. I'd be happy for Nintendo to divert the truckloads of cash that are going into Clash of Clans and the like over to FE Heroes, maybe it'll get people interested in the 3DS/Switch games.

@otakugamer said:

This might be Mission Accomplished for what Nintendo wants these mobile games to do. I'm guessing they don't expect to suddenly be one of the top contenders in the mobile side of the industry, but even if Super Mario Run and FE Heroes (and accidentally Pokemon GO) just introduce people to/remind people that certain Nintendo brands exist and are kinda fun, maybe that sells a few more copies of a 3DS game or the Switch or whatever.

@redyoshi said:

This is the part that's really killing it for me. My only other experience with a gacha game was playing Terra Battle for more months than I'd like to admit, because it just had that extra little something thanks to involvement from Uematsu and Sakaguchi. It's been so long I kinda forget the specifics of Terra Battle, but I do seem to recall that it had a similar structure of "flimsy story missions - also here are missions you do just for grinding". The difference was that the story missions permanently increased your stamina pool, while you could grind out an in-game currency that let you pull from a slightly weaker pool of heroes, and then there was the premium currency (that you could very gradually get for free) which let you pull from the overall pool of heroes (including the really good ones). Still some really grindy bullshit, but it was at least kinda tolerable for a while? Also, upgrading heroes sometimes cost some rare materials that were rare drops from certain events, which was sometimes frustrating, but it wasn't as demoralizing as "yo, you need fucking TWENTY THOUSAND feathers to progress, my dawg."

But back to my main point: the orbs are bumming me out. They just give me an immediate distaste for the game. I haven't finished the story on all three difficulties, but I'm already discouraged by the fact that the orb supply is very obviously finite, except they bait you with a bunch of them early on, which feels extra gross. Monthly quests, which reward like 3 orbs? Are you fucking kidding me, game? Sure, they'll do temporary events here and there that give out orbs, but this feels like a terrible game for someone like me who intends on staying a F2P pleb who doesn't put money into it, because I'm gonna be stuck with the same characters for a long-ass time, unless you want to count the absolutely worthless 1- and 2-star heroes they rotate daily.

On the other hand, I'm sure this game will make so much more money than Super Mario Run because of the whales who want all of their 5-star waifus.

I am enjoying it immensely. I see plenty of events and characters being added and I'm trying to prepare my team(s) for the upcoming things that will be added. I like the long-term nature of the one gacha game I've played so far so I look forward to enjoying this one as well.

I agree, but also feel its important to remember that they've also said that they intend to release new content every couple of weeks. Further story chapters with more orbs will come. Once you finish what is there right now you'll see that they obviously have not finished the story yet.

The event that's going on is going to be 5 maps over the course of 5 weeks. Each with a normal and a hard difficulty that reward 3 orbs each. So you have a very easy source of 30 orbs in the next month as long as you play once a week. There's also the 3 orb quest for February that you mentioned. I'm fine with what they have right now really. There's A LOT of orbs available through the story, so quest and event orbs on top of that is very generous considering they could just feed off of the whale hype right now if they wanted. There are 45 maps in the story right now each with an orb as a reward. You can play through this 3 times on different difficulties to get orbs so that's a total of 135 orbs just for playing the game. That's enough for 27 heroes assuming you pay max cost for each summon for some reason and ignore upgrading the castle. This isn't including linked account orbs, the daily launch bonus orbs from release, and the current month long 30 orb event.

If you're going free to play I'd assume that it will take awhile to complete the highest difficulty, so that should keep you busy while more maps get released and more events happen. If you're not free to play and can beat every map in a couple days then orbs don't really matter anyway. I think its best to wait and see before we start judging them for being stingy on orbs.

while it may not be interesting to fans of the series, i'm sure it has made hundreds of thousands of people interested in the series that have never played it before.

I played it alot and it was super fun,only real problem is that the later hard and lunatic missions require so much stamina to attempt them.

Also i have caved in and bought 20 orbs,got nothing good so im pretty much annoyed with it lol.

I just got 900 feathers for my points in the Arena.

Are you telling me it's gonna take TWENTY more weeks to upgrade my Corrin to 5 stars, game? Is that what you're telling me?!

My impression is coming from the experience of playing Star Trek Timelines from launch to present day and playing FF: Record Keeper for the past year+. Seriously, if you put any time into STT at launch and tried it again right now, it's a far better/more enjoyable experience that obviously still wants all your money. That said, I'm going to keep playing, empty out the stamina catch basin regularly, and see where this ends up. Hoping for more features that just make this experience better. It's light enough for a quick 5 minute session to longer sessions after a fresh hero summoning.

