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11-15-21 01:21 PM
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11-15-21 01:21 PM
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zanderlex
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Six months ago, I didn't even like Fire Emblem at all, but here we are with it now being one of my 3 most favorite game series of all time. Some people know that I quickly fell in love with Three Houses, so much that I started buying a ton of Fire Emblem stuff, including every single one of the 3DS games. I really wanted to try out some of the "older" games but because I was so invested in Three House and Warriors, I didn't have a chance to until recently.

In September, I finally decided that it was time for me to branch off and try one of the 3DS games. The only problem was that this was my first time ever looking into the 3DS games, so I had no idea what Awakening, Fates, and Echoes were even like at all. So I ended up doing a lot of research so that I could figure out which of the 3DS games I wanted to play first. This was kind of like what happened with Three Houses when I was researching the best house to join, but this ended up being harder.

I ended up spending more than a week looking up everything I could about the games. I read reviews and watched gameplay footage, I read character profiles, and I even ended up taking note of how long each game was. In the end, I went with Fates based on a combination of characters and story, though that came back to haunt me later on because I had to do even more research to figure out which of the games within Fates I was going to play.

Going into the 3DS era of Fire Emblem games, there was only one character that I really knew anything about, and that was Camilla. Before getting into these games, I had already put in many hours into Fire Emblem Heroes and Camilla was the one that I summoned the most. I got her like three or four times in total, so I ended up learning a lot about her from playing Heroes.

I know I picked up more characters in Heroes that were from the 3DS games, but they didn't really stick with me so she ended up being the only character that I recognized between Fates, Awakening, and Echoes. I honestly didn't really care too much for her design or her voice, but from what I knew of her involvement in Fates, I really liked her story and personality.

That was one of the two main reasons that I ended up going with Fates. The other reason was that I really liked the story and how it was broken into different options. I was used to that feature in Three Houses, and I figured choosing which side you're on would make for a great story. But the big reason I liked the story was that you're introduced to so much of the conflict, drama, and emotion right at the start of the game, before you even get to choose your path.

When it was time to pick the game though, I knew very little of the actual story itself. All I knew was that there was some sort of a war and you had to choose to stick with your real family or your adopted family. I knew nothing else about any of the plot at the time, but the concept of choosing a side with that big of a stake so early really stuck with me. So I ended up going with Fates, and from there, I bought all three games that make up the Special Edition. But then deciding on which route to start first was a whole other obstacle for me.

It also helped that I had a ton of merchandise from Fates at this point, a lot more than any of the other games. I had a few buttons and bookmarks, a ton of stickers, and a few posters and prints. I even had ordered a Camilla figure, though I'm afraid that it may never arrived. Even without knowing anything about the game, I was pretty invested at that point, so after doing hours of research, my final decision on which game to play was a lot easier.

For this review, the structure is going to be a bit different for two reasons. Both of my reasons have to do with the capabilities of the 3DS but the first is the graphics and sound while the other is gameplay. When it comes to the graphics and sound, the quality is significantly worse than what you get with Three Houses, but I'm not going to take that into account too much.

For the first couple hours of me playing Fates, both the graphics and sound were pretty bad to me in a few areas. That was especially true when compared to Three Houses. But I obviously understand that when the game came out many years ago, they would have been viewed as amazing. Looking back, the quality is worse, but it's less about the game and more about the capabilities of the 3DS and the fact that far better looking and sounding games have been released afterwards.

So, in this review, I'm going to talk about these negative aspects, but they're not going to have as much of a big effect on their respective grades as you'd think they would. The other reason that the structure is going to be different is because I'm going to be putting a much greater emphasis on gameplay. Normally, gameplay would be a small part of the story or addictiveness section, and in some of my reviews, it was its own section under Story.

I'm going to be doing things differently here and having gameplay be its own section with its own grade because in Fates, gameplay as a much bigger presence and a lot more to offer thanks to the 3DS capabilities and the use of the bottom screen. When I first started playing, I was really impressed by the functionally of the bottom screen and thought it added so much extra to the game, so I decided that gameplay is just as important as many of the other sections.

There's also going to be a decent number of spoilers when it comes to the story for two reasons. The first is that Fire Emblem Fates is three games, so there's a lot more stuff to cover. Not only that, but the game follows a similar structure to Three Houses, where you play through a linear required story before branching off onto one of the three game paths. The problem is that you can't really talk about what the three games are like without talking about the backstory and the prologue chapters.

Not only that, but in some areas, the story, characters, and writing are really well done to the point where it's going to affect other areas of the game or are just good enough to talk about. But those kinds of spoilers are mostly going to be limited to the story section only, so you don't have to worry about that if you don't want to.

GRAPHICS: 9/10

Before playing Fates, it was a very long time since the last time that I played my 3DS. I did play a lot in 2017 when I was going to and from school when it was three hours each way. But at the end of 2017, I went to a school that was much closer and I moved and because of that, I never bothered really unpacking it. As a result, I maybe played for 5 hours in the last few years, and going back to it after putting 2000 hours into the Switch felt so weird when it came to graphics and the technological aspect.

For the most part, I did really enjoy the graphics of Fates, but going back to the 3DS after so long, and after putting so much time into Three Houses, my reaction was a bit more mixed than I was hoping that it would be. Of course, it can't be helped when playing a 6 year old game on a small 10 year old handheld console, but a part of me was a little bit disappointed.

Most of my disappointment came from the in game Graphics and was mostly specific to characters and movement in cutscenes. Other than that, the graphics were good to great in my opinion. Overall, I broke down graphics into four separate categories, which are in game Graphics, map graphics, character designs, and animated cutscenes.

1. In game Graphics: 7/10

This is the part that I had a little trouble with, but it was only in certain spots and I further broke this section down into another two categories, which are the battle animations and models. When it came to models, I really disliked them when I first started playing but I started to like them a little more as I played, but I was still a bit disappointed. My main criticism of models was with in game character models. They are nothing like they are in Three Houses.

I remember beginning the first chapter, and Corrin wakes up in the fortress with Felicia and Flora? Trying to wake you up and standing over you. When I first played through that moment, I absolutely hated it. I thought they looked HORRIBLE. This was especially true for me when it came to their heads, faces, and expressions. The models just didn't look right, they looked weird and goofy at times. I get that when this came out six years ago, it would have been a lot better, but now it just seems a bit weird, like there's so much detail and structure missing.

It's not even that big of a deal if it's not a close up, but when you're looking right at them, it's weird. It's not like I have an issue with the characters themselves either, because I think the actual character are amazing, but I'll get into those later. The models were probably the only real issue that I had with the Graphics, everything else was fine to me.

The battle animations on the other hand were a lot better, even though they used the same character models. But since there's a lot more going on in battles, it was easier to pay less attention to the actual models and focus on the actual fight. Not only that, but with more going on, the models also look a little bit better because things look a bit more minimalistic in order to fit everything that's going on at once.

When you're battling, there's also a bit more color and life than when you're just in your average in game cutscene and the movement itself looks pretty decent and clean too. It's also a really nice touch that you are able to change the battle speed and camera angle after a battle has started. This gives you a bunch of new ways to view each battle and neither the animation nor the performance suffers when you change the settings in the middle of a battle.

2. Map Graphics: 8/10

When it comes to the map graphics, I personally like these a little bit more in Fates than in Three Houses. The Three Houses maps had a lot more detail and you were able to zoom in and see much more of the environment but in Fates, since it's a lot simpler and more minimalistic, it's a lot cleaner and better looking as a whole. It's also specifically designed to fit perfectly into the size of the 3DS screen. With Three Houses, each person's experience is going to be different with visuals based on how they play.

Right now there's three different screen sizes for handheld gaming and when it comes to playing on the TV, every TV is going to look different and if you're playing on a massive TV, maybe the maps don't look as clean. With Fates, everyone plays on the same uniform screen unless you have an XL, so the look doesn't have to be adjusted. That's not the only way in which the map graphics are good, there's also a decent amount of detail as well.

You'd think that Three Houses would be the clear winner when it comes to map detail. The game has so much detail on its maps when it comes to characters, other 3D objects, and movement. But Fates actually has a lot going on. With all things considered, Fates might have around the same amount of stuff happening on screen as Three Houses, just on a much smaller scale? How is that even possible, well there are two main ways that I see, the first of which being Dragon Veins.

Using Dragon Veins did a variety of things for your gameplay depending on what map you're on. Early on in my first playthrough, which was Conquest, I was really impressed by the range of actions that could be performed using Dragon Veins and how they looked. There was one chapter where the Dragon Vein destroyed a hill so it became flat terrain and easier to walk across. Then there was another chapter where it dried up all the water in the rivers so that you could walk directly across without walking around or crossing a bridge.

Not only were these actions very useful, but the way that they looked on the map was pretty cool too. Another aspect that I wanted to mention on this topic was the PVE aspect. It was easy to destroy things in the environment in order to get through or access another area, and I don't mean with Dragon Veins, but with regular attacks. This is an aspect that was in Three Houses but was incredibly underused if you ask me.

In Three Houses, there were so many times where there'd be something like a wall that could be broken so you could go through. Or some other part of the environment that could be damaged. There was a decent animation that occurred when you did this, I don't think it was ever required. In many cases it was even easier and quicker to just maneuver my units around the wall and find a different way instead of wasting a turn or two trying to tear it down. There were plenty of maps where there'd be five to ten of these breakable objects or even more and I'd literally skip over all of them. There was no need to break them.

But in Fates, they're way more prevalent, and in many cases they're required too. So there's many cases where you're forced to do something that clutters the screen so you might not have as much detail, but definitely a ton going on when it comes to the map. Other than that, the character sprites on the map are pretty good and the movement animation works really well.

3. Character Designs: 10/10

Character designs are without a doubt my favorite aspect of the game when it comes to graphics. In fact, characters in general might even be my favorite part of Fates in general. Earlier I mentioned how little I like the character models because they look bad and weird to me, but those models really don't do the characters justice. As a whole, the character designs are very similar to what you get in Three Houses and many of them look really good and are full of detail.

When you're in a dialogue moment and you see the cutout of each character, or you're in an animated cutscene, this is where the characters shine the most. Many of the characters look so good when it comes to their look and outfit, and many of their expressions look great too. It's also very easy to begin to appreciate some character designs more as you play the game more. There were a few characters that I just didn't really like their look and then after just a couple of chapters I would be thinking differently.

Yeah, they don't look as great as the character designs in Three Houses and would probably look even better on a bigger screen, but there's still a ton of detail and manages to keep pulling off the really good anime aesthetic.

4. Animated Cutscenes: 9/10

Lastly, the animated cutscenes are as good as they could be. They're not as good as the ones in Three Houses and I don't think there was nearly as many, but they still look really good. Many of the animated cutscenes look so much better than the in game ones with the crappy models and look like they came right out of an anime. They are well done and voiced, and I couldn't have asked for anything better on the 3DS. If I played this when the game was first released, I might have been in awe.

It's also really cool that there's an in game media player that allows you to watch animated cutscenes that you've already unlocked, like in Three Houses. But there are two issues that I have with this. The first is that in order to access them, you need to be in the Records Hall, which is in your castle. The only problem is that you can only access that after you've beaten the prologue chapters.

The Other issue I have is that it only shows the ones you've already unlocked. In Three Houses, it had a blank spot for each one, regardless of whether or not you unlocked them yet. That way, you can keep track of how many there are in total, and how many you are missing. There's no way to know in Fates unless you look it up, but it's still a very nice feature to have in the game.

Overall, the graphics of Fire Emblem Fates are really good. They are about the same as what I've seen with Three Houses other than a few small issues here and there. It's a very fun game to look at and my overall grade for graphics is going to be a 9 out of 10.

SOUND: 8/10

When it comes to sound, Fire Emblem Fates has a lot going on, both good and bad. First off, let’s talk about one aspect that I really liked about sound, which was the music. When it came to the music, I actually liked a lot of songs right away, which is more than I can say than what happened with Three Houses. There are a lot of songs in the Three Houses soundtrack that I love, but it took a while for me to really fall in love with them.

In fact, a week after playing Three Houses for the first time, I think there were only two songs that I liked at all. After about a month, that grew to five songs, and then I started loving more as more time went on and thanks to hearing the same songs over and over. But I didn’t instantly start liking the songs. When I first played, I hated the theme song with the lyrics, and after playing for like 20 hours, there was nothing that really jumped out at me.

But it was different with Fire Emblem Fates. After only playing for about an hour, there were already songs that I started liking. Unlike with Three Houses, where it took a long time to connect with many of the songs but was instant with Fates. In Three Houses, it was more of the fast paced and energetic songs that I found myself liking, but it was the slow and dramatic ones that I was mostly listening to when it came to Fates.

One example of how differently I viewed each soundtrack was with the song that Azura sings. I normally do not like songs in games or anime that have lyrics in them at all. I didn’t like this in the main theme for Three Houses and I still don’t, I’ll almost always skip over that song when I’m playing Three Houses. But for some reason, I just think that Azura’s song is way better. Not only do I enjoy listening to it, I also like listening to instrumental versions of it. It’s a really good song and I found myself enjoying it after listening to it once or twice.

There’s also another song that I really liked right away, a slow and epic song that played whenever I entered one of the shops in My Castle. The first time I ever entered that shop, I really enjoyed it, and then I heard it again while playing one of the DLC maps because it played during the dialogue scene before the battle starts. It didn’t take me weeks to fall in love with these songs like with Three Houses, but just a couple of hours.

After playing for around 20 hours, there were already seven or eight songs that I was enjoying. To me, none of them were as good as some of my favorites in Three Houses such as Fodlan Winds, Shackled Wolves, and The Long Road. But, because I was liking songs so early, I was able to become fully immersed in the game earlier on, and that helped with my overall experience.

Just like with Three Houses, many of the songs in the Fates soundtrack has multiple versions, but it can get pretty confusing. Many of the Three Houses songs had both a Rain version and a Thunder version, and they were significantly different from each other. They were so different that you might not even be able to tell that it’s the same song in some cases and will probably prefer one over the other. For instance, I don’t like the Thunder version of Fodlan Winds, Thunder version of Shackled Wolves, or the Rain version of The Long Road even though their opposites are my favorite songs in the whole soundtrack.

Fire Emblem Fates doesn’t stick with one template for variations. In addition to your base songs, there are 11 different versions, many of which are exclusive to each game, but can be unlocked and played later. The 11 possible versions include Fire, Storm, Light, Dark. Sky, Land, Flow, Ablaze, Deeds, Roar, and Below. I much prefer the way simpler method that Three Houses took because having 11 different versions is way too much. Many of them aren’t even that different from each other aside for the different name.

One other thing that I really liked about the game’s music was that just like Three Houses, the soundtrack is just massive. The base soundtrack has a hefty 120 songs in total and there are a handful of songs that appear in the game but are not in the official soundtrack, which means that the total is higher. There are also another ten songs that are added through DLC, including three more unique versions bringing the total to 14.

Sure, there’s a bunch of songs that I don’t care for and a couple that I flat out don’t like, but having that many options to choose from is such a nice touch. After playing for about 100 hours, I think the total number of songs that I liked reached about a dozen. It’s also really cool that you can access songs in the Records Hall too. However, just like with viewing cutscenes, you can only view the songs that you have already unlocked, meaning that there’s no way to confirm what songs you’re missing without looking it up.

It does suck that you have to be in the Records Hall to be able to listen to the music. Not only does that require you to play through the first few chapters just to unlock it, when you turn on the game, it will take you a while to load in and get there to begin with. With Three Houses, the media player is right in the main menu.

When it comes to music, Fates isn’t as great as what we got with Three Houses, but not only is it good in general, it’s exceptionally good for what you’d expect from a 3DS game. Now we can talk about something that I didn’t really like, which was the voice acting.

When it came to voice acting, Three Houses was a game changer for me. When I completed my review, I had around 100 hours or so invested into the game and I was loving every minute of the voice acting. After those 100 hours and completing the review, there were only two voice actors that I recognized, and I still loved the acting so much.

I loved the voice acting so much that I started paying attention to many of the voice actors and I ended up becoming a big fan of nearly all of them, watching and playing all of their other projects. About four months after finishing that review, I became a fan of 13 of the voice actors. So, since Fates wasn’t too much older than Three Houses, I was expecting something that would at least be close to what Three Houses offered in the voice acting department.

But in the end, I was pretty disappointed with what was delivered. The voice acting was nowhere near as good as what I was hoping it would be. There were very few moments of full voice acting, and all the moments with voices were just way too shorts. There were so many moments where you’d get a dialogue box with a full sentence, but it would only be accompanied by a very short statement that sums it up or even just a word or two. If I had to guess, I’d say that less than 33 percent of the dialogue lines were actually voiced.

In many ways, that was a dealbreaker for me. I couldn’t even tell if I liked half of the voices because of how few spoken lines there were. Most of the time, it would really hurt the immersion too. Because I’d listen to a couple words of spoken dialogue, but then be forced to read the text in the end. That was something that I absolutely hated, and I grew annoyed of hearing the characters voice for only one to four words at a time while reading 10 to 20. I personally think that if they wanted to do voice acting at all, they should have gone all the way, and not give a small portion of dialogue spoken lines.

I don’t think it could have been because of the 3DS capabilities either, because they did find a way to cram 120 songs into the game, so time and size couldn’t have been too big of an issue. Honestly, if each character only had an extra minute or two of spoken lines across the game, I think that would have made this category so much better.

There was also some star power across Fates too, but nothing major. Max Mittelman and Yuri Lowenthal had a few roles each but that was about it. There were also a few actors who would gone on to have a role in Three Houses. But none of them left me impressed. There were a couple voices that I did really enjoy, but just like all of them, they were very short lived.

The only thing left to say when it comes to the sound of Fire Emblem Fates is the generic sounds, You have your common battle sounds and the different menu sounds, plus there’s a variety of sounds while traversing your castle, but nothing too crazy. Overall, I really like the soundtrack, but it wasn’t as epic as the one in Three Houses, and I thought that the voice acting was pretty lackluster in comparison too. My overall grade for sound is an 8 out of 10.

STORY: 10/10

The story of Fire Emblem Fates is definitely one that’s very expansive and in some ways I like the story here more than in Three Houses. I feel like the structure is way less complex and redundant in Fates so before I talk about the plot, I wanted to talk about a few of the ways that the two games are different when it comes to story and chapter structure.

The chapter structure between Fates and Three Houses is very different. The big thing is that the different paths that you could follow in Three Houses were their own independent game and at the same time, half of each path was a path that you had to do over each time you wanted to start the game over.

What do I mean by that? Well obviously, there are three houses. You pick one and that sends you down one of three different paths. The first half is the same regardless of which house you pick other than characters, dialogue, and some different events, and lasts for 12 chapters. Then once you reach the end of part one, the story branches off into one of four distinct games for the second part.

This shows two ways that Fates is very different from Three Houses. The four different part two paths in Three Houses are Azure Moon, Crimson Flower, Verdant Wind, and Silver Snow. Azure Moon is 10 chapters, Crimson Flower is six chapters, Verdant Wind is 10 chapters, and Silver Snow is 9 chapters.

The first way that Fates is very different is with the story type. In most games where you can pick one side or another, it’s usually the same game with the same story and events, you’re just doing everything from a different perspective. Or the same game with some different modifications such as what Pokemon does. Three Houses didn’t do anything like that at all.

It’s not like Azure Moon was the same as Silver Snow, just from someone else’s perspective. No, it was an entirely different game with a different story, different characters, different events, and different deaths too. It’s not like a “what if” situation where picking a different house just shows you what would have happened. The game basically created different alternate timelines for you to experience.

Fates is more like a “what if” scenario and in a way makes an even more complete game. They’re still very different games but the games more accurately portray what happens on each side of the story. If you choose the Conquest route, that’s the story you’re following. But then if you play Birthright next, it’s not a whole new event, it’s a what happens if you’re on the other side situation.

It’s still three different games but it tells a complete story concerning all three sides and the ramifications of being on each side instead of three or four separate stories.

The other big difference between the two games is the story structure and I prefer the system used in Fates because not only is there more chapters, it’s also easier to get to the new stuff when starting the game over.

