Fire Emblem Heroes feels like the ultimate crossover comic book for a Nintendo universe full of heroes and villains. And it could not have come at a better time for the long-running, turn-based strategy series. After years of niche status, Fire Emblem is in the middle of a renaissance since 2013’s successful FE Awakening on Nintendo 3DS. The new free-to-play mobile game appears to be a faithful experience, but one that uses random selection mechanics, called Gacha, as motivation for players to build an unstoppable FE dream team.
The mobile debut of Fire Emblem uses the same tried-and-true battle language of the series, but it makes a few changes too. Hardcore fans will recognize the familiar weapon triangle, a series mainstay that uses a rock, paper, scissors system to determine which weapons dominate in an engagement (sword are strong against axes, axes beat spears, and spears get a damage boost versus swords). It's an elegant system that can always be found at the lower right of the screen. Every skirmish takes place on a single screen map, so you can position your troops and attack using a single hand while you’re riding the bus or train. The smaller battlefields appear much simpler at first than the larger ones we’ve seen on the 3DS, but they feel engineered for quicker turn-based matches on the go.
Right from the intro movie, you can see how much FE Heroes wants to re-imagine the series to work on a smartphone. The tone and direction of the first cutscene feel similar to the same colorful, animated style used for the 3DS games. The story setup is a familiar too, one where two rival factions, the Emblian Empire and the Askran kingdom, are at war. This time around you play the role of a powerful summoner who can pull heroes from different worlds into this Fire Emblem game.
Relationship management and the ability to bear children have taken a back seat in FE Heroes, but it still manages to feel like an authentic FE product. We were told that longtime series developer Intelligent Systems led the making of FE Heroes with assistance from Nintendo and DeNA -- the mobile studio the Kyoto-based company aligned with to create mobile games back in March 2015.
While losing the ability to play matchmaker and create unbeatable offspring is a bummer, FE Heroes does an admirable job of fusing the deep turn-based decision making with the simple interface of smartphones. In and out of battle, FE Heroes uses easy-to-learn mechanics to carefully position soldiers, level up their individual abilities, and gain the upper hand on your foes in the battlefield. Battles require stamina, but you earn back units of energy fairly quickly. FE Heroes has the normal, hard, and lunatic difficulty modes and each one requires a higher stamina investment and yield greater rewards.
Heroes have some slight alterations but compare well to the previous appearances in 3DS FE games. A party consists of four heroes, and every one has three ability slots: one for a special attack, one defensive ability, and a passive one on the field. Each one also has beautifully detailed portrait art that is much higher quality than the squat, chibi-style art you have to watch during battle animations. Witnessing these mini-heroes fight is probably the ugliest part of this FE. It is important note is that characters do not stay permanently dead if they perish in battle, likely because of the way you can summon random characters using in-game currency.
As a crossover game FE Heroes taps into a large selection of mighty warriors, powerful mages, and cameos by legendary champions, but it comes with a potential risky system that uses in-game funds. The ability to summon heroes depends on whether you have a healthy stock of special orbs, a currency rewarded to you for winning battles and fulfilling other objectives -- like completing specific monthly quests or winning other special challenge-based contests.
This is where FE Heroes’ Gacha system comes into play. Typically, gacha-style systems are built around a gambling component, where players pay in-game currency (or spend actual money) for a shot at a random character from a large pool of available heroes. In FE Heroes, each character is ranked in a three to five star system, where five star characters have a high set of stats that affect their performance. Paying five orbs gives you a chance to randomly summon one hero of a potential pool of five slots -- the color elements of each slot is randomly selected.
You could just summon one hero and leave, but Nintendo has implemented a system where it makes more sense to buy heroes in bulk. The second, third, and fourth heroes pulled consecutively from the same pool are offered at a discounted rate of four orbs a piece. If you go for the last remaining character pull, you’ll only pay three orbs for it. Then, you start the process again at the cost of five orbs.
Since the summon system picks heroes randomly you can get duplicate characters, but they can be fused together to increase their stats. You’ll have no problem making room for a big stockpile of heroes either, since you can collect up to 200 warriors from the outset. Each character can level up using special materials to learn new abilities, get access to upgraded weapons, and more. If you miss out on a five star pull, the draw system is designed to slightly increase the drop rate in your favor until you finally get one. Afterwards, it resets back to default values.
Orbs have a few other uses in FE Heroes. You can spend them to revive a party that has wiped out near the end of a battle, or restock currency you need to participate in Arena battles. The systems all makes sense, but it hinges on having a healthy income of orbs. It demoed fine, but we couldn’t get a sense of how generous the rewards in FE Heroes was during our time with it. We saw an average reward of one orb per battle in the early game matches. If you’re the impatient type, Nintendo has built-in app purchase where you can buy them using real money. We’d advise checking the FE Heroes wiki once it is released on February 2 for iPhone and Android to get a better idea of how this systems works.
Overall, Fire Emblem Heroes appears to have the strategy and upgrade paths that fit right in with the series’ prior console and portable games. It stars epic characters in a fight to restore peace to a war torn kingdom. And, ultimately, it looks like a good mobile implementation of what makes FE so good, without feeling too light on content. If you have time and access to an internet connection (yes, it is required to play) FE Heroes can keep you busy with matches that move at a brisk pace. The biggest question mark is whether this free-to-play game is dishing out enough orbs to keep the character economy flowing. If it does, then the game built around it should be satisfying enough for fans and newcomers alike to build a powerful team.
Jose Otero is an Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat. You can follow him on Twitter.
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