Note: this review covers both Birthright and Conquest
Rather than be the final entry in a series rapidly declining in popularity, Fire Emblem Awakening proved to be one of the 3DS's biggest hits. The introduction of new mechanics involving unit pairing, a more robust social link style system that allowed you to marry units and create child units, and greater ability for users of different skill levels to customize difficulty breathed new life into a series with twelve previous games spanning over two decades. Thus Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have brought us not one, not two, but three sequels merged into one core product titled “Fire Emblem Fates.” But while the ambition of this game may sound grand, the result are three games that feel reluctant to take the same chances Awakening did that rejuvenated the series, yet also stretch the content they have far too thin.
Fates makes a few changes to the core mechanics of the series. Three of these changes are most worthy of note. First, weapons no longer degrade with use. Instead, to stop you from just using higher-tier weapons, more status effects have been added to each weapon. So for instance, use of a silver weapon results in a temporary penalty to your stats, while a weaker iron weapon does less damage, but has a boost to hit percentage. Second, the famous “Weapon Triangle” of the series has been remixed. Fire Emblem operates on a bit of a rock-paper-scissors system with its weapon types. Swords beat axes, axes beat lances, and lances beat swords. While some weapons have previously worked outside the Triangle, they are now incorporated into it. So now tomes beat bows, bows beat “hidden weapons,” the game's new class of weapons, and hidden weapons beat tomes. Finally, the “Dual System” where units can pair up has been reworked. If you pair units together, the support unit will offer stat bonuses and a chance to protect the lead unit. If a unit is on their own, adjacent units can offer a support strike.
The Nohr and Hoshido sides each have their own unique classes. If you're mostly familiar with the series based on Awakening, the Nohrian side will feel more familiar. Here you will find your classic knights, cavaliers, wyvern riders, and their various promoted classes. The Hoshidan side on the other hand is made up of number of remixed classes from previous games as well as several new classes, most notably ninjas. While Nohrian classes tend to be more focused on raw power and defense, Hoshidan classes offer a wider variety of status ailments, special effects, and tend to be faster.
Following the impressive shakeup Awakening felt like toward the series, these changes feel far less substantial. Removing weapon durability was a good idea in theory, but it overly favors forging stronger lower-tier weapons over using higher-tier weapons with more significant penalties. A steel +1 weapon costs as much as a silver weapon, does the same or in some cases slightly better damage, and carries a lesser penalty in most cases. Also if you're playing Conquest, you have limited gold and limited ability to grind weapon skill, so you're economically better offer repurposing your existing lower tier weapons through the forge. In addition, weapons specially designed to defeat specific classes such as Armorslayers that can be used an infinite amount of times are more useful investments than spending large sums of gold on expensive standard weapons
There is some neat stuff going on with all of the new weapons and remixed classes, but you'll have access to a limited amount of each based on the path you play. On the Conquest side, you'll get plenty of cavalry-type units and fliers, but you'll only get a handful of archers by default and your hidden weapon options are more limited. On the Hoshidan side, you get a lot more on-foot units that can’t move as many spaces per turn while also getting more sword and lance users than axe users. There is some amount of planning around this you can do if you want to spend the time digging into the game’s reclassing system but it often requires a lot of complex, long-term planning. Training units on the Conquest side to plan around a lost unit can be difficult without the ability to grind. At some point, the game stops handing you further units under the theory you will be getting child units around that point.
In addition, the game at times feels almost a little too RNG heavy. This comes more into play on the Conquest path where you're facing ninjas and samurai. You'll often find the majority of your units having hit percentages at or below 50%. This can be particularly annoying on higher difficulties when the CPU uses high-level skills, some only available to you as DLC, to plug weaknesses in its own units. At times, you're almost forced to just throw units against some of the “boss” CPU units and pray RNG is in your favor. These units often have skill combinations that can kill any unit in a single hit if you're unlucky enough, which can be particularly infuriating when playing on classic mode. There are typically at least some tactical options to improve the situation, but they may involve skills you have yet to unlock, units you lost in previous missions, or sometimes there just plain isn't a good option. Some of these issues may just be a result of splitting units between the two paths.
With efforts needing to be split in so many directions with Fates, it is becoming difficult to create a cohesive design for all players. Awakening was the introduction for most of “casual mode” (added in the previous game released in Japan only), which removes the game's classic permanent death mechanics. This created an issue with difficulty balance: how do you balance the same maps so that a mode where losing all but one of your units carries no penalty with a mode where losing a singular unit can be disastrous in the long-run? For example, say in Conquest I lost the early archer unit I am given. Not only do I lose that unit for the campaign, but I also lose access to his daughter later in the game. This creates situations where losing just a few units early on can potentially doom a campaign that can take over forty hours to see through.
