Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright Reviews
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright is a fantastic balance of tactical challenge and accessibility. Even after I finished the story, I found myself returning to the battlefield again and again to unlock more conversations between friends and test my army's might against Nohr's finest. I'm addicted to Fire Emblem Fates, and that's fine by me.
Vast, gorgeous (and confusingly delivered), Fire Emblem Fates sees Intelligent Systems at the very top of its game.
Fire Emblem Fates smartly revises a quarter-century old battle system and offers ever more reasons to care about your little chess pieces, but neither version does enough to welcome new players.
Birthright takes Awakening's combination of narrative flexibility and tactical strategy and makes it even better
Fire Emblem Fates is an emotional war game
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright polishes the series' time-tested strategy combat and adds intimate, exciting interpersonal relationships.
With Fates, the series hasn't frayed under the pressure. Instead, Intelligent Systems has created one of the most narratively ambitious games to hit a Nintendo platform. Fire Emblem Fates lets you explore the value of familial love and friendship, then offers you the option to go back and kill everyone you love, while loving everyone you killed.
While the story can feel like it's dragging at times, it's tough to hold too many grudges against what feels like padding since the core gameplay is so much fun.
Fire Emblem: Fates is a fantastic turn-based strategy game. If you're worried about the multiple versions, you don't need to be. You'll get a full experience with a single campaign, but it's great to know that you can keep going and discover new content long after beating a single path.
Fire Emblem Fates is an incredible package and an experience that rivals the very best the 3DS has to offer.
Outside of those unfortunate problems, Fire Emblem Fates provides the memorable gameplay of the series and a formidable, entertaining challenge for any 3DS owner. The added stress of betraying characters you've come to admire elevates the narrative tension to a natural and organic height.
Fire Emblem Fates exemplifies the best way to approach a sequel. It maintains and iterates on Awakening's best qualities, while also introducing new systems that have a profound impact alongside a richer and more poignant story. It's more than just a worthwhile successor to a recent hit. Taken as a whole, it's the best Fire Emblem to date.
In that sense, as a stand-alone title Fire Emblem: Fates: Birthright is not a particularly good game, though it's not a bad one either. It's an above-average tactical RPG with excellent production value and moderately good gameplay scenarios, but it feels surprisingly one-note and dissatisfying if taken on its own merits as a self-contained game.
Birthright is probably the best starting place for newcomers. Not only does it offer unlimited grinding opportunities to beef up your party, but the actual missions mostly consist of easy "rout (kill) the enemy" parameters. The tale is also relatively open and shut, following a traditional storyline from a macro perspective, while keeping the complicated relationships intact. That's not to say it's a waste of time though, as you can still jack up the difficulty and add in permadeath if you want, and you still have to win those battles.
The best Fire Emblem yet, with more depth of gameplay and options than ever before and yet still perfectly accessible for new players.
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright is amongst the best tactical videogames of all time. While it's not the wholesale reinvigoration that Awakening was, it is the refinement of three decades worth of game development, from a team who have fundamentally defined the handheld tactical genre.
Fire Emblem: Fates offers new features and gameplay that weigh down the series' tried and true gameplay, rather than enhance it.
For the foreseeable future, if I'm not reading something, I know what I'll be doing the next time I'm waiting in line.
Regardless of which version of the three editions you buy you'll be in for dozens of hours of top-notch turn-based tactics – plus a bit of old-fashioned Japanese melodrama
A captivating story and strong cast of supporting characters, along with the very well designed gameplay and impressive breadth of pure content make Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation a must own trilogy for the Nintendo 3DS.