I'm really enjoying it so far. With the half stamina for the training tower, i havent had much problem with the stamina draining and the gameplay is fun especially in higher levels when strategy is needed and brute force will get you immediately killed. Only thing i hate is the terrible luck i have with RNG and some levels with bottlenecks are fucking terrible. Also, i am having a lot of problem with bugs. They should also say something about material gathering so people wont have to make assumptions.

I really like this game. It has issues, but if they update it and nurture it like SE did for Final Fantasy Records Keeper, that game will be a really solid mobile game for the next couple years. There's one issue I think they will never be able to change though and that's the fact that when I play it, I just want to get my 3DS and play a real Fire Emblem....

@zevvion: That's understandable, its definitely not for everyone and there are definitely a whole other grouping of issues that come up once you get to the later stuff. If it's not doing it for you I'd just stick with the main games, hard to go wrong with those.

@mezza: I'm already playing Fates again. I've discovered the glory of Casual mode. Fits those games a whole lot better (if you don't intend to ever reload, like me). Lunatic/Casual feels very good.

@zevvion: I ended up going back as well, and lunatic has given me a whole new appreciation for conquest. There's a lot of clever design between the enemy units and maps in that story branch compared to the other two. I'd only done hard/classic before.

I'm really enjoying Heroes but I got lucky with 5 star heroes and have a team full of them. I currently have two flying, an archer, and a spear lady. My guess would be if I didn't get those while summoning I wouldn't be progressing as fast as I am through the story and making progress.

I also really hope people complain when they increase the stamina cost to train after this month. I get that it's half for launch but it will suck to do anything in this game when those goes to full cost.

*If they go full cost and everything is a high requirement of stamina I might quit. I'm almost on the last difficulty and the costs are already high.

Final Fantasy Tactics is one of my best games of all time and this is basically a lite version of that. I had never played a Fire Emblem game, but now I'm interested in the series. I hope they add more complex mechanics into the game.

You are right about starting positions in battle, but you CAN choose where to attack from. It's significantly easier to control the game in general if you change everything that says "auto" in the menu to "tap". Then you tap a unit, tap where to move and then attack.

I'm having fun with it so far. Some of the later levels and high-level training tower stuff takes a load of stamina so gameplay is only like a couple of instances and that's fine considering I only play for minutes at a time anyway. Other than that, it's a way to get a quick Fire Emblem fix on a small map start to finish without having to carry around my 3DS.

I liked it out of the gate because I liked seeing the numbers and bars go up, but I noticed I was also having fun optimizing my battles. Sure I could just slam my guys against their guys and probably come out on top, but I liked setting up blockades so I could have my healer keep healing until she stopped getting XP. I liked trying to give killing blows to weaker characters without getting them killed.

Now that I've got some LV25-ish characters, I'm finding there's actually some meat in this game. I think it's chapter 9-3, with Zephiel? He's got a thing that drastically protects armored characters, with two armor knights that follow him around. Along with some of the stuff I've gone against in the arena, I've found myself in some really sticky situations that I had to really think about. I could see myself having a need to tailor my heroes to specific maps if this difficulty keeps up.

What has bummed me out is that around LV25, 5* heroes start to really stand head and shoulders above the others. I've got five 4* characters up to LV20 just waiting for feathers. So many feathers. I liked bouncing around, leveling up units I thought might have an edge case use, keeping things fresh. But now I've got 5 units I stick with, the others can't really hack it anymore.

Anyway I see myself playing it for a couple more weeks. When I started I set myself the goal of getting my favourite hero and levelling them up. Still waiting, Lyn. If I hit that goal I'll probably be happy to stop.

@mcfart: Oh that is good to know. I'll have to check that out.

I'm really having a TON of fun with it. I've managed to get a few friends into it and it's just a lot of fun for a Free-to-play mobile game, although i'm playing it on my iPad which I'm EXTREMELY glad I chose to do. The interface and artwork look amazing. It's scratching the itch that Terra Battle used to except this time I'm going to try to not fall down the casino hole of sinking a bunch of money into it to try and get characters. I sunk some money in at first to grab 20 Orbs just to give myself a head start but I'm going to be spending very sparsely on this, instead just run with it and see what happens. I hope Nintendo support it well!

