Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia Review [Minor Spoilers]
Gameplay
It’s finally time to get to the real meat of why I play Fire Emblem, the gameplay. Since this is a remake of a 1992 game, and the second Fire Emblem game, there will be stark differences in how the game mechanics works, especially when compared to other previous 3DS Fire Emblem games. Forgone are the pair-up mechanics, weapon triangle, and predictable archers, instead replaced with another slew of mechanics that are unique only to this game that I will cover later on. Intelligent Systems decided to stay as faithful to the original game’s mechanics as possible, which means most of the good and bad (and I mean BAD) things that were in the original still remain in the remake.
First you must understand that this game has both elements of a tactical RPG and a traditional JRPG. Unlike most fire emblem games where gameplay is broken up in chapters, with a major battle taking place in each, Fire Emblem Echoes is broken in acts, with several major and minor battles spruced in between. Your two main armies can freely traverse through an overworld to engage in battles, as well as visit villages, castles and other locations to stock up on supplies and upgrade your equipment.
“Hey there Celica, how you doing over there?”
During the overworld segments, every now and then an enemy squadron can spawn from an enemy base, these squadrons can also move across the overworld map to actively engage the player or assist in big story battles. These encounters often left me annoyed and tired, as these squadrons respawn rather frequently, and often served more as an obstacle than actual challenges, since the battles happened on maps that I’ve played before. So, nothing new is really added, and when they are paired with story battles, it made it almost impossible to beat that story mission, since the story missions themselves are balanced around the entire army you have.
“You can keep running, but there’s nowhere left for you to hide….”
In addition to these moving squadrons, the player can also visit dungeons, where the gameplay switches to a 3D dungeon crawler, with the player revealing secret passageways and collecting treasure chests. The player is allowed to only bring a certain number of characters in their army into the dungeons, so the player has to consider what kind of party they think can succeed before proceeding into the dungeon. They also have to take into consideration the overall balance of levels in the entire army, as only the characters entering the dungeon can get experience, so if a certain character is lacking in levels, they can recuperate them in the dungeons. Enemies also roam the halls of these dungeons, and can approach the player to initiate a battle. However, if the player gets the jump on them by attacking them first, they are provided an advantage in battle by getting the first turn and the enemy units losing a bit of health. The dungeons themselves provide a nice break in gameplay, however they quickly lose their novelty as the game goes on, due to how long they can take to traverse. Dungeon battles themselves are also not very interesting as time goes on compared to regular battles, as many of them take place in the same style of maps, resulting in the player employing the same strategies every time an enemy encounter appears.
The dungeons as mentioned before provide a nice way for players to grind up their characters if they feel that the story missions are a bit too hard for them. However, to prevent players from abusing the dungeons, the fatigue system was introduced in the game, meaning that units in your army would get increasingly fatigued as they engaged in more battles in the dungeons, losing huge stats when they become too fatigued. Fatigue can be cured however, with food supplies that are found in villages and dungeons. Personally, I never found fatigue to be a problem at all, as the game gives out free food supplies like it’s Halloween. The fatigue system could have honestly been done away entirely and nothing much would have changed in the game. Still, it provided a sense of immersion by having you experience your parties fatigue as you continued to explore the gloomy halls of a castle or catacombs .
The dungeons also contain the only method of promoting units in this game, the Mila Idols. Once a unit in your army is ready to promote, they can visit the Mila Idol and get promoted immediately. Note that unlike Awakening and Fates, the options for reclassing is extremely limited, with only a handful of characters capable of branching out into different class paths, so players looking to replay the game and experiment with army compositions will find that Echoes provides a very unsatisfying experience in that regard.
“It’s rude to stare you know”
Now let’s finally talk about the tactical side of gameplay. You’ve got the usual Fire Emblem staples, archers, horseback riders, Pegasus riders, magic users, etc. The main mechanics unique to this game however is how firstly, each unit can only hold one item at a time, as opposed to other games where they can hold several items at once. This places a heavy emphasis on pre-battle planning, as each unit has much less tactical options during battle, so having the right item at hand can be essential to victory. Where this inventory system in my opinion fails however is the skill system. As characters fight more and more with a weapon at hand, they will eventually be able to learn skills specific to that weapon. However, once you unequip the weapon, the skills are lost due to them being inherently tied to that weapon. This would provide a great incentive for players to never stick with the same weapon, as each weapon could have skills that fit certain situations, however as you progress further in the game, you end up finding weapons that are just flat out better both in terms of stats and in skills, completely throwing out all the potential the skill system could have had.
Because there isn’t much tactical variety in battles, enemy placements were in turn dumbed down and made predictable, mages were almost always at the back, while horse units were pretty much always at the front. The game instead introduces a new enemy unit to try to spice up the difficulty, cantors. Cantors are mages who are able to summon up to eight other units per turn to fight for them, and they…. never……STOP. These units do not provide any new interesting challenge whatsoever, as they spawn units that you have already seen before, they end up serving more as a major pain in the ass, existing only so that you feel like chucking your 3DS against the wall repeatedly every time they open their stupid mouths to summon more of their pesky underlings to smack you with. It’s especially grueling when Intelligent Systems decide to put FOUR cantors in a single map, those who played the game will know exactly which level I’m talking about.
“What do you mean I’m annoying, when you possess the same ability yourself and exploit our AI’s!”
………….
Sigh, let’s just move on.
The game is also unique in the sense that archers are given massive presence in maps due to their enormous range, and the ability to counterattack against melee weapons. Echoes tried to balance this by giving them slightly worst accuracy, but they are still too good of a utility unit, especially when they promote to a bow knight, allowing them the same movement as a paladin. Mages also behave differently in that they now have to expend health points in order to use magic, though there are a myriad of ways to counteract this, mainly through the use of rings, so it really isn’t that big of a deal. There are also certain spells that work especially well against specific type of enemies, such as Seraphim against terror units. Overall the unit balance in this game is done fairly well, with every unit having clear strengths and weaknesses that serve specific roles in battle.
One point I’d like to bring up before I move on is the growth rates in Echoes. Players should be wary that since Echoes is a remake of an old Fire Emblem game, it shares the same element in that this game has pretty abysmal growth rates, especially compared to Awakening and Fates. In my playthrough of the game, two units were so unlucky with their level ups that they became entirely useless throughout most of my playthrough of the game (RIP Gray and Atlas). Thankfully the game is balanced around these abysmal growth rates, as despite having two worthless units, I still found the overall combat to be pretty easy, even on hard classic mode, which is the mode I played in. This could be due to the fact that Echoes is host to a new mechanic that is unique even to Gaiden, that being the Turnwheel system. The Turnwheel system allows players to rewind to a previous point in battle, allowing them to utilize new strategies should their previous ones fail. This is a welcome mechanic in my eyes, as it cut down severely on the amount of times I had to reset the game. I just wish that they didn’t give the player so many chances to fix their mistakes, because at that point unless the player really doesn’t know how to play SRPG’s, they will never need to use all of the chances Mila’s Turnwheel grants them.
Magic wheely please grant my wish. Allow me to relive the death………of MY ENEMIES. AHAHAHA… Oh and uh, save my friend too kthx.
Finally let’s talk about the map design, and boy are they bland. With the exception of one or two maps, most of the maps feature the same type of design, and all share the same objective of routing the enemy. This is mostly a result of Intelligent Systems trying to stay faithful to the original instead of remaking it in a better light, and is definitely an area that I felt would have been perfect for a better redesign. I know they could have easily done it, as they had already proven themselves before with Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest, a game that had the most well-designed and varied maps I have ever played in a Fire Emblem game. In the end though, the map design is definitely the biggest flaw that both the original and the remake has.
Before I end this section, I’d just like to mention that Fire Emblem Echoes does indeed have post-game content that players can contend with, that being a couple of new maps and a brand new dungeon in another continent. However this content is meant only for the most well-prepared of players, as the content was designed more as an incentive for players to buy the DLC’s this game has to offer, speaking of DLC’s.
One thing that absolutely rubs me the wrong way in recent Fire Emblem titles is how they relegate fast grinding methods behind DLC paywalls. The game has a currency system that can be spent on upgrading weapon stats, however there is no efficient way to farm these currency unless you buy a specific DLC map that essentially pours you with torrents of currency to spend. It’s a real shame, since the endgame content requires you to have nearly perfect stats on both your characters and weapons, so even getting to that point without the DLC will take hours and hours of grinding, along with loads of resetting. Personally, I’m really not a fan of how Intelligent Systems handles DLC in their Fire Emblem games. Granted there is some relevant content such as additional backstory for certain characters in the game, but when you consider that the season pass for Echoes costs even more than THE GAME ITSELF, really Intelligent Systems?!? Maybe one day I’ll get around to playing the postgame/dlc content, who knows.
(Continued on Page 3)
