Hailinel
Musou Mania!
Fire Emblem as a series has had a very long, storied, and at times turbulent history, whether it be the franchise's original creative mind departing Intelligent Systems under a cloud of drama and self-inflicted legal battles, to the series finally getting localized thanks to Super Smash Bros. Melee, to falling on such rough times that a second Wii game was scrapped in favor of DS remakes, the first of which sold poorly enough that the second wasn't even localized, to Awakening causing an explosion of popularity that has led to a dedicated, and relatively healthy international audience.
Here we are in 2023, deep into the Switch's lifespan, having seen multiple mainline and spin-off Fire Emblem games released for it (and elsewhere). And so I figured, why not have a bit of a personal retrospective on the Switch era of Fire Emblem (which may not actually be over, if certain rumors hold true).
Note: I'm not going to touch on Tokyo Mirage Sessions or the FE1 English release in the OP. This ended up taking a long while to write and got rambling enough without their inclusion, but if you want to bring them up, feel free!
Fire Emblem Heroes
OK, we're starting off a discussion of Switch-era Fire Emblem with...a mobile phone game. Fair enough.
In all seriousness though, I've played Fire Emblem Heroes largely off and on for the past six and a half years, and have largely stayed confined to the story chapters, Tempest Trials, and other side modes that don't require me to break the bank on gacha to have a snowball's chance in Hell of beating the ever-evolving arena meta. It has been, from my experience, perhaps the most generous gacha game I have ever played, and while I've spent money on the game, I have never felt like I needed to spend money to do well at any mode that didn't put me up against whales.
It's also a game that has evolved and come a long way from launch, when the gacha roster was a festival of Shadow Dragon, Awakening, and Fates characters, and the year one story that was painfully basic. At this point, most of the games are well-represented, the game modes have gotten a lot more diverse and expansive, and the storyline, while still not incredibly deep, has taken a lot of twists and turns that have kept me invested. A lot of fans still consider Book 3 the story's high point (it involves heavy metal music and fighting the personification of death), but more recent storylines have built pretty solidly over that awkward start.
P.S.: Vote Deirdre in the next Choose Your Legends.
Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
I swear we're getting to the Switch games! But it's only fair to bring up Shadows of Valentia since, as a remake of a game that a lot of people call a black sheep. Fire Emblem Gaiden is a very weird game next to the usual Fire Emblem title, particularly of its era, but Shadows of Valentia leans hard into that identity to the point that the weapon triangle doesn't exist (because there are zero playable axe users), and dungeon and town exploration play a large role in the gameplay as the connective tissue between battles. Hidari's artwork also breathed new life into a cast that largely didn't even have official art until the remake. And those that did have art, well, um...
Literally every single member of the cast received a god-tier glow-up. Every single one.
The game isn't perfect. Its maps are still largely Gaiden's maps, which include a lot of poison swamp nonsense among other design issues. On the other hand, it was also the Fire Emblem that introduced being able to undo actions. You can rewind from a bad move in Turn 23 all the way back to the start of Turn 1 if you want (I know I did some total rewinds to unscrew myself on occasion), but mechanically it offers a way for Classic players to fix mistakes without having to restart the whole map.
Fire Emblem Warriors
Finally, a Switch game! And...it's one that had a 3DS version developed right alongside it.
I love Musou games. I've played most every Dynasty and Samurai Warriors game and the vast majority of the various licensed spin-offs over the years. I have played some excellent Musou games, and I have played ones that were...not. Fire Emblem Warriors is definitely among the better entries, particularly compared to a number of the licensed Musou titles that exist. It doesn't bother me too much that the roster is entirely Shadow Dragon, Awakening, and Fates characters, or that moveset cloning is pretty heavy. It built pretty heavily on concepts from Hyrule Warriors, but with an FE twist. The OCs are pretty bland (no one in the cast is nearly as entertaining as the Hyrule Warriors OCs), but it's a very solid Musou that offers some good fanservice for the series and the particular represented games.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
For many years, Fire Emblem fandom discourse was obsessed with handwringing over Fates. Fire Emblem Fates had perhaps the most pants-on-head writing of any entry in the franchise, inflicting a level of psychic damage to a fandom that became convinced that every game going forward would be equally as bad. (Never mind that Shadows of Valentia came out with a story, writing, and world-building that expanded on everything Gaiden was without falling into any of the Fates pitfalls of rewrites on top of rewrites. Intelligent Systems was apparently staffed by idiots.) So the moment that Three Houses was revealed to have a school settings and multiple routes, people immediately started screaming that it would be another Fates.