It helps that I find the game really fun as well, I've had a few instances where I've tackled a map with a sub-par team and retried until I nailed it. It's actually pretty satisfying!

I'm really enjoying the game. I find myself waking a little earlier than usual to play before work. I haven't been this hooked to a FTP game since Hearthstone. And then there's the bad... in terms of long term viability, Nintendo needs to add more content, balance 5 star characters and add strategic layer in the game.

In terms of typical FE stories, this story is forgettable, weak and conveniently written to showcase the characters from the entire FE franchise. It's also not finished so here's hoping Nintendo adds to the story in the upcoming weeks.

5 star characters are broken, 4 star characters are overpowered, 3 star characters are fair and everything below is so feeble comparison that it's not worth investing into them (unless you plan on upgrading them). If you play arena, you'll mostly see everyone running 5 star characters. One character I routinely see people running is a 5 star archer that can retaliate at close range. He is the only character I've seen that has no weapon triangle weakness and can't be attacked without suffering a counterattack. Then again I won't complain about balance since I'm running Lyn who can pretty much 1 shot any character with her Astra special active. Of course you can grow your weak 1-2 star characters into 5 star characters but currently the amount of feathers it takes to upgrade from 4 stars =>5 stars is too difficult. You have to be a top arena player for roughly 5 weeks in a row to afford a 5 star upgrade. An important note is that there is no way to buy feathers, so arena, achievements and daily bonuses are the only way to go.

Strategy wise the game is well balanced if you are playing <=3 star characters. You have to use the weapon-triangle well and study your opponents abilities carefully. It sucks that you can't place your characters before hand because there are some maps where your characters are split apart and can be easily felled. As mentioned previously, strategy gets completely thrown out the window with 4+ star characters. I wish there was a star restriction on some maps because right now I intentionally pick sub-optimal lineups so I actually need to think and use a hint of strategy.

Overall I had more fun with this game than Pokemon Go. There IS strategy and depth to this game as long as you're willing to handicap yourself and play with only 1-3 star characters.

I think it's a pretty good mobile game iteration of Fire Emblem. It has just enough of that FE flavor to interest fans while offering the kind of casual gameplay that attracts a weirder audience. It looks good and it plays well. Pricing aside, the gacha system is also one of the friendliest I've seen from these kinds of games. Most gacha focusing mobile games will offer a 'single' or a discounted 'bulk' pull option with little to no guarantee you'll actually get anything you want. Here, not only are the percentages on higher tier characters pretty generous, but it also shows you up front what character classes you'll be getting and lets you back out after the initial 5 orb fee if you don't like the spread.

That said, like what @yyninja just wrote, there's a bit of a balance and content problem right now. I got lucky and had 5* Takumi (the archer unit mentioned) drop in one of my first gacha rolls, and quickly found out just how broken and overpowered he really is. I only play for a few minutes in the morning or before bed, but right now my team is working it's way through Lunatic difficulty after cruising through Normal and Hard. Even in PVP I've got a 100% defense record so far, and I've only lost once while on attack even though I've been choosing the hardest options.

I'm sitting on about 60 gacha orbs right now, and I don't really see a reason to use them? I've upgraded my castle to the maximum and restoring stamina is pretty useless... I guess I could aim to roll for a team of all 5* characters, but if I'm cruising through the game's content with what I have now what would be the point of changing it up if my current team is just going to get stronger by using them more often?

The map in this Narcian event is the most rigged thing I've ever seen. It's basically unwinnable, unless you have obscenely overleveled flying units that can fly over the mountains and one-shot the archer taking off some pressure, or obscenely overleveled tanky units (that can do ranged counterattacks) that can go up the left side and withstand all the hits you're going to take from the archer and Narcian.

I see how the map is finishable in the abstract, but the handful of units I have in the lvl 25+ range just aren't appropriate for it whatsoever.

Ah well, it's not like I particularly want a 2-star Narcian and a 3-star Narcian because that's like guaranteed terrible, but still, what a dumb challenge event.

At least that lines up with the real Fire Emblem Fates. Takumi is a total gamebreaker. His Fujin Yumi lets him ignore terrain movement penalties and his stats are nuts. The only potentially more broken character is his brother, Ryoma, and his Raijinto katana.

