It’s a new Fire Emblem! I took way to long to actually post this review! I’ve had this, like, half-written for the last almost 4 weeks now.

I’m not the biggest FE fan out there, but I enjoyed all the ones I played before this (the original Famicom one, the GBA ones, Awakening, Three Houses). This one, I saw the announcement trailer, and watched absolutely nothing else. So I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting into, but it did look cool.

Let’s see if it’s good!

Developer: Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo
Release date: January 20th 2023
Platforms: Switch
Genre: Strategy RPG

Review

You play as Alear, the daughter of the Divine Dragon, who has been asleep for a thousand years. Alear seemingly defeated the Fell Dragon a thousand years ago but was hurt so she had to sleep for a bit. She wakes up, fights some new kind of monsters called Corrupted (they’re basically zombies), meets her mom for just a bit before the castle is attacked and her mom dies. The enemies also take Emblem Rings, which are magical rings that contain Emblems, basically spirits of heroes from parallel universes (IE previous FE games), and getting all of them (not counting DLC, ignore the DLC when it comes to canon I guess) leads to a major miracle that can give the user tremendous power. So you journey around the world through the 4 kingdoms, getting help from the people there, in a quest to prevent the resurrection of the Fell Dragon and get all the rings back. It’s fairly straightforward.

The story has some issues. Namely that the game introduces a ton of characters, but they all have exactly no involvement in the main plot. They have their own support conversations both with Alear and between each other, but this has zero effect on anything. So plot-wise you’ll see characters once or twice in cinematics and never again other than the nobles, and I assume they’re generally not around if dead. Other than basically none of the characters mattering the moment they join your party, I’d say the biggest problem with the plot itself is that it’s very generic, and also the story is beyond predictable, I figured all the plot twists the moment I met Veyle the first time. And also there’s some REALLY shit Deus Ex Machina not long before the final battle, it’s really blatant and really dumb.

And the whole permadeath thing is a bit of an afterthought plot-wise, at least in the ending. I tried not to lose anyone through the game, but in the final boss battle I lost 2 characters that happen to be nobles. They still popped up in the ending cinematics, and then in the epilogues they showed up as “Died in the final battle”, but other character epilogues ignored their deaths. So some characters may have served as an ally for someone who became king… even though obviously that other character couldn’t become a king, due to being FUCKING DEAD. Oops.

The biggest story issue is the garbage localization. It’s actually one of the worst localizations I’ve seen, ever. I now Fire Emblem is famous for its awful official translations, but this might take the cake, or be at the level of Fates. The people at Nintendo Treehouse might be the least competent people in the industry and Nintendo needs to fire all of NOA, as soon as possible. They’re causing loss of sales because people are getting madder and madder at their awful translations that change the meaning of basically every conversation in the game.. A large amount of people are avoiding especially the Nintendo RPGs like Xenoblade and Fire Emblem because those series are famous for getting awful translations. Nintendo! You’re losing money because of your incompetent translators!

I don’t even know where to start with describing how bad the english version is. There’s SO many examples, because basically every support conversation is fucked. Sometimes it’s pretty minor things, but a lot of the time it’s complete alteration of the character’s personality. And sometimes it’s just completely changing everything about the conversation because… the localizers are weirdos. One character mentions that another is pretty? Well fuck that, now at best you’ll get “amazing”. A character tells your character that they love you in the japanese version? Well in the localization, you’ll be lucky if you get something any more than “you’re special to me”. No love allowed. No beauty allowed. No quirky personality allowed. There’s a lot of examples, but I’d say my “favorite” is this conversation between Etie and Goldmary about whether men prefer muscle girls or voluptuous girls, being turned into a conversation about… folding clothes. How the fuck are Nintendo just accepting this garbage from their localization branch? Now you don’t even choose a gender, you choose a “form”. Women are no longer women, they’re “Form B”… totally not sexist </sarcasm> (this is something you may have seen in other games too). Also I fucking hate that they keep changing character names for no reason… It’s just random and stupid, some don’t change but some do and there’s no logic or reason for the change. And it’s way more annoying when you play with japanese voices (that way you don’t get shit voice acting), since you’ll hear a name spoken, but see another one written. But yeah, search around, you’ll see how shit the localization work was on this game.

