[Impressions] Fire Emblem Heroes

One year ago, Fire Emblem Heroes had just released on Android and iOS. I rushed to download the game on my smartphone and what I found was an incredible game from a great franchise. However, due to storage problems, I had to eventually uninstall the game. Fast forward one year and here we are: Fire Emblem Heroes installed once again, my progress saved in my My Nintendo account, I am ready to pick up where I left. After playing more than I dare to admit this past weekend, I bring you my Impressions on this fantastic entry.

What is Fire Emblem Heroes and how different is it from the recent Nintendo 3ds games? For starters, there’s no grand story that sprawls across hours that leaves you enchanted with the characters you meet along the adventure. Instead, this game mixes characters from a wide range of games in the series, such as Marth of the very first entry in the series or Corrin from the recent Fire Emblem Fates. It also adds a couple of brand new characters but those, at least for me, are forgettable, or rather, they just give some purpose and reasoning as to why all these characters from different worlds and timelines are meeting in a common space out of nowhere. In short, the story that exists is mostly just a justification as to why all these heroes are in the same place at the same time.

But how different is the gameplay here? In Heroes, the gameplay is centered around small maps. Each map is a short and self-contained engagement between your party (up to four characters) against, most of the time, an opposing party of the same size. A large number of these maps are a walk in a park with a straightforward objective of “defeat all the enemies” but if you want to be challenged, you can entertain yourself with the more difficult modes (we’ll get to that in a bit). As with the main games, there’s a triangle chart of which weapon best which that keeps you on your toes in tougher maps so that you do not make careless moves and send your troops to their death.

Getting back to the different modes available, fortunately there’s a lot to sink your teeth into. On one hand there’s the story, which provides a steady income of premium currency, and guides you in your first steps with the game, but on the other hand there’s plenty of options such as the Training Tower, which includes maps with ever-increasing difficulty, or the Special Maps, which push you to the limit in order to be completed. There’s also the possibility to fight against the teams of other players (it’s not direct player vs. player, you fight another player’s team controlled by the game). What this means is that the game offers options to all kinds of players: if you want to steamroll your opponents then there’s plenty of choice, but the game is more than ready to kick your ass in the Tempest Trials and Special Maps.

There are some slight RPG elements available, mainly with the leveling of your characters and unlocking of skills with points earned by using those characters in battle, but beyond that there’s not much more. You can also use an in-game currency to level up your characters several levels. For example, after you summon new characters, this is the perfect way to get them up to snuff and ready to join your team in the battlefield since they are summoned at level 1.

As with other free-to-play games, there’s a premium currency available (it comes in the form of Orbs). These are your precious resources to try your luck with summoning heroes, which can either result in a 5-star Lucina or a disappointing 3-star Arthur. As usual with this type of games, you’ll have to rely on luck to get your favorite characters but, thankfully, this game is rather generous with characters’ appearance rates. Recovering the story topic, it plays a major role in the premium currency economy. Since you get at least one Orb upon first-time completion of each story map and as you complete those you unlock higher difficulty versions which reset the Orb reward, this means the story is an amazing free source of premium currency. In other words, you can get a really good amount of free Orbs by simply playing through the story and later coming back to more challenging versions of those maps. Beyond the story, daily and monthly quests also award Orbs and other precious items for completing certain maps or tasks, which means, the more you play the more Orbs you can get and the more heroes you can summon.

On a final note, between the different modes and wealthy cast of beloved characters available, you won’t get bored playing Fire Emblem Heroes. The game sounds and plays beautifully and it shows across the board that this is a Nintendo game, that is, a polished product that clearly has the player enjoyment in mind instead of hiding the fun content behind cheap tricks to make the purchase of premium currency the obvious option. In Heroes, you get plenty of content to have fun with, a varied range of options to obtain premium currency by simply playing the game, and, most importantly the devotion of the developers to make this game worth your time and something that you want to come back to.

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