It's weird that you need so many feathers to go from 4* -> 5* but there is basically no good way to get them (even paying). Would be nice if you could sometimes get them from training tower or arena or something.

Yeah this was pretty annoying, though the AI is quite dumb so with enough scouting I managed to do it with my 4* team that were just the first ones I got. The main issue for me was keeping my low RES characters out of range of the horse mages. The limitation that you can't lose any characters was pretty annoying because I could definitely have beat the opponents easily enough if I were allowed to sacrifice my archer.

@quantris: Yeah, sadly most of the lvl 25+ units I have are glass cannons, which I can have success with on the normal random maps with proper positioning, but in this challenge map that is such a good defensive position for the enemy, none of my units are tanky enough to draw out the enemy. They just die immediately.

I kinda feel like what they want you to do is buy dueling crests to refill your dueling swords so you can grind your way to the top of arena rankings and get feather rewards that way, but even that would take like 5 days to pay off.

@redyoshi: You don't really need to grind to get to the top of the arena rewards. It only tracks your highest set of 7, and you should have enough in a regular week to get 2 runs by only using 1 dueling crest which is easy to obtain through rewards. Do one safe run that'll get you to the upper middle of the scoreboard just in case and then one slightly risky run that can get you to the top each week. Repeating it over and over again isn't beneficial unless you're trying to do a no deaths full advanced run which is way over the maximum requirements for the current highest reward. I hit the highest section by doing 5 intermediates and 2 beginners while also losing a couple people during that 7 streak which lowered my score even more. Stopped immediately after cause there's no point in going on once you max out your feather reward for the week. Ranking is a different story, but unless you're paying money I wouldn't worry about rankings considering the whales out there.

@mezza: I thought that it would add together all your points totals so doing a bunch of 7 win streaks would stack up to a high score? I mean, I just do a streak of 7 wins by fighting beginners, and then a couple more wins just to get enough points for the 1,000 feather reward and then stop there for the week.

@redyoshi: Nope. It looks at the highest score of a particular set of 7 for the week. Nothing other than your win streak during a set of 7 and the points you get from each individual match during that 7 add together. Each set of 7 is isolated. When you begin a new set of 7 the last set no longer matters aside from possibly being your high score for the week.

Say I score 2,000 on my first 7 (this is the match points in addition to the streak bonus for winning 7 in a row hypothetically). It's only halfway through the week so I do another 7 before the week is over. I take some risks on the difficulty since i have a safety net to fall back on in my 2,000 score. This time my match points and my 7 streak bonus add up to 3,000. This means that for the week I score 3,000 and not 5,000. The 2,000 was beat and no longer matters. There's no benefit from multiple runs. The only benefit is if you don't get the score you want and need to go again to get a new high score.

This is only in regards to offensive rewards. Defense works similarly. If you want to get the 250+ reward on defense you need to score 250 or higher on one individual defensive match. I have no idea how ranking works since it left me unranked even after playing last week, so I can't say for that. I mainly focus on offense and defense anyway since I'm not likely going to get high on ranks anytime soon.

@mezza: I see. I didn't realize that the streaks didn't stack since I'm satisfied with the 1,000 feather reward, and since I don't run into many Takumi or Hector units in beginner, it's quick and easy enough to do. I've only got 11k after all this time though so maybe I should throw in some intermediates.

@redyoshi: That's what I did the first week too until I realized there isn't much of a downside to taking risks after you get one score on the board. You get 1,000 free feathers for a quest if you complete 10 intermediate or higher arena battles before the end of the month, so might be worth the attempt. Even if its just the few after your first 7. How many people live through the map matters as well in case you didn't know. You'll get more points per map if your whole team lives. Or at least that's what I've heard. The crazy thing people are doing is trying to get the highest score possible by doing nothing but advanced, and immediately surrendering and starting over if someone dies. That sounds super not fun to me. I've found intermediate to be a nice balance if you have a diverse team ready to go. Or Robin with a dancer. Robin in a team can pretty much solo most of the currently popular picks in intermediate unless there are multiple copies involved.

@mezza: Sadly no Robin and my Olivia is the 2-star from the hero battle. I've got a 4 star Cecilia and her Gronnraven gives her colorless advantage, problem is she's very frail. I'm still considering using the feathers I'm saving up for her unless some better option pops up.

