Heroic or Pathetic? Fire Emblem Heroes Review

Heroic+or+Pathetic%3F+Fire+Emblem+Heroes+Review

Andrew Borba (12th), Reporter

Fire Emblem Heroes marks Nintendo’s 2nd attempt to break into the mobile market after Super Mario Run failed to garner the huge success Nintendo was looking for. Fire Emblem Heroes with its more gacha-based gameplay (gacha refers to a type of game on mobile where players roll for characters, they are usually free-to-play) has been a big success for the company.

It appeals to both the casual and hardcore fans of the series. With its simple 6×8 map structure it is streamlined for mobile phones but still has all the depth of the main series of games. The weapon triangle has been simplified to red vs green vs blue. Red beats green, green beats blue, and blue beats red.

The weapon triangle is very important to the combat in the game as you could be doing huge damage to a green enemy as a red unit but you may do zero damage to a blue unit. Players will need a balanced team to be able to beat the higher end content in the game (or just have a bunch of 5 star units).

Which leads into one of the main problem of the game, the gacha system. Since you only get random characters, with a random star unit, it’s possible for a player to never get decent units and be unable to progress if they choose to play the game’s maps on a higher difficulty. Fortunately the game gives you a couple of free pulls which can be exploited by deleting and reinstalling the game until you get a decent character.

However that won’t help you in the game’s arena.

The arena, which is basically the game’s pvp mode, where players fight cpu controlled version of other player’s teams. Right now the balance of the mode is broken and is very exploitable so it’s up to Nintendo to fix the problems with it.

Another flaw with the game is the character progression. As advertised it is possible to change a low star unit to a higher star unit by using certain items. Mainly a player needs feathers which the game tends to give laughable amounts of, for example, to move a 4 star unit to a 5 star unit you need 20,000 feathers and outside of the broken arena mode the game tended to give you 5-15 feathers at most. Nintendo has acknowledged this by giving away 10,000 feathers and has recently added more ways to get feathers.

It’s nice to see Nintendo give more post launch support for their apps as Miitomo didn’t get anything and Super Mario Run got very little new content.

Overall Fire Emblem Heroes has been a successful app Nintendo and a good time for series newcomers and series veterans.