Because fandom is stupid.
Three Houses ended up becoming the most successful game in the series (well, not counting Heroes and it's billion dollar-plus revenue intake at this point), setting franchise records, and also igniting new fandom wars. (And I swear to Sothis, if any one reading this tries to start a house leader war in this thread, go touch grass.)
Setting aside discussion of idiots arguing over their preferred flavor of war criminal for 300 forum pages, Three Houses will also likely go down in franchise history as one of its most experimental games. Developed by Koei Tecmo, it expands on some elements tried before, like, expanding Fates's My Castle into Garreg Mach Monastery, and trying out some things brand new to the series (ex: a calendar system, battalions and gambits, giant monster enemies that take up more than one tile of space). The game has a unique flow to it that isn't entirely successful (the monastery sections tend to run out of steam in the latter half of the game regardless of route), but despite the structural shortcomings, it has one of the most well realized, thought-out casts in any Fire Emblem title. A lot of that can be attributed to the world building and lore writing that shape the world and how the characters live in it, with many having existing personal relationships that go beyond the basic, or characters that have genuine issues that the writing handles well, if not perfectly.
Fandom stupidity aside, there are really solid reasons for why people go to war over the cast. From top to bottom, they're a more complex, more interesting bunch in their histories and relationships than the FE norm, which given the norm, may not say much, but hearing characters have heartfelt discussions over family, or depression, or genuine traumas, mixed in with lighter discussions of baking sweets or hangovers is, in some ways, more genuine to life, particularly with the standout voice performances across so much of the cast.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes
Honestly, this is a tough one for me. I love Musou games. I love Three Houses. I think Three Hopes is one of the single best-playing Musou games in existence. It takes everything that the original Fire Emblem Warriors built and expands on it with mechanics and concepts either directly lifted from or inspired by Three Houses.
And yet it's a slog that I find utterly depressing. I say this despite having played through two whole routes and half of the third.
As a concept, it's fine. It's an alternate universe take on Three Houses centered on a new protagonist, but in practice, it plays out like a bad Three Houses fanfiction, from watering down individual cast members or entire story routes, to recasting the protagonist of Three Houses into an enemy completely unaffiliated with the academy or the rest of the cast, to the main character being the precise form of fanfiction OC that has special powers that mirror the original protagonist and takes the protagonists place, complete with a mysterious background that's left a complete mystery because they just don't bother to explore it in any depth at all.
I don't hate Three Hopes. I think it plays well. The maps are fun and there are some genuine laughs and some interesting moments, almost all of which are entirely undercut by the fact that it's an AU spin-off that leaves an unsatisfying taste regardless of route. People that didn't pay Three Houses might enjoy Three Hopes more than I did, but I just found Three Hopes...well, like I said before. It's a depressing slog.
Fire Emblem Engage
Man.
Man. I am of two minds on Engage. One is that, it's very obviously an anniversary celebration game (though a couple of years late to the party. Thanks, COVID), and it wears its heart for the franchise on its sleeve. Engage is loaded with fanservice from the over to the subtle, and it's all very fun to see. The core gameplay is some of the best that the series has ever had, with entertaining maps that stay fresh throughout and new battle mechanics like the Emblems and the tweaks to the weapon triangle all being so polished and tight. It's absolutely top-tier in that sense.
But man. The story is awful. I don't mind that the narrative is more basic than Three Houses. I'm fine with different entries having different levels of narrative complexity, and Engage is, again, an anniversary game more concerned with fanservice over a complex narrative. But even so, Engage's story is a huge flat nothing. There are moments that stand out to me, but as a whole it's just the most bland story that has ever been told in a Fire Emblem. Even the current arc of Heroes has more emotional depth than Engage. Engage feels like Saturday Morning Fire Emblem, sleepwalking through a basic story where you fight the same handful of enemies over and over again. Mileage will always vary, but even after the game was over, I don't feel especially attached to any of the characters. In a way, most of them are outshined by the legacy characters that appear as Emblems. Sigurd does an enormous amount of heavy-lifting.
(Please, IS, give Genealogy a remake so Sigurd can shine again in his own game again.)