It’s not that I'm opposed to permanent death, as I've played and enjoyed the Fire Emblem series for some time now as well as games like X-Com. It’s that instead of modernizing and making these mechanics more interesting, the solution here has been take it or leave it rather than improving it. X-Com for instance has a lot of mechanics surrounding losing units baked in. You have more ways to buy new units, upgrades you can buy that result in downed units surviving, ways to train new units outside of combat, and upgrades that basic units can still make use of as you train them. Or you have a game like Banner Saga that is shorter, but offers more replayability and has interesting narrative twists surrounding loss. Instead of finding a creative solution that moves the series forward, the developers settle for trying to keep both types of players placated through existing solutions. Training up units you haven’t been using for a while here is quite time consuming, and also is very difficult in Conquest where you can’t grind (outside of one DLC map). The way Fire Emblem is doing permanent death in 2016 just doesn’t feel as fresh or interesting as it once did. Having to accept an inferior save system while playing classic mode is just an added annoyance for trying to challenge yourself.
The AI still mindlessly charges at your units with the same suicidal fervor it has always tended to in these games. This fits with the classic mode design of the game where even a single loss on most maps can be considered failure, but it hardly makes for a winning strategy on casual mode. 'm going to flat out state that I am not an expert at these games, so I don't want to haphazardly throw out a charge of the game being too hard or too easy. Rather, it feels unbalanced. If nothing else, I think the idea of “casual” and “classic” modes, which already had some issues even in Awakening, has hit the point that it needs work.
I really do wish some of the more creative level design of Conquest was present in Birthright. Birthright's levels are fairly straight forward, and the overall campaign is fairly easy even on hard. Conquest is intentionally designed to offer a greater challenge, but simultaneously features more maps with varying objectives and tricks and traps. There is no inherent reason though for these types of levels to be restricted to Conquest. At the same time, I far more enjoyed playing with the units in Birthright than those in Conquest, as they were at least fresher in design.
After Awakening received a great deal of criticism over its cliché narrative, Intelligent Systems claimed it would address its writing quality in Fates. If that was the goal, their efforts did not bear fruit. The plot is at best stretched thin and at worst generic and dull. Birthright is the more paint-by-numbers narrative of the two, filled with predictable story beats that never offer any emotional payoff. Conquest on the other hand conceptually is more interesting, but is tonally off and feels forced. On this path, your character is kind of an idiot and the thrust of the narrative involves the character pursuing a really convoluted plan of action that doesn't much sense if you stop and think on it.
Perhaps the quality of this game's story can be best summarized by a particular chapter. You're traveling toward an enemy stronghold. Your character decides they need to save time. The map of the area notes a place called Demon Falls. Not only does that sound like a place you probably shouldn't go, but your party remarks that it is a known place to avoid. Not once, but twice recently your party nearly got wiped out venturing into areas with cryptic names that were notoriously dangerous. But your character decides to chance it anyway. The next screen is your party arriving at this place to find the whole area literally on fire, to which another party member suddenly remembers to mention that there's been an uncontrollable fire there for years. If one didn't know better, you'd almost think the writers were satirizing the game.
The idea of having a split narrative based on a choice is interesting, but the choice occurs before any real emotional attachment has occurred toward any of the characters or factions in the game. Worse yet, there is a very clear “wrong side,” a very clear “bad guy,” and it feels too much like the paths are “good,” “neutral,” and “bad.” The “good path” is only available after your purchase Birthright or Conquest, thus it's a pricey option if you're only interested in investing time into one of these three games. On top of that, the “good path” feels like it undercuts the already weak themes of the other two paths.
But the greatest creative failing of the game are the child units. Children were introduced in Awakening and were a rather popular addition to the franchise. However, Awakening had a narrative involving time travel. While the time travel genre has its own narrative pitfalls, it makes sense that your characters can get married in the present day, have children at some point, and those adult children could travel back to the past. Here, the narrative justification is several paragraphs of text that are so ludicrous that its borderline audacious the writers ever thought it worked. Unlike Awakening, these units are ignored by the game's narrative. Ultimately, child units are there because it was a popular mechanic from a previous game whether they make sense here or not.
Fire Emblem Fates is not a bad game. It's basically a lot more Awakening, which was a really good game to begin with. It simply tries too hard to please everyone at the expense of doing any particular element as well as it should. It feels like going to a buffet: there are plenty of options, but none of the food is as good as it could be if they weren't trying to offer as much of it. The game encourages you to gorge yourself past the point you're likely to be full. For me, I probably could have stopped after Birthright, and I certainly have no room for Revelations after beating Conquest. It's not that the value proposition isn't there, as $19.99 for additional campaigns after the first purchase of $39.99 is perfectly fair. It's just I would rather have one well-realized and expertly crafted product than three mediocre ones that fail to move the series forward in any meaningful way.