Fire Emblem Fates Review · 12:05pm Nov 2nd, 2016
Hey, guys. Sorry there is not really a Critique Review this week. Real life has been kind of busy with the last few days. Especially this past week. WIth Halloween and the fact that I have a couple members on my team who are just awful to work with. And it’s caused me a lot of stress this week and it’s affected my ability to work on my reviews.
And I’m really sorry about that guys. I hate missing these reviews and I seem to be doing that a lot. And I’m really sorry.
However, I do want to do something this week, so I’ll be making a quick review I guess you could call it. It won’t be of a Fan Fiction, it will be about a game I recently played that I really didn’t end up enjoying. I’ll try to make it as fun as possible, but I’m literally writing this the day before.
Next week will be a Critique Review. We won’t skip it. You will get your Critique Review, I just ask that you be patient with me. Thank you so much for that. I hope you guys have a great day.
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Ever have something you really love. Something that you couldn’t live without. Something that gives your life meaning everyday. Like… I don’t know… Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. The best kind of Ice Cream. The kind of Ice Cream that puts a smile on my face until the RNG screws me over and causes me to start the whole damn chapter all over again.
But no matter how it does that, I can’t stay mad at it. Because it has a lot interesting characters, a good storyline, and even if it doesn’t have that, it at least is fun to play.
Now imagine that thing you love is set on fire, pissed on to put it out, stomped on, and then worn as a hat by a dick while he shows you photos of all the good times you had together.
That’s basically Fire Emblem: Fates, the newest installment to the long running Fire Emblem series.
You might remember that I actually liked Fire Emblem. I’d better. I decided a whole fucking month to it. But Fire Emblem: Fates is starting to make me question whether Fire Emblem was any good or not because this game is fucking atrocious.
I know what the official video game reviewing websites would say. 90/100! A-! 9/10! Best Fire Emblem Game to date.
Fuck them! They’re not me! And if the current slew of Feature Box disasters are any kind of proof, it’s that the masses aren’t always to be trusted as to what’s good and what’s not. I’m looking at you Madea movies!
But enough about that, let’s begin this review proper.
Our game starts well enough, you make your own avatar character, but within the first few seconds, I have a few eyebrow raises. For one, the main character's design is one of the most distracting things about him.
Is it me or does he look like a fucking vampire?! I can’t be the only one who sees this! Apparently, I am because when I look up the character, I can find no images of the character cosplaying Dracula, although it wouldn’t take much. Some fake fangs and there you go.
Yes, those be the ones, Luna. Though I hope you wash them before you give them to someone. That’s fucking disgusting.
Anyway, after making my distraction for the next several hours, I am thrown into a battlefield with absolutely no context. Great way to start off the game, game. It clear that I’m supposed to know who these characters are, what with the way the opening number just thrusts you into an open all out war without so much of a chance to put your pants on.
It’s as if the game had very little confidence in it’s opening that the developers were haunted with the thought of players turning off their 3ds’s before making the 5 minute mark. But whatever, maybe the rest of the game will make me forget about it.
Fortunately, it does, but not in the way I’d hoped.
Anyway, after that, we are introduced to the nation of Nohr. The main character, who I am naming Dracula (his actually name is Corrin for accuracy sake, but fuck it if I give a shit about this guy’s name) wakes up from a nightmare. Well, that’s probably the most cliche way to begin a story. So far I’m not exactly having a lot of faith in this story so far, but Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword did this as well, so I’m willing to let it slide.
We are introduced to our family. Our two older brothers, our little sister, a pair of tits
and our father, who is clearly not evil because… Well, fucking look at him. He’s so clearly not evil, that it’s so fucking obvious he’s not evil.
If you thought ‘well, that character kind of looks like he’d be the villain,’ congratulations, you are now officially smarter than the writers of this piece of shit. This character could not have been more obviously the villain if they stapled a big sign to his forehead saying ‘I’m the villain!’
Granted, out of several dozen Fire Emblem villains, only two of them have ever actually been good, but come fucking on guys, could you at least try and pretend that you don’t think your audience is stupid.