It's definitely a weird game. On one hand they did a good job distilling the game down to faster, smaller matches with low unit counts and maps that fit on a phone screen. On the other hand you have the "gacha" model which, while popular in Japan, will probably be frustrating to most other players. I just cut my video review together last for those who haven't seen the game yet (but honestly, its free so just try it):

@warmachine: Even though they did distill it down somewhat successfully, I think they also fucked it up kinda bad. Units that used to be good because they could attack/counterattack at range 1 or 2 (mages, thieves/ninjas) are much worse because now they only do stuff at range 2. The handful of units that CAN counterattack at range 1 or 2 (Takumi, dragons) end up being pretty good because nothing else has that flexibility.

Also the units that used to have high Avoid (swordmasters, Pegasus knights, thieves/ninjas, etc.) used to be glass cannons that were hard to hit, and since everybody hits 100% of the time they've compensated by just buffing the def/res of those units somewhat, but it loses a lot of the nuance of those unit types.

Definitely agree with this. Some of my favorites (like Lon'qu) are basically just weaker versions of the more straight forward front line melee units because they don't have any avoid or crit mechanics to lean on.

@mezza: Yeah, they tried to sorta make crits with all of the purple special attacks that boost damage after a certain number of attacks, but it's not really the same as a swordmaster that consistently crits in Awakening/Fates, for example.

I'm liking it a lot. I've always known that Fire Emblem would probably be my jam, but having a free mobile entry has finally given me an easy in. So mission accomplished there, Nintendo.

I wonder if perhaps having not played the full thing is allowing me to enjoy the mechanics more, but it does feel deep enough to allow you to plan out different strategies - especially now I'm building out my team and have access to interesting skillsets and moves like Dance and Smite.

Taking on the Hard Narcian challenge this week was a real tough test, took me right up to the deadline to level my team enough and find a workable strategy. As for the gacha mechanics, I've only really spent much time with Love Live previously, and I understand Heroes better than that game. It feels about right pacing-wise, though: not a game you're supposed to sit with for hours but rather dip into for a few minutes a couple times a day.

So I continue to play this game, despite constantly being low-key salty about arena/character balance.

I've linked FE Heroes to the My Nintendo website, and I'm looking to dump pretty much all of my Fire Emblem Heroes points and generic My Nintendo points into some Fire Emblem Heroes rewards (aside: all of the My Nintendo rewards are SUPER useless and I miss old Club Nintendo). The cost for FE Heroes items is 100 points per item, no matter which thing you choose, and here is the list of possible things 100 points will get you:

• 500 universal shards
• 500 universal crystals
• 1 stamina potion
• 1 light's blessing
• 1 dueling crest

The shards and crystals seem pointless, because whatever, I'll grind out the levels eventually for my characters. Light's blessings seem like a sucker's game, because if you need a full party revive, maybe those units weren't right for the task at hand (or are light's blessings helpful for later lunatic stages?). Stamina potion is kinda nice, I guess. But I assume the best option is getting a bunch of dueling crests, since some of the arena quests seem to require you to play (and win) a whole lot of arena matches in one month, and without using dueling crests you only get ~90 arena plays per month. Having a reserve of dueling crests to be able to complete more arena quests seems useful. Agree or disagree?

tl;dr version: people who have played this game a lot and read a bunch of guides: what is the most valuable item out of stamina potion, light's blessing, dueling crest?

@bisonhero: Yeah don't bother with the shards and crystals. Shards are useless since it's incredibly easy to level up early on and 500 crystals won't even net you one level up. I'd say go for the stamina potions or dueling crests, whichever you feel like you'd use the most. It is however nice to have a couple light's blessings on hand since the last couple of lunatic story missions are pretty nasty. I know I grabbed one or two just to get through it and get my orbs. The Stamina potions are nice if you like to sit and play for a while, but I tend to only play every couple hours or so. Dueling crests are probably the way to go if you're into getting a good ranking, otherwise the potions are fine as well.

@bisonhero: I'd go with the Light's Blessings myself. I'm playing it a lot and have over a dozen Stamina Potions & Dueling Crests stored, although as @theblue said, the later Arena missions need a lot of wins (Hard level requires 40 wins).

Personally I've been having a decent/good time at Arena with my Gold Marth / Corrin / Olivia / Nino team. I've found they can hold their own against teams with three 5-star heroes, even dealing with that damn archer with the obscene Attack rating who can close-counter (Takumi?). It feels like I could even take on an All-Gold team with some decent tactics. (Of course, that may be because Dance is overpowered.) At the very least, I've never felt boned by not spending enough money.

@theblue: Have the devs ever suggested that arena ranking will get you anything? I've seen people wildly speculate that higher arenas might somehow yield more rewards, but I assume the ranking is mostly just for matchmaking, and kinda warns players how accomplished their opponent is.

I don't really care about my ranking, but I am all about grinding those feathers, so I'm curious. Also, in general it's pretty irritating how slowly arena plays regenerate.

Yeah, I'm currently playing Awakening after getting the itch for something meatier, and it's beginning to feel like Heroes is where they got to focus on the combat-puzzle aspects of the series until they polished it to a fine sheen. I've found it harder in Awakening to estimate how much damage units will do to each other, set up proper chokepoints & protect units in the back, and make good use of assists/supports. I want to play several more hours of it to be sure, but it could be possible that Heroes has better moment-to-moment gameplay than other entries in the series. (It also helps you don't have to worry about Permadeath if you screw up.)

@bisonhero: I mean, besides your ranking determining how many feathers you get, I believe that's the only reward. I believe that matchmaking is determined by the stat total of your four units. I could be wrong but I know for sure that the higher your stat total, the more points you get per round. I find that incredibly lame because my Kagero absolutely cleans up most of my opponents, but because of her low stat total and not being one of the bonus units, I can never score higher than 4300ish. I could switch her out for someone else, but then every team with a 5 star Robin destroys me. However, considering the difference is about 500 feathers to hit that higher rank tier, I try not to sweat it too much.

@theblue: Sorry, when I asked about arena ranking, I meant the tiers they put you in. I know the rank points correlate to your feathers at the end of that week, but the game doesn't have much to say about whether the tiers really matter at all.

But yeah, I agree that it's ridiculous that your character stats dictate how many points you get, instead of being purely about your performance. But then, they're also forcing people to use arbitrary characters that just boost your score because you're using them.

@bisonhero: Oh the tiers? Yeah I have no clue. Seems pretty arbitrary at the moment, like you go up a tier for ranking in that season, or possibly just playing in the arena in general.

I've already got a mobile Japanese thing going with FF Exvius and though you could make an argument that the gameplay is better in Fire Emblem, I just have more attachment to FF characters than FE ones.

If you want the puzzle aspects in the 3DS games you'll want to go for Conquest over Awakening. Conquest has the best map setups out of the 3DS games, and makes Heroes feel bland by comparison honestly. Heroes' moment to moment decisions only boil down to how best to kite around the map, and that's not actually that complex unless you randomly get an awful map. Awakening and Birthright are mostly focused on making you survive in fairly wide open maps, so its not surprise those don't feel as puzzle-y. It's actually not that hard to estimate exactly what damage you can receive per turn in the full games, but like Heroes it requires knowing how damage is calculated based on stats, what things modify it, and what the AI likes to prioritize. Learn how combat is calculated, how stats modify it, and how the weapon triangle modifies it and then you're mostly set. You'll still have to account for crits and dodges, but those are determined by stats as well and add a bit of RNG to keep players from steamrolling the math. Also, you can turn off permadeath in the recent main games, so that's not unique to Heroes.

You can turn permadeath off in Awakening. That's what the "Casual" setting does (same for Fates). There are also a ton of settings for the pre-battle screen, but it helps to just know the damage formulas to have a better idea of what various stats actually do. There is also a button to show the enemies' movement and attack range. Awakening was criticized for its wide-open map design, but don't write off real FE just yet. It's far better than the stripped down mobile version. I'd hesitate to recommend Conquest to someone having trouble with Awakening, its maps are very gimmicky in my opinion, and quite punishing even on it's normal setting.

@mezza:I skipped the Fates duo because the third "Golden" path was apparently locked away in the pre-order, although it's DLC as well? I'd hope so, but I've already bought Awakening so one game at a time.

@freedom4556: I know you can turn off deaths in Casual, but the game is made to be played in Classic. It's not like Heroes where the maps are designed so you're expected to lose a unit occasionally. Playing Fire Emblem in Casual just feels off. But I've been burnt by Surprise Insta-Acting Reinforcements in Path of Radiance before.