Though, it's really hilarious to me that Engage is both the first FE to have a bad ending trigger when you lose to the final boss, and that elements of the bad ending were used as a bait and switch in one of the game's pre-release trailers. That was pretty clever.
Here we are in 2023, deep into the Switch's lifespan, having seen multiple mainline and spin-off Fire Emblem games released for it (and elsewhere). And so I figured, why not have a bit of a personal retrospective on the Switch era of Fire Emblem (which may not actually be over, if certain rumors hold true).
Note: I'm not going to touch on Tokyo Mirage Sessions or the FE1 English release in the OP. This ended up taking a long while to write and got rambling enough without their inclusion, but if you want to bring them up, feel free!
Fire Emblem Heroes
OK, we're starting off a discussion of Switch-era Fire Emblem with...a mobile phone game. Fair enough.
In all seriousness though, I've played Fire Emblem Heroes largely off and on for the past six and a half years, and have largely stayed confined to the story chapters, Tempest Trials, and other side modes that don't require me to break the bank on gacha to have a snowball's chance in Hell of beating the ever-evolving arena meta. It has been, from my experience, perhaps the most generous gacha game I have ever played, and while I've spent money on the game, I have never felt like I needed to spend money to do well at any mode that didn't put me up against whales.
It's also a game that has evolved and come a long way from launch, when the gacha roster was a festival of Shadow Dragon, Awakening, and Fates characters, and the year one story that was painfully basic. At this point, most of the games are well-represented, the game modes have gotten a lot more diverse and expansive, and the storyline, while still not incredibly deep, has taken a lot of twists and turns that have kept me invested. A lot of fans still consider Book 3 the story's high point (it involves heavy metal music and fighting the personification of death), but more recent storylines have built pretty solidly over that awkward start.
P.S.: Vote Deirdre in the next Choose Your Legends.
Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
I swear we're getting to the Switch games! But it's only fair to bring up Shadows of Valentia since, as a remake of a game that a lot of people call a black sheep. Fire Emblem Gaiden is a very weird game next to the usual Fire Emblem title, particularly of its era, but Shadows of Valentia leans hard into that identity to the point that the weapon triangle doesn't exist (because there are zero playable axe users), and dungeon and town exploration play a large role in the gameplay as the connective tissue between battles. Hidari's artwork also breathed new life into a cast that largely didn't even have official art until the remake. And those that did have art, well, um...
Literally every single member of the cast received a god-tier glow-up. Every single one.
The game isn't perfect. Its maps are still largely Gaiden's maps, which include a lot of poison swamp nonsense among other design issues. On the other hand, it was also the Fire Emblem that introduced being able to undo actions. You can rewind from a bad move in Turn 23 all the way back to the start of Turn 1 if you want (I know I did some total rewinds to unscrew myself on occasion), but mechanically it offers a way for Classic players to fix mistakes without having to restart the whole map.
Fire Emblem Warriors
Finally, a Switch game! And...it's one that had a 3DS version developed right alongside it.
I love Musou games. I've played most every Dynasty and Samurai Warriors game and the vast majority of the various licensed spin-offs over the years. I have played some excellent Musou games, and I have played ones that were...not. Fire Emblem Warriors is definitely among the better entries, particularly compared to a number of the licensed Musou titles that exist. It doesn't bother me too much that the roster is entirely Shadow Dragon, Awakening, and Fates characters, or that moveset cloning is pretty heavy. It built pretty heavily on concepts from Hyrule Warriors, but with an FE twist. The OCs are pretty bland (no one in the cast is nearly as entertaining as the Hyrule Warriors OCs), but it's a very solid Musou that offers some good fanservice for the series and the particular represented games.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
For many years, Fire Emblem fandom discourse was obsessed with handwringing over Fates. Fire Emblem Fates had perhaps the most pants-on-head writing of any entry in the franchise, inflicting a level of psychic damage to a fandom that became convinced that every game going forward would be equally as bad. (Never mind that Shadows of Valentia came out with a story, writing, and world-building that expanded on everything Gaiden was without falling into any of the Fates pitfalls of rewrites on top of rewrites. Intelligent Systems was apparently staffed by idiots.) So the moment that Three Houses was revealed to have a school settings and multiple routes, people immediately started screaming that it would be another Fates.
