Confessions of a Lizard Girl: Fire Emblem Heroes and the Curse of the Gacha
Ever since I got back into it a few months ago, I’ve played a lot of Fire Emblem Heroes. I’ve played Heroes over breakfast, while watching Star Trek, on the train, waiting in the doctor’s office, and so on, usually just for a few minutes at a time, but all those small sessions add up. I’ve even played a few hours of the game for its own sake, like a real video game, when I get particularly absorbed in fiddling with my skills or the tactics of a hard fight.
Fire Emblem Heroes is free-to-play with optional (for a certain definition of the word) in-app purchases, but I haven’t spent a lot of money on it yet, more because I don’t have much in the bank than any notable self-control on my part. If not cold hard cash, Fire Emblem Heroes is undoubtedly the game I’ve spent the most time on recently. When I decided I wanted to start writing again, and to start with games criticism specifically, Heroes stood out as the natural choice.
The only problem with that idea is that it’s hard to write about Fire Emblem Heroes. Specifically, it’s hard to praise it. It’s not that I don’t have anything good to say about the game. In fact, I have a lot of praise I could give for Heroes. The trouble is that once I move from simple “I like this” statements to think about why I like certain parts of the game, things get weird. The fact is that Fire Emblem Heroes is a game designed around getting me to spend the price of some multiple other video games on an incredibly small chance to get certain Fire Emblem characters, and it becomes impossible to ignore this fact the more you analyze the game. It’s not an unexpected design philosophy — this is a gacha game, after all, but I underestimated just how far the ethos extended into the design of the game, and how much it makes me feel like a dupe, instead of a player, when I think about it.
In the last paragraph, you read the phrase “gacha game.” If you’ve lived a more virtuous life than mine, you might have no idea what that means. If you’re interested, here is an article with an in-depth explanation that just so happens to talk about Heroes as well, but I’ll give you the short version if you don’t want to click away. In a gacha game, you put an in-game currency (often bought with real-world money), into a kind of digital slot machine and receive something random in return. These random items, characters, monsters, or whatever else assist you in doing video gamey stuff. In Heroes, for example, you get random characters from across the Fire Emblem games, and use them as your soldiers in strategic combat similar to what you’d expect from the mainline games in the franchise. Gacha games combine a core mechanic that’s suspiciously similar to gambling with all the money-grabbing tricks that mobile games have developed over the years, and often add in the brand loyalty and enthusiasm that comes with a long running media franchise like Fire Emblem or Fate Stay Night, making for a very lucrative genre that’s only getting more popular.
I’m no stranger to gacha games, but Fire Emblem Heroes is the only one I’ve been this invested in. Starting with my introduction to gacha games, which was Love Live, I’ve played Puzzle & Dragons, Fate/Grand Order, and Granblue Fantasy in addition to Fire Emblem Heroes. At my peak, I was playing three of these games at once, though that didn’t last for long. I’ve been slowly deleting my various gacha games off my phone, and now only P&D and FEH, as they’re called, are left, and I only open Puzzle and Dragons occasionally to look at the art of my monster collection. For all intents and purposes, Fire Emblem Heroes is the only gacha game I still play, and the one I’ve gotten the most into.
Why Heroes, you might ask? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, and I don’t like my conclusions. I think I like Fire Emblem Heroes so much because it’s the most moderate of all the gacha games I’ve played. At some point in every other gacha I hit a wall made of slim chances and money, but in Heroes I feel like I can work with. A combination of free rolls and certain gameplay mechanics make me feel like I don’t need to drop hundreds of dollars into the gacha every time they release a new unit just to keep playing. To a certain extent, my results support that feeling. I have a good roster of heroes, with which I’ve been able to best most of the single-player modes up to the hardest difficulty, Infernal, as well as compete in some of the multiplayer modes at an alright level. All without spending that much money, although I’m in no hurry to calculate exactly how much the total is, either.