Well, let’s get away from Nintendo Treehouse being dumbasses and talk about the thing they had no power to change, that being the gameplay!

I think I can keep the basics simple since… This is a Fire Emblem game. After changing the settings to play with the grid properly instead of doing free movement within the grid, this works like every other Fire Emblem game. On your turn you can move all your units, in the order you want. Each character has a movement range based on their movement stat, indicated by blue squares in the grid. Red squares will indicate where their attacks can reach. Once you moved you get one action, either attacking, using specials or using items… or waiting. You can also do actions without moving, which prevents you from moving afterwards (unless the character has a skill that allows otherwise).

Weapons and units have special attributes, which will have different strengths and weaknesses. The weapon triangle is back after skipping over Three Houses, so Swords are good against Axes, Axes are good against Lances and Lances are good against Swords. Also bows are good against flying enemies, magic is good against armored enemies, and armored enemies have strong resistance against most weapons. Some weapons have strengths of their own as well, some being strong against dragon enemies or against armored enemies or against riding enemies. There’s a couple other notes of course, such as having a large speed advantage providing more hits for the one with the advantage, and as usual any attack in range of the defenders own attack range results in a counter attack.

There’s a few base differences between this and other FE games. There’s the Engage system which I will talk about a bit more later. There’s the fact that weapons have no durability, so there’s no need to keep buying more weapons, you just keep any weapon you have forever, but staves DO have uses which limits healing per-battle. And while leveling is the same as usual (100 EXP for a level, you get EXP from hits/heals but more EXP from kills), not all powering up is quite the same, more on that later.

Oh and time-rewind is back from the last game. If you fuck up and a unit dies, you can turn time back to any action on any turn. Sometimes mistakes do happen turns before the result of it, so that’s nice. You are limited though, you “only” get 10 rewinds per battle. Sometimes I’d rewind because I misclicked, sometimes because an attack didn’t quite have the result I wanted so I’d look for better options, but I will say, on hard mode, it was not too out of the ordinary to be able to use all 10 rewinds, and still lose. I played on classic, but did save scum. The game does have some high-difficulty moments where the best tactical options are not always super obvious, or you may need to play extra safe. The game does put a large variety of enemy types around, so intending to get a tank out to take hits for the rest of your party might not be ideal if the other side happens to have mages nearby, and they very frequently do.

The Engage system is the big thing differentiating factor in this game. Any hero with an Emblem Ring equipped is able to Engage with its Emblem if your Engage meter is full (which fills up as you play, or when you end a turn on a glowing space that replenishes it). This doesn’t count as an action, so you can Engage, then move, then attack. Engaging has various effects, based on which Emblem it is. This can be extra stats, extra skills, extra weapons, and more importantly special attacks (or support skills). A fun example is Sigmund. With him equipped you can move, THEN Engage, then move again, then use an action. This can give already-fast characters massive movement potential, or slower units the ability to more easily position themselves in defensive positions. And then the special attacks are usually pretty powerful. They can have massive range (one level I cheesed by using a bunch of glowing spaces to spam an arrow special attack to hit enemies from somewhere they’d somehow refuse to react to at all), hit really hard (Marth’s basically does like 7 full power hits), or might have special effects (Micaiah’s special reduces the user’s HP to 1 but fully heals all teammates in the level). They’re really useful. The Engage system is quite fun, and that’s for a variety of reasons. Namely, I like that it allows characters to use weapons they don’t usually have (so Engaging Marth will allow an axe user to have a sword when engaged, for example), as well as give skills that might cover for disadvantages a character might inherently have. It’s a pretty cool system.

Outside of battle, you have a world map with nodes, and the Somniel, a small area you can freely walk around in where you can talk to other characters. The world map is basically a level select, where you next mission is highlighted, and side-quests and skirmishes appear that you can use to get stronger or unlock optional characters or make your emblems better.

