Side Quest #10 – Thoughts on Fire Emblem: Fates (One Year Before Playing The Damn Thing)

UPDATE: The Fire Emblem Fates Character Analysis is currently underway!!

It’s no secret that I am a guy who deeply enjoys the Fire Emblem franchise. Even though I had played other SRPGs before them, Fire Emblem 7 was the game that sparked my 12+ year-long love affair with turn-based tactical games. So, it should go without saying that I am basically condemned obligated to play every damn game in this franchise – for better or worse. The last two games in this franchise (that actually left Japan) led me to believe that the series' days as challenging turn-based tactical games, were over. But still, after Fire Emblem: Fates launched in Japan a few weeks ago, I gave it a fair shake and investigated the game, mechanically and narratively. Mind you, I haven’t actually played it yet, because Nintendo are region-locking bastards, but I think I know enough now to feel comfortable saying that IS fixed most of what was wrong with their last game.

I’ve written a lengthy deconstruction of the most egregious design decisions of the previous Fire Emblem game. But, if you’d rather not spend 15 minutes catching up, it basically comes down to the Pair Up system being too biased in favor of the player and limited mission objectives. The former forced IS to create enemies with unreasonably high stats and random broken abilities in order to keep step with the player’s inherent combat advantage, while the latter severely limited the number of necessary strategies for success. In tandem, these issues resulted in a game that was either excessively easy or too random to allow one to devise or execute a reliable strategy – i.e. it was a bad strategy game.

Fortunately, FE: Fates addresses both of these issues by utilizing some of the obvious changes I suggested in my post, in addition to several others I had never even considered. For starters, enemies can now Pair Up just like the player. As such, unit stats are much lower across the board, putting them on par with those of the last (new) good game in the franchise, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. This way there is more direct parity between the player and the enemies, encouraging tactical thinking instead of purely rewarding grinding.

Additionally, the Dual Strike and Dual Guard mechanics were separated and reworked so that they no longer have a percent chance of activating – a gauge has to be filled up instead – and can only occur if one is in the appropriate stance (Attack Stance and Guard Stance respectively). This is HUGE, because, it returns the enemy phase to its rightful position as the most important component of a Fire Emblem game.

To clarify, the gameplay of Fire Emblem games is inherently asymmetrical – the enemy always outnumbers the player, and players are blessed with units that can grow in strength over the course of an engagement. During a standard rout mission, if a player manages to overcome their initial disadvantage through sheer survival, they will eventually gain the upper hand. If on the other hand, they lose units, the enemy will inevitably tear them down. To make this apparent to players without directly explaining it to them, IS implemented a perma-death system that incentivizes players to value every individual unit and, consequently, attempt to survive every engagement without casualties. But, because the enemy always outnumbers the player, it is extremely possible that the player’s unit(s) will be attacked multiple times before they can react. So in order to maximize the survivability of one’s army, players need to plan each of their moves around the enemy phase – the time in which they can do nothing. Typically this involves strategic positioning, intelligent terrain usage, and guerilla tactics among other things. Essentially, a Fire Emblem game’s legitimacy as a strategy game is derived from how it handles its enemy phase.

The games preceding Awakening all contained diverse maps that encouraged the tactical planning outlined above, as well as dozens of subtle mechanics that ensured unit-to-unit combat was predictable, making one’s plans consistently accurate. However, Fire Emblem: Awakening possessed maps that primarily consisted of open areas, minimizing the amount of strategies one could devise. What’s more, it removed one of the series’ consistency measures (True Hit) and added the two Dual mechanics each increasing the inconsistency of individual combat. Collectively, one could neither devise as many strategies as before, nor rely on them working to begin with. So, FE: Fates grounding the dual system in more finite terms makes it something one can consistently plan around, revitalizing the strategic component of this SRPG franchise.

Now, as I mentioned before, planning around the enemy phase is where the bulk of Fire Emblem’s strategic thinking stems from. Part of this planning comes from the player’s weapon choice. When a unit attacked an enemy, they could select whichever weapon in the unit’s possession would be most effective in taking them out. But, because attacking ends the unit’s turn, the unit would also have to fight every other enemy in range with that same weapon. Aside from the potentiality that the unit’s weapon won’t be particularly useful against nearby enemies, weapons also had an unreplenishable (except via the one-time-use Hammerne staff) finite durability that, once exhausted, would cause the weapon to break. Because there are many rare specialized weapons highly effective against specific enemies, the finite weapon usage encourages players to equip their weapons carefully.

FE: Fates changed this so that weapons no longer break, but strong weapons penalize the user’s accuracy and damage each time they are used. The Serenes Forest community seems unsure of how to receive this change, but in the context of the importance of the enemy phase, I’m going to argue that this is a good thing. A common occurrence in Fire Emblem games was that one (or several) characters would eventually become so powerful that they can easily handle anyone that attacks them during the enemy phase, regardless of which weapon they are holding. While this is great from a consistency perspective, it makes it difficult for these games to retain their challenge. The pseudo-fatigue system addresses this issue by limiting the number of times that a unit can effectively fight during an enemy phase with lasting implications for the remainder of the map.

While it’s true that granting all weapons infinite durability removes the meta-strategy of saving weapons for later encounters, an individual unit can only equip one weapon at a time and carry a handful of weapons on their person. Players still have to be judicious with their weapon choices even though they don’t have to worry about them breaking anymore.

Now, even though it seems like I’m singing this game’s praises to high heaven, I still don’t know enough about it to wholly gauge whether or not it’s good. Supposedly the Nohr (Conquest) version of the game has maps on par with the pre-Awakening Fire Emblem games, but the other two games are reportedly similar to FE13. Then there’s the story which seemingly everyone agrees is bad, regardless of which version you play (though the Nohr campaign is reportedly the worst). And finally, the characters are (as usual) nothing to write home about. If all of these reports are true, then for one game, IS got the S and one half of the RPG right in the Nohr game, and missed almost everything in the Hoshido one. That doesn’t sound so good – like, at all. But it’s still a step up from Awakening, and as someone who enjoys these games primarily for their gameplay, I am officially on board to get this game on day one.

Oh yeah, I also built a maximum stat and character class calculator for this game so that I could work out pairings and see how well its characters are balanced (spoilers: it’s pretty damn good). The online version has a crippling bug where it can’t calculate a character’s spouse classes, but the offline version is essentially done – just need to add in the unimportant characters and DLC classes. So if you’d like to start playing around with character stats and figuring out your waifus & husbandos here’s a download link.

I strongly recommend minding the class skills and class weapon options, as well, when planning.

http://serenesforest.net/fire-emblem-fates/hoshidan-classes/class-skills/

http://serenesforest.net/fire-emblem-fates/hoshidan-classes/

Also Galeforce is now DLC and was nerfed to boot, so SUCK IT BITCHES!