I mean, that's up to you, but I'd argue the maps are in 3DS Emblem are still designed to try and make you sacrifice characters. It's just that the sadists at Intelligent Systems want to you have to live with the casualties. I personally can't stand losing units to RNG, and find that Casual is much faster and less frustrating than save-scumming past dying to a 1% crit. Playing Casual is definitely better than putting the game down, imo. Don't let the label get to you.

I like the weapon quests that they added a couple days ago. While they already added a selection of missions tied to the latest banner like "defeat X units with Ephraim", these new ones where they ask you to field a monotype team between swords, axes, and lances is something anyone can do without being at the mercy of pull rates, and it also gives you a reason to use some benched units. I was worried about the source of orbs once people finished all difficulties of the main story, but if they keep adding a steady trickle of stuff to do like this, someone who's F2P can still get a full 20 orb pull often enough.

@mikelemmer: Revelation is dlc and not mandatory by any means. Most of the series fans will tell you to skip it because it's nothing but frustrating map gimmicks and it doesn't do much to explain the plot in a satisfying way. Revelation is mainly just there so you can have every character playable in one save file for supports, shipping, and online stuff. Most people I see rate the trio in terms of difficulty/fun as Conquest then Birthright then Revelation, so don't feel bad if you just want to buy Conquest and nothing else. The only thing conquedt really fails at is story, but none of the 3ds games really have much of a story aside from Awakening anyway. Good luck playing the main games! They're real fun if you can get into the groove. I'm one of those play on lunatic/classic and always reset when a unit is lost players, but play however you feel comfortable.

Alright, I have amassed 20,000 feathers from this bullshit system. Which of these 4-star units that I have should I upgrade to 5-star?

-Kagero

-Nino

-Nowi

Heavily leaning towards Kagero, because her dagger that super kills infantry is insane, especially when that's almost all you see in Arena because most of the cavalry, fliers, and armoured units are kinda poor in this game.

Also, I'm super salty that they didn't renew the Arena-based quests that gave feathers as rewards. In general, quests are pretty bad right now, with nothing to do but the March monthly quests and these stupid "sibling quests" which only half of are doable because the other half require that you own the various sibling characters (which I do not).

@bisonhero: Tough choice because they're all decent in the Arena, but have different uses. Nino's high's attack and speed while being green can help her blow up a lot of other blues that show up frequently in the Arena like Robin and Linde while having Hone Attack as an added bonus and Draw Back for some utility. Nowi has decent defense stats, has Distant Counter to counterattack ranged units, and being blue helps her withstand the added damage bonus from Falchion users which are also common in the Aarena. You mentioned Kagero's main benefit but she's also able to better trade with some mages with Warding Blow and has Daggerbreaker, just in case.

I think it really depends on what you need for your Arena team.

@purplepartyrobot: My current arena team is 5-star Ephraim and Sakura, 4-star Ogma and Hawkeye. I get kinda obliterated on maps where ranged characters are helpful, but usually I can kite the AI enough to still win.

I'm leaning away from Nowi, if only because I really need some ranged, so Kagero and Nino seem like better picks, and like you said, Kagero is a good anti-Mage card.

My other 4-stars that I could upgrade are: Caeda, Henry, Donnel, Sully, Florina, Arthur, Sheena, Cecilia, Saizo, and Azama. None of them really wow me.

@bisonhero: Yeah I'd go with Kagero or Nino. Probably Kagero because there is a 5* Nino focus coming up soon. You'll have a better chance of getting Nino randomly than Kagero. Rolling for Kagero's color right now is also inefficient because you only have her and Takumi that are good while the rest are bad pulls. Greens at least have Camilla, Hector, Nino, and Julia. Also Kagero can fill Sakuras spot on arena since healers tend to underperform outside of grinding pve

It also depends if you care that much about chasing higher arena rankings, because Kagero's base stats are fairly low. She's really good though. Based on your team currently I probably wouldn't upgrade Nino. Nino is pretty good by herself, but really strong with a team that can buff her stats, she's incredibly strong, and I don't think anyone in your current line-up can apply buffs. Kagero is a lot better on her own.