If you have either Conquest or Birthright, you’re only going to play through that specific story but if you have all three, then the game branches off into the respective story after chapter six. Once you reach chapter six, then you can choose which story you want to follow. First let’s finish looking at the chapter structure of Three Houses.

Let’s say you chose the Blue Lions on your first playthrough. You’re going to do the 12 part one chapters and then you’re going to do 10 part two chapters. Then for your second playthrough, you choose to go with the Golden Deer. You’re going to do the 12 part one chapters and 10 part two chapters. Here’s the problem. Other than having different characters and dialogue, you’re playing through the same 12 chapters and battles in the first part.

That’s a lot of repeating. If you do all four stories once, you’ll have done 35 part two chapters, all of which are unique, but you’ll have done the same 12 part one chapters four times each. Part one usually took me like 20 to 25 hours to complete and that ended up being a lot of extra work to just get back to the new stuff.

In total, by the time you reach the end of the fourth playthrough, you’ll have completed 83 chapters but only 47 of them would have been unique. The remaining 36 would have been re-dos of the part one chapters. In my opinion, Fates does this way better because the part that’s the same among all three games is much shorter while there’s way more content that’s restricted to each game.

The first part, which Is the same for everyone, is only five chapters long, not 12 like in Three Houses. This makes it feel more like a long prologue than an entire 25 hour act. If you did three playthroughs in Three Houses, you’d be doing the same 12 chapters three times in part one. But you’re only doing five chapters three times in Fates. That allows you to get into the game exclusive stuff a lot sooner and doesn’t force stuff to drag on.

But not only that, each game has a lot of content in their own storyline. In Three Houses, the longest exclusive chapters were Azure Moon and Verdant Wind, which had 10 chapters each. Including the 12 part one chapters, those two paths ended at chapter 22. All three Fates games has 27 chapters and a final battle following the competition of chapter 27. This means that aside for the five chapters that are the same for everyone, each game has 22 unique chapters.

Three Houses had 83 total chapters among four paths but only 47 of them were unique. Fates has 81 total chapters among three paths and a whopping 71 of them are unique. When it comes to paralogues, the two games are almost about the same. Three Houses has 23 different paralogues not including the DLC ones while Fates has 22. Also, unlike with Three Houses, the Fates DLC adds so many more paralogues

PROLOUGE

Before I even started playing Fire Emblem Fates for the first time, I pretty much made up my mind as to which game I had wanted to play first and that was based on a few pieces of detail here and there as to what the game is about. But apparently, I knew very little of the emotional depth and character development of the game, if any at all.

The two things that I knew about Fates were a few of the main plot points and about Camilla. I played Fire Emblem Heroes for around 30 hours, and I summoned Camilla so many times in that game, so I ended up learning a lot about her and her involvement in Fates through that game. From what I knew about her personality, I sort of fell in love with her quickly. My first impressions from when I first started reading into her was that she’s like the best sister ever.

At this point, I knew a bit about the story and knew of her involvement. I knew that she was kind of obsessed with Corrin and I knew a little bit of her involvement in the story for both the Conquest and Birthright routes. I thought it was just adorable and some really good character development. In addition to that, I knew a little bit of the story itself. There’s a war that very much made me think of the war for Fodlan in Three Houses but this time it’s between two sides, the Nohr and the Hoshidians.

Corrin is the son of the King of Nohr, but not really because he was kidnapped when he was really young and then raised as one of their own. After you complete the fifth chapter, the game that you play dictates which side you’re on. If you play Conquest, you stay with the people that you grew up with, the Nohr. If you play Birthright, you return to your birth family, the Hoshidians. If you play Revelations, you’re sort of branded a traitor by both and set off on your own journey.

It’s the family involvement and Camilla’s story that made me initially decide that I wanted to play Conquest for my first playthrough. But by the time I reached the end of chapter five, I honestly had no idea what I really wanted anymore because of how wild and emotional the first few chapters were, even though it was something that I already knew was coming.

In the first couple of chapters there’s a lot going on because it serves as both a battle tutorial and an introduction to many of the characters. The game starts off in Nohr and you’re introduced to your adopted family as well as a couple of people from Hoshido. You’re ordered by your father to kill a couple Hoshdian prisoners but that’s not something that you can bring yourself to do.

As a result, the king sends you on a mission to make up for it. You’re supposed to evaluate a fortress that’s near the border between Nohr and Hoshido but there’s soldiers there, so you have to fight. After the battle you’re attacked and brought into Hoshido. This is where things get really wild throughout the entirety of chapter four. This is the chapter in which Corrin finds out that he’s actually from Hoshido.

Obviously, I knew that there was supposed to be some sort of reveal to Corrin early on since you have to choose which side to join in the next chapter, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so emotional. By this point in the game, I was having a decent amount of enjoyment. I wasn’t too fond of the characters yet, but I was having a lot of fun with the gameplay and the story picked up quite a bit in the previous chapter. But I would go as far as to say that chapter four was one of the best levels in a game that I have ever played and was what really made me invested in the game.

The chapter starts off with your real family members explaining that they’re your family and about you being kidnapped many years ago. Then there’s a battle against some monsters where you end up saving two people who also happen to be your real siblings, and this is where the story and emotion really kick in.

I love a good story. As someone who goes to the movies 50 to 80 times a year and can get super emotional, I love a really well made story. But I don’t often play games story driven games. I’ll gladly sit and watch an emotional movie or TV show for hours, but when I’m playing a game for fun, I usually stick to games that have a lot of fun gameplay, battles, humor, or music.

In fact, before I started playing Three Houses earlier this year, my 10 most played Switch games were Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Pokemon Sword, Stardew Valley, Breath of the Wild, Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, Golf Story, Super Smash Bros, Story of Seasons, and Smite. Very few of those games are story driven and those that are, like BoTW, really have the story as a secondary element behind the gameplay.

In fact, I’ve reviewed nine of those games and the average score that I assigned for Story was just a 7.1. I just overall didn’t pay attention to the story, didn’t care for it, or was playing something that had an insignificant story. You’re rarely going to see me playing any of the critically acclaimed games with award winning games.

I guess that’s part of the reason why Three Houses made such a big impression on me, because it was such a drastic change from the kind of games that I commonly play to one with such a massive story. Three Houses was one of the few times that I’ve ever been impacted by a games story, but I quickly started to realize that the story of Fates might even be better.

In the second half of chapter four, the game does a really amazing job at letting the emotion settle in. It doesn’t just explain that Corrin was kidnapped when they were young, but it fully explores the emotion and trauma that Corrin’s family went through, and I was not prepared for that at all. When Hinoka realizes who you are, she breaks down. That, mixed with the explanation of what she went through when she was little nearly broke my heart too.

At this point I had actually began questioning my thought process as to which game I should be playing for my first playthrough. Of course, I knew that I was going to come back and play all of them, but in the moment, the decision just felt so personal. I was pretty conflicted now between the family that actually raised Corrin and their actual family that was so devastated when they lost them.

Not only that, but the family was so keen on getting Corrin back that they tried multiple rescue attempts that failed, but eventually went so far as kidnapping someone from Nohr in an attempt to get Corrin back. This adds so much extra flair and emotion to the story, and it really added so much to the perspective of what was going on between the two sides.

In chapter five, tensions grow even more as there’s an attack at a Hoshidian festival and Corrin’s real mother is killed trying to save them. After a battle, Corrin gets their memories back of his “fake father” killing his real one and kidnapping him and then just as the two sides meet on the battlefield, it’s where your decision comes in to pick where you want to stay and which game you play.

After the experience of chapters four and five, I was too emotionally broken to go through with picking a side to the point where I was about ready to play Revelations just so I could be friends with everybody. But after researching further what each game did for your gameplay, I stuck with Conquest, and from there, the story, emotion, and tension only grew.

A part of me was glad at how short the five chapter prologue was. I think the whole thing was only around two hours, but it really packed a punch and the story was more than enough to make me want to keep going forward. The pacing was just perfect and if I had to say, I’d consider just the prologue as one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had in gaming.

In Conquest, you choose to return to Nohr, back to the adopted family that you spent most of your life with. In retrospect, this is the option that makes the most sense to me based on the characters and story. But there’s just one small issue with choosing this option. Your adopted father, the king, doesn’t really trust that you’re still one of them now that you know the truth and he thinks that you could be a spy now.

In Birthright, you return to your birth family. This itself has a very good story considering you’re now going against the people that you actually grew up with. In both games, you fight the other side and as a result, each one is drastically different from each other with different antagonists. Then you have Revelations, in which you don’t choose a side and try to bring the two sides together. But in this game, there’s yet another new antagonist. Once you get through the prologue chapters, there’s a ton of content to play through for each of the three games.

A MILLION CHARACTERS

For me, the characters of Fates ended up being one of the strongest parts of the game. I remember when I first started playing Three Houses, I was really intrigued by the large cast of characters. There were so many characters and each of them had some really cool and unique designs, personalities, and backstories. I would spend so much time doing research beforehand on each of the characters and I slowly began to love many of them as I played the game more.

My experience with Fates ended up being very different because I fell in love with many of the characters much faster, right at the start of the game in some cases. For instance, my two most favorite characters in Three Houses right now are Ashe and Leonie. But here’s the thing, even though I had experience with them during my first playthrough of the game, I didn’t really start liking them until I was well into my second playthrough. In Leonies case, she was even one of my least favorite characters for the first 60 or so hours, it took a lot of time for me to start liking her.

Even the characters that I liked during my first playthrough didn’t really cement their places in my heart until after I played for like 10 or 20 hours. But in Fates there were so many characters that I felt instantly connected to after only a handful of chapters. I already talked a bit about how much I liked Camilla going into the game, but I was experiencing so much immersion with many of the other characters that she ended up dropping to around fourth on my list of favorite characters by the time I completed the second chapter of Conquest, which was barely five hours into my first playthrough.

There were even a couple of characters that I was pretty indifferent to at the start of the game that I slowly started to like as I played more. One example of such a character was Felicia. Like Leonie, I didn’t really like Felicia too much near the start of the game but after just a few additional interactions with her, I started to like her supports and backstory a lot. Speaking of supports, there were a ton in Fates that I ended up liking more than in Three Houses. Because I started liking these characters very early on in the game, by the time those supports came along, I felt way more attached to them and was pretty invested in their lives.

In Three Houses, there were plenty of times where I would hold off on seeing certain supports since I didn’t care too much for a character at the time or I would rush and skip them. But here, I was invested pretty early on. To be honest, I wasn’t too invested in the supports that didn’t involve Corrin, but those kinds of supports went a really long way when it came to marriage and children, but I’ll talk more about those later on.

In total, there are so many characters between those that are playable, NPC’s, and enemies. There’s a huge variety based on which game you play, similar to what you had in Three Houses. Obviously, you only get access to a portion of the characters based on the game, but between all of the main characters, children, and DLC characters, the number of playable units reaches 72. That’s not including all of the characters that you can acquire through the use of amiibos and capturing. That adds another 17 possible units to the roster.

That’s nearly 100 characters to play as, train, and do supports with, and that’s not including the dozens of additional characters that appear as enemies, NPC’s, or random characters. Fates is not lacking at all when it comes to the number of characters and there are so many that are very likable. The only downside I could see is that if you’re playing either Conquest or Birthright, it’s not possible to recruit characters from the other path like you could in Three Houses.

By the time I had put around ten or so hours into the game, there was already like five characters that I had really liked. By the time that I was done with all of the games, there was around a dozen or so characters that I loved and another 10 or so that I really liked, which ended up being well more than what I liked in Three Houses. I’m pretty sure that if Fates had full voice acting like what Three Houses had, I would have loved the characters so much more and I might have even gone on to like Fates more than Three Houses in the end.

I was enjoying the characters so much that there were plenty of times where I would spend hours at a time trying to raise their supports non stop. I would bring a character that I wanted to improve into my base at the castle so that I could have the little conversation with them in order to raise their support a little bit. Then I would randomly visit someone else’s castle and then instantly go back to mine so that time in the game would move forward. If I did this two or three times, it would jump to the next day and I would be able to do the conversation again.

-I would just keep doing this for like 30 minutes straight I’d be able to get six or seven conversations in a row with the same character taken care of and that really helped boost their supports. Just like in Three Houses, supports are incredibly useful because not only do they offer you their own little boosts, but they also offer a ton of backstory. At times, they can also be super emotional or adorable, which would add to the charm of the game. Just like in Three Houses, there are a ton of supports between you and another unit, but also between two other units.

On its own, that’s amazing, but I think Fates did this so much better than Three Houses did because of its marriage and children system, which is extensive. Three Houses had its own marriage system, but it was very small and wasn’t available until after you beat the game. When you would marry someone in Three Houses, you would get an adorable cutscene, but you weren’t even able to make a decision on who to marry officially until you made it all the way to the final battle.

When two other units marry each other, you get to see a paragraph of what their lives were like but that too is after the game is over, and in the base game, you can’t choose who gets to marry who and you don’t know the pairings until the game is over. If you have the DLC, then you were able to spend a lot of renown to marry specific units, but even that would have to wait until the end of the game to see it unfold and it was an expensive option.

Let’s face it, the harsh reality is that Three Houses was only an adorable cosmetic option that just added a little extra story content and lore after you beat the game, nothing more. Not only is there a whole lot more in Fates when it comes to marriage, but it’s also unlocked significantly earlier in the game. Marriage in Fates is still amazing just for the adorable factor alone because there are a ton of supports that will get super emotional or cute. Plus, you’re going to waste so much time making sure that your two favorite characters get together.

But the fact that there’s so much more to marriage after the fact adds a whole extra level of immersion to the game. In Three Houses, marriage was at the end of the game when it came to supports, and they weren’t even that great to begin with unless it was your own marriage and you watched the cut scene. In Three Houses, the best part was seeing all the adorable supports unfold but once those supports reached their end and the marriage was done, that was really the end of it. In Fates, watching the supports unfold was still great, but they were just the beginning of the marriage journey.

Just the process of deciding who you want to marry to who and how you go about doing so is another big aspect simply because of what happens next. To marry people off to each other in Fates, it’s the same as in Three Houses. You just need to have them fight together and their supports with each other will increase slowly over time. There’s also just a ton of possible combinations. There are so many possible units that Corrin can marry, regardless of the gender that you choose for them, and each of those units have a plethora of other possible units that they can marry. There are literally thousands of possible ways to dictate marriage when you’re playing.

Many of these pairings will also lead to children, which is an amazing feature that I’ll discuss a bit in the next section. As for supports though, there are just so many. There might even be more supports in Fates than there are in Three Houses, which is another reason why I’m so disappointed that there isn’t full voice acting. One part of this is simply because there are so many characters, but another reason for this is because there’s a bunch of different types of supports. For instance, you have your regular supports that are shared with that of Three Houses.

The regular supports that I’m talking about include your main supports which can be increased to C, B, and A, and your romance supports. There are so many characters that you can increase your support with but obviously there’s also a ton of other combinations between two random units. Raising these supports between Corrin and another unit are easy and are the same as in Three Houses and other supports because you just have to fight alongside the character that you want the support to grow. But there are also many other ways to increase these supports such as inviting a unit to your base.

In addition to your classic C, B, A supports, there are also a ton of S supports for marriage and since you can marry off two characters mid game, the possible outcomes become endless. In addition to all of these standard supports, the inclusion of children adds another two types of supports, types that weren’t even possible in Three Houses without children. Units that have a kid will have a standard C, B, A, support system with them, and Corrin’s kids will also be able to have supports with their sibling too if applicable, which adds even more to the support lore.

This just adds a whole extra level of depth, detail, and storytelling. In total, there’s hundreds of different supports to uncover across all three games, the game might even be pushing close to a thousand. Again, it sucks that there’s no full voice acting, but there’s a lot of story to be told through supports, much more than in Three houses in my opinion.

And we didn’t even get to talk about the children themselves yet. There’s a bunch of different children that can be had either between Corrin and another character or between two other units and they offer so much to the game because they become playable units. That’s right, marriage is only the beginning because in addition to picking out your favorite pairing, marriage also allows you to construct the perfect kid army. The game just has so much going on in the character department.

GAMEPLAY: 9/10

Another one of my favorite aspects of the game is the gameplay for a number of reasons. In fact, I prefer the gameplay in Fates over Three Houses because of the amount of strategy involved and the involvement of the lower screen. It's also a bit crazy that just a few months ago, I absolutely hated the genre. In May, I couldn't stand grid based strategy game. I thought they were kind of boring, and at the same time very confusing and hard to understand.

But then when I started playing, I realized that it was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, and I started noticing that it was fun and a good puzzle as well. So I quickly started to like the genre, even though there are still aspects from that game that I don't understand yet. But then when I started playing Fates, there were some times where I started facing different kinds of challenges and it started getting hard again.

What I realized was that Three Houses was a sort of entry point for new gamers and was much easier than what I experienced in Fates. So, while I was playing Fates, I had to re-adjust how I play, and it became a big challenge again. But in this case, I really liked the extra challenge, and it was easier to understand.

Just like in Three Houses and other SRPG’s, each of your units stands on a tile and can only move a little bit during each turn and has a specific number of actions that they can perform during that turn. One big thing that I noticed between Fates and Three Houses in the gameplay department is that there appears to be more actions that you can do. I was way more likely to invest time in different skills and relationships across Fates as a result. In fact, I didn’t even pay too much attention to things like Combat Arts and Abilities in Three Houses, but I put a lot of focus into skills here.

Many of the skills in Fates felt way more interactive and useful at times and allowed for way more immersion during my playthrough. For instance, there was a bunch of healing skills, one that allowed you to find money, and even one that allowed you to get another turn, which proved to be super useful at times. This meant that strategy was even more important in Fates than it was in Three Houses, at least in the ways that I played. In order to do well, you had to find the perfect combination of skill, stats, support, and equipment, even more so than in Three Houses.

That’s not even counting the battle itself because you had to really focus on where each unit was, where each enemy was, the type of enemy, the terrain, and the location and purpose of any dragon dens that may be littered across the map. There’s a lot to take into consideration when playing, and if you’re playing on classic more, it’s even more true because you’re going to want to make sure that everybody survives. You’re going to have to kick your strategy and planning into overdrive to ensure you don’t lose any of your important pieces.

I loved this about the game, and I was super invested as a result. My very first playthrough of Fates was on classic mode and I was just terrible, but that didn’t stop me because I was having so much fun with the gameplay and characters. For instance, there were some intense battles where a character would die after like 10 or 15 minutes. But instead of going forward and losing them, I would start the battle over and try even harder. As a result, there were some battles that I did ten or so times and took me hours to complete, but I didn’t care because they were fun and engaging.

Bottom Screen For The Win

While those gameplay aspects are great, they aren’t even my favorite when it comes to what Fates has to offer. My favorite aspect has to do with the capabilities of the 3DS and the usage of the bottom screen. When you play Three Houses, all of the info that you have is displayed on the same screen as everything else and you need to keep toggling back and forth between different pages or different actions. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, especially when you really want to focus on the info and stats, but in Fates, that’s exactly what the bottom screen is for.

There are two main reasons that I love the bottom screen when it comes to gameplay. The first is the inclusion of so much info and the second is the ability to change battle angles. While you’re battling, the bottom screen literally gives you all of the info that you could ever wish for and that can be incredibly useful for so many reasons.

When you first start a battle, you’re going to be above Corrin and the bottom screen is going to show you so much information. The three things that will jump out at you the most are your name, an image of the character, and a list of your items but those three aren’t really that important compared to the rest of the stuff. Near the top of the screen, you’ll see your rank, level, HP, and small icons for all six skills that you have.

You won’t see the name of each skill but tapping on the icon will not only show you the name, but a description of each skill as well, which is very helpful in determining what can and can’t be done during that specific battle. You’re also going to see all seven of your stats including Strength, Speed, Magic, Luck, Skill, Defense, and Resistance. You’re going to see each stat rating in addition to an overall rating. Lastly, you’re also going to see which units you have the deepest connection with, which is also helpful if you want to boost supports by battling. But all this is just on the simple UI screen.

You can change to a more advanced screen that will show extra pieces of info such as your attack, critical rate, hit rate, avoid rate, experience points, and movement level. This version will also show you which weapons you are the most proficient in. You can also change the bottom screen to instead of showing your character, it will show a full map of the battlefield including how many units there are between you and the enemy, and where they are located.

In addition, if you move the cursor to another unit, it’s going to change so that you can see all the same info but for each of your units. But it gets way better because you can also scroll to an enemy, and you can see all of their stats and things as well. You’re able to see each of their stats, their strength, skill, speed, HP, what weapons they have, and even items or money that will be dropped if you kill them. The bottom screen is just filled with so much information that you need to take advantage of to make sure that your strategy works the best way possible.

But when you’re in an actual battle animation fighting someone, there’s even more that you can do with the bottom screen because you can control the speed and camera angle during the battle. In addition, watching an attack normally, you can pause the animation or speed it up and slow it down to make it just the right speed. There are also many things that you can do with the camera angle. There are different kinds of fixed angles that can follow either your unit or the enemy. There’s a first person view and a cinematic view that moves too. I like this too because it adds a lot more immersion to the actual fight animations. Gameplay wise, Fates is about the same as Three Houses, but with a couple extra features and gets a 9 out of 10 from me.

ADDICTIVENESS: 9/10

I don’t even have to truly talk about the addictiveness, do I? In a few ways, the replayability of Fates is a lot better than it is in Three Houses because it’s so much easier to start a new game and get right into the action. If you are a fan of the game, and you spent the money to get all three versions, you’re going to easily find yourself wanting to go back and play all three, whether it’s for the story, the characters, or just because you want to. But the big difference here between Fates and Three Houses is how easy it is to get back into the game once you completed it.

In Three Houses, if you wanted to start a new game after beating one path, you would still need to go through the long 12 chapter part one. Even though the characters and dialogue, and in some cases, the events, were different, many of the events were the same. You would spend many hours doing the same thing over, sometimes 20 or more hours before you get to the part that’s exclusive to the other path. But in Fates, the introductory first part is only a few chapters long and takes just a couple of hours to beat before you’re ready to pick your path. But what’s better is that you don’t even have to do that at all, you can skip the first few chapters and pick your game right away.

So, if you beat the game once and wanted to start a new game along a different path, you could do so immediately. Also, if you’re heavily invested in many of the characters, you’re going to want to keep going back and working on supports and marriages. Maybe in your first playthrough you couldn’t get through all the supports, so you need a second playthrough to get through them. Or maybe you wanted to pair your units with other units and marry them.

This game is going to give you many reasons to keep coming back and playing some more. Even though there’s three games, you might have well more than three playthroughs depending on if you want to try different challenges or play with different difficulties. There’s many different reasons for coming back and addictiveness gets a 9 out of 10 from me.

DEPTH: 10/10

When it comes to depth, Fire Emblem Fates just has so much going on. There aren't as many
unique things to do compared to Three Houses but there is still a ton, and each unique aspect of depth has So much to offer. For instance, just look at all the chapters. If you have all three games, there's going to be a total of 71 unique chapters to Play through. On top of that, there's a ton of battles and so many characters to play as or interact with.

But none of those even come close to the size and scope of the three biggest depth aspects. Those three add so much more to the game. Playing through all the story alone is a 60 to 100 hour game but those three easily add another hundred hours or more. That's also great when you look at value because if you buy either conquest or Birthright and then digitally add the other two games, you're paying $80 for three massive games

CASTLE

My favorite aspect of depth is the castle feature. This is very similar to the monastery in Three Houses, and I spent countless hours there taking advantage of all the services that were being offered. These services also change based on which game you're playing, so the number of things you can do or buy is actually a lot higher than you might think.

-The amount of stuff that you can buy in your castle is just insane, The Shops are very much like the three Houses marketplace but with a lot more stuff to buy. The main way to buy weapons in Fates is to shop at the Armory. There's a different armory for each game and each one sells different versions of the same weapons. For instance, one will sell swords while the other will sell katanas.

If you're playing conquest, you'll have access to the Dusk Armory while you'll get the Dawn Armory if you're playing Birthright. If you're playing Revelations, then you get access to both shops. Both versions can be upgraded twice. At maximum level, the Dawn Armory will have 55 items to choose from while the Dusk Armory will have 54.

In the Dusk Armory, you will find seven main weapons. They are swords, lances, axes, daggers,
Knives, bows, and magic scrolls. There are your Common weapon types which include bronze, Iron, Steel, and silver, and a couple rare ones such as Brave and killer. There are also a couple rare types that are limited to one or two weapons and there's a couple of specialty weapons that are significantly stronger than the others.

On the other hand, the Dawn Armory is very different. In this armory, you'll find six main weapons, which include Katanas, Naginatas, clubs, Shuriken, Yumi’s, and spirits. The Dawn Armory Shares Iron, steel, and silver with the Dusk Armory but they have Brass instead of Bronze. There are also a couple rare types such as venge and dual. Like in the Dusk Armory, you can buy tailored weapons and ones that are much stronger as well.

The Armory isn't the only place to buy stuff in the castle, you have the vendor too. If you have Birthright, you'll get the Rod Shop but you'll get the Staff Store in conquest. Just like with the armory, both vendors can be upgraded twice. Both the staff store and the Rod Shop Carry 35 items and many of the items are the same in both stores.

The main items you'll find in the Rod shop are Festals, Tonics, and seals. This shop has five Festals, which are rods used to heal characters. There are nine tonics, which are items that temporarily boost certain stats. There are four seals, which are used to change your class. Festals are limited to the Rod Shop, but you can find the same tonics and seals in the Staff Store

In the Rod Shop, all the healing rods have the name Festal attached to them. In the Staff Store, these items are staffs and have no special name assigned to them. They are simply named after what they do such as Heals Psychic, Freeze and Entrap. The two vendors also have a bunch of rare items that can be bought in one store or the other and a bunch of other items that can be bought at both such as vulnerary and Elixir.

The Accessory shop is probably my favorite of all the shops in the castle. Accessories are a way
to customize an outfit and there are more than 60 in total, many of which can be bought in this shop. The last shop is the lottery Shop. Obviously, you can't pick which items you want but the Dusk lottery has 89 Possible Prizes while the Dawn lottery has 90.

-Stores are only a small fraction of the things that you can do in the castle. My favorite thing to do is visit other castles because this is an easy way to get unlimited resources. You can't visit the same castle more than once in a day, but you can visit as many different castles as you like and reap the rewards.

One of the main facilities of your castle are basically mines and farms. Every in game day, you can collect a resource from each building. You can collect food such as meat, berries, or wheat and minerals such as Pearls and Topaz. You can only collect resources limited to your own game but visiting other castles is a great way to fix this.

Some castles will have a lot of resource buildings which will allow you to stock up on a ton of stuff. You can collect all the stuff, leave, and then go to a new castle to collect even more stuff. The best part is that you can Visit castles from other games. That way, even if you are playing conquest for example, you can collect all the resources from Birthright.

I really took advantage of this during my first playthrough of conquest. I kept going back and forth between random castles collecting as much stuff as I could get. After doing this for half an hour, I had nearly 20 of every single item. But resource farming just scratches the surface of what you can do in other castles.

Another big thing that you can do in other people’s castles is that you can challenge them to battles. Battles have been hit or miss with me because whenever I battle another player, it’s either so easy that I win without even attacking, or it’s so hard that I lose in a couple of turns. I think the difficulty is based on what the other person sets though, so if you challenge a few easy castles, you can get lots of rewards. These are rewards that will be a huge benefit, especially if you’re playing on a harder difficulty or on Classic.

If you win a battle, there are two prizes that you can choose from. The first is that you can recruit one of the units that the other player was using. They’re more of a guest unit, similar to when you recruit someone for just one chapter in Three Houses and apparently, they can’t physically attack enemies. At first, I thought this was a terrible prize because I thought it would just be a waste to enter a battle with one less spot basically because the guest unit would be useless.

But then I started to realize that this is an amazing way to help out your own units because the guest ones can be used as a distraction or as a way to quickly move forward to a certain area, or to go to areas where there’s things such as chests. Not only that, if you’re playing on Classic, there are far fewer restrictions on what you can do with a guest unit because you don’t have to worry about them. If you were worried about a certain plan not working, you can send in one of the guest units instead of one of your own and if they die, it’s better to be them than one of your own.

The second reward that you can get from beating other players is easily my favorite of the two. You can buy skills. The only problem is that you can only buy skills that the other player already had in their battle and only for units that you already have in your party. For instance, if the other player had eight different units on your team, but you don’t have any of them, you won’t be able to buy any. But if you have a unit that they have, you could buy one of the skills that their unit has.

Of course, this is going to be very limited based on how much gold you have because these skills can be very expensive, but this can be an amazing way to make some of your units overpowered early on. It’s very much like when you go hunting for specific stats in Pokemon. You can keep battling other players over and over until you find the right skill for the right unit. Then all you have to do is buy it and just like that, your chosen unit is so much better. I had a lot of fun doing this because every time I won, I would carefully look into all the available skills and then check to see if they would make me any better.

For instance, there was one skill that I found called Profiteer and I knew that I had to have it, even though it was so expensive. It’s a skill that has a chance to find a gold bar on each of the units first seven turns based on their luck skill. Getting money is much harder in Conquest, so I attached this skill to Corrin, and whenever I did one of the DLC battles, I would find two or three gold bars per battle, which could be sold for 1,000 gold each.

I also found a couple really good healing skills for Corrin. One that restores up to 30 percent of your HP each turn and another that restores up to 50 percent of your attack if you defeat an enemy. So, by battling other players, my Corrin got skills that allowed to find free money and restore lots of health before I even made it to chapter ten. By being able to randomly find gold, I was able to buy a ton more skills, and before I knew it, many of my units had some pretty powerful skills early on, making them nearly unstoppable.

Sometimes other players are going to really want you to visit their castle, so they purposely set up a team with all of the most powerful skills as a reward. A lot of the time, people will even mention it in their castle names in order to make you want to visit them. But if you don’t have enough gold or you don’t have any of the same units, it can get depressing fast. It’s very easy to miss out on a really powerful skill if the conditions aren’t met.

-Another big aspect of the castle is the invasions, which are basically kind of like their own paralogues that revolve around the safety of your castle and are completely optional, but also tough. With these invasions, you’re just protecting the castle from invading soldiers and each game has three unique invasions to go through, that begin shortly after you pick your side. If you’re playing on Conquest, the invasions are a great way to gain experience but if you’re playing on Classic, your units will be gone for good if they die.

The invasions are fun and challenging but the only problem that I see is that three invasions for each game is just not enough. Maybe some people don’t want to be bothered with these invasions at all, but I thought it would be much better if each game had more invasions. Having more would have been a great way to get extra experience and items and having more would also just result in more gameplay, which is just as good.

There’s also a ton of extra stuff that you can do in the castles, whether it’s in your own, or in someone else’s. You have places like the Prison and the Arena. These two can be very helpful if you constantly visit. Visiting the Mess Hall and Lilith will also be very helpful over time. There’s also the records hall, where you might spend lots of time if you want to revisit some video and music.

CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION

Within a minute of starting up a new game for the first time, I was surprised by the number of options that there are when it comes to creating your character. Since Three Houses was my first big Fire Emblem experience, I was used to not really have much customization to begin with. With Three Houses, there isn’t much you can do because there’s no way to change how you look and the only thing that you can really change about yourself at the start of the game is your gender.

Later on, you’re also able to change the outfit that you wear, but that’s very limited in terms of how many options there are and not all of them look all that great to begin with. But with Fire Emblem Fates, you’re hit with a bunch of different options right when you first start playing and that was a pleasant surprise. The more I went through the customization pages, the more that I realized there was more to change.

For starters, the idea that you could change your hair completely blew my mind. In Three Houses, your hair style and color were such an important part of the game and then being able to change everything about your hair in Fates felt so weird at the start. In total, there were 12 different kinds of hairstyles and 30 different colors to choose from. The hairstyles were also along a graph that labeled them either wild, simple, slick, or stylish instead of just having random ones to choose from.

This means that there were 360 unique hairdos to choose between, which I thought was pretty cool, but hairstyle was just one of the options when it came to customization. In addition to choosing whether you’re a boy or girl, you also get to choose if you’re tall or short. There are only two options to choose between for each gender, but they drastically change your appearance, especially in animated form.

The next thing that you get to work on is your face and there’s a lot of options for that too. You get to choose between seven face types which range from caring and boyish to mature and stern. After that, you have 12 options for face detail, which lets you choose if you want something like a tattoo, a scar, or even an eyepatch. I do like the idea of this, but I wish it was possible to add multiple details onto one character. Like, I thought it would be cool to have a scar and a tattoo or a tattoo and an eyepatch. I thought that would have added so much more.

The last of the big details that you get to change is your characters voice and for each gender, there’s three to choose between. By the time you’ve reach this point, all the details that you’ve changed resulted in thousands of possible combinations to make your character as unique as possible. But wait, there’s more. Now there’s a bunch of smaller details that you can add to your character.

In addition to changing your name, you can also change your birthday. But once you’ve gotten through all that, it’s time for you to pick your Boon, Bane, and Talent. When I first started playing, I had no idea what Boon and Bane were so in the middle of creating my character, I had to stop for like 30 minutes just so that I could look up a guide and read what they are before making a sort of educated decision on which ones I would want. A Boon is kind of like a personality trait and it helps boost a certain stat so that this stat grows faster than the others. Kind of like a strength. In total, there are eight Boons to choose from. Calm boosts resistance and reduces magic damage. Clever boosts your magic and makes magic attacks stronger. Robust increases your HP. Strong increases your strength. Sturdy increases your defense. Quick increases your speed. Lucky increases your luck, which helps with critical hits and evasion. Deft also increases critical hits.

Banes are the complete opposite though and are your weaknesses. Whichever bane you pick, that stat will have the slowest growth. They are Excitable, Dull, Sickly, Weak, Fragile, Slow, Unlucky, and Clumsy. Each Bane is the complete opposite of the corresponding Boon, and you obviously can’t choose a Bane that’s the opposite of a Boon that you’ve already chosen.

Lastly there are 17 talents to choose from, which are basically classes. They include Mage, Troubadour, Archer, Dragon, Ninja, Knight, Apothecary, Mercenary, Fighter, Priestess, Sky Night, Lancer, Oni Savage, Cavalier, Outlaw, and Samurai. There were a few that I recognized from Three Houses like Cavalier, Archer, and Knight, but I had no idea what many of them were.

DLC

Oh boy do I have a lot to say when it comes to the DLC of Fates. Not only do I think that this is one of the best DLC’s out there based on how much stuff you get along with the price, but I also think that it’ the most useful of any DLC that I have ever played before. In my opinion, it’s also miles better than the expansion pass that Three Houses had.

For me, the expansion pass in Three Houses was incredibly lackluster. It cost $25, which is about what you’d normally pay for your average pass, but there was barely anything in the pass. The biggest part of the Three Houses expansion pass was Cindered Shadows. That was its own side story that lasted for multiple chapters and added four new characters and a new location that can be explored during your main game.

But even though the side story added a couple extra hours and a few new characters, there were still a few minor annoyances that I had with it. For once, you couldn’t actually recruit the new characters until you unlocked them by completing certain chapters in the side story. Not only that, but it’s a very short campaign when you factor in how much it cost. Sure, there’s a couple extra things that the DLC offers you like extra outfit stuff and a couple items here and there but there was nothing else significant outside of the story, characters, and new location.

Once you beat the side story, it was done. While you could still use the new location to farm renown, there wasn’t really that much that justified the $25 price tag. I went as far as to say that it was the worst DLC that I ever played on the Switch. But now that I played Fates and saw the amount of DLC that it had, I started to question how the developers could have gotten away with making such a bad DLC for Three Houses.

If you buy all of the DLC packs that Fates has to offer, you’re getting a ton of content for a good price and many of the individual pieces can be used over and over, and further prove their value. In total, all the Fates DLC costs around the same as the Three Houses expansion pass but offered so much. Individually, there’s a ton of DLC in Fates but they could be bundled into two distinct DLC packs.

The first DLC pack is simply called Map Pack 1 and is by far my favorite because of all the things that you get. It costs $17.99 and has 2 free DLC and ten paid ones that would cost $25 if bought by themselves. The next one is called Map Pack 2 and has six paid ones that consist of its own story and one free one. The second pack costs $8. So by buying both DLC packs, you’re paying $26 for a ton of content.

That first pack for $18 alone got me way more value than I got out of the Three Houses expansion pass. In fact, I got most of the value from just two of the ten paid packs. So technically I guess you could just buy those two DLC’s alone, but the entire pack is still well worth it. The two that I love are called Boo Camp and Ghostly Gold.

These two DLC maps are basically the equivalent of what Three Houses did with their Free Battles. In that game, whenever you had a day off, you could do free battles literally as many times as you want. I remember once battling over and over for a couple hours straight just so I could stock up on as much gold as I could carry and so I could get a ton of experience too.

I was very disappointed when I realized that Conquest didn’t have something like that. Other than doing stuff in your castle, it was a very linear game with very little room to do extra stuff or to gain extra money or exp. In the main game, you can only get money with certain skills or as rewards and it’s impossible to grind for experience and levels because once a chapter is done, that’s it, you can’t go back to it to grind some more. You can do a lot more grinding in Birthright but if you’re playing Conquest or on Classic, it’s much harder to acquire exp and money.

That’s where these two DLC maps come in. With Ghostly Gold, you don’t technically even have to fight anybody because the objective of the map is to survive for eight turns. But if you do defeat an enemy, there’s a chance that you could earn 1,000 gold. Don’t get too greedy though because if you try to defeat every enemy, you might end up losing the battle or you’ll have a couple units die. That’s something that you obviously don’t want to happen if you’re playing on Classic Mode.

The best thing to do is to defeat a few enemies until you’ve collected a nice amount of gold and then retreat until the round is over so that you don’t lose any of your units. The best part is that once the battle is over, there’s nothing stopping you from going back and doing the same one over and over again. If you play things safely, you should easily be able to earn around 2,000 to 3,000 gold every five or so minutes. This is a great way to earn money for weapons, items, skills, and recruits.

Boo Camp is basically the same thing but a bit more tough. It’s another wait a certain number of turns and the battle will automatically end but it’s closer to 20 turns and there’s a lot of enemies, with more appearing every few turns. Towards the end of the battle there’s a few really tough ones too. But that kind of challenge makes it perfect for exp grinding. All you have to do is battle a few enemies with the unit that you want to grow, and then spend the rest of the battle retreating or defending.

When I was playing on Classic mode, I put a lot of strategy into it and every battle I would have four or five units gaining a level early on. There was one point before chapter ten where I did this map for an hour straight and I had three characters that jumped by six levels in between chapters. By the time I had completed Conquest, I ended up putting around 10 hours into those two DLC’s alone and that’s not even counting a few hours I lost by resetting when one of my units died.

The two DLC maps on their own are very useful and could be alone worth the full $26 if you use them consistently throughout all three routes. These two DLC maps are basically Fates version of Free Battles and are insanely useful if you want to do some grinding.

Another really good DLC map from the first pack is called Museum Melee. It’s another great way to grind, but I don’t group this one with the first two because not only is it a bit harder, but there isn’t always a guarantee that you’ll get anything good. With this map, there’s kind of a tournament that you have to battle your way through. There are some enemies that have weapons or items that will be dropped when they’re defeated and all across the map there’s a bunch of chests that you can open and acquire a bunch of items.

It’s all random too, the item and the item strength and value will change each time you do this map. For instance, during my first time playing this map, there were two enemies that dropped stuff. The first was a steel dagger and the second was a heart seal. The two chests that I opened had a master seal and a fortify spell. The second time that I played, the dropped items were a Kris Knife, Fuga’s Club, Iron Naginata, Steel Lance, Heart Seal, and Master Seal.

If you’re strong enough to plow through everybody, it’s possible that you can acquire all the items but you’re either very brave or very dumb if you try that in Classic Mode because it can get very hard. This is a great way to grind for weapons and other items, especially because there’s a chance to get very rare stuff. But it’s very hard and since the items are completely random, you’re also going to get a bunch of items that might not be worth much.

It’s definitely worth it if you have a good enough army to defeat everyone without taking any damage or if you really need weapons to sell for gold or to forge into better ones. Those three DLC maps together are incredibly useful based on what you need and offer a ton of value and yet they only cover about a quarter of the entire pack.

Next up you have the Beach Brawl DLC, which was an interesting one. It kind of treated the game like the war was over and both the Nohr and Hoshido were already friends with each other, but it takes place in a non canon timeline that’s separate from the game, which is similar to what Cindered Shadows was in Three Houses. It’s kind of a hilarious DLC because the story was about going to a tropical resort and none of the siblings wanted it.

In the end, you have to again pick which family you want to fight for, but this time you’re literally fighting for who gets to go to the beach. But once you pick the family, you pick which sibling to play as, and you get a couple other pre determined units on your team too.

Gameplay wise, this is one of the battles that I’ve had the most fun with. I enjoyed it more than many of the main game chapters and more than most of the DLC maps as well. It’s a friendly battle between the two families and that takes a lot of the stress off and with eight different teams to choose from, there’s a lot of gameplay options and it will never be the same battle twice, which makes it even more fun.

It’s still super difficult though. The first time that I played, I chose the Camilla, Beruka, and Selena combo and was only able to defeat one unit before losing both of mine. The gameplay is fun but it’s a pretty useless map if you ask me because all you get for winning is a photo of the character you chose on the beach.

Royal Royale is very similar. It’s another map where both the Nohr and Hoshido are friendly and it’s another battle royale where you pick a family and then who you want to play as. It’s literally the exact same as the previous one. For instance, if you pick Camilla, not only will you also play with Beruka and Selena, but you’ll play on the exact same map and all units will start in the similar positions.

But it’s much harder than the previous one. It took me 14 attempts to beat it for the first time. You get a stat boost the first time you win but every time after that, you can get Dread Scrolls and Ebon Wings as much as you like. Personally, I like the Beach one more than this because at least it’s easier and is way more humorous story wise.

The next DLC item that you get is called Hidden Truths, which is a series of two maps. This is the first of the DLC packs that’s story driven and serves as. Sort of prologue to the game. Both are worth doing just for the story alone, but you can do these battles over and over to acquire special items, but these are very specific items that you probably won’t need any more after you’ve collected a couple.

Anna on the Run is another one of my favorite DLC items and is very similar to the Anna quest in Three Houses that unlocks her as a playable character. Unlike the other DLC maps so far, there’s no reason to do this multiple times because once you complete it for the first time, you unlock Anna and that’s it. Even if you’re playing on Classic mode and she dies, you can’t do this map again to get her back. But getting an extra character is really cool.

The rest of the paid DLC maps from this pack are pretty simple. There are Ballistician Blitz, Witches Trial, and Vanguard Dawn. These get you unlimited Vanguard Brand, Witch’s Mark, and Sighting Lens and I didn’t care about these two at all.

On top of the 10 paid DLC maps, there’s also two free ones that come with the $18 pack or individually. There’s one called Before Awakening which is a fun one that involves other characters and can be done multiple times, and there’s one that’s just a gift from Anna.

Put all of that together and you’re left with one of the most comprehensive DLC passes in gaming history. For only $18, you’re looking at a truckload of content and you probably wouldn’t even need to look at the second DLC pack. If you were to do each map from the first pack and then never again, you’d probably be looking at five to ten hours’ worth of gameplay in addition to all the gold, exp, and items that you would acquire from completing them. Plus, a decent amount of story content too.

But if you’re focused on grinding and need all the exp, money, and weapons that you can get, then the DLC is perfect for you because you could waste dozens of hours just completing the first three DLC maps over and over. By the time I was done with both Conquest and Birthright, I estimate that I put in around 40 hours into just the content of the first DLC pack alone.

Then things get even crazier when you’re talking about the second DLC pack but thankfully there isn’t much to talk about. The second pack is very much like Cindered Shadows because it’s a six chapter long side story called Heirs of Fate. Just like Cindered Shadows, this story is separate from your main game and involves child characters.

While you do get items for completing each chapter and you can do it as many times as you like, the main purpose of this DLC pack is the story that was a decent length. It’s also a pretty decent price since it’s only $8. That’s a way better price for a six chapter side story than paying the full $25 for the Three Houses side story and a handful of semi useless customization options.

All in all, the two DLC packs for Fates are an amazing deal and make each route feel way more complete by adding the ability to grind and collect a variety of weapons and items. Some people might even believe that the first three map are necessary to the game. The first DLC pack is well worth it’s cost in terms of content, usefulness, and story and the second pack is also well worth the price for the amount of story stuff that it has.

Put the two together and you’re paying $26 for a DLC set that’s nearly 20 chapter long with tons of story stuff, lots of fun gameplay, a ton of weapons and items, and adds the ability to grind freely. If you are the kind of person who needs to grind, all the DLC could easily set you back 50 hours or more. The DLC is not something that you should be skipping over if you play Fates. Even if you think just getting all three games is expensive.

The only issue that I had with the DLC is the fact that you have to wait until after you complete the prologue section before you can start buying DLC or redeeming stuff. With nearly all games, you can just buy a DLC item from the eshop or store and directly have it downloaded into the game. Or if you buy a code for a DLC from a store like Gamestop, you can normally redeem them right away and then have them download.

But that’s not the case with Fates. In order to buy or redeem, you have to complete chapter six and unlock access to your castle first. It’s different if you want to buy the other games though. If you have Conquest and wanted to buy Birthright or Revelation, you can buy those from the main menu and download them immediately. I wish I knew that earlier though. I made the mistake of buying my copy of Revelations from Gamestop because I wanted to use all my certificates so that the game would only cost me $5.

But I couldn’t redeem it right away and I wasn’t ready to play the game yet, so I put the receipt that had the code away until I was ready to play it. One to two months later, I was finally ready to play but I couldn’t find the receipt with the download code anywhere and was forced to buy it again since I wasn’t able to download it right when I got it the first time. Even without my issue, it sucks that you still have to play for a couple hours just to buy and download the DLC. Even if you have the DLC downloaded, you can’t even access them at all until you’ve reached your castle. So even if you’re starting a new playthrough, you have to wait to access them again. But that’s only a small issue since it just sets you back a couple hours here and there. Overall, the Fates DLC is still legendary.

Also, can we talk about the fact that you only have to pay for the main DLC once and you get the DLC across all three games? That's a huge feature right there. Let's compare it to the expansion pass for Pokemon Sword and Shield for a second. That DLC had a lot more content and exploration than the Fates one, but it cost more and was limited to which game it was played on.

So, if you had Pokemon Sword and wanted the DLC, you had to specifically buy the one for Sword. If you ever got Shield later on, that DLC wouldn't work because you'd need to also buy the one for Shield. So, if you already had both of the Pokemon games and wanted the DLC on both, you'd have to pay $60. In order to get all the paid DLC in Fates, you'd only pay $26, and the DLC would work across all three games.

If you bought and played Birthright, you'd get all the DLC. But if you bought Conquest later on, you'd still have all the DLC ready to go on that game too, and the same goes for Revelations as well. Who knows, maybe they could have gotten away with game specific DLC, but since they did it like this, it only adds so much more to the value.

NO MORE PLANNING

With so much to do across Fire Emblem Fates, it has to be very difficult to keep track of everything and plan what to do right? Well, it's not, and that was a pleasant surprise to me after putting so many hours into Three Houses. Fates is a lot more lenient and forgiving when it comes to allowing you to do what you want and when you want. In Three Houses, you were very limited by the calendar system, and you had to be very strategic in what you do.

Your free day was on Sunday, and you had to pick what you wanted to do for that day. You could explore the monastery, which would allow you to shop, do some quests, work on supports, and just explore the monastery as much as you like. You could also battle, which gives you the option to do free battles, auxiliary battles, paralogues, and quest battles. You also had the ability to teach or to rest on your day off but I never bothered with those options.

The only problem was that you couldn't do more than one task on a given day. Sure, exploring the monastery literally gave you hundreds of things to do. Sure, if you do free battles, you can do them over and over as many times as you like. But you can't mix and match at all. If you chose battle and you did one free battle and got bored, that's it, your only option is to move forward to the next day because you wouldn't be able to do anything else.

If you chose to explore, you couldn't do any battles at all. Plus, with only a few free days in a given chapter, you had to be very careful with what you wanted to do and it was basically down to picking between working on supports versus working on stats. You needed to have a strategy for the entire month based on what you wanted to improve during that chapter. Thankfully, that's not what happens in Fates, so you can rest easy.

For starters, your castle is basically the equivalent of the monastery, and unlike in Three Houses, you're forced to explore it each time you're free since it operates like a home base. So, every time you're free, you have the option to explore your castle as much as you like. This gives you the ability to freely collect resources, shop, work on your supports, and do other things within your castle as much as you like.

Plus, a big feature in Fates that isn't in Three Houses is how often things refresh and restock. For instance, in Three Houses, you could explore the monastery during the first week of a chapter and buy all the items in the marketplace. But if you explore again the next week, you won't be able to buy more, because they only refresh once per chapter. In Fates, there's a day night cycle, and things like resources and supports refresh every single day.

It's easy to go to the next day too because the time passes each time you battle or visit someone else's castle. So, you could spend an hour playing but a week could pass in game and your castle would keep refreshing. This gives you even more control over what you can do in your free time. Plus, if you have the DLC, you can do a ton of battles over and over, but they aren't separate from you exploring the castle like in Three Houses.

So, you could do 10 battles in a row, but keep visiting the castle in between each battle for whatever reason. You could spend hours during the same free session just bouncing between battles and exploring, which was not possible at all in Three Houses. The only downside is that you do need the DLC in order to fully take advantage of this, but it's totally worth it because of all the extra grinding you get to do.

There aren't as many things to do in Fates as there are in Three Houses, but if you have all three games and the DLC, you're easily looking at 200 hours or more. Plus, if you fully invest your time into supports or grinding, you might even find yourself spending another hundred or so hours. There's so much to do and just like in Three Houses, depth gets a perfect 10 out of 10.

DIFFICULTY: 6

If you are like me and your first or most recent Fire Emblem playthrough was Three Houses, then you really should not try Classic Mode at all. When I was playing Three Houses, for my first playthrough I played on the easiest difficulties. I went with Normal and Casual and that worked out very well for me because I had no idea how to play and the first few minutes that I tried playing on a harder difficulty mode didn’t work out.

During my second playthrough, I chose the same settings, and it became too easy very quickly. I was just mowing down enemies left and right, especially thanks to doing all of the free battles. But I didn’t feel any real connection to the characters or to the possibility of losing them if they were defeated. At that point, I was ready to do something much more challenging so I decided that for my third playthrough, I would play on Classic mode and Maddening difficulty.

At that point, I was accustomed to the gameplay and was good at the game, so I thought that I could handle the extra challenge. I also thought that it would translate over to other Fire Emblem games, so when I started playing Fates for the first time, I chose Normal difficulty and Classic. But after playing for about three hours, I began to realize that this might have been a mistake and I quickly started to lose all of my units, making it so that I could never use them again.

For my first playthrough, I lost all of my Nohr siblings except for one in chapter six. Then in chapter seven, I lost the remaining sibling as well as the two new characters that were introduced in that chapter. So, when I started chapter eight, I literally only had one other unit by my side.

It’s not that I didn’t understand how to play, it’s that the gameplay was different enough from Three Houses that I wasn’t fully able to battle correctly from the start. There were a lot of different gameplay features that I just wasn’t used to such as Dragon Veins, singing, and pairing and when I first played, I just didn’t know how to use them in the best possible ways. Not only that, but the enemies are also tougher too.

By the time I had made it to chapter eight, I realized that I basically dug my own grave and I spent an hour trying to fix things. I was considering going from Classic mode to Casual but in order to do that without having to start the whole game over, I had to start from the part where you choose the game, but I wasn’t allowed to just pick a new difficulty. No, I had to beat the level first before I could make any changes and every time I tried, either Corrin or Felicia would die and I would have to start over.

I ended up redoing chapter 6 maybe 20 times before I was able to win without Felicia dying. At that point, I was thinking of changing to Casual, but instead of doing that, I made a second save file that was for casual so I could play on Classic and keep making an extra save file that was for Casual. That way, if a chapter ever got too hard for me, I could jump into Casual and beat it. The only problem was that I wouldn’t be able to jump back to Classic if I did that.

So, if you’ve done well on Three Houses and then try to jump to the highest difficulty on Fates when you first try playing, you’re only setting yourself up for disaster. But on the other hand, if you’ve played the other 3DS Fire Emblem games or are more used to overall gameplay mechanics of the series, then you’ll be way better with a higher difficulty.

But I do have a few tricks on how to make the game a lot easier, but they rely on a lot of usage of your castle and requires the gold DLC. There are two things that you want to do. First you want to keep doing the DLC so that you can keep getting money over and over. But don’t forget that you also want to keep your units alive because if they die in the DLC, they’re also gone for good if you’re playing on Classic.

So, if you can defeat just a couple of the ghosts to get 1,000 or 2,000 gold, and then spend the rest of the level retreating, you’re going to be fine. You should be able to do the level 3 times and get 3,000-5,000 gold if you’re lucky. Of course, you can spend all that gold at the shops in your castle on all sorts of weapons and items, but the trick is to spend all your gold at someone else’s castle.

Connect to the internet and visit a random person’s castle so that you can battle them. If you win, you have the option to either recruit one of their units to serve as a support to inherit a skill that one of their units knows. If you have the same unit, then you can buy a skill. I’ve done this so many times that in between chapter seven and eight, I bought nine different skills for Corrin so that I could make the perfect loadout early in the game.

After that, I started battling and then buying skills for other characters. So, at this point, my units were still pretty weak but had a ton of great skills that really helped in battle. It’s also helpful if you get the Profiteer Skill from battling someone. This is a great skill to have because based on how much luck the unit has, you can randomly find gold bars during the first few turns of a battle. Gold Bars can be sold for 300 gold each so that’s another great way to make money early on.

This will help you out a lot if you really don’t want to play on one of the easier difficulties, but you need a little help to get the advantage. But even with all that, the game can still get super difficult.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Fire Emblem Fates has a lot to offer. There are a few aspects that I didn't like such as some parts of graphics and some parts of music, but I either liked or loved every other aspect of the game and what it had to offer. To be honest, if Fates was the first Fire Emblem game that I played, I probably wouldn't have gotten into the series as much as I did, especially if I had played it now. To me, the game is good on its own but it's even better to fans of the series or genre.

There's still a lot that I don't understand when it comes to Fire Emblem or strategy RPG's in general, but that didn't stop me from having lots of fun with Fates. I also think that the game is going to hold up nicely for a long time, even with the graphical things that I hate. Heck, I'm probably going to go back one day and try to complete it again on the hardest difficulties.

The great thing about Fire Emblem Fates is that you can control how much you pay and how much content you get based on what you want. Depending on how you want to play, you can spend anywhere between $40 and $126. For instance, if you only want the bare minimum because you just want to experience the story once, you can pay $40 to get either Conquest or Birthright. Even if you only get one game and nothing else, you'll still get a lot of content and way more value than you spent.

If you want the complete experience, then you're going to want to buy all three games. You'll pay either $80 or $100 depending on whether you want the second game to be digital or physical. Personally, I much rather prefer the $80 option because not only is it cheaper, but all three games will be on one cartridge, which is a huge plus. Content wise, $80 for three games that are each a decent length is a great deal.

If you play all three games and you like them, it should be easy to get 50 to 70 hours out of each one. Plus, if you're dying for even more content, items, and grinding, you can pay the extra for all of the paid DLC stuff. You can pay $40 for one game to try it out or you can pay $106 for all three good and complete games plus the huge DLC set on one cartridge.

If you're crazy, you could also try to get your hands on a sealed or complete copy of the Special Edition but that's going to cost you a fortune so only diehard Fire Emblem fans should really be looking into that. The complete version of the Special Edition includes all three games on a single limited edition cartridge but can cost you anywhere between $200 and $400 depending on where you find it and what else it includes.

In addition to the games, this complete version also comes with an 80 page art book and a little carrying pouch. You're basically paying an extra $200 give or take for small art book and a small bag. That's not good considering that I've seen copies of the book sell for under $50 by itself over the summer. But the games themselves are going to get you a crazy amount of content and value, at least a few hours for every dollar spent.

THINGS I WISH WERE BETTER

Here’s a brief recap of what I wish was in the game, some of which were already mentioned a few times but there’s a few more things that I think should have been included.

1: The obvious missing piece of content is the full voice acting. It’s really good on its own and does not hurt the game at all, but having spent so much time in Three Houses, a game that has a ton of voice acting, going to this game afterwards felt a little bit disappointing in comparison. Of course, it’s no way faulted to the game itself, but it’s something that could have made the game age much better.

2: One of my favorite aspects of gameplay were the Dragon Veins. I thought they were a really good gameplay mechanic that added a bit to both gameplay and story. But to me, there were so many times where they were heavily underused. I think there were a lot of chapters that would have become way more fun and engaging if they had an extra one or two Dragon Veins to either use as a requirement or optionally as part of a strategy.

3: One of my biggest complaints with the game was the fact that the DLC could only be bought within the game for the most part and that you had to actually play the game to a certain point in order to redeem, buy, or access most of the DLC. I think it would have been a much better experience if all of the DLC options were available right away in the main menu. The game would have been much more streamlined and I’m sure there’s other who agree with me that the wait to chapter six was a pain, especially if you bought a DLC pack or a 2nd or 3rd game externally and had to wait to add it in.

4: There aren’t nearly as many save files spots as I would have liked. Three Houses had a ton and I ended up using more than a dozen. I had one for each playthrough so that I could keep tabs on how long each one took. I had separate ones for different challenge runs and different difficulty settings. I even had a few that were locked before the final battle of each route in case I wanted to do that battle whenever or I wanted to try out different marriage supports without having to do the entire game all over again.

But Fates has just nine save slots in total, and I don’t think that’s a great idea to have that few with this kind of game unless you don’t plan on playing all three or you plan on deleting files as you play. You’re going to need three just for the different games, but you might need some for different difficulties or some to play on either casual, classic, or phoenix mode. I know I had a few extra save files that I would keep on standby in case one of my guys died in Classic mode so that I could jump back a chapter or two and keep grinding so that they would survive when I reach that chapter again. If you’re just a casual player or only playing one game, this might not bother you but if you plan on taking Fates very seriously, you need a lot more than nine slots.

The game isn't as good as Three Houses but that's to be expected and I still had so much fun with the story, characters, music, and insane amount of content. I've seen lots of people saying that there's a lot of stuff that went wrong with the games, but I haven't seen any of those issues myself. I still love it and I'm sure people who love Fire Emblem have invested many hours into Fates. My overall grade for Fire Emblem Fates is going to be a 9.2 out of 10.
Six months ago, I didn't even like Fire Emblem at all, but here we are with it now being one of my 3 most favorite game series of all time. Some people know that I quickly fell in love with Three Houses, so much that I started buying a ton of Fire Emblem stuff, including every single one of the 3DS games. I really wanted to try out some of the "older" games but because I was so invested in Three House and Warriors, I didn't have a chance to until recently.

In September, I finally decided that it was time for me to branch off and try one of the 3DS games. The only problem was that this was my first time ever looking into the 3DS games, so I had no idea what Awakening, Fates, and Echoes were even like at all. So I ended up doing a lot of research so that I could figure out which of the 3DS games I wanted to play first. This was kind of like what happened with Three Houses when I was researching the best house to join, but this ended up being harder.

I ended up spending more than a week looking up everything I could about the games. I read reviews and watched gameplay footage, I read character profiles, and I even ended up taking note of how long each game was. In the end, I went with Fates based on a combination of characters and story, though that came back to haunt me later on because I had to do even more research to figure out which of the games within Fates I was going to play.

Going into the 3DS era of Fire Emblem games, there was only one character that I really knew anything about, and that was Camilla. Before getting into these games, I had already put in many hours into Fire Emblem Heroes and Camilla was the one that I summoned the most. I got her like three or four times in total, so I ended up learning a lot about her from playing Heroes.

I know I picked up more characters in Heroes that were from the 3DS games, but they didn't really stick with me so she ended up being the only character that I recognized between Fates, Awakening, and Echoes. I honestly didn't really care too much for her design or her voice, but from what I knew of her involvement in Fates, I really liked her story and personality.

That was one of the two main reasons that I ended up going with Fates. The other reason was that I really liked the story and how it was broken into different options. I was used to that feature in Three Houses, and I figured choosing which side you're on would make for a great story. But the big reason I liked the story was that you're introduced to so much of the conflict, drama, and emotion right at the start of the game, before you even get to choose your path.

When it was time to pick the game though, I knew very little of the actual story itself. All I knew was that there was some sort of a war and you had to choose to stick with your real family or your adopted family. I knew nothing else about any of the plot at the time, but the concept of choosing a side with that big of a stake so early really stuck with me. So I ended up going with Fates, and from there, I bought all three games that make up the Special Edition. But then deciding on which route to start first was a whole other obstacle for me.

It also helped that I had a ton of merchandise from Fates at this point, a lot more than any of the other games. I had a few buttons and bookmarks, a ton of stickers, and a few posters and prints. I even had ordered a Camilla figure, though I'm afraid that it may never arrived. Even without knowing anything about the game, I was pretty invested at that point, so after doing hours of research, my final decision on which game to play was a lot easier.

For this review, the structure is going to be a bit different for two reasons. Both of my reasons have to do with the capabilities of the 3DS but the first is the graphics and sound while the other is gameplay. When it comes to the graphics and sound, the quality is significantly worse than what you get with Three Houses, but I'm not going to take that into account too much.

For the first couple hours of me playing Fates, both the graphics and sound were pretty bad to me in a few areas. That was especially true when compared to Three Houses. But I obviously understand that when the game came out many years ago, they would have been viewed as amazing. Looking back, the quality is worse, but it's less about the game and more about the capabilities of the 3DS and the fact that far better looking and sounding games have been released afterwards.

So, in this review, I'm going to talk about these negative aspects, but they're not going to have as much of a big effect on their respective grades as you'd think they would. The other reason that the structure is going to be different is because I'm going to be putting a much greater emphasis on gameplay. Normally, gameplay would be a small part of the story or addictiveness section, and in some of my reviews, it was its own section under Story.

I'm going to be doing things differently here and having gameplay be its own section with its own grade because in Fates, gameplay as a much bigger presence and a lot more to offer thanks to the 3DS capabilities and the use of the bottom screen. When I first started playing, I was really impressed by the functionally of the bottom screen and thought it added so much extra to the game, so I decided that gameplay is just as important as many of the other sections.

There's also going to be a decent number of spoilers when it comes to the story for two reasons. The first is that Fire Emblem Fates is three games, so there's a lot more stuff to cover. Not only that, but the game follows a similar structure to Three Houses, where you play through a linear required story before branching off onto one of the three game paths. The problem is that you can't really talk about what the three games are like without talking about the backstory and the prologue chapters.

Not only that, but in some areas, the story, characters, and writing are really well done to the point where it's going to affect other areas of the game or are just good enough to talk about. But those kinds of spoilers are mostly going to be limited to the story section only, so you don't have to worry about that if you don't want to.

GRAPHICS: 9/10

Before playing Fates, it was a very long time since the last time that I played my 3DS. I did play a lot in 2017 when I was going to and from school when it was three hours each way. But at the end of 2017, I went to a school that was much closer and I moved and because of that, I never bothered really unpacking it. As a result, I maybe played for 5 hours in the last few years, and going back to it after putting 2000 hours into the Switch felt so weird when it came to graphics and the technological aspect.

For the most part, I did really enjoy the graphics of Fates, but going back to the 3DS after so long, and after putting so much time into Three Houses, my reaction was a bit more mixed than I was hoping that it would be. Of course, it can't be helped when playing a 6 year old game on a small 10 year old handheld console, but a part of me was a little bit disappointed.

Most of my disappointment came from the in game Graphics and was mostly specific to characters and movement in cutscenes. Other than that, the graphics were good to great in my opinion. Overall, I broke down graphics into four separate categories, which are in game Graphics, map graphics, character designs, and animated cutscenes.

1. In game Graphics: 7/10

This is the part that I had a little trouble with, but it was only in certain spots and I further broke this section down into another two categories, which are the battle animations and models. When it came to models, I really disliked them when I first started playing but I started to like them a little more as I played, but I was still a bit disappointed. My main criticism of models was with in game character models. They are nothing like they are in Three Houses.

I remember beginning the first chapter, and Corrin wakes up in the fortress with Felicia and Flora? Trying to wake you up and standing over you. When I first played through that moment, I absolutely hated it. I thought they looked HORRIBLE. This was especially true for me when it came to their heads, faces, and expressions. The models just didn't look right, they looked weird and goofy at times. I get that when this came out six years ago, it would have been a lot better, but now it just seems a bit weird, like there's so much detail and structure missing.

It's not even that big of a deal if it's not a close up, but when you're looking right at them, it's weird. It's not like I have an issue with the characters themselves either, because I think the actual character are amazing, but I'll get into those later. The models were probably the only real issue that I had with the Graphics, everything else was fine to me.

The battle animations on the other hand were a lot better, even though they used the same character models. But since there's a lot more going on in battles, it was easier to pay less attention to the actual models and focus on the actual fight. Not only that, but with more going on, the models also look a little bit better because things look a bit more minimalistic in order to fit everything that's going on at once.

When you're battling, there's also a bit more color and life than when you're just in your average in game cutscene and the movement itself looks pretty decent and clean too. It's also a really nice touch that you are able to change the battle speed and camera angle after a battle has started. This gives you a bunch of new ways to view each battle and neither the animation nor the performance suffers when you change the settings in the middle of a battle.

2. Map Graphics: 8/10

When it comes to the map graphics, I personally like these a little bit more in Fates than in Three Houses. The Three Houses maps had a lot more detail and you were able to zoom in and see much more of the environment but in Fates, since it's a lot simpler and more minimalistic, it's a lot cleaner and better looking as a whole. It's also specifically designed to fit perfectly into the size of the 3DS screen. With Three Houses, each person's experience is going to be different with visuals based on how they play.

Right now there's three different screen sizes for handheld gaming and when it comes to playing on the TV, every TV is going to look different and if you're playing on a massive TV, maybe the maps don't look as clean. With Fates, everyone plays on the same uniform screen unless you have an XL, so the look doesn't have to be adjusted. That's not the only way in which the map graphics are good, there's also a decent amount of detail as well.

You'd think that Three Houses would be the clear winner when it comes to map detail. The game has so much detail on its maps when it comes to characters, other 3D objects, and movement. But Fates actually has a lot going on. With all things considered, Fates might have around the same amount of stuff happening on screen as Three Houses, just on a much smaller scale? How is that even possible, well there are two main ways that I see, the first of which being Dragon Veins.

Using Dragon Veins did a variety of things for your gameplay depending on what map you're on. Early on in my first playthrough, which was Conquest, I was really impressed by the range of actions that could be performed using Dragon Veins and how they looked. There was one chapter where the Dragon Vein destroyed a hill so it became flat terrain and easier to walk across. Then there was another chapter where it dried up all the water in the rivers so that you could walk directly across without walking around or crossing a bridge.

Not only were these actions very useful, but the way that they looked on the map was pretty cool too. Another aspect that I wanted to mention on this topic was the PVE aspect. It was easy to destroy things in the environment in order to get through or access another area, and I don't mean with Dragon Veins, but with regular attacks. This is an aspect that was in Three Houses but was incredibly underused if you ask me.

In Three Houses, there were so many times where there'd be something like a wall that could be broken so you could go through. Or some other part of the environment that could be damaged. There was a decent animation that occurred when you did this, I don't think it was ever required. In many cases it was even easier and quicker to just maneuver my units around the wall and find a different way instead of wasting a turn or two trying to tear it down. There were plenty of maps where there'd be five to ten of these breakable objects or even more and I'd literally skip over all of them. There was no need to break them.

But in Fates, they're way more prevalent, and in many cases they're required too. So there's many cases where you're forced to do something that clutters the screen so you might not have as much detail, but definitely a ton going on when it comes to the map. Other than that, the character sprites on the map are pretty good and the movement animation works really well.

3. Character Designs: 10/10

Character designs are without a doubt my favorite aspect of the game when it comes to graphics. In fact, characters in general might even be my favorite part of Fates in general. Earlier I mentioned how little I like the character models because they look bad and weird to me, but those models really don't do the characters justice. As a whole, the character designs are very similar to what you get in Three Houses and many of them look really good and are full of detail.

When you're in a dialogue moment and you see the cutout of each character, or you're in an animated cutscene, this is where the characters shine the most. Many of the characters look so good when it comes to their look and outfit, and many of their expressions look great too. It's also very easy to begin to appreciate some character designs more as you play the game more. There were a few characters that I just didn't really like their look and then after just a couple of chapters I would be thinking differently.

Yeah, they don't look as great as the character designs in Three Houses and would probably look even better on a bigger screen, but there's still a ton of detail and manages to keep pulling off the really good anime aesthetic.

4. Animated Cutscenes: 9/10

Lastly, the animated cutscenes are as good as they could be. They're not as good as the ones in Three Houses and I don't think there was nearly as many, but they still look really good. Many of the animated cutscenes look so much better than the in game ones with the crappy models and look like they came right out of an anime. They are well done and voiced, and I couldn't have asked for anything better on the 3DS. If I played this when the game was first released, I might have been in awe.

It's also really cool that there's an in game media player that allows you to watch animated cutscenes that you've already unlocked, like in Three Houses. But there are two issues that I have with this. The first is that in order to access them, you need to be in the Records Hall, which is in your castle. The only problem is that you can only access that after you've beaten the prologue chapters.

The Other issue I have is that it only shows the ones you've already unlocked. In Three Houses, it had a blank spot for each one, regardless of whether or not you unlocked them yet. That way, you can keep track of how many there are in total, and how many you are missing. There's no way to know in Fates unless you look it up, but it's still a very nice feature to have in the game.

Overall, the graphics of Fire Emblem Fates are really good. They are about the same as what I've seen with Three Houses other than a few small issues here and there. It's a very fun game to look at and my overall grade for graphics is going to be a 9 out of 10.

SOUND: 8/10

When it comes to sound, Fire Emblem Fates has a lot going on, both good and bad. First off, let’s talk about one aspect that I really liked about sound, which was the music. When it came to the music, I actually liked a lot of songs right away, which is more than I can say than what happened with Three Houses. There are a lot of songs in the Three Houses soundtrack that I love, but it took a while for me to really fall in love with them.

In fact, a week after playing Three Houses for the first time, I think there were only two songs that I liked at all. After about a month, that grew to five songs, and then I started loving more as more time went on and thanks to hearing the same songs over and over. But I didn’t instantly start liking the songs. When I first played, I hated the theme song with the lyrics, and after playing for like 20 hours, there was nothing that really jumped out at me.

But it was different with Fire Emblem Fates. After only playing for about an hour, there were already songs that I started liking. Unlike with Three Houses, where it took a long time to connect with many of the songs but was instant with Fates. In Three Houses, it was more of the fast paced and energetic songs that I found myself liking, but it was the slow and dramatic ones that I was mostly listening to when it came to Fates.

One example of how differently I viewed each soundtrack was with the song that Azura sings. I normally do not like songs in games or anime that have lyrics in them at all. I didn’t like this in the main theme for Three Houses and I still don’t, I’ll almost always skip over that song when I’m playing Three Houses. But for some reason, I just think that Azura’s song is way better. Not only do I enjoy listening to it, I also like listening to instrumental versions of it. It’s a really good song and I found myself enjoying it after listening to it once or twice.

There’s also another song that I really liked right away, a slow and epic song that played whenever I entered one of the shops in My Castle. The first time I ever entered that shop, I really enjoyed it, and then I heard it again while playing one of the DLC maps because it played during the dialogue scene before the battle starts. It didn’t take me weeks to fall in love with these songs like with Three Houses, but just a couple of hours.

After playing for around 20 hours, there were already seven or eight songs that I was enjoying. To me, none of them were as good as some of my favorites in Three Houses such as Fodlan Winds, Shackled Wolves, and The Long Road. But, because I was liking songs so early, I was able to become fully immersed in the game earlier on, and that helped with my overall experience.

Just like with Three Houses, many of the songs in the Fates soundtrack has multiple versions, but it can get pretty confusing. Many of the Three Houses songs had both a Rain version and a Thunder version, and they were significantly different from each other. They were so different that you might not even be able to tell that it’s the same song in some cases and will probably prefer one over the other. For instance, I don’t like the Thunder version of Fodlan Winds, Thunder version of Shackled Wolves, or the Rain version of The Long Road even though their opposites are my favorite songs in the whole soundtrack.

Fire Emblem Fates doesn’t stick with one template for variations. In addition to your base songs, there are 11 different versions, many of which are exclusive to each game, but can be unlocked and played later. The 11 possible versions include Fire, Storm, Light, Dark. Sky, Land, Flow, Ablaze, Deeds, Roar, and Below. I much prefer the way simpler method that Three Houses took because having 11 different versions is way too much. Many of them aren’t even that different from each other aside for the different name.

One other thing that I really liked about the game’s music was that just like Three Houses, the soundtrack is just massive. The base soundtrack has a hefty 120 songs in total and there are a handful of songs that appear in the game but are not in the official soundtrack, which means that the total is higher. There are also another ten songs that are added through DLC, including three more unique versions bringing the total to 14.

Sure, there’s a bunch of songs that I don’t care for and a couple that I flat out don’t like, but having that many options to choose from is such a nice touch. After playing for about 100 hours, I think the total number of songs that I liked reached about a dozen. It’s also really cool that you can access songs in the Records Hall too. However, just like with viewing cutscenes, you can only view the songs that you have already unlocked, meaning that there’s no way to confirm what songs you’re missing without looking it up.

It does suck that you have to be in the Records Hall to be able to listen to the music. Not only does that require you to play through the first few chapters just to unlock it, when you turn on the game, it will take you a while to load in and get there to begin with. With Three Houses, the media player is right in the main menu.

When it comes to music, Fates isn’t as great as what we got with Three Houses, but not only is it good in general, it’s exceptionally good for what you’d expect from a 3DS game. Now we can talk about something that I didn’t really like, which was the voice acting.

When it came to voice acting, Three Houses was a game changer for me. When I completed my review, I had around 100 hours or so invested into the game and I was loving every minute of the voice acting. After those 100 hours and completing the review, there were only two voice actors that I recognized, and I still loved the acting so much.

I loved the voice acting so much that I started paying attention to many of the voice actors and I ended up becoming a big fan of nearly all of them, watching and playing all of their other projects. About four months after finishing that review, I became a fan of 13 of the voice actors. So, since Fates wasn’t too much older than Three Houses, I was expecting something that would at least be close to what Three Houses offered in the voice acting department.

But in the end, I was pretty disappointed with what was delivered. The voice acting was nowhere near as good as what I was hoping it would be. There were very few moments of full voice acting, and all the moments with voices were just way too shorts. There were so many moments where you’d get a dialogue box with a full sentence, but it would only be accompanied by a very short statement that sums it up or even just a word or two. If I had to guess, I’d say that less than 33 percent of the dialogue lines were actually voiced.

In many ways, that was a dealbreaker for me. I couldn’t even tell if I liked half of the voices because of how few spoken lines there were. Most of the time, it would really hurt the immersion too. Because I’d listen to a couple words of spoken dialogue, but then be forced to read the text in the end. That was something that I absolutely hated, and I grew annoyed of hearing the characters voice for only one to four words at a time while reading 10 to 20. I personally think that if they wanted to do voice acting at all, they should have gone all the way, and not give a small portion of dialogue spoken lines.

I don’t think it could have been because of the 3DS capabilities either, because they did find a way to cram 120 songs into the game, so time and size couldn’t have been too big of an issue. Honestly, if each character only had an extra minute or two of spoken lines across the game, I think that would have made this category so much better.

There was also some star power across Fates too, but nothing major. Max Mittelman and Yuri Lowenthal had a few roles each but that was about it. There were also a few actors who would gone on to have a role in Three Houses. But none of them left me impressed. There were a couple voices that I did really enjoy, but just like all of them, they were very short lived.

The only thing left to say when it comes to the sound of Fire Emblem Fates is the generic sounds, You have your common battle sounds and the different menu sounds, plus there’s a variety of sounds while traversing your castle, but nothing too crazy. Overall, I really like the soundtrack, but it wasn’t as epic as the one in Three Houses, and I thought that the voice acting was pretty lackluster in comparison too. My overall grade for sound is an 8 out of 10.

STORY: 10/10

The story of Fire Emblem Fates is definitely one that’s very expansive and in some ways I like the story here more than in Three Houses. I feel like the structure is way less complex and redundant in Fates so before I talk about the plot, I wanted to talk about a few of the ways that the two games are different when it comes to story and chapter structure.

The chapter structure between Fates and Three Houses is very different. The big thing is that the different paths that you could follow in Three Houses were their own independent game and at the same time, half of each path was a path that you had to do over each time you wanted to start the game over.

What do I mean by that? Well obviously, there are three houses. You pick one and that sends you down one of three different paths. The first half is the same regardless of which house you pick other than characters, dialogue, and some different events, and lasts for 12 chapters. Then once you reach the end of part one, the story branches off into one of four distinct games for the second part.

This shows two ways that Fates is very different from Three Houses. The four different part two paths in Three Houses are Azure Moon, Crimson Flower, Verdant Wind, and Silver Snow. Azure Moon is 10 chapters, Crimson Flower is six chapters, Verdant Wind is 10 chapters, and Silver Snow is 9 chapters.

The first way that Fates is very different is with the story type. In most games where you can pick one side or another, it’s usually the same game with the same story and events, you’re just doing everything from a different perspective. Or the same game with some different modifications such as what Pokemon does. Three Houses didn’t do anything like that at all.

It’s not like Azure Moon was the same as Silver Snow, just from someone else’s perspective. No, it was an entirely different game with a different story, different characters, different events, and different deaths too. It’s not like a “what if” situation where picking a different house just shows you what would have happened. The game basically created different alternate timelines for you to experience.

Fates is more like a “what if” scenario and in a way makes an even more complete game. They’re still very different games but the games more accurately portray what happens on each side of the story. If you choose the Conquest route, that’s the story you’re following. But then if you play Birthright next, it’s not a whole new event, it’s a what happens if you’re on the other side situation.

It’s still three different games but it tells a complete story concerning all three sides and the ramifications of being on each side instead of three or four separate stories.

The other big difference between the two games is the story structure and I prefer the system used in Fates because not only is there more chapters, it’s also easier to get to the new stuff when starting the game over.

If you have either Conquest or Birthright, you’re only going to play through that specific story but if you have all three, then the game branches off into the respective story after chapter six. Once you reach chapter six, then you can choose which story you want to follow. First let’s finish looking at the chapter structure of Three Houses.

Let’s say you chose the Blue Lions on your first playthrough. You’re going to do the 12 part one chapters and then you’re going to do 10 part two chapters. Then for your second playthrough, you choose to go with the Golden Deer. You’re going to do the 12 part one chapters and 10 part two chapters. Here’s the problem. Other than having different characters and dialogue, you’re playing through the same 12 chapters and battles in the first part.

That’s a lot of repeating. If you do all four stories once, you’ll have done 35 part two chapters, all of which are unique, but you’ll have done the same 12 part one chapters four times each. Part one usually took me like 20 to 25 hours to complete and that ended up being a lot of extra work to just get back to the new stuff.

In total, by the time you reach the end of the fourth playthrough, you’ll have completed 83 chapters but only 47 of them would have been unique. The remaining 36 would have been re-dos of the part one chapters. In my opinion, Fates does this way better because the part that’s the same among all three games is much shorter while there’s way more content that’s restricted to each game.