• Feathers - As for the 20K feathers for the 4* >> 5*, still to early to say? We're all Tier 1 in the Arena with no idea if higher tiers yield bigger rewards. One would seriously hope so.
• Orbs - I hope they go to a daily orb reward system. Basing this thought from FF:RK, where you get about 9 or 10 mythril a week and it's 25 for a 11x equipment pull. A 5 hero summon every 20 days is enough to keep me checking in.
• Events - More variety. But I have no idea how they could do this. Puzzle scenarios?
• Story - Just finished the 1st section of Chapter 9 Normal, so I have plenty of grinding to go. Is there much that they can work with to add more to the existing "story"? Do we even want more of a story?

EDIT: Anyone see the waking the owl up animations? So cute! Utterly adorable. Also buying orbs... holy cow are those expensive. $39.99 for best value at about 53.32 cents an orb.

Yeah, it varies game to game in FE, but some of them do have different objectives, like "defend a particular point against constantly spawning dudes for a certain number of turns", or "escape to the other side of the map within a certain number of turns" and that sort of thing. FE Heroes is really hamstrung by the map size, though, so I'm really not sure what interesting constraints they could add to such a small grid other than something basic like "win the battle within 2 rounds" or something.

This is a nice thought but looking at the structure of FE: Heroes it's very clear that they want to make a lot of money with it. If they wanted to make a game that would funnel people into their other titles it'd be a one-time purchase like Super Mario Run or would be significantly more kind with the orbs.

Gacha games make shitloads of cash from a small but dedicated group of PVP oriented whales that spend thousands of dollars on the game and the casual group that spends small amounts in larger numbers to try to pull their favorite characters. FE Heroes is structured EXACTLY like any other gacha game. Consider that it costs $3.32 to pull one character (going off the base $1.99 for 3 orbs price). If they just wanted you to get a ton of characters and become interested in the Fire Emblem games they came from, they would have definitely made pulling characters cheaper.

I also thought this game would be way more oriented towards getting you to play other FE games, but it's missing stuff that seems essential to this. One thing is that when examining characters you don't get any real backstory blurbs or even which game they first appeared in. This is absolutely insane to me, since you could pull, like, Lyn for instance and have no clue what game she was in and why she was important. You can Google this, but again the real funnel would be to say "Hey, this character came from this game, and you can buy it on the eShop through this link." Still sort of baffled they didn't do this.

When you have a character selected in the menus, if you click on the character name way in the upper left, it opens a tooltip that tries to explain who that character is. Usually just their basic demeanor (maybe) or their one gimmick (looking at you, Awakening/Fates characters), their basic role or familial relationship (ninja, retainer for Sakura, princess, moody wizard, Marth's betrothed, etc.), and then what game they're originally from.

But yeah, that does a pretty shit job of endearing me to any characters I'm not familiar with already. I give zero fucks about any of the characters I've pulled from any of the older FE games that I never played.

Wowwwwwww why is this so hidden?! Crazy. Thanks for letting me know, haha.

Edit: I wanted to quickly add that the pity timer in this game is extremely fucked up. It only applies to 5 star characters for THAT BANNER, i.e. you get a 0.5% increase every 5 summons to get a 5 star unit in the Legendary Heroes banner if you summon from Legendary Heroes, but not in the Deep Devotion banner. Also, naturally, after the banner ends the game resets the pity timer back to 6% chance for 5 star.

Thanks for clearing that up. I have indeed not reached Lunatic difficulty. But what I got to play so far makes me not very interested in playing more of it. What you describe doesn't sound that much more fun to be honest.

If it were a game I could just pay for and play, and in being so dropped all the free to play stamina garbage and whatnot, I would probably enjoy it. However, I have no intention in engaging in that F2P nonsense.

I got bored of it way more quickly than I thought I would. I know that there are harder difficulties once you beat the story mode the first time, but I just can't bring myself to play through such mind numbingly easy missions to get to that. Plus, I really hate not being able to move to a location and then attack. Unit placement has always been kind of the key component of the strategy in these types of games. Not being able to choose your starting positions, and not being able to choose what square you are attacking from kind of takes most of the fun out of the game.

Also, the developers took the time to create an overlay to show you were the danger zones on a map are, but until you move into those zones the AI won't move, and thus far no map has been designed in such a way that allows you to make good use of that overlay. If I can't bait the AI into a bad position then why even allow me to know what the bad positions are?