Fire Emblem Direct

Not much said about Warriors, which is too bad. We got some footage of Chrom wrecking shit, though.

I'm still skeptical about the mobile game. Freemium business model, Fire Emblem light gameplay, and random drops for heroes. Ehhhh, I don't know how much I need that when we've got two full games in the next two years.

Thoughts:

Gaiden remake: Day 1 purchase guaranteed. Love me some retro FE, but the first 2 games can be a bit of a slog mechanics-wise (the SNES games on are much more polished).
FE Warriors: Yep, one reason I'll eventually get a Switch.
FE Switch: ...And this is probably WHEN I'll get a Switch.
Mobile: Well, I'll try it, but I don't expect much at all. At least we're getting official English names for a bunch of characters.

Edit: Make that every playable character and major boss ever, via the voting site. Frankly, that's good enough for me, even if the game is worse than E.T. on the Atari its existence is now justified in my eyes.

I'm never not against more Fire Emblem. Crazy how it went from a series that was supposed to end with Awakening due to poor sales to getting multiple games within so few years due to popularity.

Glad to have a modern-ized remake of Gaiden, and hell, any other game in the series we never got here yet. While I'm happy with Fire Emblem Warriors, of course I'm all over a full console version. As for Mobile, on one hand, I was kinda hoping it'd be a real game that would be fun on an iPad...but this also means I can probably try it once out of curiosity, and never play it again without feeling like I have to.

Side note: While I would actually prefer they jsut leave the Japanese voice in this one and only case, I do still kinda like that they had the Direct narrated by Yuri Lowenthal, who does Marth's voice for Codename STEAM and Fates if you grab his Amiibo.

Overall, this was quite the Direct. We got two total surprise games, one of which is coming in 4 months. We got amiibos. We got mobile game details. We confirmed out first Fire Emblem Warriors character. Hot damn, it's a good time to be a FE fan.

I'm really looking forward to Gaiden. It's in the grand tradition of bizarre NES sequels, and I imagine a remake will make it shine. Plus, it will help mollify the Fire Emblem fans who hated the 3DS era, which emphasized the character build elements above the battle tactics*. I'm really looking forward to finding out more about the two Switch games.

The mobile game is concerning. I learned the word "gacha" today, and it's a delightful coincidence that it's a homonym with "gotcha." The recruiting scheme looks like a total wale hunt and the strategy looks watered down. I can't say that's what I'm after in my FE, but Nintendo has shareholders to subdue.


*Except Conquest. Friggin' play Conquest, whichever kind of fan you are.

I've honestly never been much of an FE fan, they look like well made games, but I've just never felt the inclination to jump in on them.

I will say though, much like Zelda, it seems like an ideal series for a Warriors spinoff. I quite enjoyed Hyrule Warriors on Wii U, and I've been wanting to try out the Dragon Quest Heroes, so this version may very well make my list.

Hmm. The mobile game looks like garbage, sadly. Well done for what it is, but that's not saying much. I like the illustrations and that's about it - I'll just find them all uploaded online somewhere and get more enjoyment out of that than I would playing the game. 

Warriors will likely be a bit fun, but again - Tecmo Koei hasn't made a truly good Warriors game since the early PS2 era. The series bothers me enormously because there is SO MUCH potential, but they haven't evolved in 17 years, and I doubt they'll start now. The only reason they see any success at all is because they keep finding new audiences with their licensing strategy. I enjoyed Hyrule Warriors for the fan service, and the gameplay was fun for a couple hours, until I started to see the deep flaws throughout the whole damn thing. Terribly balanced combat - it's only difficult when you're underleveled, and when that happens it's not a satisfying challenge, it's a brutal slog whittling down enormous HP bars. They don't seem to have any understanding of how to make combat good, once you see through the appeal of hitting a thousand helpless pinatas. Tons of UX issues. Annoying bosses. A weak semblance of strategic play that doesn't hold up. I expect Fire Emblem Warriors to be exactly the same: fun for a bit, and good fan service, but a bad game underneath it all.

Excited for the Gaiden remake and the new Switch game though. I'm also very intrigued by the "Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia" branding. It implies that there may be more "echoes" games coming. Crossing my fingers for a Genealogy of the Holy War remake.

Yeah, I picked up on the Echoes thing too. If this one sells, I bet we'll be seeing Genealogy before too long.

So, anyone else take a peek at Fire Emblem Heroes?

I haven't done much, but so far it's pretty much not great, but not horribly offensive either. Lots of being able to wring money out of people, which is a shame, but it doesn't seem as egregious, at least not yet. Surely, it'll ramp up more as you progress through the story, but for now I can live with putting it down and picking it up later to keep going. I think I'll keep playing for now and see when I lose interest. The new artwork is pretty nice, though the new characters are pretty bland, likely because they won't have a chance to be fleshed out like characters in a real game would be able to.

Masa and I played it for Gamehater tonight. I will link the Youtube video once it's up.

I quickly got into an unwinnable situation because my starting characters couldn't handle Xander, which pressured me to cash in my free orbs earlier than I would have liked.

Very gacha. The strategy wasn't anything exciting. None of that characters I accumulated were all that exciting for me. All I can say is that I hope this inspires some people to try out the real games, which are so much better.

Here's that Gamehater episode.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw-TrcTqyz8

I have now actually played fire emblem heroes. My concerns were right on the money. Collecting heroes is fun at first, and could be the basis of a great game, but they instead chose to go down the standard gacha route and make a game that bashes you over the head to buy regular maintenance MTX. And it doesn't matter how much you spend now, in a few months time they'll have power creeped the heroes to the point that your current ones are garbage. Because that's how gacha games work. I'm only a few hours in and the depth is running out and I can already see the paywall coming up. 

It's a dumpster fire and a disgusting, consumer hostile, exploitative skinnerbox cash grab. I hope it fails so miserably that Nintendo execs wake up in cold sweat nightmares about it for years to come. 

But it'll probably make a billion dollars.


At least some of the art is nice. Though I'm not a fan of how they're treating some of the female character designs. Lyn's breasts went up two or three sizes, for example: 

FE7 design: 


FE Heroes: 

...And he dress hasn't grown a bit.

At this point, I don't consider us, the gamers, to be the target audience of Nintendo's mobile games. It's all about the shareholders and the critics. Nintendo is shitting out mobile abominations of their core franchises because it's easy money (because mobile gamers have no taste) and it gets those people off their back.

Personally, it baffles me how people got so upset about being asked to pay $10 for Super Mario Run. It's like they want to be speared with a harpoon.

The strategy seems to be put out a version of a franchise on mobile games and hopefully bait people in when the "real" version comes out on a proper Nintendo piece of hardware, I don't know how well that would work, but that seems to be it.

And yeah, I was stunned at how people were complaining that Mario Run cost 10 bucks for the whole shebang and they would've liked it better if it had micro-transactions instead. Last I read they had 5% turnaround on people who actually ended up buying the game, which sounds good, I think? I wonder how many of those were people whoa lready play video games anyway though.