The first part, which Is the same for everyone, is only five chapters long, not 12 like in Three Houses. This makes it feel more like a long prologue than an entire 25 hour act. If you did three playthroughs in Three Houses, you’d be doing the same 12 chapters three times in part one. But you’re only doing five chapters three times in Fates. That allows you to get into the game exclusive stuff a lot sooner and doesn’t force stuff to drag on.

But not only that, each game has a lot of content in their own storyline. In Three Houses, the longest exclusive chapters were Azure Moon and Verdant Wind, which had 10 chapters each. Including the 12 part one chapters, those two paths ended at chapter 22. All three Fates games has 27 chapters and a final battle following the competition of chapter 27. This means that aside for the five chapters that are the same for everyone, each game has 22 unique chapters.

Three Houses had 83 total chapters among four paths but only 47 of them were unique. Fates has 81 total chapters among three paths and a whopping 71 of them are unique. When it comes to paralogues, the two games are almost about the same. Three Houses has 23 different paralogues not including the DLC ones while Fates has 22. Also, unlike with Three Houses, the Fates DLC adds so many more paralogues

PROLOUGE

Before I even started playing Fire Emblem Fates for the first time, I pretty much made up my mind as to which game I had wanted to play first and that was based on a few pieces of detail here and there as to what the game is about. But apparently, I knew very little of the emotional depth and character development of the game, if any at all.

The two things that I knew about Fates were a few of the main plot points and about Camilla. I played Fire Emblem Heroes for around 30 hours, and I summoned Camilla so many times in that game, so I ended up learning a lot about her and her involvement in Fates through that game. From what I knew about her personality, I sort of fell in love with her quickly. My first impressions from when I first started reading into her was that she’s like the best sister ever.

At this point, I knew a bit about the story and knew of her involvement. I knew that she was kind of obsessed with Corrin and I knew a little bit of her involvement in the story for both the Conquest and Birthright routes. I thought it was just adorable and some really good character development. In addition to that, I knew a little bit of the story itself. There’s a war that very much made me think of the war for Fodlan in Three Houses but this time it’s between two sides, the Nohr and the Hoshidians.

Corrin is the son of the King of Nohr, but not really because he was kidnapped when he was really young and then raised as one of their own. After you complete the fifth chapter, the game that you play dictates which side you’re on. If you play Conquest, you stay with the people that you grew up with, the Nohr. If you play Birthright, you return to your birth family, the Hoshidians. If you play Revelations, you’re sort of branded a traitor by both and set off on your own journey.

It’s the family involvement and Camilla’s story that made me initially decide that I wanted to play Conquest for my first playthrough. But by the time I reached the end of chapter five, I honestly had no idea what I really wanted anymore because of how wild and emotional the first few chapters were, even though it was something that I already knew was coming.

In the first couple of chapters there’s a lot going on because it serves as both a battle tutorial and an introduction to many of the characters. The game starts off in Nohr and you’re introduced to your adopted family as well as a couple of people from Hoshido. You’re ordered by your father to kill a couple Hoshdian prisoners but that’s not something that you can bring yourself to do.

As a result, the king sends you on a mission to make up for it. You’re supposed to evaluate a fortress that’s near the border between Nohr and Hoshido but there’s soldiers there, so you have to fight. After the battle you’re attacked and brought into Hoshido. This is where things get really wild throughout the entirety of chapter four. This is the chapter in which Corrin finds out that he’s actually from Hoshido.

Obviously, I knew that there was supposed to be some sort of reveal to Corrin early on since you have to choose which side to join in the next chapter, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so emotional. By this point in the game, I was having a decent amount of enjoyment. I wasn’t too fond of the characters yet, but I was having a lot of fun with the gameplay and the story picked up quite a bit in the previous chapter. But I would go as far as to say that chapter four was one of the best levels in a game that I have ever played and was what really made me invested in the game.

The chapter starts off with your real family members explaining that they’re your family and about you being kidnapped many years ago. Then there’s a battle against some monsters where you end up saving two people who also happen to be your real siblings, and this is where the story and emotion really kick in.

I love a good story. As someone who goes to the movies 50 to 80 times a year and can get super emotional, I love a really well made story. But I don’t often play games story driven games. I’ll gladly sit and watch an emotional movie or TV show for hours, but when I’m playing a game for fun, I usually stick to games that have a lot of fun gameplay, battles, humor, or music.

In fact, before I started playing Three Houses earlier this year, my 10 most played Switch games were Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Pokemon Sword, Stardew Valley, Breath of the Wild, Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, Golf Story, Super Smash Bros, Story of Seasons, and Smite. Very few of those games are story driven and those that are, like BoTW, really have the story as a secondary element behind the gameplay.

In fact, I’ve reviewed nine of those games and the average score that I assigned for Story was just a 7.1. I just overall didn’t pay attention to the story, didn’t care for it, or was playing something that had an insignificant story. You’re rarely going to see me playing any of the critically acclaimed games with award winning games.

I guess that’s part of the reason why Three Houses made such a big impression on me, because it was such a drastic change from the kind of games that I commonly play to one with such a massive story. Three Houses was one of the few times that I’ve ever been impacted by a games story, but I quickly started to realize that the story of Fates might even be better.

In the second half of chapter four, the game does a really amazing job at letting the emotion settle in. It doesn’t just explain that Corrin was kidnapped when they were young, but it fully explores the emotion and trauma that Corrin’s family went through, and I was not prepared for that at all. When Hinoka realizes who you are, she breaks down. That, mixed with the explanation of what she went through when she was little nearly broke my heart too.

At this point I had actually began questioning my thought process as to which game I should be playing for my first playthrough. Of course, I knew that I was going to come back and play all of them, but in the moment, the decision just felt so personal. I was pretty conflicted now between the family that actually raised Corrin and their actual family that was so devastated when they lost them.

Not only that, but the family was so keen on getting Corrin back that they tried multiple rescue attempts that failed, but eventually went so far as kidnapping someone from Nohr in an attempt to get Corrin back. This adds so much extra flair and emotion to the story, and it really added so much to the perspective of what was going on between the two sides.

In chapter five, tensions grow even more as there’s an attack at a Hoshidian festival and Corrin’s real mother is killed trying to save them. After a battle, Corrin gets their memories back of his “fake father” killing his real one and kidnapping him and then just as the two sides meet on the battlefield, it’s where your decision comes in to pick where you want to stay and which game you play.

After the experience of chapters four and five, I was too emotionally broken to go through with picking a side to the point where I was about ready to play Revelations just so I could be friends with everybody. But after researching further what each game did for your gameplay, I stuck with Conquest, and from there, the story, emotion, and tension only grew.

A part of me was glad at how short the five chapter prologue was. I think the whole thing was only around two hours, but it really packed a punch and the story was more than enough to make me want to keep going forward. The pacing was just perfect and if I had to say, I’d consider just the prologue as one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had in gaming.

In Conquest, you choose to return to Nohr, back to the adopted family that you spent most of your life with. In retrospect, this is the option that makes the most sense to me based on the characters and story. But there’s just one small issue with choosing this option. Your adopted father, the king, doesn’t really trust that you’re still one of them now that you know the truth and he thinks that you could be a spy now.

In Birthright, you return to your birth family. This itself has a very good story considering you’re now going against the people that you actually grew up with. In both games, you fight the other side and as a result, each one is drastically different from each other with different antagonists. Then you have Revelations, in which you don’t choose a side and try to bring the two sides together. But in this game, there’s yet another new antagonist. Once you get through the prologue chapters, there’s a ton of content to play through for each of the three games.

A MILLION CHARACTERS

For me, the characters of Fates ended up being one of the strongest parts of the game. I remember when I first started playing Three Houses, I was really intrigued by the large cast of characters. There were so many characters and each of them had some really cool and unique designs, personalities, and backstories. I would spend so much time doing research beforehand on each of the characters and I slowly began to love many of them as I played the game more.

My experience with Fates ended up being very different because I fell in love with many of the characters much faster, right at the start of the game in some cases. For instance, my two most favorite characters in Three Houses right now are Ashe and Leonie. But here’s the thing, even though I had experience with them during my first playthrough of the game, I didn’t really start liking them until I was well into my second playthrough. In Leonies case, she was even one of my least favorite characters for the first 60 or so hours, it took a lot of time for me to start liking her.

Even the characters that I liked during my first playthrough didn’t really cement their places in my heart until after I played for like 10 or 20 hours. But in Fates there were so many characters that I felt instantly connected to after only a handful of chapters. I already talked a bit about how much I liked Camilla going into the game, but I was experiencing so much immersion with many of the other characters that she ended up dropping to around fourth on my list of favorite characters by the time I completed the second chapter of Conquest, which was barely five hours into my first playthrough.

There were even a couple of characters that I was pretty indifferent to at the start of the game that I slowly started to like as I played more. One example of such a character was Felicia. Like Leonie, I didn’t really like Felicia too much near the start of the game but after just a few additional interactions with her, I started to like her supports and backstory a lot. Speaking of supports, there were a ton in Fates that I ended up liking more than in Three Houses. Because I started liking these characters very early on in the game, by the time those supports came along, I felt way more attached to them and was pretty invested in their lives.

In Three Houses, there were plenty of times where I would hold off on seeing certain supports since I didn’t care too much for a character at the time or I would rush and skip them. But here, I was invested pretty early on. To be honest, I wasn’t too invested in the supports that didn’t involve Corrin, but those kinds of supports went a really long way when it came to marriage and children, but I’ll talk more about those later on.

In total, there are so many characters between those that are playable, NPC’s, and enemies. There’s a huge variety based on which game you play, similar to what you had in Three Houses. Obviously, you only get access to a portion of the characters based on the game, but between all of the main characters, children, and DLC characters, the number of playable units reaches 72. That’s not including all of the characters that you can acquire through the use of amiibos and capturing. That adds another 17 possible units to the roster.

That’s nearly 100 characters to play as, train, and do supports with, and that’s not including the dozens of additional characters that appear as enemies, NPC’s, or random characters. Fates is not lacking at all when it comes to the number of characters and there are so many that are very likable. The only downside I could see is that if you’re playing either Conquest or Birthright, it’s not possible to recruit characters from the other path like you could in Three Houses.

By the time I had put around ten or so hours into the game, there was already like five characters that I had really liked. By the time that I was done with all of the games, there was around a dozen or so characters that I loved and another 10 or so that I really liked, which ended up being well more than what I liked in Three Houses. I’m pretty sure that if Fates had full voice acting like what Three Houses had, I would have loved the characters so much more and I might have even gone on to like Fates more than Three Houses in the end.

I was enjoying the characters so much that there were plenty of times where I would spend hours at a time trying to raise their supports non stop. I would bring a character that I wanted to improve into my base at the castle so that I could have the little conversation with them in order to raise their support a little bit. Then I would randomly visit someone else’s castle and then instantly go back to mine so that time in the game would move forward. If I did this two or three times, it would jump to the next day and I would be able to do the conversation again.

-I would just keep doing this for like 30 minutes straight I’d be able to get six or seven conversations in a row with the same character taken care of and that really helped boost their supports. Just like in Three Houses, supports are incredibly useful because not only do they offer you their own little boosts, but they also offer a ton of backstory. At times, they can also be super emotional or adorable, which would add to the charm of the game. Just like in Three Houses, there are a ton of supports between you and another unit, but also between two other units.

On its own, that’s amazing, but I think Fates did this so much better than Three Houses did because of its marriage and children system, which is extensive. Three Houses had its own marriage system, but it was very small and wasn’t available until after you beat the game. When you would marry someone in Three Houses, you would get an adorable cutscene, but you weren’t even able to make a decision on who to marry officially until you made it all the way to the final battle.

When two other units marry each other, you get to see a paragraph of what their lives were like but that too is after the game is over, and in the base game, you can’t choose who gets to marry who and you don’t know the pairings until the game is over. If you have the DLC, then you were able to spend a lot of renown to marry specific units, but even that would have to wait until the end of the game to see it unfold and it was an expensive option.

Let’s face it, the harsh reality is that Three Houses was only an adorable cosmetic option that just added a little extra story content and lore after you beat the game, nothing more. Not only is there a whole lot more in Fates when it comes to marriage, but it’s also unlocked significantly earlier in the game. Marriage in Fates is still amazing just for the adorable factor alone because there are a ton of supports that will get super emotional or cute. Plus, you’re going to waste so much time making sure that your two favorite characters get together.

But the fact that there’s so much more to marriage after the fact adds a whole extra level of immersion to the game. In Three Houses, marriage was at the end of the game when it came to supports, and they weren’t even that great to begin with unless it was your own marriage and you watched the cut scene. In Three Houses, the best part was seeing all the adorable supports unfold but once those supports reached their end and the marriage was done, that was really the end of it. In Fates, watching the supports unfold was still great, but they were just the beginning of the marriage journey.

Just the process of deciding who you want to marry to who and how you go about doing so is another big aspect simply because of what happens next. To marry people off to each other in Fates, it’s the same as in Three Houses. You just need to have them fight together and their supports with each other will increase slowly over time. There’s also just a ton of possible combinations. There are so many possible units that Corrin can marry, regardless of the gender that you choose for them, and each of those units have a plethora of other possible units that they can marry. There are literally thousands of possible ways to dictate marriage when you’re playing.

Many of these pairings will also lead to children, which is an amazing feature that I’ll discuss a bit in the next section. As for supports though, there are just so many. There might even be more supports in Fates than there are in Three Houses, which is another reason why I’m so disappointed that there isn’t full voice acting. One part of this is simply because there are so many characters, but another reason for this is because there’s a bunch of different types of supports. For instance, you have your regular supports that are shared with that of Three Houses.

The regular supports that I’m talking about include your main supports which can be increased to C, B, and A, and your romance supports. There are so many characters that you can increase your support with but obviously there’s also a ton of other combinations between two random units. Raising these supports between Corrin and another unit are easy and are the same as in Three Houses and other supports because you just have to fight alongside the character that you want the support to grow. But there are also many other ways to increase these supports such as inviting a unit to your base.

In addition to your classic C, B, A supports, there are also a ton of S supports for marriage and since you can marry off two characters mid game, the possible outcomes become endless. In addition to all of these standard supports, the inclusion of children adds another two types of supports, types that weren’t even possible in Three Houses without children. Units that have a kid will have a standard C, B, A, support system with them, and Corrin’s kids will also be able to have supports with their sibling too if applicable, which adds even more to the support lore.

This just adds a whole extra level of depth, detail, and storytelling. In total, there’s hundreds of different supports to uncover across all three games, the game might even be pushing close to a thousand. Again, it sucks that there’s no full voice acting, but there’s a lot of story to be told through supports, much more than in Three houses in my opinion.

And we didn’t even get to talk about the children themselves yet. There’s a bunch of different children that can be had either between Corrin and another character or between two other units and they offer so much to the game because they become playable units. That’s right, marriage is only the beginning because in addition to picking out your favorite pairing, marriage also allows you to construct the perfect kid army. The game just has so much going on in the character department.

GAMEPLAY: 9/10

Another one of my favorite aspects of the game is the gameplay for a number of reasons. In fact, I prefer the gameplay in Fates over Three Houses because of the amount of strategy involved and the involvement of the lower screen. It's also a bit crazy that just a few months ago, I absolutely hated the genre. In May, I couldn't stand grid based strategy game. I thought they were kind of boring, and at the same time very confusing and hard to understand.

But then when I started playing, I realized that it was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, and I started noticing that it was fun and a good puzzle as well. So I quickly started to like the genre, even though there are still aspects from that game that I don't understand yet. But then when I started playing Fates, there were some times where I started facing different kinds of challenges and it started getting hard again.

What I realized was that Three Houses was a sort of entry point for new gamers and was much easier than what I experienced in Fates. So, while I was playing Fates, I had to re-adjust how I play, and it became a big challenge again. But in this case, I really liked the extra challenge, and it was easier to understand.

Just like in Three Houses and other SRPG’s, each of your units stands on a tile and can only move a little bit during each turn and has a specific number of actions that they can perform during that turn. One big thing that I noticed between Fates and Three Houses in the gameplay department is that there appears to be more actions that you can do. I was way more likely to invest time in different skills and relationships across Fates as a result. In fact, I didn’t even pay too much attention to things like Combat Arts and Abilities in Three Houses, but I put a lot of focus into skills here.

Many of the skills in Fates felt way more interactive and useful at times and allowed for way more immersion during my playthrough. For instance, there was a bunch of healing skills, one that allowed you to find money, and even one that allowed you to get another turn, which proved to be super useful at times. This meant that strategy was even more important in Fates than it was in Three Houses, at least in the ways that I played. In order to do well, you had to find the perfect combination of skill, stats, support, and equipment, even more so than in Three Houses.

That’s not even counting the battle itself because you had to really focus on where each unit was, where each enemy was, the type of enemy, the terrain, and the location and purpose of any dragon dens that may be littered across the map. There’s a lot to take into consideration when playing, and if you’re playing on classic more, it’s even more true because you’re going to want to make sure that everybody survives. You’re going to have to kick your strategy and planning into overdrive to ensure you don’t lose any of your important pieces.

I loved this about the game, and I was super invested as a result. My very first playthrough of Fates was on classic mode and I was just terrible, but that didn’t stop me because I was having so much fun with the gameplay and characters. For instance, there were some intense battles where a character would die after like 10 or 15 minutes. But instead of going forward and losing them, I would start the battle over and try even harder. As a result, there were some battles that I did ten or so times and took me hours to complete, but I didn’t care because they were fun and engaging.

Bottom Screen For The Win

While those gameplay aspects are great, they aren’t even my favorite when it comes to what Fates has to offer. My favorite aspect has to do with the capabilities of the 3DS and the usage of the bottom screen. When you play Three Houses, all of the info that you have is displayed on the same screen as everything else and you need to keep toggling back and forth between different pages or different actions. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, especially when you really want to focus on the info and stats, but in Fates, that’s exactly what the bottom screen is for.

There are two main reasons that I love the bottom screen when it comes to gameplay. The first is the inclusion of so much info and the second is the ability to change battle angles. While you’re battling, the bottom screen literally gives you all of the info that you could ever wish for and that can be incredibly useful for so many reasons.

When you first start a battle, you’re going to be above Corrin and the bottom screen is going to show you so much information. The three things that will jump out at you the most are your name, an image of the character, and a list of your items but those three aren’t really that important compared to the rest of the stuff. Near the top of the screen, you’ll see your rank, level, HP, and small icons for all six skills that you have.

You won’t see the name of each skill but tapping on the icon will not only show you the name, but a description of each skill as well, which is very helpful in determining what can and can’t be done during that specific battle. You’re also going to see all seven of your stats including Strength, Speed, Magic, Luck, Skill, Defense, and Resistance. You’re going to see each stat rating in addition to an overall rating. Lastly, you’re also going to see which units you have the deepest connection with, which is also helpful if you want to boost supports by battling. But all this is just on the simple UI screen.

You can change to a more advanced screen that will show extra pieces of info such as your attack, critical rate, hit rate, avoid rate, experience points, and movement level. This version will also show you which weapons you are the most proficient in. You can also change the bottom screen to instead of showing your character, it will show a full map of the battlefield including how many units there are between you and the enemy, and where they are located.

In addition, if you move the cursor to another unit, it’s going to change so that you can see all the same info but for each of your units. But it gets way better because you can also scroll to an enemy, and you can see all of their stats and things as well. You’re able to see each of their stats, their strength, skill, speed, HP, what weapons they have, and even items or money that will be dropped if you kill them. The bottom screen is just filled with so much information that you need to take advantage of to make sure that your strategy works the best way possible.

But when you’re in an actual battle animation fighting someone, there’s even more that you can do with the bottom screen because you can control the speed and camera angle during the battle. In addition, watching an attack normally, you can pause the animation or speed it up and slow it down to make it just the right speed. There are also many things that you can do with the camera angle. There are different kinds of fixed angles that can follow either your unit or the enemy. There’s a first person view and a cinematic view that moves too. I like this too because it adds a lot more immersion to the actual fight animations. Gameplay wise, Fates is about the same as Three Houses, but with a couple extra features and gets a 9 out of 10 from me.

