It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows my tastes that I have an opinion on Intelligent Systems’ newest entry in the Fire Emblem series. It’s one of my favorite long-running video game series of all time, which likely explains why I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 hours playing this one over the last month between the game’s three separate campaigns. Did I just say three? Yes. A vital factor for understanding Fire Emblem Fates is to understand that it’s split into three complete and separate campaigns: Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation. I’m crazy, so I bought the $80 special edition with all three of them on the same cartridge, otherwise Birthright and Conquest are sold separately and Revelation is DLC. The closest analogue I can think of is The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons, which are two games with identical general gameplay mechanics but different goals when implementing them. Anyone who wants a lot of Fire Emblem can rest assured that the three campaigns are stylistically distinct from one another, but I can assure you that might be too much Fire Emblem and not all of it is great Fire Emblem. I personally found a pretty clear gradation of quality between the three campaigns: Conquest is fantastic, Birthright is decent, and Revelation is... less than decent.

The way Fates is split between the three campaigns makes talking about it as a whole a little difficult, but it’s worth mentioning that I think all of the changes to the nuts and bolts mechanics are smart. They're mostly aimed at tackling some of the more OP tactics in Awakening, but they also address and tweak some longstanding Fire Emblem mechanics. The removal of weapon durability in favor of giving weapons different effects, the changes to pair-up, updating the weapon triangle, and the introduction of shuriken and debuffs are all great additions. On this basic level, Fates is a far more interesting game than Awakening was, though it’s stuff that is probably only super noticeable if you’ve been a long-ish fan of the series. I guess the castle building stuff is another part of the new features and that’s a bit more of a “whatever” kind of thing for me. The only truly important buildings you need to buy are the armory and staff shop, the rest seem to give minor buffs or exist mostly for flavor or if you get way into the castle invasion stuff. I guess you can hang out with people and not rub their faces or something? That sounds like a dumb feature. I’m sure glad that’s optional. It’s no base menu from Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, I’ll tell you that much.

I started with Conquest, which ended up being my favorite by a significant margin. I don’t think that should be much a surprise, since I’m someone who isn’t afraid of a little sadism in his strategy games. If you haven’t heard the pitch, Conquest is essentially the campaign aimed at longtime fans of the series who thought Awakening was too simple and easy. In that aim, the developers succeeded, maybe a little too well. The biggest difference is that there’s no option to grind, outside of DLC maps (you can grind supports in online castle invasions if you want a roundabout way of getting all the child paralouges). The scenarios in Conquest are often tactically demanding by design, with a lot of maps whose win conditions are something other than "Rout Enemy" or "Defeat Boss". Freed from the shackles of needing to be for everyone who likes Fire Emblem, Conquest doesn’t mess around. Enemies aren’t necessarily that much stronger than they are in the other two campaigns, but they do tend to have nasty skills on top of some really devious map design. I was really into that, and I found Conquest to be one of the most satisfying tactics games I've played in a long time (not that I've played a lot of great tactics games in the last year. Steamworld Heist is alright.) How hard is it? I played all three campaigns on Hard/Classic, and Conquest is the most difficult by a fair margin. Even I, as someone who has finished most of the games in the series, had serious trouble with a handful of maps (Chapters 10, 17 and 25 are especially rough. Ninjas man, ninjas.) It’s not quite Thracia 776 hard (it’s more fair and lacks that game’s gleeful propensity for bullshit), but it’s up there. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a segment of the audience who doesn’t care for Conquest at all, even on the likes of Normal/Casual. For me, this might as well be a Fire Emblem game with my name on it, and you’ll probably see it rather high up on my Game of the Year list come December.

By comparison, Birthright is the campaign aimed at newer fans of the series. Map design is more open and simple, while resources are more plentiful even without grinding. In short… if you liked Awakening, this is more of that. That’s not a bad thing. Listen, I probably like Awakening more than it deserved, fully as a time/place sort of thing. It was the first Fire Emblem game to come out in the US for 4 years after the lackluster Shadow Dragon (the far superior New Mystery of the Emblem staying a Japan exclusive) and I was desperate for anything from this series. Does it have problems? Yes, absolutely. But the marked increase in production values and “best of Fire Emblem” slate of features were enough for me at that time. Birthright doesn’t get away with quite as much. It was a nice change of pace from Conquest, being able to finish maps on my first try and all that, but coming off of the much harder campaign, I found it fairly easy and I kinda wish I had played it on Lunatic instead of hard. Keep in mind that this comes from the perspective of someone way into tactical turn-based whatever. I’ll be the old man who yells at you for playing on Casual mode (please don’t), doesn't much care for the Fire Emblem series’ increased focus on visual novel-esque anime pairing funtimes, thinks Massive Chalice is mediocre, and will probably make a snarky remark whenever a game journalist compares anything with turn-based combat on a grid to the XCOM reboot (because apparently no other turn-based games existed before 2012). That’s my perspective, but if you aren’t insane like me, Birthright will probably do you just fine. The new Hoshidan classes are a lot of fun, and just because I gripe about the difficulty doesn’t mean I didn’t have to reset every now and again. It’s only a cakewalk in comparison to Conquest and I still enjoyed it just fine.

That leaves me with Revelation, the “Golden Route” DLC campaign for either version meant to explain everything about the story and act as a compromise between the other two campaigns (It has grinding and complex level design), set in a version of the world where your character doesn’t side with either nation. It’s also the worst of the three. Revelation feels like a half-assed compromise, where the maps are still complex like Conquest’s without being difficult. Instead, they’re usually gimmicky and take forever to complete, like a map that requires you to clear out snow to uncover a path (and enemies) or a late-game one with a lot of waiting around for elevators. Regular enemies usually don’t have any skills (something that even Birthright can boast of) and a lot of your own units come under-leveled to the point where you’d have to grind if you wanted to use them (not that you would use most of them, given that you can’t deploy as many characters in most of Revelation’s maps and you have access to both sets of royal siblings. Are you really going to tell me that you’re not going to deploy Ryoma and Xander?) The flipside is that you do get almost everyone aside from Yukimura and Izana and Scarlet, sort of. That means all of the regular units, all of the children units, and even a single Revelation-exclusive character who isn’t half-bad himself. Oh, and access to both armories and staff stores. If you’re interested in whatever crazy post-game DLC that will inevitably be released, or one of those people who wants to ship all of the pairings and doesn’t care about the nuances of the strategy (you are not me), this is the route to play. But I cannot emphasize enough that if Revelation was its own Fire Emblem game, it’s kind of middling and would be near the bottom of my personal tier list. It doesn’t feel like it was as balanced or playtested to the same extent as the other two, but the most critical thing I can say about it is that it’s honestly dull in a way the other two campaigns aren’t. Oh, it’s still Fire Emblem, so I still played the entire thing and got every kid, but if you weren’t crazy and didn’t get the special edition, I might recommend against getting Revelation unless you really want closure to the story, or really like these mechanics (they’re good, don’t get me wrong). Otherwise, I’d recommend the campaign you didn’t buy (be it Birthright or Conquest) and then a long laundry list of almost every other game in the series.

You’ll notice a deliberate omission from my overview of all three campaigns; the story. Yes, believe it or not, Fire Emblem is more to some people than just a turn-based tactical RPG. If I had to judge based off of the three separate stories for Fates, I wouldn’t quite know why. Listen, Fire Emblem has never had the greatest stories. I think those games have their moments (and some have more moments than others), but even when the quality of the writing is good the plots are usually stock and standard JRPG fare (I couldn’t tell you if I have high or low standards for JRPG stories, given that I liked Final Fantasy XIII’s story well enough and am both genuinely and ironically enjoying going through Kingdom Hearts now). Fates is sub-standard JRPG fare, but with the advantage of being bad in three different ways. Conquest bungles its morally grey premise by, among other things, feeling the need to tell your player created avatar that they’re still definitely the good guy despite siding with the obviously evil invading kingdom, though it does have the advantage of a very unorthodox final boss for a Fire Emblem game. Birthright’s story goes the opposite direction and is so straightforward and boring to the point of being forgettable. The main hook of Revelation’s story (namely that the avatar character can’t explain who the true enemy is because of a curse) is exceptionally sloppy writing, and once that gets resolved it sort of muddles its way to the obvious “Best End” conclusion where everyone tells your avatar character how great they are. The presence of the avatar character as the main protagonist (instead of a secondary protagonist like Robin was in Awakening) leads to some really dumb hero worship stuff on the part of everyone else; it doesn’t help that Corrin is kind of a naive dupe with a bland good-guy personality and Azura is a mysterious waif whose main job is to be mysterious and deliver exposition (while praising the avatar character, naturally). Remember how I said I don’t much care for the waifu stuff? I’ll be honest, it’s fine, it’s whatever, it’s not totally the death of Fire Emblem as we know it even if it's also clearly pandering towards an audience that I'm not part of. But the thing about that that really puts the nail in the coffin for me in regards to Fates’ stories is the ability to marry your siblings. Yeah, it pulls the “We’re not actually blood related!” thing with both families, which is cowardly, but I can’t help but feel it subverts one of the game’s main themes? Like, the whole thing with the game is that your character has to choose between his blood family and the family who raised him, so then making the blood family turn out to just be step-siblings and making all of your siblings fair game on the bone train (Westermarck effect be damned, I guess) gives me a pretty good idea of where the developers priorities were. Awakening’s main plot was kind of a mess, but at least it never tripped over its own themes. The grand irony of all of this is that it’s revealed that Azura is your cousin in Revelations and you can marry and have children with her no problem. Well, with real incest I guess it’s a real Fire Emblem game after all.

As for the rest of the writing, it’s usually good, though I think the general quality of supports is a little more inconsistent than Awakening. I dunno if that’s a script thing, or if it’s because 8-4 handled that game and Nintendo Treehouse handled this one, but there are a couple of character interactions that don’t fly at all, especially when you add in the part where everyone can marry everyone else (As a result, I tended to like the kid and platonic supports more, because they don’t need to end in “Hey, let’s get married!” every single time.) I imagine you’ll have your favorites, perhaps a waifu or three (I’m not gonna pretend I married Odin, Hana, and Shiro for their sweet, sweet pair-up bonuses but also I sorta did) but I think it would be cool if Nintendo didn’t feel pressured to have as much marriage or kids in the next Fire Emblem game. I guess there’s a group that’s totally into that now or something, but if that’s what they’re after there are far more consistent options out there that don’t have that pesky strategy game to slog through.

But hey, as a whole I like Fire Emblem Fates a lot. Revelation might’ve taken some of the wind out of my sails, and some of my internet friends can attest to the angry rants I’ve written in regards to the story, but as a complete package it’s a super neat thing that I appreciate exists in multiple forms for multiple types of fans. Obviously, my grognard sensibilities will always prefer Conquest the most, but Birthright is the Fire Emblem game for the rest of you and Revelation is the Fire Emblem game for people who really, really want more Fire Emblem. Now I feel kind of Fire Emblem’d out, to be honest. I might have to take a bit of a break from the series for a while. You know what that means… you don’t? Okay, fine. I’m going to finish that Kingdom Hearts blog I was writing before this madness even started. Expect it. Cherish it.