Review: Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright & Conquest (3DS)
Your biological family and the family you actually grew up with are at war. It’s a mess so big it takes three different games to sort out.
Fire Emblem is a series that has enjoyed little renown in the mainstream but is well beloved by the cult of gamers who have followed the series for a long time. Published by Nintendo themselves, the series is a turn-based strategy game in the vein of something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea, with grid-based movement and positioning and a basic rock-paper-scissors weapon type system influencing how units match up on the field.
What’s interesting about Fire Emblem Fates however is that while the title applies to the world and characters presented within it, there are actually three separate games under the blanket title of Fates. These are subtitled Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation. Essentially presented as three different answers to a major question posed early in the game’s plot, each of the three games splits off in wildly different directions and tells a different tale of two countries at war and a young royal caught between both sides.
A second half of this review will come later in the form of Revelation, but as I’m only one man who has only a finite amount of time and patience for playing three very similar games in succession (and having to go back and level up my main into a powerhouse over and over) I’ll be covering Birthright and Conquest today. The first two of the three released stories, Birthright and Conquest play very much as mirrors of each other, with Revelation originally releasing a little later as a third and arguably more canon storyline covering both.
Designed to appeal to different people in different ways, Birthright reflects the more modern incarnation of Fire Emblem that appeared in Fire Emblem: Awakening. Namely the ability to grind what are essentially random battles to level your units up — apparently a point of contention among longstanding fans of the earlier games, where there was no time to grind between major story points and therefore one had to be careful about how they completed maps to avoid letting their army become underpowered by the game’s end. Conquest, designed more for the older fans, ignores these grinding opportunities and tasks players with making sure their army’s blades don’t rust on the road to, well, conquest, demanding one’s attention to make sure everybody they need is well levelled lest they find themselves in an encounter they simply are not adequately geared or levelled for.
But if you’ve read this far and you don’t yet know why Fates requires three separate games to tells its stories you’re probably wondering what the premise is — how did these bloodsuckers justify three games for one plot?
The story centres around two major kingdoms and their smaller surrounding allied or subjugated countries. These kingdoms, Hoshido to the East and Nohr to the West, live in a state of cold war, with the violent and brutal Nohr pushing against Hoshido’s borders but unable to press into their territory and truly invade. The main character, a customisable avatar with their own personality and whose default name is the gender neutral “Corrin” (although the player is free to name them anything they like) is sent by the king of Nohr, a ruthless tyrant by the name of Garon, to poke at the border of Hoshido, and after one mess leads to another they find themselves captured by Hoshidan forces who reveal that Nohr’s royalty is in fact not their own blood but an adopted family they were raised into as a baby after being a kidnapped. The Hoshidan royal family is thus Corrin’s biological family.
Several big messes later and the game presents a moment where each family demands Corrin’s allegiance as the main forces clash, and herein lies the point where the three games diverge. In Birthright Corrin accepts the call of their biological family, siding with Hoshido and vowing to end Nohr’s aggression and topple the tyrant who rules it even if it means coming to blows with the family they have grown up with. In Conquest Corrin makes the other choice, choosing nurture over nature and siding with the only family they’ve known over their blood relatives and working to change Nohr’s brutal aggression from within, hoping to change the King’s mad lust for power from a position closer to him, even though this means declaring war on his own blood.
While part of me recoils at the thought of these requiring entirely separate games when I’ve seen things pull this multiple storyline option in the past, I was pleased to see that both sides of this story at least feel like complete games in their own right. They’re not incredibly long experiences but both have clean arcs that come to satisfactory conclusions with enough game across them that I didn’t feel ripped off by it. And with that in mind, I must admit that this style of storytelling is very charming to me — a major choice and the wildly divergent paths that spring from it is the sort of thing people talk about Telltale doing, let alone a series as steeped in tradition as Fire Emblem.
The gameplay of the series follows a very traditional tactics interface. Units move about on a grid with different types assigned different weapons and capabilities — archers are excellent at striking down flying units. Flying units get around easier than anyone else and can exploit openings in enemy formations. The heavy swordsman and cavalry units do exactly what you think they would, and various other types fill out the roster, keeping your lineup good and diverse — important when you don’t know how a situation might change halfway through a battle. In the middle of this, as I said above, is a rock-paper-scissors weapon system wherein one type beats another, but is weak to a third. The most common example of this is that swords are weak against polearms, which are in turn weak to axes, which loop around to be weak to swords. In these sets there also exist special weapons which reverse the typing, specifically designed to catch both the player off guard and also the AI as it prioritises who attacks who on its turn.
When two units clash on the field a small cutscene plays, showing the units involved in the skirmish trading blows, special effects activating and any support actions such as an ally blocking a follow-up attack and negating the damage that would have been dealt. While neat, these drag battle out by a significant amount and I pretty quickly turned the animations off, which instead uses a simplistic animation of the two units slamming into each other to indicate they’ve clashed, along with the symbols for any special skill or critical action. It’s much faster and once you’ve had your fill of the battle animations I’d highly recommend turning them off for the sake of brevity, otherwise it turns some of the longer slogs into outright tedium.