ADDICTIVENESS: 9/10

I don’t even have to truly talk about the addictiveness, do I? In a few ways, the replayability of Fates is a lot better than it is in Three Houses because it’s so much easier to start a new game and get right into the action. If you are a fan of the game, and you spent the money to get all three versions, you’re going to easily find yourself wanting to go back and play all three, whether it’s for the story, the characters, or just because you want to. But the big difference here between Fates and Three Houses is how easy it is to get back into the game once you completed it.

In Three Houses, if you wanted to start a new game after beating one path, you would still need to go through the long 12 chapter part one. Even though the characters and dialogue, and in some cases, the events, were different, many of the events were the same. You would spend many hours doing the same thing over, sometimes 20 or more hours before you get to the part that’s exclusive to the other path. But in Fates, the introductory first part is only a few chapters long and takes just a couple of hours to beat before you’re ready to pick your path. But what’s better is that you don’t even have to do that at all, you can skip the first few chapters and pick your game right away.

So, if you beat the game once and wanted to start a new game along a different path, you could do so immediately. Also, if you’re heavily invested in many of the characters, you’re going to want to keep going back and working on supports and marriages. Maybe in your first playthrough you couldn’t get through all the supports, so you need a second playthrough to get through them. Or maybe you wanted to pair your units with other units and marry them.

This game is going to give you many reasons to keep coming back and playing some more. Even though there’s three games, you might have well more than three playthroughs depending on if you want to try different challenges or play with different difficulties. There’s many different reasons for coming back and addictiveness gets a 9 out of 10 from me.

DEPTH: 10/10

When it comes to depth, Fire Emblem Fates just has so much going on. There aren't as many
unique things to do compared to Three Houses but there is still a ton, and each unique aspect of depth has So much to offer. For instance, just look at all the chapters. If you have all three games, there's going to be a total of 71 unique chapters to Play through. On top of that, there's a ton of battles and so many characters to play as or interact with.

But none of those even come close to the size and scope of the three biggest depth aspects. Those three add so much more to the game. Playing through all the story alone is a 60 to 100 hour game but those three easily add another hundred hours or more. That's also great when you look at value because if you buy either conquest or Birthright and then digitally add the other two games, you're paying $80 for three massive games

CASTLE

My favorite aspect of depth is the castle feature. This is very similar to the monastery in Three Houses, and I spent countless hours there taking advantage of all the services that were being offered. These services also change based on which game you're playing, so the number of things you can do or buy is actually a lot higher than you might think.

-The amount of stuff that you can buy in your castle is just insane, The Shops are very much like the three Houses marketplace but with a lot more stuff to buy. The main way to buy weapons in Fates is to shop at the Armory. There's a different armory for each game and each one sells different versions of the same weapons. For instance, one will sell swords while the other will sell katanas.

If you're playing conquest, you'll have access to the Dusk Armory while you'll get the Dawn Armory if you're playing Birthright. If you're playing Revelations, then you get access to both shops. Both versions can be upgraded twice. At maximum level, the Dawn Armory will have 55 items to choose from while the Dusk Armory will have 54.

In the Dusk Armory, you will find seven main weapons. They are swords, lances, axes, daggers,
Knives, bows, and magic scrolls. There are your Common weapon types which include bronze, Iron, Steel, and silver, and a couple rare ones such as Brave and killer. There are also a couple rare types that are limited to one or two weapons and there's a couple of specialty weapons that are significantly stronger than the others.

On the other hand, the Dawn Armory is very different. In this armory, you'll find six main weapons, which include Katanas, Naginatas, clubs, Shuriken, Yumi’s, and spirits. The Dawn Armory Shares Iron, steel, and silver with the Dusk Armory but they have Brass instead of Bronze. There are also a couple rare types such as venge and dual. Like in the Dusk Armory, you can buy tailored weapons and ones that are much stronger as well.

The Armory isn't the only place to buy stuff in the castle, you have the vendor too. If you have Birthright, you'll get the Rod Shop but you'll get the Staff Store in conquest. Just like with the armory, both vendors can be upgraded twice. Both the staff store and the Rod Shop Carry 35 items and many of the items are the same in both stores.

The main items you'll find in the Rod shop are Festals, Tonics, and seals. This shop has five Festals, which are rods used to heal characters. There are nine tonics, which are items that temporarily boost certain stats. There are four seals, which are used to change your class. Festals are limited to the Rod Shop, but you can find the same tonics and seals in the Staff Store

In the Rod Shop, all the healing rods have the name Festal attached to them. In the Staff Store, these items are staffs and have no special name assigned to them. They are simply named after what they do such as Heals Psychic, Freeze and Entrap. The two vendors also have a bunch of rare items that can be bought in one store or the other and a bunch of other items that can be bought at both such as vulnerary and Elixir.

The Accessory shop is probably my favorite of all the shops in the castle. Accessories are a way
to customize an outfit and there are more than 60 in total, many of which can be bought in this shop. The last shop is the lottery Shop. Obviously, you can't pick which items you want but the Dusk lottery has 89 Possible Prizes while the Dawn lottery has 90.

-Stores are only a small fraction of the things that you can do in the castle. My favorite thing to do is visit other castles because this is an easy way to get unlimited resources. You can't visit the same castle more than once in a day, but you can visit as many different castles as you like and reap the rewards.

One of the main facilities of your castle are basically mines and farms. Every in game day, you can collect a resource from each building. You can collect food such as meat, berries, or wheat and minerals such as Pearls and Topaz. You can only collect resources limited to your own game but visiting other castles is a great way to fix this.

Some castles will have a lot of resource buildings which will allow you to stock up on a ton of stuff. You can collect all the stuff, leave, and then go to a new castle to collect even more stuff. The best part is that you can Visit castles from other games. That way, even if you are playing conquest for example, you can collect all the resources from Birthright.

I really took advantage of this during my first playthrough of conquest. I kept going back and forth between random castles collecting as much stuff as I could get. After doing this for half an hour, I had nearly 20 of every single item. But resource farming just scratches the surface of what you can do in other castles.

Another big thing that you can do in other people’s castles is that you can challenge them to battles. Battles have been hit or miss with me because whenever I battle another player, it’s either so easy that I win without even attacking, or it’s so hard that I lose in a couple of turns. I think the difficulty is based on what the other person sets though, so if you challenge a few easy castles, you can get lots of rewards. These are rewards that will be a huge benefit, especially if you’re playing on a harder difficulty or on Classic.

If you win a battle, there are two prizes that you can choose from. The first is that you can recruit one of the units that the other player was using. They’re more of a guest unit, similar to when you recruit someone for just one chapter in Three Houses and apparently, they can’t physically attack enemies. At first, I thought this was a terrible prize because I thought it would just be a waste to enter a battle with one less spot basically because the guest unit would be useless.

But then I started to realize that this is an amazing way to help out your own units because the guest ones can be used as a distraction or as a way to quickly move forward to a certain area, or to go to areas where there’s things such as chests. Not only that, if you’re playing on Classic, there are far fewer restrictions on what you can do with a guest unit because you don’t have to worry about them. If you were worried about a certain plan not working, you can send in one of the guest units instead of one of your own and if they die, it’s better to be them than one of your own.

The second reward that you can get from beating other players is easily my favorite of the two. You can buy skills. The only problem is that you can only buy skills that the other player already had in their battle and only for units that you already have in your party. For instance, if the other player had eight different units on your team, but you don’t have any of them, you won’t be able to buy any. But if you have a unit that they have, you could buy one of the skills that their unit has.

Of course, this is going to be very limited based on how much gold you have because these skills can be very expensive, but this can be an amazing way to make some of your units overpowered early on. It’s very much like when you go hunting for specific stats in Pokemon. You can keep battling other players over and over until you find the right skill for the right unit. Then all you have to do is buy it and just like that, your chosen unit is so much better. I had a lot of fun doing this because every time I won, I would carefully look into all the available skills and then check to see if they would make me any better.

For instance, there was one skill that I found called Profiteer and I knew that I had to have it, even though it was so expensive. It’s a skill that has a chance to find a gold bar on each of the units first seven turns based on their luck skill. Getting money is much harder in Conquest, so I attached this skill to Corrin, and whenever I did one of the DLC battles, I would find two or three gold bars per battle, which could be sold for 1,000 gold each.

I also found a couple really good healing skills for Corrin. One that restores up to 30 percent of your HP each turn and another that restores up to 50 percent of your attack if you defeat an enemy. So, by battling other players, my Corrin got skills that allowed to find free money and restore lots of health before I even made it to chapter ten. By being able to randomly find gold, I was able to buy a ton more skills, and before I knew it, many of my units had some pretty powerful skills early on, making them nearly unstoppable.

Sometimes other players are going to really want you to visit their castle, so they purposely set up a team with all of the most powerful skills as a reward. A lot of the time, people will even mention it in their castle names in order to make you want to visit them. But if you don’t have enough gold or you don’t have any of the same units, it can get depressing fast. It’s very easy to miss out on a really powerful skill if the conditions aren’t met.

-Another big aspect of the castle is the invasions, which are basically kind of like their own paralogues that revolve around the safety of your castle and are completely optional, but also tough. With these invasions, you’re just protecting the castle from invading soldiers and each game has three unique invasions to go through, that begin shortly after you pick your side. If you’re playing on Conquest, the invasions are a great way to gain experience but if you’re playing on Classic, your units will be gone for good if they die.

The invasions are fun and challenging but the only problem that I see is that three invasions for each game is just not enough. Maybe some people don’t want to be bothered with these invasions at all, but I thought it would be much better if each game had more invasions. Having more would have been a great way to get extra experience and items and having more would also just result in more gameplay, which is just as good.

There’s also a ton of extra stuff that you can do in the castles, whether it’s in your own, or in someone else’s. You have places like the Prison and the Arena. These two can be very helpful if you constantly visit. Visiting the Mess Hall and Lilith will also be very helpful over time. There’s also the records hall, where you might spend lots of time if you want to revisit some video and music.

CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION

Within a minute of starting up a new game for the first time, I was surprised by the number of options that there are when it comes to creating your character. Since Three Houses was my first big Fire Emblem experience, I was used to not really have much customization to begin with. With Three Houses, there isn’t much you can do because there’s no way to change how you look and the only thing that you can really change about yourself at the start of the game is your gender.

Later on, you’re also able to change the outfit that you wear, but that’s very limited in terms of how many options there are and not all of them look all that great to begin with. But with Fire Emblem Fates, you’re hit with a bunch of different options right when you first start playing and that was a pleasant surprise. The more I went through the customization pages, the more that I realized there was more to change.

For starters, the idea that you could change your hair completely blew my mind. In Three Houses, your hair style and color were such an important part of the game and then being able to change everything about your hair in Fates felt so weird at the start. In total, there were 12 different kinds of hairstyles and 30 different colors to choose from. The hairstyles were also along a graph that labeled them either wild, simple, slick, or stylish instead of just having random ones to choose from.

This means that there were 360 unique hairdos to choose between, which I thought was pretty cool, but hairstyle was just one of the options when it came to customization. In addition to choosing whether you’re a boy or girl, you also get to choose if you’re tall or short. There are only two options to choose between for each gender, but they drastically change your appearance, especially in animated form.

The next thing that you get to work on is your face and there’s a lot of options for that too. You get to choose between seven face types which range from caring and boyish to mature and stern. After that, you have 12 options for face detail, which lets you choose if you want something like a tattoo, a scar, or even an eyepatch. I do like the idea of this, but I wish it was possible to add multiple details onto one character. Like, I thought it would be cool to have a scar and a tattoo or a tattoo and an eyepatch. I thought that would have added so much more.

The last of the big details that you get to change is your characters voice and for each gender, there’s three to choose between. By the time you’ve reach this point, all the details that you’ve changed resulted in thousands of possible combinations to make your character as unique as possible. But wait, there’s more. Now there’s a bunch of smaller details that you can add to your character.

In addition to changing your name, you can also change your birthday. But once you’ve gotten through all that, it’s time for you to pick your Boon, Bane, and Talent. When I first started playing, I had no idea what Boon and Bane were so in the middle of creating my character, I had to stop for like 30 minutes just so that I could look up a guide and read what they are before making a sort of educated decision on which ones I would want. A Boon is kind of like a personality trait and it helps boost a certain stat so that this stat grows faster than the others. Kind of like a strength. In total, there are eight Boons to choose from. Calm boosts resistance and reduces magic damage. Clever boosts your magic and makes magic attacks stronger. Robust increases your HP. Strong increases your strength. Sturdy increases your defense. Quick increases your speed. Lucky increases your luck, which helps with critical hits and evasion. Deft also increases critical hits.

Banes are the complete opposite though and are your weaknesses. Whichever bane you pick, that stat will have the slowest growth. They are Excitable, Dull, Sickly, Weak, Fragile, Slow, Unlucky, and Clumsy. Each Bane is the complete opposite of the corresponding Boon, and you obviously can’t choose a Bane that’s the opposite of a Boon that you’ve already chosen.

Lastly there are 17 talents to choose from, which are basically classes. They include Mage, Troubadour, Archer, Dragon, Ninja, Knight, Apothecary, Mercenary, Fighter, Priestess, Sky Night, Lancer, Oni Savage, Cavalier, Outlaw, and Samurai. There were a few that I recognized from Three Houses like Cavalier, Archer, and Knight, but I had no idea what many of them were.

DLC

Oh boy do I have a lot to say when it comes to the DLC of Fates. Not only do I think that this is one of the best DLC’s out there based on how much stuff you get along with the price, but I also think that it’ the most useful of any DLC that I have ever played before. In my opinion, it’s also miles better than the expansion pass that Three Houses had.

For me, the expansion pass in Three Houses was incredibly lackluster. It cost $25, which is about what you’d normally pay for your average pass, but there was barely anything in the pass. The biggest part of the Three Houses expansion pass was Cindered Shadows. That was its own side story that lasted for multiple chapters and added four new characters and a new location that can be explored during your main game.

But even though the side story added a couple extra hours and a few new characters, there were still a few minor annoyances that I had with it. For once, you couldn’t actually recruit the new characters until you unlocked them by completing certain chapters in the side story. Not only that, but it’s a very short campaign when you factor in how much it cost. Sure, there’s a couple extra things that the DLC offers you like extra outfit stuff and a couple items here and there but there was nothing else significant outside of the story, characters, and new location.

Once you beat the side story, it was done. While you could still use the new location to farm renown, there wasn’t really that much that justified the $25 price tag. I went as far as to say that it was the worst DLC that I ever played on the Switch. But now that I played Fates and saw the amount of DLC that it had, I started to question how the developers could have gotten away with making such a bad DLC for Three Houses.

If you buy all of the DLC packs that Fates has to offer, you’re getting a ton of content for a good price and many of the individual pieces can be used over and over, and further prove their value. In total, all the Fates DLC costs around the same as the Three Houses expansion pass but offered so much. Individually, there’s a ton of DLC in Fates but they could be bundled into two distinct DLC packs.

The first DLC pack is simply called Map Pack 1 and is by far my favorite because of all the things that you get. It costs $17.99 and has 2 free DLC and ten paid ones that would cost $25 if bought by themselves. The next one is called Map Pack 2 and has six paid ones that consist of its own story and one free one. The second pack costs $8. So by buying both DLC packs, you’re paying $26 for a ton of content.

That first pack for $18 alone got me way more value than I got out of the Three Houses expansion pass. In fact, I got most of the value from just two of the ten paid packs. So technically I guess you could just buy those two DLC’s alone, but the entire pack is still well worth it. The two that I love are called Boo Camp and Ghostly Gold.

These two DLC maps are basically the equivalent of what Three Houses did with their Free Battles. In that game, whenever you had a day off, you could do free battles literally as many times as you want. I remember once battling over and over for a couple hours straight just so I could stock up on as much gold as I could carry and so I could get a ton of experience too.

I was very disappointed when I realized that Conquest didn’t have something like that. Other than doing stuff in your castle, it was a very linear game with very little room to do extra stuff or to gain extra money or exp. In the main game, you can only get money with certain skills or as rewards and it’s impossible to grind for experience and levels because once a chapter is done, that’s it, you can’t go back to it to grind some more. You can do a lot more grinding in Birthright but if you’re playing Conquest or on Classic, it’s much harder to acquire exp and money.

That’s where these two DLC maps come in. With Ghostly Gold, you don’t technically even have to fight anybody because the objective of the map is to survive for eight turns. But if you do defeat an enemy, there’s a chance that you could earn 1,000 gold. Don’t get too greedy though because if you try to defeat every enemy, you might end up losing the battle or you’ll have a couple units die. That’s something that you obviously don’t want to happen if you’re playing on Classic Mode.

The best thing to do is to defeat a few enemies until you’ve collected a nice amount of gold and then retreat until the round is over so that you don’t lose any of your units. The best part is that once the battle is over, there’s nothing stopping you from going back and doing the same one over and over again. If you play things safely, you should easily be able to earn around 2,000 to 3,000 gold every five or so minutes. This is a great way to earn money for weapons, items, skills, and recruits.

Boo Camp is basically the same thing but a bit more tough. It’s another wait a certain number of turns and the battle will automatically end but it’s closer to 20 turns and there’s a lot of enemies, with more appearing every few turns. Towards the end of the battle there’s a few really tough ones too. But that kind of challenge makes it perfect for exp grinding. All you have to do is battle a few enemies with the unit that you want to grow, and then spend the rest of the battle retreating or defending.

When I was playing on Classic mode, I put a lot of strategy into it and every battle I would have four or five units gaining a level early on. There was one point before chapter ten where I did this map for an hour straight and I had three characters that jumped by six levels in between chapters. By the time I had completed Conquest, I ended up putting around 10 hours into those two DLC’s alone and that’s not even counting a few hours I lost by resetting when one of my units died.

The two DLC maps on their own are very useful and could be alone worth the full $26 if you use them consistently throughout all three routes. These two DLC maps are basically Fates version of Free Battles and are insanely useful if you want to do some grinding.

Another really good DLC map from the first pack is called Museum Melee. It’s another great way to grind, but I don’t group this one with the first two because not only is it a bit harder, but there isn’t always a guarantee that you’ll get anything good. With this map, there’s kind of a tournament that you have to battle your way through. There are some enemies that have weapons or items that will be dropped when they’re defeated and all across the map there’s a bunch of chests that you can open and acquire a bunch of items.

It’s all random too, the item and the item strength and value will change each time you do this map. For instance, during my first time playing this map, there were two enemies that dropped stuff. The first was a steel dagger and the second was a heart seal. The two chests that I opened had a master seal and a fortify spell. The second time that I played, the dropped items were a Kris Knife, Fuga’s Club, Iron Naginata, Steel Lance, Heart Seal, and Master Seal.

If you’re strong enough to plow through everybody, it’s possible that you can acquire all the items but you’re either very brave or very dumb if you try that in Classic Mode because it can get very hard. This is a great way to grind for weapons and other items, especially because there’s a chance to get very rare stuff. But it’s very hard and since the items are completely random, you’re also going to get a bunch of items that might not be worth much.

It’s definitely worth it if you have a good enough army to defeat everyone without taking any damage or if you really need weapons to sell for gold or to forge into better ones. Those three DLC maps together are incredibly useful based on what you need and offer a ton of value and yet they only cover about a quarter of the entire pack.

Next up you have the Beach Brawl DLC, which was an interesting one. It kind of treated the game like the war was over and both the Nohr and Hoshido were already friends with each other, but it takes place in a non canon timeline that’s separate from the game, which is similar to what Cindered Shadows was in Three Houses. It’s kind of a hilarious DLC because the story was about going to a tropical resort and none of the siblings wanted it.

In the end, you have to again pick which family you want to fight for, but this time you’re literally fighting for who gets to go to the beach. But once you pick the family, you pick which sibling to play as, and you get a couple other pre determined units on your team too.

Gameplay wise, this is one of the battles that I’ve had the most fun with. I enjoyed it more than many of the main game chapters and more than most of the DLC maps as well. It’s a friendly battle between the two families and that takes a lot of the stress off and with eight different teams to choose from, there’s a lot of gameplay options and it will never be the same battle twice, which makes it even more fun.

