Before I continue with this review, I have to preface it with this: being a tactician in a role playing game is hard work. It’s rewarding, but very hard work. Fire Emblem is a tactical role playing game series, or TRPG for short, that punishes you heavily for having holes in your tactics, by having your units die permanently should their HP drop to 0. Now of course, a lot of people reset the game when this happens, myself included. Am I playing the game incorrectly? Maybe so, but if that’s the case, then the developers themselves are too. (ctrl+f "reset")
Fire Emblem Fates is the fourteenth entry in the series, and the second to be released on the 3DS, three years after its predecessor, Fire Emblem Awakening. But this time the developers of the game, Intelligent Systems, opted to take a page from Game Freak’s Pokémon book, and released multiple versions of the same game. The three versions were named Birthright, Conquest, and Revelations. Birthright is considered the easiest of the three, Conquest is the hardest, and Revelations (which was only released as DLC) is an even mix of the two. I purchased the special edition of Fates, which contained all three versions in one game card, and I started off with the hardest version, Conquest. And man, was it quite the ride.
I chose to play on the Hard difficulty to give myself a challenge, and at some points I almost found myself regretting choosing it. The maps are extremely well designed, requiring much more thought than Awakening’s while introducing many more elements such as castle seizing (which was a staple of the series up until Awakening) and the use of ballistae. Many, if not all, of the maps are challenging, while also extremely rewarding once they are beaten.
While the gameplay was great, the story itself was a bit lackluster. It wasn’t awful by any means, but the pacing was pretty slow throughout. Story characters that you’re supposed to feel some sort of attachment to die off rather quickly, while the final boss itself feels shoehorned in. Fortunately, the lacking story is offset by the amazing gameplay. Gameplay wise, Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest is one of the best games of 2016 so far, and I’m hoping the other two versions, Birthright and Revelations, are just as good.