Over the past three weeks, I have been playing one of the three storyline paths of Fire Emblem Fates ie Birthright and have managed to 100% it by beating all the main storyline chapters, the sidequest Paralogues and the DLC Xenologues. I have also maxed out all my units' stats and developed a pretty good base in My Castle. Playing this game for over 100 hours over spring break got me thinking, what changes made to Fire Emblem Awakening work in Fates? Changes that work: 1) The game is more gorgeous than ever. Awakening really stepped up in terms of highlighting just how gorgeous this series really is after Shadow Dragon and Radiant Dawn. However, Fates blew it right out of the water with stunning cutscenes with a high quality anime style. I also loved the strategy to battle transitions with the battle environment mirroring the strategy environment perfectly. 2)Various classes and features added. Dragon Vein really added a great level of puzzle solving to the same by allowing the user to use one move of one member of the royal family to use their inherent skill of Dragon Vein to freeze the pond, plug up poisonous ponds etc. The game also added dozens of classes which are dependent on the characters' nationality and background. 3)This game is not playing around. People criticized the Hard mode of Awakening to be too easy and I must admit I was one of them. However, Birthright which is supposed to be the easiest path of the three was never playing around with the enemy units smarter and more lethal than I have ever seen. 4)My Castle: My god this feature is addictive. It is basically adding Animal Crossing to Fire EMblem with daily items to be collected and won, daily arena battles which allow you to win or lose resources. In My Castle, the private quarters also allows the player to bond with units from the army and understand more about the units' personality and backstory. Changes that don't work: 1) Various skills have been nerfed. I was absolutely gutted that the skills in Awakening like Galeforce which allowed the unit an extra turn after killing an enemy unit now only gives an extra move if the unit does not have another unit adjacent to it. 2)The overworld map is very similar to Shadow Dragon and not at all like Awakening. Awakening had an awesome overworld map which allowed you to view the kingdom op Ylisse and it's topography but Fates doesn't have a proper map which doesn't let you see what Hoshido looks like. 3)The DLC! Awakening had awesome Xenologues with a grinding for experience map called EXPonential growth which allowed the player to train his weaker units. However, the grinding for experience map in Fates called Boo Camp is disappointing since the enemies are considerably strong for weak units and are always running away from the units hence not crediting the weaker units for the kill. Honestly now that I have beaten Birthright, I can't wait for the intensely difficult Conquest and the reveal it all path Revelations. Fire Emblem indeed is one of the most powerful and strategizing RPGs I have ever played and despite some of my disappointments with Fates it has been a 9.5/10.
2 Comments
Justin
3/30/2016 06:19:28 pm
I've heard many great things about Fire Emblem but I have never played it! I will definitely play it someday on my 3DS. Since I've never played it, I can't comment on the changes in the game that worked or didn't work. However, it is really interesting that they chose to add the Animal Crossing component into the series. That seem like a great mini-game that helps the player to take a break from the stress of completing missions. Having no knowledge of the game, I wished there were more analysis of the design decisions behind the game to better understand the different mechanics involved.
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Milind NilekaniLove Nintendo games and game design. This blog is to detail my love for both. Archives
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