Aside from that the game offers the player the fairly significant choice of unit permadeath — what this means is that if a unit falls in battle they’re either injured to the point they can no longer fight (generally for characters who still need to have a presence in cutscenes) or they’re outright killed. Either way, they disappear from the player’s roster and can’t participate in any further battles. Obviously this adds a lot of tension to the rougher battles of the game, as surviving to the end with everyone still alive becomes a significant challenge, especially during Conquest where the player is not given the opportunity to grind levels and make characters overpowered or help the ones falling behind keep up.
For those more interested in the story than the challenge the game has a scathingly named ‘casual mode’ where characters defeated in battle merely ‘retreat’ and are available in the next round. I’m not afraid to say I made use of this during Conquest’s brutal campaign — even without the threat of death I had to work hard to stop many of my units from falling behind so far that they were useless to me anyway. Going even further, for those who don’t want to think hard about battle at all, there was also a ‘phoenix mode’ wherein characters who have fallen will return to the battle at full HP in the next turn. Frankly if you manage to get a game over that isn’t on a non-standard loss condition in this mode you don’t deserve your gamer card and I’m going to have to revoke it.
Turning to units, the characters who you work with and against are mostly mirrored across the games, with major allies on one side often taking the role of boss units on the other. This presents a good look at these characters from both sides, which by the end of things does give you a stronger sense of who they are. There’s a specific point where an ally character in one campaign puts down a troublesome foe who was begging for mercy. The main character remarks that their ally with their cold, ruthless demeanour would have been frightening to oppose. Sure enough, on the other side’s playthrough they play a role as a particularly rough boss battle.
To the subject of characters, outside of the series’ fairly standard tactics gameplay the general flow of play also includes a customisable castle where characters congregate between battles. Using points earned through battling and some street-pass related activity the player can build and upgrade features of the castle, providing them access to a range of amenities — a weapon shop for example, or a lottery stall you can play between each battle stage in order to win a new weapon of varying quality. Much like the Disgaea series’ hub zones, this provides a much appreciated break from the steady plod of careful combat, and after a particularly gruelling encounter you’ve had to reload a couple of times to ensure no units ended up dead it’s nice to just chill out a little and tinker with the theme of your castle, stick a couple of statues down and maybe see if the blacksmith looks nicer sitting beside the staff shop instead of the weapon shop.
On top of this is the other major part of the downtime outside of battle — supports. Think of these as the social links of Fire Emblem, assuming a Persona analogy isn’t just as meaningless to you. Basically, by fighting beside one another (literally, the most common way to build relationship values is either standing next to each other while fighting or occupying the same tile using the pair-up system) units become friendlier, granting an increase in stats when they fight together as well as unlocking a series of small scenes showing the units getting to know each other.
It’s a sim element to be sure, and it only goes deeper after the success of Fire Emblem Awakening’s second generation element — namely that as the plot progressed through Awakening characters whose affection had risen to the highest rank would produce children who would ultimately join as playable units with some attributes influenced by their parent units. Fates brings the system back for round two, providing the player access to a wider array of characters you can make use of and influence the hair colour of. The reasoning behind fully grown second generation characters being able to join their parents in battle is given a fairly minute handwave and then no further attention is drawn to it throughout the games. Honestly, that kind of irritated me, as it really smelled of the developers just finding any excuse to use a system Awakening was lauded for, even if it didn’t actually fit the situation or world as well as it did in Awakening. That said, the second generational characters contained some of my most and least liked characters in Fates in general, and offered some surprisingly nuanced or, dare I say it, progressive characters for a series that still looks like it belongs on the SNES.
In general, for both characters and plot, I felt like I got more out of the Conquest storyline than I did the Birthright one, owing to Conquest’s more shades-of-grey approach to its world. The idea of joining what are essentially the ‘bad guys’ in order to both save the good guys who have no choice but to work with them and also to help turn said ‘bad guys’ on to a better path offered a lot more complexity in its scenarios than Birthright’s comparatively black and white worldview. To spell out the two differences clearly, by the time I’d finished Birthright I was kind of pushing myself to hit the end, and it had made me want to go back and play Awakening, a game I feel generally did what Birthright does but better. Conversely, I almost couldn’t put Conquest down — every opportunity I’d sit down, flip out my 3DS, and get to work burning through a little more story and chewing through those support scenes, trying to pair off my best units to produce the best offspring units I could like my army was just purebred livestock.
Living in a PAL region country I ended up snagging the complete edition of Fates, which contains all three storylines in the single game cartridge, and it’s definitely how I’d recommend anyone acquire the game if they’re going to get their mitts on it. While the individual storylines serve fine as standalones, they shine much brighter when you’ve got the points of reference the other stories provide.
I’ve mentioned that there’s a third story in the form of Revelation a few times in this review, and while I’d have liked to review the whole lot together at once I quite frankly didn’t have it in me to burn through the game a third time in a row so soon after purchasing it, so I’m leaving a bit of a grace period to cool off on the Fire Emblem before I get into it feeling more refreshed. If you’re not already opening a spare tab to find out what’s different about Revelation when Birthright and Conquest seem to take two sides of a fairly binary choice, Revelation’s plot is the literal take a third option trope — the player character refuses to side with either of their families, charting their own course while each side brands them a traitor.
I can honestly say I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into that when I get back to it, and any game that makes me want to essentially play it three times through for the sake of fully experiencing it has to be doing something right.