It’s still super difficult though. The first time that I played, I chose the Camilla, Beruka, and Selena combo and was only able to defeat one unit before losing both of mine. The gameplay is fun but it’s a pretty useless map if you ask me because all you get for winning is a photo of the character you chose on the beach.

Royal Royale is very similar. It’s another map where both the Nohr and Hoshido are friendly and it’s another battle royale where you pick a family and then who you want to play as. It’s literally the exact same as the previous one. For instance, if you pick Camilla, not only will you also play with Beruka and Selena, but you’ll play on the exact same map and all units will start in the similar positions.

But it’s much harder than the previous one. It took me 14 attempts to beat it for the first time. You get a stat boost the first time you win but every time after that, you can get Dread Scrolls and Ebon Wings as much as you like. Personally, I like the Beach one more than this because at least it’s easier and is way more humorous story wise.

The next DLC item that you get is called Hidden Truths, which is a series of two maps. This is the first of the DLC packs that’s story driven and serves as. Sort of prologue to the game. Both are worth doing just for the story alone, but you can do these battles over and over to acquire special items, but these are very specific items that you probably won’t need any more after you’ve collected a couple.

Anna on the Run is another one of my favorite DLC items and is very similar to the Anna quest in Three Houses that unlocks her as a playable character. Unlike the other DLC maps so far, there’s no reason to do this multiple times because once you complete it for the first time, you unlock Anna and that’s it. Even if you’re playing on Classic mode and she dies, you can’t do this map again to get her back. But getting an extra character is really cool.

The rest of the paid DLC maps from this pack are pretty simple. There are Ballistician Blitz, Witches Trial, and Vanguard Dawn. These get you unlimited Vanguard Brand, Witch’s Mark, and Sighting Lens and I didn’t care about these two at all.

On top of the 10 paid DLC maps, there’s also two free ones that come with the $18 pack or individually. There’s one called Before Awakening which is a fun one that involves other characters and can be done multiple times, and there’s one that’s just a gift from Anna.

Put all of that together and you’re left with one of the most comprehensive DLC passes in gaming history. For only $18, you’re looking at a truckload of content and you probably wouldn’t even need to look at the second DLC pack. If you were to do each map from the first pack and then never again, you’d probably be looking at five to ten hours’ worth of gameplay in addition to all the gold, exp, and items that you would acquire from completing them. Plus, a decent amount of story content too.

But if you’re focused on grinding and need all the exp, money, and weapons that you can get, then the DLC is perfect for you because you could waste dozens of hours just completing the first three DLC maps over and over. By the time I was done with both Conquest and Birthright, I estimate that I put in around 40 hours into just the content of the first DLC pack alone.

Then things get even crazier when you’re talking about the second DLC pack but thankfully there isn’t much to talk about. The second pack is very much like Cindered Shadows because it’s a six chapter long side story called Heirs of Fate. Just like Cindered Shadows, this story is separate from your main game and involves child characters.

While you do get items for completing each chapter and you can do it as many times as you like, the main purpose of this DLC pack is the story that was a decent length. It’s also a pretty decent price since it’s only $8. That’s a way better price for a six chapter side story than paying the full $25 for the Three Houses side story and a handful of semi useless customization options.

All in all, the two DLC packs for Fates are an amazing deal and make each route feel way more complete by adding the ability to grind and collect a variety of weapons and items. Some people might even believe that the first three map are necessary to the game. The first DLC pack is well worth it’s cost in terms of content, usefulness, and story and the second pack is also well worth the price for the amount of story stuff that it has.

Put the two together and you’re paying $26 for a DLC set that’s nearly 20 chapter long with tons of story stuff, lots of fun gameplay, a ton of weapons and items, and adds the ability to grind freely. If you are the kind of person who needs to grind, all the DLC could easily set you back 50 hours or more. The DLC is not something that you should be skipping over if you play Fates. Even if you think just getting all three games is expensive.

The only issue that I had with the DLC is the fact that you have to wait until after you complete the prologue section before you can start buying DLC or redeeming stuff. With nearly all games, you can just buy a DLC item from the eshop or store and directly have it downloaded into the game. Or if you buy a code for a DLC from a store like Gamestop, you can normally redeem them right away and then have them download.

But that’s not the case with Fates. In order to buy or redeem, you have to complete chapter six and unlock access to your castle first. It’s different if you want to buy the other games though. If you have Conquest and wanted to buy Birthright or Revelation, you can buy those from the main menu and download them immediately. I wish I knew that earlier though. I made the mistake of buying my copy of Revelations from Gamestop because I wanted to use all my certificates so that the game would only cost me $5.

But I couldn’t redeem it right away and I wasn’t ready to play the game yet, so I put the receipt that had the code away until I was ready to play it. One to two months later, I was finally ready to play but I couldn’t find the receipt with the download code anywhere and was forced to buy it again since I wasn’t able to download it right when I got it the first time. Even without my issue, it sucks that you still have to play for a couple hours just to buy and download the DLC. Even if you have the DLC downloaded, you can’t even access them at all until you’ve reached your castle. So even if you’re starting a new playthrough, you have to wait to access them again. But that’s only a small issue since it just sets you back a couple hours here and there. Overall, the Fates DLC is still legendary.

Also, can we talk about the fact that you only have to pay for the main DLC once and you get the DLC across all three games? That's a huge feature right there. Let's compare it to the expansion pass for Pokemon Sword and Shield for a second. That DLC had a lot more content and exploration than the Fates one, but it cost more and was limited to which game it was played on.

So, if you had Pokemon Sword and wanted the DLC, you had to specifically buy the one for Sword. If you ever got Shield later on, that DLC wouldn't work because you'd need to also buy the one for Shield. So, if you already had both of the Pokemon games and wanted the DLC on both, you'd have to pay $60. In order to get all the paid DLC in Fates, you'd only pay $26, and the DLC would work across all three games.

If you bought and played Birthright, you'd get all the DLC. But if you bought Conquest later on, you'd still have all the DLC ready to go on that game too, and the same goes for Revelations as well. Who knows, maybe they could have gotten away with game specific DLC, but since they did it like this, it only adds so much more to the value.

NO MORE PLANNING

With so much to do across Fire Emblem Fates, it has to be very difficult to keep track of everything and plan what to do right? Well, it's not, and that was a pleasant surprise to me after putting so many hours into Three Houses. Fates is a lot more lenient and forgiving when it comes to allowing you to do what you want and when you want. In Three Houses, you were very limited by the calendar system, and you had to be very strategic in what you do.

Your free day was on Sunday, and you had to pick what you wanted to do for that day. You could explore the monastery, which would allow you to shop, do some quests, work on supports, and just explore the monastery as much as you like. You could also battle, which gives you the option to do free battles, auxiliary battles, paralogues, and quest battles. You also had the ability to teach or to rest on your day off but I never bothered with those options.

The only problem was that you couldn't do more than one task on a given day. Sure, exploring the monastery literally gave you hundreds of things to do. Sure, if you do free battles, you can do them over and over as many times as you like. But you can't mix and match at all. If you chose battle and you did one free battle and got bored, that's it, your only option is to move forward to the next day because you wouldn't be able to do anything else.

If you chose to explore, you couldn't do any battles at all. Plus, with only a few free days in a given chapter, you had to be very careful with what you wanted to do and it was basically down to picking between working on supports versus working on stats. You needed to have a strategy for the entire month based on what you wanted to improve during that chapter. Thankfully, that's not what happens in Fates, so you can rest easy.

For starters, your castle is basically the equivalent of the monastery, and unlike in Three Houses, you're forced to explore it each time you're free since it operates like a home base. So, every time you're free, you have the option to explore your castle as much as you like. This gives you the ability to freely collect resources, shop, work on your supports, and do other things within your castle as much as you like.

Plus, a big feature in Fates that isn't in Three Houses is how often things refresh and restock. For instance, in Three Houses, you could explore the monastery during the first week of a chapter and buy all the items in the marketplace. But if you explore again the next week, you won't be able to buy more, because they only refresh once per chapter. In Fates, there's a day night cycle, and things like resources and supports refresh every single day.

It's easy to go to the next day too because the time passes each time you battle or visit someone else's castle. So, you could spend an hour playing but a week could pass in game and your castle would keep refreshing. This gives you even more control over what you can do in your free time. Plus, if you have the DLC, you can do a ton of battles over and over, but they aren't separate from you exploring the castle like in Three Houses.

So, you could do 10 battles in a row, but keep visiting the castle in between each battle for whatever reason. You could spend hours during the same free session just bouncing between battles and exploring, which was not possible at all in Three Houses. The only downside is that you do need the DLC in order to fully take advantage of this, but it's totally worth it because of all the extra grinding you get to do.

There aren't as many things to do in Fates as there are in Three Houses, but if you have all three games and the DLC, you're easily looking at 200 hours or more. Plus, if you fully invest your time into supports or grinding, you might even find yourself spending another hundred or so hours. There's so much to do and just like in Three Houses, depth gets a perfect 10 out of 10.

DIFFICULTY: 6

If you are like me and your first or most recent Fire Emblem playthrough was Three Houses, then you really should not try Classic Mode at all. When I was playing Three Houses, for my first playthrough I played on the easiest difficulties. I went with Normal and Casual and that worked out very well for me because I had no idea how to play and the first few minutes that I tried playing on a harder difficulty mode didn’t work out.

During my second playthrough, I chose the same settings, and it became too easy very quickly. I was just mowing down enemies left and right, especially thanks to doing all of the free battles. But I didn’t feel any real connection to the characters or to the possibility of losing them if they were defeated. At that point, I was ready to do something much more challenging so I decided that for my third playthrough, I would play on Classic mode and Maddening difficulty.

At that point, I was accustomed to the gameplay and was good at the game, so I thought that I could handle the extra challenge. I also thought that it would translate over to other Fire Emblem games, so when I started playing Fates for the first time, I chose Normal difficulty and Classic. But after playing for about three hours, I began to realize that this might have been a mistake and I quickly started to lose all of my units, making it so that I could never use them again.

For my first playthrough, I lost all of my Nohr siblings except for one in chapter six. Then in chapter seven, I lost the remaining sibling as well as the two new characters that were introduced in that chapter. So, when I started chapter eight, I literally only had one other unit by my side.

It’s not that I didn’t understand how to play, it’s that the gameplay was different enough from Three Houses that I wasn’t fully able to battle correctly from the start. There were a lot of different gameplay features that I just wasn’t used to such as Dragon Veins, singing, and pairing and when I first played, I just didn’t know how to use them in the best possible ways. Not only that, but the enemies are also tougher too.

By the time I had made it to chapter eight, I realized that I basically dug my own grave and I spent an hour trying to fix things. I was considering going from Classic mode to Casual but in order to do that without having to start the whole game over, I had to start from the part where you choose the game, but I wasn’t allowed to just pick a new difficulty. No, I had to beat the level first before I could make any changes and every time I tried, either Corrin or Felicia would die and I would have to start over.

I ended up redoing chapter 6 maybe 20 times before I was able to win without Felicia dying. At that point, I was thinking of changing to Casual, but instead of doing that, I made a second save file that was for casual so I could play on Classic and keep making an extra save file that was for Casual. That way, if a chapter ever got too hard for me, I could jump into Casual and beat it. The only problem was that I wouldn’t be able to jump back to Classic if I did that.

So, if you’ve done well on Three Houses and then try to jump to the highest difficulty on Fates when you first try playing, you’re only setting yourself up for disaster. But on the other hand, if you’ve played the other 3DS Fire Emblem games or are more used to overall gameplay mechanics of the series, then you’ll be way better with a higher difficulty.

But I do have a few tricks on how to make the game a lot easier, but they rely on a lot of usage of your castle and requires the gold DLC. There are two things that you want to do. First you want to keep doing the DLC so that you can keep getting money over and over. But don’t forget that you also want to keep your units alive because if they die in the DLC, they’re also gone for good if you’re playing on Classic.

So, if you can defeat just a couple of the ghosts to get 1,000 or 2,000 gold, and then spend the rest of the level retreating, you’re going to be fine. You should be able to do the level 3 times and get 3,000-5,000 gold if you’re lucky. Of course, you can spend all that gold at the shops in your castle on all sorts of weapons and items, but the trick is to spend all your gold at someone else’s castle.

Connect to the internet and visit a random person’s castle so that you can battle them. If you win, you have the option to either recruit one of their units to serve as a support to inherit a skill that one of their units knows. If you have the same unit, then you can buy a skill. I’ve done this so many times that in between chapter seven and eight, I bought nine different skills for Corrin so that I could make the perfect loadout early in the game.

After that, I started battling and then buying skills for other characters. So, at this point, my units were still pretty weak but had a ton of great skills that really helped in battle. It’s also helpful if you get the Profiteer Skill from battling someone. This is a great skill to have because based on how much luck the unit has, you can randomly find gold bars during the first few turns of a battle. Gold Bars can be sold for 300 gold each so that’s another great way to make money early on.

This will help you out a lot if you really don’t want to play on one of the easier difficulties, but you need a little help to get the advantage. But even with all that, the game can still get super difficult.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Fire Emblem Fates has a lot to offer. There are a few aspects that I didn't like such as some parts of graphics and some parts of music, but I either liked or loved every other aspect of the game and what it had to offer. To be honest, if Fates was the first Fire Emblem game that I played, I probably wouldn't have gotten into the series as much as I did, especially if I had played it now. To me, the game is good on its own but it's even better to fans of the series or genre.

There's still a lot that I don't understand when it comes to Fire Emblem or strategy RPG's in general, but that didn't stop me from having lots of fun with Fates. I also think that the game is going to hold up nicely for a long time, even with the graphical things that I hate. Heck, I'm probably going to go back one day and try to complete it again on the hardest difficulties.

The great thing about Fire Emblem Fates is that you can control how much you pay and how much content you get based on what you want. Depending on how you want to play, you can spend anywhere between $40 and $126. For instance, if you only want the bare minimum because you just want to experience the story once, you can pay $40 to get either Conquest or Birthright. Even if you only get one game and nothing else, you'll still get a lot of content and way more value than you spent.

If you want the complete experience, then you're going to want to buy all three games. You'll pay either $80 or $100 depending on whether you want the second game to be digital or physical. Personally, I much rather prefer the $80 option because not only is it cheaper, but all three games will be on one cartridge, which is a huge plus. Content wise, $80 for three games that are each a decent length is a great deal.

If you play all three games and you like them, it should be easy to get 50 to 70 hours out of each one. Plus, if you're dying for even more content, items, and grinding, you can pay the extra for all of the paid DLC stuff. You can pay $40 for one game to try it out or you can pay $106 for all three good and complete games plus the huge DLC set on one cartridge.

If you're crazy, you could also try to get your hands on a sealed or complete copy of the Special Edition but that's going to cost you a fortune so only diehard Fire Emblem fans should really be looking into that. The complete version of the Special Edition includes all three games on a single limited edition cartridge but can cost you anywhere between $200 and $400 depending on where you find it and what else it includes.

In addition to the games, this complete version also comes with an 80 page art book and a little carrying pouch. You're basically paying an extra $200 give or take for small art book and a small bag. That's not good considering that I've seen copies of the book sell for under $50 by itself over the summer. But the games themselves are going to get you a crazy amount of content and value, at least a few hours for every dollar spent.

THINGS I WISH WERE BETTER

Here’s a brief recap of what I wish was in the game, some of which were already mentioned a few times but there’s a few more things that I think should have been included.

1: The obvious missing piece of content is the full voice acting. It’s really good on its own and does not hurt the game at all, but having spent so much time in Three Houses, a game that has a ton of voice acting, going to this game afterwards felt a little bit disappointing in comparison. Of course, it’s no way faulted to the game itself, but it’s something that could have made the game age much better.

2: One of my favorite aspects of gameplay were the Dragon Veins. I thought they were a really good gameplay mechanic that added a bit to both gameplay and story. But to me, there were so many times where they were heavily underused. I think there were a lot of chapters that would have become way more fun and engaging if they had an extra one or two Dragon Veins to either use as a requirement or optionally as part of a strategy.

3: One of my biggest complaints with the game was the fact that the DLC could only be bought within the game for the most part and that you had to actually play the game to a certain point in order to redeem, buy, or access most of the DLC. I think it would have been a much better experience if all of the DLC options were available right away in the main menu. The game would have been much more streamlined and I’m sure there’s other who agree with me that the wait to chapter six was a pain, especially if you bought a DLC pack or a 2nd or 3rd game externally and had to wait to add it in.

4: There aren’t nearly as many save files spots as I would have liked. Three Houses had a ton and I ended up using more than a dozen. I had one for each playthrough so that I could keep tabs on how long each one took. I had separate ones for different challenge runs and different difficulty settings. I even had a few that were locked before the final battle of each route in case I wanted to do that battle whenever or I wanted to try out different marriage supports without having to do the entire game all over again.

But Fates has just nine save slots in total, and I don’t think that’s a great idea to have that few with this kind of game unless you don’t plan on playing all three or you plan on deleting files as you play. You’re going to need three just for the different games, but you might need some for different difficulties or some to play on either casual, classic, or phoenix mode. I know I had a few extra save files that I would keep on standby in case one of my guys died in Classic mode so that I could jump back a chapter or two and keep grinding so that they would survive when I reach that chapter again. If you’re just a casual player or only playing one game, this might not bother you but if you plan on taking Fates very seriously, you need a lot more than nine slots.

The game isn't as good as Three Houses but that's to be expected and I still had so much fun with the story, characters, music, and insane amount of content. I've seen lots of people saying that there's a lot of stuff that went wrong with the games, but I haven't seen any of those issues myself. I still love it and I'm sure people who love Fire Emblem have invested many hours into Fates. My overall grade for Fire Emblem Fates is going to be a 9.2 out of 10.
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That is one in depth review! I too got into fire emblem because of three houses, after playing It i went and bought all the 3ds games as well, and I'm getting ready to get started on my next fire emblem as well. I think I might go for Awakening before fates just because it seems like awakening will be a shorter and more concise game the fates so I'll wanna get it out of the way before tackling fates. Keep up the great work man, you did Waifu Emblem proud with this one
That is one in depth review! I too got into fire emblem because of three houses, after playing It i went and bought all the 3ds games as well, and I'm getting ready to get started on my next fire emblem as well. I think I might go for Awakening before fates just because it seems like awakening will be a shorter and more concise game the fates so I'll wanna get it out of the way before tackling fates. Keep up the great work man, you did Waifu Emblem proud with this one
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YEEEAAAAHHHHH!!!! ANIME GIRLS!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
YEEEAAAAHHHHH!!!! ANIME GIRLS!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
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The more recent editions to the series including Awakening and Fates tend to be waifu games with an emphasis on pairings and the child units that result from them to maximise stats, pass down skills or classes or simply to fuel the headcanon of the players themselves on which pairings end up together for one reason or another to help compensate for their weak stories. While 3 houses does have an option where you can marry your main character it tends to not be focused on as this happens after the war which makes a lot more sense if you ask me. While I enjoy breaking Awakening and Fates with broken children units I can definitely see why fans of the older games in the series tend to have a dislike for them if not in part due to the stark contrast. Shadows of Valentia and 3 houses tend to be taking the series back to its roots though and I look forward to finding out where it's gonna take us next. Also gotta love the "plot".
The more recent editions to the series including Awakening and Fates tend to be waifu games with an emphasis on pairings and the child units that result from them to maximise stats, pass down skills or classes or simply to fuel the headcanon of the players themselves on which pairings end up together for one reason or another to help compensate for their weak stories. While 3 houses does have an option where you can marry your main character it tends to not be focused on as this happens after the war which makes a lot more sense if you ask me. While I enjoy breaking Awakening and Fates with broken children units I can definitely see why fans of the older games in the series tend to have a dislike for them if not in part due to the stark contrast. Shadows of Valentia and 3 houses tend to be taking the series back to its roots though and I look forward to finding out where it's gonna take us next. Also gotta love the "plot".
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