Fire Emblem Fates: Review

         Fire Emblem Fates: Review
    Is it good compared to Awakening?

Those who buy the game digitally through the Nintendo eShop will, in fact, be able to choose one way or the other, but either way, I can't help but feel like Intelligent Systems could have made more of this big, fate-altering moment. As it stands, the whole scenario feels terribly under-cooked and it's so lacking in moral complexity that it almost feels rather arbitrary, as if you're simply making a decision about whether you like the idea of riding around a Pegasus and firing shurikens for the rest of the game, or fancy mastering the art of wyvern riding and magic spells.

Yet, judging Fire Emblem Fates solely on the strength of that one moment would be incredibly short-sighted, as Intelligent Systems has once again delivered a first-in-class strategy game that's more ruthless and more ambitious than any other game in the series. As with the excellent Fire Emblem Awakening (also on 3DS), the basic setup boils down to moving your warriors around a board of tiled squares, bringing them in range of your enemies and letting their attacks fly in dramatic, 3D battle sequences. 

Improving character relationships is particularly important in Fates, as Fire Emblem's intricate support systems play an even greater role here than they did in Awakening. By pairing them up or having them stand next to each other in battle, certain characters can give each other stat boosts once they reach a certain support rank. When two characters achieve S rank support, they can also get married and (by some strange act of time-bending magic) produce children that will eventually fight alongside you later on. Each child's stats also depend on who their parents are, so getting each character to the required support rank is almost an entire sub-game in itself.

Conquest, on the other hand, forces players to make do without these additional challenge battles, so you'll need to get by on less gold and fewer experience points. It also has more bespoke victory conditions than Birthright, such as defeating a set number of characters or defending a particular area on the map for a certain number of turns.

The landscape veins can be a real lifesaver if you're fleeing from a hoard of oncoming enemies but activate them at the wrong time and you might find you've destroyed a valuable bottleneck that lets you stem the tide of multiple attacks. The maps themselves are more varied, too, as Birthright has a particularly memorable set of battles on a series of gondolas and a dense, trap-ridden forest, while Conquest sees you dash through ice villages and defend a barricaded pier where enemies are attacking from multiple angles.