Because fandom is stupid.
Three Houses ended up becoming the most successful game in the series (well, not counting Heroes and it's billion dollar-plus revenue intake at this point), setting franchise records, and also igniting new fandom wars. (And I swear to Sothis, if any one reading this tries to start a house leader war in this thread, go touch grass.)
Setting aside discussion of idiots arguing over their preferred flavor of war criminal for 300 forum pages, Three Houses will also likely go down in franchise history as one of its most experimental games. Developed by Koei Tecmo, it expands on some elements tried before, like, expanding Fates's My Castle into Garreg Mach Monastery, and trying out some things brand new to the series (ex: a calendar system, battalions and gambits, giant monster enemies that take up more than one tile of space). The game has a unique flow to it that isn't entirely successful (the monastery sections tend to run out of steam in the latter half of the game regardless of route), but despite the structural shortcomings, it has one of the most well realized, thought-out casts in any Fire Emblem title. A lot of that can be attributed to the world building and lore writing that shape the world and how the characters live in it, with many having existing personal relationships that go beyond the basic, or characters that have genuine issues that the writing handles well, if not perfectly.
Fandom stupidity aside, there are really solid reasons for why people go to war over the cast. From top to bottom, they're a more complex, more interesting bunch in their histories and relationships than the FE norm, which given the norm, may not say much, but hearing characters have heartfelt discussions over family, or depression, or genuine traumas, mixed in with lighter discussions of baking sweets or hangovers is, in some ways, more genuine to life, particularly with the standout voice performances across so much of the cast.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes
Honestly, this is a tough one for me. I love Musou games. I love Three Houses. I think Three Hopes is one of the single best-playing Musou games in existence. It takes everything that the original Fire Emblem Warriors built and expands on it with mechanics and concepts either directly lifted from or inspired by Three Houses.
And yet it's a slog that I find utterly depressing. I say this despite having played through two whole routes and half of the third.
As a concept, it's fine. It's an alternate universe take on Three Houses centered on a new protagonist, but in practice, it plays out like a bad Three Houses fanfiction, from watering down individual cast members or entire story routes, to recasting the protagonist of Three Houses into an enemy completely unaffiliated with the academy or the rest of the cast, to the main character being the precise form of fanfiction OC that has special powers that mirror the original protagonist and takes the protagonists place, complete with a mysterious background that's left a complete mystery because they just don't bother to explore it in any depth at all.
I don't hate Three Hopes. I think it plays well. The maps are fun and there are some genuine laughs and some interesting moments, almost all of which are entirely undercut by the fact that it's an AU spin-off that leaves an unsatisfying taste regardless of route. People that didn't pay Three Houses might enjoy Three Hopes more than I did, but I just found Three Hopes...well, like I said before. It's a depressing slog.
Fire Emblem Engage
Man.
Man. I am of two minds on Engage. One is that, it's very obviously an anniversary celebration game (though a couple of years late to the party. Thanks, COVID), and it wears its heart for the franchise on its sleeve. Engage is loaded with fanservice from the over to the subtle, and it's all very fun to see. The core gameplay is some of the best that the series has ever had, with entertaining maps that stay fresh throughout and new battle mechanics like the Emblems and the tweaks to the weapon triangle all being so polished and tight. It's absolutely top-tier in that sense.
But man. The story is awful. I don't mind that the narrative is more basic than Three Houses. I'm fine with different entries having different levels of narrative complexity, and Engage is, again, an anniversary game more concerned with fanservice over a complex narrative. But even so, Engage's story is a huge flat nothing. There are moments that stand out to me, but as a whole it's just the most bland story that has ever been told in a Fire Emblem. Even the current arc of Heroes has more emotional depth than Engage. Engage feels like Saturday Morning Fire Emblem, sleepwalking through a basic story where you fight the same handful of enemies over and over again. Mileage will always vary, but even after the game was over, I don't feel especially attached to any of the characters. In a way, most of them are outshined by the legacy characters that appear as Emblems. Sigurd does an enormous amount of heavy-lifting.
(Please, IS, give Genealogy a remake so Sigurd can shine again in his own game again.)
Though, it's really hilarious to me that Engage is both the first FE to have a bad ending trigger when you lose to the final boss, and that elements of the bad ending were used as a bait and switch in one of the game's pre-release trailers. That was pretty clever.