And keep in mind, we are still only in the first 20 minutes of the fucking game. I’m starting to wonder when they story is going to draw me in. I find myself enjoying it less and analyzing it more. I don’t play Fire Emblem to analyze the fuck out of it, I want to mindlessly spend my knights to their inevitable demise because I have the forward planning of a man whose brain only works while he’s running head first into a brick wall and his momentum is just fast enough to keep him from stopping in time. Forcing me to start the last 30 or so minutes over again for the umpteeth time that day.
Anyway, your father, named Garon (seriously, just name him Ganon for fuck’s sake) tells you about a couple of soldiers from the land of Hoshido who were captured trespassing on your turf. And he wants you to take them out.
And despite that he’s been raised in a society where the strong survive and the weak perish and all flowers and rainbows should be set on fire, Dracula decides that ‘Hey, this is kind of wrong to kill prisoners of war and all that.’
I realize why the story writers think that, but why the hell does Dracula think that? As we’ll soon see, he wasn’t exactly treated with a lot of morals in Nohr. But whatever, after one of his brothers, Leo, manages to think the same thing, despite him being older and killing more cute fuzzy bunnies, and fakes the deaths of the two prisoners before releasing them.
I guess this is suppose to make the children relatable, but all it does is make me question if Father’s Day is really awkward here.
Anyway, Ganon (I’m just calling him that now, it’s about as subtle) decides to send Dracula on mission with a violent prisoner who is known for snapping people’s necks because he’s in a good mood as a bodyguard for his son. And Dracula, being a brain dead idiot, decides to go with the mass murderer who is hiding a dagger behind his back.
The reason why they give that Dracula is such a trusting idiot is because he’s been locked away in a dungeon for several years and hasn’t been let out until recently. Fair enough, but as we see later in the game, he doesn’t ever fucking learn that when people are evil, they usually stay that way.
Naturally, he is betrayed and falls off a cliff. Well, that was bad, but at least it was short.
Wait? What?
A girl turns into a dragon and manages to save him. Although to be honest, it’s more fish than dragon.
Anyway, she saves us and takes us to the alternate world where no enemies can get in, but we can use as a base for whenever the hell we want. Oh, thank god, I was about to get invested.
The fish, named Lilith, tells us that Dracula is the only one who can save the world or some bullshit, like that. I realize they’ve done this in previous Fire Emblem games, but I just wish they wouldn’t make it so blatantly obvious with some prophecy or something.
Whatever.
Dracula wakes up in the land of Hoshido, where the queen is waiting for him with a fresh plate of cookies, some warm milk and lots of hugs and kisses. Oh, and you meet your two older brothers and two younger sisters. No tits though. Frankly, I was disappointed. I am known for my love of jerking off while playing Fire Emblem.
Anyway, it turns out the queen of Hoshido is your biological mother and tells you that you were kidnapped by the king of Nohr when you were just a child. Because of your return, the queen decides to throw a big party in your honor and smothers you with hugs and kisses and all the ice cream you could ever want. She’s so cartoonishly perfect and good and wonderful that naturally she dies within five minutes.
Oh, boy, Fire Emblem, way to keep me on my toes.
It turns out that the attack that killed Mother Teresa was orchestrated by the King Ganon.
This makes Dracula so angry about a mother that he knew for about half a day that he opens his seven chakras, transforms into the avatar state and goes Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan.
Oh, and he turns into a dragon, but that’s far less impressive.
In fact, even the game thinks this is completely unimpressive, because it’s never fucking brought up again. Oh, sure, after this chapter you can transform into an overpowered dragon whenever you want and the game is over barring 20 more hours of torment. It’s like unlocking Mewtwo as your starter Pokemon. Short of a tactical bombing, nothing can really pose that much of a challenge.
But as far as the plot goes, it doesn’t really make the most of it. He transforms once, loses his shit and then a character named Azura, who I am officially naming one of the worst Fire Emblem leading ladies since Micaiah from Radiant Dawn, gives him a magic stone that makes it all better and allows him to control his powers whenever he wants.
This isn’t all that uncommon in Fire Emblem, mind you. People turning into dragons is nothing new. And having stones that allow them to use that power isn’t something new either. But the main character having this ability, having it overpowered for many parts of the game, and then never bringing it up again in the plot, it makes me wonder why they even fucking did it.
Anyway, after that, we finally get to the part of the game where the main selling point sticks out. See, in Fates, you are given the choice by your two families to decide which nation you will fight for.