The Somniel has a few things you can do in it. After battles you can adopt animals, and you have a small space where you can let them hang out where they’ll provide items after each battle. There’s the exercise zone where you can do a minigame to increase your stats for the next battle. There’s the kitchen where you can make food which improves relationship between you and 2 characters, as well as increases stats for all your units (there’s some randomness involved, such as the character handling the kitchen only being good at making a few meals, and the chance they fuck up… but they can also NOT fuck up and provide extra stat bonuses!). There’s a tower where you do multiplayer shit I didn’t do (this helps power up emblem skills I think? I never did it so… it’s obviously not required or important). There’s a place where you can feed the shitty mascot animal thing for… some reason (I don’t get it, it gives you a small handful of bond fragments). There’s a fishing minigame, it’s a bit pointless. And of course there’s items (largely cooking ingredients and horse shit) just on the ground for you to pick up between each battle. There’s a blacksmith which allows you to place power from your emblems into one weapon each, as well as spending materials and money to power up weapons which is decently useful.

The big things on the Somniel I’d say are the Emblem Ring room and the training room. The training room allows to just get EXP for a few characters each battle (I think 3?) and spending Bond Fragments to improve relationship between characters and emblems (which means you can improve relationships to Emblems without actually using them with a character, so you can unlock skills that way, which is very nice). Then the Emblem Ring room does have a few features. You can clean the rings, which improves relationships very slightly, and you can inherit skills from the emblems at the cost of Bond Fragments.

What’s great about the Somniel is that I find it to be at least partly optional. You can do bond conversations from the menus, you don’t NEED to get all the items on the floor, and there’s fast travel which is a bit crazy considering it’s not very big. So you can kinda skip shit if you don’t want to do it. I can tell you that you don’t need to ever fish. So do your exercises (I always do the strength one), do your training room reps, make food, and that’s about all you need to do each time you go there. It’s WAY less time spent with this shit than in Three Houses. And from time to time you can optimize your Emblem setup and stuff, but it’s not required. I don’t mind the balance here, the game is mostly about fighting shit.

If there’s an issue with this game, it’s the resources. Bond Fragments do all the most useful shit, but no matter how much you scrounge up, you never quite have enough. Money is similar, it’s weirdly hard to get (maybe there’s a method to get a lot that I didn’t look into). Thankfully you don’t have to constantly rebuy the same weapons over and over so it’s not always so bad, but I’d sometimes get a variety of missions where I’d just not get money.

There’s a gacha system but it’s barely worth mentioning. A few chapters into the game, you won’t touch it unless you really want to waste bond fragments and/or min-max, it’s just a very early game thing. Using bond fragments, you can give those to emblems and they’ll generate rings. Those are not emblem rings. You can equip one per character, and this gives them an upgrade to a few stats. The rings have an image from a non-Emblem character next to them, and you can combine ones of the same character to make better rings. Once you have a lot of Emblem rings, you won’t be using the shitty gacha rings anyways. I’ve seen people really complaining that this game was a “Gacha game”, and I thought they meant it was Emblem that you got this way… Well, it’s not. So… Whatever. Might as well not have the system basically. A Gacha game is a game that revolves around the Gacha entirely for gameplay or progression, while here you can literally ignore the system entirely (better to spend Bond Fragments on literally anything else).

And no I didn’t get Tiki because I refuse to buy DLC 99% of the time. So I at least missed the awful localization they gave her (and have been giving her since at least the DS, it being bad on the DS doesn’t mean it’s not bad now). Don’t buy DLC, it’s a scam.

Yunaka is best girl.

Overall

As far as the important stuff, which is the gameplay, Engage is definitely great. It’s closer to more standard Fire Emblem experiences than Three Houses was, in part because of less time being wasted in-between missions, as well as the return to the weapon triangle and the heavier focus on hard battles. There’s some side stuff in the Somniel, but the Somniel itself is much smaller than Garreg Mach, and it’s way faster to handle that stuff.

The game does have problems, though they’re mostly because of the absolute dogshit translation. The story also lacks any kind of depth, but that’s fine, because this is a game, not a book.

I’d recommend this one. Just… it’s possible that you’ll want to wait for a “correct translation” hack, that way you don’t get to experience this garbage localization.