Nintendo 3DS – Fire Emblem Fates

I decided to write about this game for many reasons: firstly, in my previous blogs I was asked to talk about how I feel about Fire Emblem, secondly, there was a proposal to expand the article about suitable tactical games and, thirdly, this is simply a good game on pocket consoles, which became a kind of result of all the experience that the developers of the series have accumulated. Thus, we kill a school of birds with one machine-gun burst.

To date, Fire Emblem Fates is the last full-fledged tactical game in the series (not counting an incomprehensible game based on Warriors, a version on mobile and remakes of old games), it was released on 3DS and is one of the best parts, and for good reason.
I bet now you’re expecting me to list story, gameplay, or maybe tactics as the main advantage, but no. I consider the main achievement of the developers to be primarily convenience. When I started playing, I almost had a gaming orgasm from how finely you can customize the gameplay, turning animation on and off, right down to the animation of an individual unit, sounds, camera, as well as all sorts of nuances for oldfags and newfags. The gameplay itself does not force you to wait for half an hour for your turn, the enemy moves quickly and clearly and, it would seem, such a trifle as the announcement of a move lasts about one second, but this is really short compared to similar games. No matter how hard I tried (and my computer opponent tried even harder), I didn’t feel any discomfort while playing, although at some point I specifically tried to find shortcomings here.

The enemy horseman made a serious mistake by attacking our heavy spearman, it looks like he will soon give up his hooves.

But the plot of the game took on all the negativity. The developers made an interesting move and divided the game into three parts, or rather two plus DLC, and in fact the name of the game in the die is not complete, but depends on which part you will play. As the story progresses, we will be given the opportunity to choose sides of the conflict, of which there are two, or to tell everyone to go to hell, after which the Fire Emblem Fates prefix will appear and we can continue our journey.

You ask: “Why is everything so serious, this is a normal branching of the plot?». But in addition to a completely different plot, even the gameplay changes here. The basics, of course, will remain, but the experience you get from playing through varies greatly, so much so that serious gaming portals give a separate rating for each option. And it seems like the idea is good and needs to be supported by an excellent story, but, alas, it didn’t work out. The plot itself and its presentation here are at a rather low level, and the only revelation you will find is perhaps in the title of the DLC. Its essence lies in the fact that the main character finds himself in a difficult situation: two countries are waging a bloody war between themselves and we are part of the ruling family of one of the parties to the conflict. And everything would be fine, but as a result of certain events we find ourselves among our enemies and find out that they are our real family and in fact our hero was kidnapped. Now we have a choice: either we play for the foster family who raised us and treated us well, or we help blood relatives, or we go our own way. This is where all the interesting things end, because no matter what path we choose, we will always have the same goal – ending the war, and even the global scenario will coincide at key points. And this is doubly offensive when you see quite kosher videos that you want to watch again and again, and the music didn’t let us down.

Fighting in the city is https://duckyluckcasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ the most enjoyable: you can set up an ambush here literally on every corner.

We read about the plot and have already decided not to play? Not everything is so bad in our kingdom, or rather in the fort. Yes, yes, the hero will have his own fort, where you can build almost an entire city with shops, baths, a prison and a crowd of evil golems that will guard our settlement. Here you can buy weapons, chat with characters and even romance someone, get married, have children and enlist them in your army. Moreover, by “romance” I meant not only the hero, but also all your companions with other companions. If you want, you can marry almost everyone, but before that you need to raise their relationship to the required level. In general, for lovers of such things, this is a real paradise and expanse.
But enough beating around the bush, many people probably want to know about the main thing, what’s going on with the tactics. One of the most famous tactical series simply cannot be bad. And I’ll immediately spoiler: this particular part is good in terms of tactics and sacred cows will not go under the knife today.
I have already said about convenience, it is beyond praise, the interface provides you with all the necessary information, you can find out about the enemy’s progress by literally pressing one button, you can change the speed of battle and animation. Nothing to complain about.
As for the cards, everything is far from perfect. The terrain seems to be able to influence the movement and increase the stats of the characters, but in reality it only interferes or irritates, because it is implemented extremely poorly: the terrain is visually practically indistinguishable from each other and, even if you distinguish one from the other, it is not at all a fact that it will give you an advantage, and if it does, it will be so insignificant that it practically does not affect the battle, so when planning your actions, it is easier to score on most types of surfaces. In addition to everything, dragon veins can be scattered across the map – these are special points that can be used by local Dovahkiin, those who have the blood of dragons and they are needed mainly to change the landscape. Of course, you can use them for your maneuvers, but they are made more as crutches than as a serious tactical solution. The maps themselves are quite boring, but even among them there are nuggets with unique mechanics, mobile platforms and teleports. I didn’t take these features into account and half of your army went to another part of the map, leaving your partners without cover in the face of evil and unfriendly enemies.