The nation of Hoshido, where you were loved and cared for by a mother who gave you cookies, took you into her home when you were ‘technically’ an enemy and healed your bleeding injuries, and used herself as a shield when you were attacked by a magic missile that caused her to die.
Or the nation of Nohr, where you were locked in a room for several years with no outside contact with anyone. Raised by a father who not only killed your biological father, but kidnapped you when you were a child. Erased your memory of your past life. Convinces you to murder enemy soldiers who have already surrendered. And within the past week has tried to kill you twice.
It’s like trying to decide between Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler.
I can only think of one reason why anyone would side with Nohr. Or should I say… two reasons!
I wonder if I should label this review NSFW?
And this is kind of what killed the game for me. Why the fuck would anyone pick fucking Nohr?! I don’t know about you, but I don’t go back to the man who tried to kill me twice within a short amount of time. I already don’t call or write my dad and he only tried to teach me about morals and shit like that. If Dracula went back to Nohr, that’d be a fucking awkward dinner conversation.
Dracula: So, about you trying to kill me the past week…
Ganon: Look, I was just trying to gain the Triforce of Power. You know how it is. I have priorities.
Dracula: And how about kidnapping me as a baby?
Ganon: What was I supposed to do? Send you back to your biological family? It was all the way over there.
Dracula: And what about the fact that you killed my biological mother?
Ganon: Look, she was a whore, okay?
Dracula: Why did I join you again?
So, the big selling point of the fucking game and they botch it up like fucking amateurs. I was hoping that we’d get to see a real dilemma here with both sides having equal and relatable motives and morals behind them. Making it difficult to side with one or the other. But no, the writer decide that it was too hard and decided to make it as clear cut as ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
‘But wait’, others might reply. “Your siblings are still good. So Nohr has to be good?”
Except, they’re not. They still blindly follow the murdering psychotic stomp all over a nation that did nothing wrong, whether you join them or not. The only decision you really make is how much bitching they do at you.
You realize I haven’t even mentioned the characters yet, because the enormous mass that is the story is such a fucking trainwreck that Metroid: Other M might have some competition.
From there, it’s a race to see which characters can be stupider. Will it be Hoshido and their inability to not trust the enemy who is trying to kill them? Or will it be Nohr who willingly go along with Ganon’s plan to leave Hoshido in ruins and all of it’s citizens dead before playing their magical McGuffin stone to kill him?
A few hours earlier would have been expedient, people! This is even more baffling since half the fucking story Dracula whines and complains about if he made the right choice or not, while he’s using the blood of innocents to polish his shoes.
Speaking of Dracula, I’m officially calling him the worst lord of any Fire Emblem game. Dracula’s a boring little shit. He’s so stupidly optimistic it makes me want to spit, he’s a crybaby about things that he could easily change, ‘but it’s too hard, mommy’, the only interesting thing about him is never explored and feels like it was put into the story last minute with no idea how it ties everything together, and overall, he’s an awful unit to use in your army.
Lord units, like Dracula and Ike, are supposed to be some of the strongest heroes in the game. They’d better fucking be since you have to keep them for every fight. But Dracula says he wants to be different by trying to be the worst at everything. No matter what class I ended up making him, by the end of the game, he was always one of my shittiest units, barely doing any damage, taking a fuck ton of damage and having more deaths in a day than a house of flies.
No, I won’t get over that. What the fuck Nintendo?!
The characters are some of the most generic, one note, gimmick characters in the history of the game. Fire Emblem has never been Shakespeare, yeah, but it’s been fucking something.
Here’s the perfectionist, here’s the lazy one, here’s the character that tries too hard, here’s the racist, here’s the stereotypical samurai, here’s the gay one. They are such one note characters that by the end of the game I didn’t give a shit about them and just went with the characters that had the highest stats and growth (insert boob joke here), which was good because the game is unforgivably difficult!
I know it’s normal for Fire Emblem games to have their RNG stacked against you, but in this game it seems like the developers went out of their way to make sure people had to buy as many replacement 3DS’s as possible, because the RNG is broken!
Many times I would attack my enemy with a 89 percent success rate and miss. Now you might be saying, ‘Well, there still is a chance. So it’s not that bad.’ And normally, I would agree with you. So why the fuck does it happen seven more times in a row at the exact same chance rate?!
In one battle, I was facing down the boss with a weaker character that I knew could use some EXP. So I cast a bunch of abilities to decrease the bosses hit rate down to 7 percent. “Okay,” I thought. “Time to gain some EXP.” I would attack the enemy and they would hit me. Of course they would. Well, at least I survived.
During the enemy’s turn they would attack, at the same 7 percent mind you, and they hit and killed the character, forcing me to start the whole fucking chapter again because the RNG decides to not actually show that it just added 50 extra points to that hit rate without telling you.
I’m not against an enemy having perfect aim. I played Fire Emblem Awakening Lunatic+ mode where the enemies have increased hit percentage or even will hit no matter what, but the game has the decency to tell you that ‘Yes, they are going to hit you no matter what.’ Fates seems to think that the way to make the game difficult is to handicap the player unfairly.
It’s not like Dark Souls where I can learn from my mistakes and come back more knowledgeable. This is like playing Dark Souls, but every time you die, you have to cut off another one of your fingers.
And just to add to the pile of bullshit that is being thrown at me, the game turns into a fucking dating sim and a town building mini-game for half of it. The town building has very little variety, has very little perks outside of shops where you can purchase equipment and weapons. But weapons have no durability and never break, so what’s the point of new weapons?
I had 50 billion gold and nothing to spend it on. Except healing staves which do cost half a dollar and you get 50 uses out of them. I barely made a dent in my wallet by just stocking up on 100 healing staves and nothing else. My money just crying in a corner hoping that it gets some use out of it. New buildings and upgrades are given out for free, so the money is useless there.
Upgrades for weapons no longer accept cash but instead 1 of 16 stones that you have to collect, which is the most time wasting busywork you could ever put in a video game. The game tries to have crafting elements, but all it is is you take sword 1 and copy of sword 1 and make bigger sword 1 that does slightly more damage, but you’ll barely notice because your characters are so flimsy you’ll be restarting the chapter either way.
To get stones, you have to go to other people’s cities online and beg the locals for the stone you want. If they don’t have it, you have to go to another city and repeat the process until you find it. Give them all to the blacksmith who will upgrade your weapon, which as we’ve established is like taping a piece of shit to a spear, and then do it again if you want to tape two pieces of shit to your spear.
It’s something I took one look at and never used again, because the villains are dropping their weapons like they were fucking surrendering and like I said, weapons never break. But there is a drawback to unbreakable weapons.
The more powerful weapons, i.e. the weapons you would actually want to be unbreakable, punish you for using them. They decrease your stats. Your very important, life saving, chapter completing stats. And it happens every time you use them. And you’ll always be using them because you are constantly outnumbered and will be attacked anywhere from 3 to 6 times in a turn, meaning that each time you use that weapon you will do less damage and take more damage.
Meaning you’ll have to start the chapter over again when you inevitably lose that character.
The weaker weapons, however, have no penalty, so I just picked up one of the weakest weapons in the game and stuck with that the entire game and got through it just fine. Making the powerful weapons that can topple gods have as much use as money in this game.
Like I said, the building your own town aspect has nothing to offer since you’re given very few choices and there’s nothing that adds to it. Oh, I forgot. You can get attacked by other players. Fucking great. Let me just call up the no friends I have.
And then there’s the dating sim. If the boob lady was any indication, they’re trying to make Fire Emblem a lot more sexual than it has ever been. With some very questionable design choices for the ladies, making me think that this game was developed by a bunch of 13 year old boys. I realize that Awakening did this to, but it didn’t push it’s boobs in our faces.
There are some couples with such little chemistry that it make me want to give them a chemistry playset, just so they’d have some! I ended up taking the maid girl with the personality trait of Goofy in a dress, because if I was going to play Fire Emblem Fates, I might as well get into the spirit of things and treat women like a slave with a pair of bouncy things.
That said, there were a few characters I did like. I liked the younger sister on Hoshido, though being the voice actress of Buttercup helped. I liked the youngest sister of Nohr, you know, before she died.
That’s another thing, there are so many deaths in this game. And none of them necessary or even good. Out of the eight main character deaths in the story, only 2 I cared about. One I was genuinely sad. The other was for another reason entirely.
