Fire Emblem Fates Review - Introduction, Birthright, Conquest, and Gameplay

All right, it’s time. 150+ hours after playing Fire Emblem Fates through all 3 of its paths: Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation are for this post. I put a lot of time into this game, so I figure I should talk about it and get my thoughts out there. So, without further ado, let’s begin!

Fire Emblem Fates released a few years after Fire Emblem Awakening. Given how important Awakening was for the series (best selling Fire Emblem game, literally saved the series), it’s no surprise that the next game would borrow heavily from Awakening. Fire Emblem Fates can be described as Fire Emblem Awakening, but more. Given this, and given that Awakening is one of my favorite video game experiences, I waited on playing Fates, since I had a feeling I’d enjoy it. I wanted to play through all 3 paths of the game, but I also knew if I played them back to back I’d get burnt out. So what I ended up doing was: I’d play one path, wait a while, play other games, and then play another path, etc.

To start, here are my initial reactions to completing the Birthright and Conquest paths:

It’s been a while since I’ve completed a game. But tonight I completed the Birthright path of Fire Emblem: Fates.

It was a lot of fun. I was wondering how the ending would be since it’s only one of three paths and it’s not the final path. But I was happily surprised at how climactic the ending was. It was really good and I enjoyed it and the game as a whole quite a lot. Really love Fire Emblem, just the characters and story and gameplay, and ah it’s all so fun. Happy to play another game like Fire Emblem Awakening.

Though now that I’ve finished I have 2 more paths to complete before I fully complete the game. So I’m kind of one third through the whole game. But well….as I look at my play time, my Birthright playthrough was about 40 hours. It was a much larger time commitment then I was expecting.

Have to say for that reason I don’t think I’m going to just jump right in to the next path: Conquest. I think I’m going to take a break and play something else on my 3DS in the mean time. Not sure what but we’ll see.

- March 31, 2018 

Well in video games news I finished the last game I was playing: Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest path!

So this is the second path in the game I’ve completed after Birthright. And overall I really enjoyed this path. I’d read on video game forums I lurk that the Conquest path is considered the best of the 3, and I can definitely see why now that I’ve completed it, I might agree after I finish the 3rd. The map design is incredible, and so many of the maps have really neat and fun gimmicks that just make for great strategy, and I was constantly surprised at how every map would somehow top the previous one in its creativity.

The difficulty was also fantastic. This was definitely much harder than the Birthright path, and on at least half the missions I had someone die, I can recall a good few missions in which I even had 3-4 characters die. Well…..”die” I played on casual mode, I was debating doing Classic, but eh, I just enjoy Fire Emblem so much more when I’m not stressed out about permadeath, so I turned it off. I think it was the right choice too and really promoted my enjoyment of the difficulty. I still tried really hard not to let anyone die since if they did they’d lose out on not just exp for the rest of the battle but also getting supporting conversations with other members, so it still felt punishing when it happened and i tried real hard not to, it just wasn’t so punishing that it made me want to pull my hair out and stop playing the game, so yeah. Difficulty was spot on for me.

The other notable thing I’d say is the story. I was expecting the story to be the opposite of Birthright, where instead of it being “we’re the good guys let’s beat the bad guys” it would be “we’re the bad guys and we know it let’s beat the good guys.” But instead it felt more like an interesting version of Birthright’s story, where there was a sentiment of being the good guys and the others being the bad guys, but then there was this underlying tension and conflict between the main character and others about if they’re really the good guys and what being good actually means? I liked how the story was more about defeating the darkness within us then the darkness around us, it made the whole thing just feel more interesting and grey then Birthright’s story, and I really enjoyed it overall.

And that’s it for that game. I’m quite curious now to see what the Revelations path is and how this large game will conclude. But just like with Birthright I’d also like to take a break because I can only play the same game for so long. So before that I will be returning to Ace Attorney to play the most recent game in the series: Spirit of Justice. See you then!

- September 29, 2018

So, there’s a brief introduction to my thoughts, how I played the game, etc. So, as a lover of Awakening, how was Fire Emblem Fates?

The game plays and functions similarly to Awakening in many ways. The core Fire Emblem gameplay is still there. You create a team of warriors that changes as you progress through the game, you use strategy and turn based combat to defeat enemies and level up your characters. You can pair characters together, and after doing so for a while, the characters will be able to have support conversations between battles. These shed light on the characters, offering insight into who they are and what they do. They offer a lot of fun moments to add variety to an otherwise serious story about saving the world. If you have two characters of the opposite sex level up their support enough, they can marry, and you can then encounter and add their child to your party. All of this was also present in Awakening and was core to the game’s success and quality.

Fire Emblem Fates does not offer any significant changes to the gameplay, but there are two minor changes I feel are worth discussing. First is weapon durability. Fates is the first Fire Emblem game to not feature weapon durability. Once you get an item, you don’t need to worry about replacing it or stacking your characters with back up weapons. It won’t break, and you don’t have to worry about it. I love this change. I’ve always been someone who wants to love the Fire Emblem games, wants to get immersed into its worlds, stories, and characters. But the permanent death feature (in which, when one of your characters dies, you lose them forever) had made the games too stressful for me to ever complete one. This is a large part of why I loved Fire Emblem Awakening so much, as it was the first game in the series to let you turn off the permanent death feature. This took away stress and allowed me to calmly enjoy the game, and this is also how I feel about the weapon durability feature. It’s neat in giving you one more thing to strategize over, but it also brings stress that really doesn’t add much depth to the gameplay experience, in my opinion at least. So, removing it was a huge plus in my book and helped me to enjoy the game more. I’m disappointed that the upcoming game in the series (Three Houses) has brought weapon durability back, but ah well.

The second significant change is the hub world. In Awakening, the area between battles in which you could rest, buy items, complete support conversations between characters, etc. took place on a world map. In Fates it takes place in a little hub like area in which you can do all the tasks mentioned above, but there are also little stations in which you can complete simple tasks if you’d like for finding additional items and increasing a character’s support with the main character. You can only complete these mini game esque features once every few hours, so it felt like a mobile game at times, in which in the morning when I wake up or at night before bed I’d quickly play the game for a few minutes to complete them. It did feel a little predatory at times. The rewards I got from playing the game a few minutes a day were minimal and tended to offer me little benefit, yet I felt compelled to do them all the same just because of the completionist in me. The only part of the hub that felt worthwhile is your room, in which you can raise your support with a character by…petting them. The petting game is….here, it is infamous, and that’s…all I’m going to say about that.

I did like the concept of having minigames to do in the overworld though, but I will also say I liked having the world map of Awakening that allowed you to actually traverse through it one place at a time. If the minigames of Fates were combined with the map of Awakening, I would have found that to be my ideal way of doing the between battle sequences.

That’s the gameplay of Fire Emblem Fates, just to get that out of the way. In the next part I’ll get to what I would argue to be the more important parts of the game: the story and its themes.

Link to Part 2: http://johnnyappleshy.blogspot.com/2019/03/fire-emblem-fates-review-story-three.html