So, for a gacha game, Fire Emblem Heroes is pretty reasonable. Does that seem like real praise to you? Because it doesn’t to me. Everything positive I could say about the game sounds like that. Everything comes out as “Good, for a gacha,” or “Not as bad as other games like it.” I praise Heroes for holding back a little bit, for essentially pulling its punches. I don’t feel like I’m extollintg the virtues of something I like so much as making excuses for something I’m stuck with, and there’s always this nagging feeling in the back of my head that I should know better.
Here’s an example. Like many free-to-play games, Fire Emblem Heroes has a stamina system, where you spend points to do things in the game and have to wait for them to replenish if you don’t have enough. I like the way Heroes handles its stamina system: instead of having it increase with a player level like many other games, you get a flat 99 maximum from the start. It removes the need for early-game grinding to get your stamina pool up to a manageable size while still giving you a decent amount to work with. But wait, you might ask, aren’t stamina systems just in these kinds of games to keep you playing often? And I’d say, yeah, of course they are, but this one’s less intrusive.
Here’s another example. Fire Emblem Heroes’ has a Skill Inheritance system that you can use to transfer the skills of one unit to another. One side effect of this system is that it makes certain units of lower rarities just as desirable, if not more desirable in some cases, than their max-rarity counterparts. Even if you get one of those coveted five-star units, it likely doesn’t come out of the box with a full set of skills, weapons, and special abilities. So you use Skill Inheritance to take the best skills off of your more common units and give them to your favorites. This makes certain lower-rarity units that have access to powerful skills, like Hinata’s Fury 3 or Odin’s Moonbow, really good units to get, even if they aren’t the highest rarity or most powerful characters. So sometimes, when you get a four or three-star unit out of the gacha, you’re gonna be pretty happy, which is good because you’re gonna be getting a four or three-star unit 94% of the time you roll the gacha (Fire Emblem Heroes, unlike some other gacha games, openly displays its rarity rates), and no amount of supplementary systems is gonna change those really bad odds that form the basis of the entire game.
The part of me that likes Fire Emblem Heroes is not the rational, thinking part of my brain. It’s the lizard girl who loves no two things more on earth than anime-style art and making intellectually questionable decisions. Remember when we did just four rolls and we got Ike and Ninian, she asks? Wasn’t that cool as hell? What if we got that kind of roll again? Let’s just try it one more time, the new units are from Genealogy of the Holy War!
Of course it was cool, lizard girl-me, but winning once at a broken system doesn’t make the system any less broken, or change the fact that most rational criteria and several moral ones as well, I probably shouldn’t be engaging it.
I’ve always taken the gacha part of gacha games for granted. I wanted to play a rhythm game, or I thought the art was cool, and I dealt with the gacha afterwards. I don’t think I can put it aside any more. Every criticism or wincing praise I have of Fire Emblem Heroes can get traced back to the gacha, and the monetization scheme that comes with it. They influence the entire design of the game, and I really do not like the effects. The door has been opened, and I can’t go back, and someday soon I’m going to have to decide whether I keep buying (ha!) into this system, or whether I find something less difficult to do with my time and money.
It won’t be the last time I make this kind of decision, either. More video games are styling themselves as services you continually pay for instead of discrete artistic experiences, and with that shift comes new monetization schemes that look a lot like what goes on in Fire Emblem Heroes. Lootboxes in particular seem to be western games’ choice of gambling-adjacent mechanic, accounting for “a quarter of all digital revenue for PC games” in 2016. In 2017, they’re the games discourse topic du jour thanks to their appearances in Forza 7 and Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, two games that tie the smoothest player experiences to a hearty lootbox buy-in. It’s not a good system, on so many levels, and although I’ve always taken it for granted whenever it’s popped up, I have to start factoring it into my assessment of whether I should play, or keep playing, a game.
Let’s end with one final confession: as I wrangled this article into shape, I discovered some things I like about Fire Emblem Heroes that aren’t undermined by the fact that it has a gacha. I like training and building up my units, creating good skill sets for them, and testing them out in little tactical battles that take maybe five minutes at most. If Fire Emblem Heroes was just that, with no gacha, then I’d call it a great game. But it isn’t, and so it’s a good game, for a gacha game. Does that mean I keep playing? I don’t know yet, I’ll need a little more time to decide. What I can say for sure, is that I haven’t played today.