See, I was leveling up this lad to become my main thief unit. Steal items and get good weapons for me. I was drowning him in EXP when I came across a chapter where he fell down a cliff and died. In a cutscene! A fucking cutscene! As in, this is part of the actual game!
I assumed he’d just come back and he’d be fine, but no, he never did. He was dead. I used so much EXP on him to try and get him strong and the game just slapped me in the face for doing so. I only learned later that this was actually a moral choice system, if you do certain things, you can save him. Problem is, I didn’t even know I was making a choice. It was never hinted at and it’s never been in any previous Fire Emblem game. And even if it was, it was at the beginning of the game instead of halfway through it, and it made it clear what you were doing instead of being completely vague!
The other deaths aren’t much better with characters I barely care about or are barely in the story to begin with. And every single one of them makes Dracula burst into tears like a little bitch. Jesus, I don’t care about these characters. Why should you?!
I haven’t even gotten to half of the story’s problems. Or half of the problems with the gameplay. I haven’t mentioned how the plot is so fucking predictable it makes Celestia raising the sun look like the most original thing in the universe. With betrayals that are so poorly integrated, you’d swear the writer was just pulling it out of his ass. And the fact that they had the gall to charge $80 for a 40 dollar game.
This isn’t like Pokemon, where you can only catch a certain type of Pokemon in a certain game, but the game itself is largely unchanged.
No, in Fire Emblem Fates, you only get a third of the story per game. Meaning that all the plot threads and the over arching story that connects them all together and is suppose to make it a coherent plot is cut up so that anybody who wants to get the whole picture is forced to pay another 40 bucks to get it.
And the payoff isn’t even that good with a incomprehensible narrative that makes Fire Emblem fanfiction feel like Ender’s Game by comparison.
To be fair to the games, they are long games. My first playthrough took me 20 hours. Not counting restarts. But you don’t get points for it if you’re boring and padded as fuck, because you’re just making more boring.
There is no reason this game should have been three games! Here’s how to fix it! Get rid of the moral choice between the two countries altogether. Have us forced to make the sensible choice. Through the course of the story have us convince our siblings we grew up with and the pair of tits that Ganon is evil and then kill Ganon, cutting out the whole Revolutions plot thread, because that’s a can of idiocy that I dare not open.
Overall, I hated Fates and all it has done to the Fire Emblem franchise. It was a complete success with everyone and turned the series into a series of Waifu Wars that will span the test of time until we finally have to give Fire Emblem the lethal injection. It is Nintendo, I’d say we got at least 12 more games before that happens.
Here’s to holding out for Fire Emblem: Xtreme Beach Volleyball Edition.
It's all cool, man. Take your time, let your stress levels come down, and pick up things from there; the last thing we want to see is you burn yourself out.
Will do; I am absolutely killing a thirty page Crusade paper, and if all goes well I should be done by tomorrow.
I'm pretty sure some people have accused me of that when writing God Empress, on both sides of the crossover.
Image is busted, so I can't see for myself. Sorry about that.
Because Social Darwinism is easy to pick apart, even if the writers don't realize that they should be writing from the characters POV, not their own.
You know you've got a problem when even the game thinks it's not all that impressive.
Also, I imagine during this time there is some actual gameplay like what you described in January? Because this sounds more like a traditional RPG than the tactical strategy game I've come to expect from Fire Emblem.
I honestly don't know. Besides your two reason, they don't really have a lot going for them; they don't have charismatic characters (like the Fire Nation), interesting character designs (like the Chaos Space Marines/Warriors of Chaos), or sympathetic outlooks on life twisted by evil (like Mister Freeze). And they didn't even give you cookies.
Well, that's not right. Your main character should be one of the bigger badasses out there, so viewers don't think "Why are we following this guy instead of the charismatic walking tank over there who eats dragons for breakfast?"
If he had a decent dilemma or backstory, maybe, but as you have explained he does not, so he falls far short of audience expectations.
Well, that's annoying.
Sorry to see one of your favorite franchises go this way. Hopefully, someone will gain some sense and the next installment will have better selling points/plot/characters/mechanics.
Have a nice day.
This makes me glad I skipped this game. I guess I can chalk up Awakening as another "Game That Was So Good It Ruined the Franchise," right up there with Super Mario 64, Resident Evil 4, and Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
And he was never heard from again...