To the delight of the LGBT community* there are same-sex relationships.

By the way, about opponents and their ability to resist. Artificial intelligence can see the weaknesses of characters and hit them, unfortunately, this is the only thing the iron brains of our enemies are capable of. He is not trained to cover long-range units and simply showers us with meat or stands and waits until they come within striking distance of him, and if you don’t disturb the standing ones for several turns, they will run to the player themselves. I’m not even talking about teleports and platforms that they are not able to handle. This is not so much the problem with this game, but with the entire series as a whole, and bosses who cannot move and take beatings from ranged classes are the norm.
Having defeated the enemy’s intellect, let’s move on to why the game is not bad as a tactic. All thanks to simply inexhaustible tactical capabilities. The game, like the entire series, is based on the mechanics of rock-paper-scissors, complementing it with a magician.attacks and physical.attacks and defenses against them. In addition, each character has perks or passive abilities that can greatly influence the outcome of the battle, and of course, a combat assistance system.

The combat assistance system is quite an interesting thing. A character standing nearby can help his neighbor in battle and even influence him with his perks, and if something happens, they can occupy one cell together, working as a single squad and adding certain stats to each other. Are you afraid that the magician will prescribe bream for your knight?? Your pristik can join a knight’s squad and increase his magic defense. For each help in battle, the relationship between the characters improves, they can increase the level of relationships and even fall in love with each other. In the fort you can watch the development of their intimate life in the form of dialogues. Quite an elegant and plausible way for the social component, I must say.

A variety of classes that can be upgraded to upgrades once you reach level 10 and flying units round out this list of tactical brilliance. It is very difficult to take into account so many parameters when playing, but if you succeed, enemies will fly off in batches even at serious difficulty levels. However, in this barrel of honey there is a fly in the ointment. The fact is that as you progress through the game, new characters will constantly join you and many of them are either imbas tearing mobs at the British flag, or very low-level ones who need to be pumped up. There will always be outsiders on the team who are bad in everything, and their fate is to sit in the fort and wait for evil to win.
A little should be said about complexity. There are three difficulty levels and three modes, the latter affect what will happen to the character if he is killed: he can die completely, leaves the battle, but does not die, or is reborn on the next turn. Yes, you read correctly, he just stupidly respawns with full HP and, if I’m not mistaken, this feature is present only in this part, so now you can’t even reprimand the developers for not thinking about casual players.
The difficulty level here clearly describes what awaits you in the game, so I warn those who are used to taking the second difficulty out of three, here it is called hard and it is really an ass-crushing hard, at least for beginners who are not yet accustomed to the mechanics and have not figured everything out. And don’t say later that I didn’t warn you.

Our fort. Everything you see can be customized, including various decorations and statues for your loved one.

So what do we have in the end?. I seemed to be throwing lightning bolts of anger left and right, talking about the shortcomings of which there are plenty, but nevertheless I recommended the game for passing. Yes, the game is not ideal, but there is only one ideal and sometimes you need to play something not ideal, but good, and our game fits this definition. It has a place where real tactics will be deployed, turning the complexity up higher, there is a place to grow daikons and cross casual partners. This game is the first game to play if you want to get into the Fire Emblem series, and it’s definitely worth playing through.

Nintendo requires 40 evergreens for the first branch of the passage and 20 bucks for the rest, so the entire game will cost you $80. Actually, why am I writing this, so that when you buy, you understand exactly what you want (just complete the game or see all the plot options) and whether you are willing to pay for it. The passage takes only 30 hours for each part and for complete pleasure I would recommend all three branches.

For those who want to play on an emulator, I inform you that at the moment the game runs with errors and freezes some time after visiting your home or after changing the character class, but it can be solved. You just need to save and reboot after these actions.
www.reddit.com/r/Citra/comments/87p9ia/is_fire_emblem_fates_fully_playable_now/

* The activities of the international LGBT social movement are recognized as extremist and prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation