Fire Emblem Heroes Review

The First 15

I boot up the game and the first thing I have to do is a download. This seems to be the new norm for mobile games these days. There’s music playing during the download. It feels appropriate, but it’s not the typical Fire Emblem music. I thought the goal here was to make players feel like they are playing a Fire Emblem game. Music is one of the easiest ways to put people into the right mindset. Oh well.

Download is done, now I get to watch a very pretty cutscene. I have no idea what’s going on, but I see a lot of familiar characters. Did I mention it was pretty?

And straight into battle we go. I’m working my way through the tutorial on how to how to move and attack. Dragging characters feels a little odd. It seems I can’t drag a character to a space, and then issue an attack. I’m not sure I like these controls.

Along the way I get a bit of the storyline. Fire Emblem Heroes is set in a separate world that contains portals which connect to all of the other “worlds” from the rest of the Fire Emblem series.

Tutorial done. More downloading! 319 MB this time, yikes. Seems to be going slow. No doubt their servers are being bombarded by people trying to download the game. This could take a while.

Story

The story for this game is a combination of clever storyline, out and out RPG tropes, and some rather tongue in cheek humor.

The overall story line is that players have been summoned to the realm of Fire Emblem Heroes in order to act as a tactician to help the Askr Kingdom defeat the Emblian Empire. There are portals in the world to the different worlds from the various Fire Emblem games which the Emblian Empire is using to go through and brainwash heroes into fighting for them. The Askr Kingdom is trying to stop them. But this is made a bit more complicated by the fact that the Askr royalty can only open portals. It’s the Emblian royalty who can close portals. But seeing as how they want access to these worlds, they aren’t inclined to do so. I found it to be a very clever way to pull everything together to make the game work.

Worked in with the original story line are some rather thinly disguised plot ‘twists’. For instance, as you go through the missions, your party members tell you about their friend who disappeared during a battle. About the same time, a mysterious stranger begins showing up here and there wearing a mask. No one could possibly predict how this is going to end…right? Frankly it seems a bit foolish to come up with a strong backstory, but then butcher the rest of the story with crap like this. Just because this is a mobile game doesn’t mean this sort of nonsense is going to fly. Hopefully this is the exception rather than the rule moving forward.

Other parts of the story are very clearly meant to be less than serious. For instance, the object that summons the player is a magical bow. The player also seems to be the only one who can use the bow properly. The bow is used not by firing arrows at the enemy, but by summoning heroes. Yep, you have a magical weapon that fires heroes. The characters of course seem to just glaze right past this fact. So just go with it.

Interface and Controls

There are two versions of the controls. One is more familiar to Fire Emblem fans and the other is odd. Strangely, the tutorial teaches players how to use the latter version. The odd version of the controls involves dragging characters to where you want them to go or on top of who you want them to attack. This method feels imprecise and makes it difficult to position characters if there are multiple locations to attack an enemy from. It feels especially awkward for ranged character who will snap from where you released them to where they need to stand in order to attack several squares away. The other version involves tapping a character, then tapping a location to move to or a character to attack, and then tapping again to confirm the order. This will feel more familiar to Fire Emblem fans and personally just felt more precise. I feel like the tutorial should emphasize this version of the controls or maybe even show players both ways of playing.

You can see the attack area of a unit by selecting it. If you hold on an enemy unit it shows you their attack area even when you select something else. The designers also added a nice quality of life feature by letting you tap a button at the bottom labeled ‘Danger Area’ which shows you the attack areas for all of the enemy units. Being able to see enemy attack areas leads to a lot of interesting gameplay as you duck in and out of different enemies’ attack range.

I like that the game is very upfront about the chances of earning a rare hero when players spend orbs on the Gatcha system. Players can see their chances of earning a rare hero before they decide to ‘spin the wheel’. More on this system below in the Gameplay section.

The game offers players the ability to upgrade their castle. The problem is the game doesn’t give players any sort of indication that this is even there. Players can only find it by clicking on a tiny button to bring up the menu for purchasing upgrades. It would have been nice for them to include even just a single screen that brings the player’s attention to it.

It bothers me that some of the quests aren’t retroactive. For instance, when you clear all of the Normal mode missions it asks you to then clear the Hard mode missions. But if you’ve already cleared them then you have to go back and re-clear the last mission in a chapter before the quest will update as being complete. It would be nice if quests for doing story missions would check to see if a particular mission has already been completed.

Gameplay

Before I get into the core gameplay I want to talk about something that has become a common practice among players, reset marathons. Players can reset the game by deleting the game from the mobile device and reinstalling it. Doing this starts them over. The reason for doing this is players earn 20 orbs very quickly. Orbs that can be used to roll for new, hopefully more powerful, heroes. Not all heroes are made equal and a few are truly exceptional. Given the difficulty of acquiring a second set of 20 orbs versus resetting the game, players find it easier to reset until they receive one of the top tier heroes. I myself did this just to see how it felt. It was pretty boring, but after doing it twice I received the archer Takumi. At the time I simply knew that Takumi was a 5 star rank character. Later I found out that he is one of the (as of the time of this article) top three heroes in the game. So for me at least it was worth it. It made the starting hours spent “playing” the game rather boring, but as a result I had a guaranteed powerful character to use right from the start.

Right out of the gate the game provides a series of story missions. Each of these is rather short and consist of only a single screen. The story is divided up into chapters with each chapter containing five missions. Once players clear a chapter on Normal, they unlock the Hard and Lunatic difficulties. These difficulties are just the same mission with higher level enemies. It does extend the mileage of the campaign mode, though it doesn’t really add much. On the plus side, completing a mission on a higher difficulty for the first time does reward an orb. It would be nice if some of the missions were more than just a single screen and had more than simply 4 or 5 enemies.

The game, like a lot of other games, uses a weapon triangle. Blue is better against red is better against green is better against blue (those of you who have played Kingdom Hearts x should find this familiar). But within that are some other matchups that should be familiar to fans. Archers absolutely destroy flying units, casters are good against heavily armored characters (provided they can stay out of melee range), etc. All in all the combat feels very much like standard Fire Emblem, which is exactly what I want it to feel like. So props to the designers for successfully making the transition to mobile.

Another staple of mobile games is energy (called stamina in this game). In order for players to start missions players must spend an amount of stamina. Stamina is both good and bad. It’s bad of course because it limits how much you can play. A rather sad amount of time is spent waiting to be able to play the game. On the other hand it’s good because it limits things like reset marathons and gives you a good ‘stopping point’ for when you’re playing. Unfortunately in the case of Fire Emblem Heroes the designers dipped too far towards the bad side. Stamina recharges at a rate of 1 energy every 5 minutes. That’s an excessively long time to wait when some of the missions can cost 15+ energy. I think the developers realized they overshot the mark because the second day after release everyone received 10 free stamina refresh potions and they removed the stamina cost from swapping around skills. I definitely hit the wall on the first day where I wanted to keep playing but couldn’t. The designers didn’t do themselves any favors limiting people’s ability to initially enjoy the game in such a hamfisted way. At the very least they should lower the time to 1 energy every 3 minutes. But more importantly I feel like the original missions should have never had an energy cost on Normal difficulty.

The big element of this game is the Gatcha rolls system. Currently players can earn a fair number of orbs just by playing with which to buy new heroes. The problem is that the system is mostly random. Players aren’t guaranteed to get a good hero. There is at least some bad luck prevention in that the chance of receiving a five star hero increases with each hero players get that isn’t a five star. But there’s no guarantee that the five star hero will be a top tier hero or that it won’t be a hero the player already has. A lot of this system plays into people’s nostalgia. Everyone who’s played Fire Emblem has their favorite hero (mine is Lyn). But the odds of getting that specific hero are slim. This then encourages players to earn more orbs to roll for more heroes. But there’s a limit to how many orbs a player can earn. Mostly this is limited by Stamina which prevents players from binge clearing all of the missions on the various difficulties. And when players finally finish all the missions that’s it until more content is released. As a result, the only other option left is to purchase orbs with real money. When I first looked at the conversion rate for money into orbs, I felt it was absurdly low. I knew I’d never pay so much for so little return, and I was ready to blast Nintendo for such a thinly veiled ploy. But it would seem that a lot of other people don’t care that the ratio is as bad as it is and have purchased orbs regardless. There was even an article about a guy who spent $1,000 on orbs. So while I may think that buying orbs is little more than a scam, I have to concede that the designers seem to know their audience well enough to understand that they would be willing to spend so much money on so little gains. So I guess hats off to them for getting people to spend so much money on an otherwise free game.

Something I actually like is that a character always has the same skills regardless of its star rank. Lower rank heroes, however, are locked out of learning advanced levels of their abilities. This definitely creates an incentive to raise a hero to a higher star rank in order to gain access to better versions of their core abilities. That said, the given stats of a hero have some randomization, meaning that the same hero at level 40 will be a tad bit different in their final stats.

And now we reach the absolute worst system in the entire game, Player vs Player. The basic PvP system is this. Players enter the arena and are provided with three difficulty choices, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced (Easy, Medium, and Hard). Players choose one and the battle begins. Players don’t compete directly with other players, rather the enemy team is made up of heroes taken from another player’s roster but controlled by the AI. If players defeat the enemy team, they earn points. All of this works great. It’s how those points are earned and used that’s the problem.

PvP is, currently, the only way to earn feathers which you need to increase the star rating of your heroes. Unfortunately the system itself is very poorly explained. The way it works is you battle until you lose or reach seven wins. Once you complete a ‘run’ your points are tallied and that is your score for the season. The only way to increase your score is to start another run from scratch and end up with a higher total at the end. The problem is there are a ton of hidden mechanics for scoring that aren’t explained anywhere. These hidden mechanics require you to go hunting for information online if you want to get even a decent ranking. And then you have to have the right heroes to both win and earn the max amount of points for winning. You do get some feathers just for earning points, but the lion’s share of feathers each season (seasons last 5 – 7 days) are given to those who ranked high. This is an awful system that blatantly rewards players with the exact ‘right’ hero composition that nets them the most points per win. It would also be nice if the game went more in depth into the ins and outs of your PvP score. At the very least a breakdown of your score after each match would help players see how they can improve their score from game to game.

Conclusion

You will like this game if you enjoy Fire Emblem and don’t mind a large amount of randomness when it comes to which heroes you will receive.

You will not like this game if you’re looking to get a specific hero unless you’re willing to spend a lot of time resetting your game or a rather absurd amount of money (and even then there’s no guarantee).

Fire Emblem Heroes as it currently stands is a decent tactics game with an awful PvP system. In the end though, mobile games like Fire Emblem Heroes usually live and die by their special events. If the events happen frequently enough and are fun, then the game will do well. So while the game is nothing truly special at the moment and is mostly riding a wave of nostalgia people have for the different characters, what it becomes still remains to be seen.