I never quite knew what to expect in Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted to destroy my enemies. I wanted my army to trust me, and I wanted them to be happy. And I wanted, perhaps more than anything, to have someone to come home to after each battle, who would murmur to me how much he loved me despite the mess around us.
Birthright--one in a trio of Fire
Emblem Fates titles--continues the series' time-tested spin on strategy
role-playing games. But is also adds a new layer to interactions between
characters that makes things intimate--steamy, even. Mechanically,
Birthright is more forgiving than its sister titles Conquest and
Revelations, offering players easier access to resources and units as
well as more opportunities to grind out experience. As for the
narrative, there are some awkward moments and cheap drama that pull you
out of the moment, but these are brief and overshadowed by a handful of
powerful scenes. Even the melodrama can't keep Fire Emblem Fates:
Birthright from being worthy experience.
All Fire Emblem
Fates titles have identical opening chapters: your player-created
avatar is living with his or her family in the kingdom of Nohr with a
loving family. But your not-so-loving father, King Garon, is a demonic
despot bent on destroying the neighboring kingdom of Hoshido. After a
mission doled out by your father goes wrong, you wind up captured by the
Hoshido royal family, who reveal that you are their long-lost sibling
who was kidnapped as a child. When your memories return, both your
adopted and biological families meet on the battlefield and demand you
choose a side. Birthright's story follows what happens when you remain
with the latter. Having turned against you, your adopted one will do
everything in its power to bring you home or kill you trying. So you set
out to amass an entourage and stop the war, collecting new characters
and a newfound understanding of who you are along the way.
On
the battlefield, you move your characters like chess pieces along a
grid, weighing their strengths and weaknesses against enemies. The
bottom 3DS screen displays how effective your weapons are against your
enemies', as well the potential damage you'll inflict on each other.
Birthright emphasizes that same kind of unit placement introduced in
2013's Fire Emblem: Awakening,
where adjacent units will often team up to support and defend each
other. This lets you sneak in a few extra hits as well as protect weaker
units, and in turn, those units will bond. The higher the rank--S being
the highest, equating to a marriage--the better they are fighting
together.
Selecting from your dozens of fighters and
coordinating your assault is a delicate dance, and forces you to agonize
over every move. There is an embarrassment of riches in terms of
character selection--there are archers, healers, casters, aerial wyvern
riders and sky nights, and a handful of different kinds of melee
combatants, each with their own personality. Choosing who to send where
brews a special kind of anxiety that makes you feel accomplishment with
each battle won, like untying a particularly convoluted knot.
In
terms of weapons, rather than use a cut-and-dry rock-paper-scissors
triangle, you have something requiring a bit more thinking: swords and
magic trump ranged weapons, ranged weapons trump lances and smaller
weapons, which trump swords and magic. Additionally, each character
class can use at least two of these, and although weapons can still
break in battle, it's mercifully rare. Planning ahead is half the fun,
and all this variation--between the personalities and battle banter, the
weapons and classes--prevents combat from becoming stale and
oversimplified, and ramps up the tactical challenge. With a dozen
different enemy types to encounter and the variety of challenges they
present, it ensures you never get to a point where you're button-mashing
through maps. Caster enemies will heal one another, eliminating all
your hard word, or a horde of aerial opponents will bottleneck you in
narrow sections of a map. They behave unpredictably, which makes it
challenging to plan several moves ahead. However, maps offer little
variety and are often the same version of a field with a few bottleneck
points. Rather than the environment being the puzzle, it's all about
your army. But it's all still enough to keep you on your toes, and each
mission won is a victory worth celebrating.
When you're
not on the battlefield, you're in your castle. This is a more involved
version of the Barracks feature from Awakening, where you can talk to
your troops and build relationships. In your castle you build shops and
mine resourcing-giving structures like crystal mines and daikon fields.
You can also set up a lottery, where each in-game day you get a free
item of varying value, and a mess hall, where characters can cook meals
with your bounty that grant your party status buffs. There are optional
missions in which enemies attack your castle, and you can also build
support units and structures to help defend during these. Additionally,
you often find your friends walking the grounds, and can eavesdrop on
conversations between them or take a moment to pass on a gift. These
interactions contribute to the ranked support system between units,
bolstering your rapport with each other both on and off the field.
Some
characters--including yours--can reach S rank support with another unit
of the opposite sex and have a child. This child will appear in a
Paralogue, another optional mission type. Completing these missions
successfully will add the child to your army, and most of these second
generation fighters come pre-packaged powerful, with high critical rates
and impressively high stats. It's worth breeding for these super
soldiers, at the very least, and Birthright makes it worth your time to
work towards them.
Right from the start, Birthright is
thick with over-the-top theatrically, at points bordering on straight-up
cheese. This wouldn't be so terrible--some of the romantic banter
between units can cross over into hokey territory at times--if the plot
weren't peppered with characters dying or becoming incapacitated for no
reason other than to be sensational. One egregious instance pokes so
many holes in the rules of Fire Emblem's world and the laws of physics
it had me rolling my eyes. There are several moments like this where
things go off the rails, but not enough to spoil the more intimate
parts.
Intimate might actually not be strong enough a
word for how hard Birthright tries to tug on your heartstrings--and
maybe your loins. Like in Awakening, you can talk to your troops between
battles in your private quarters, building up support ranks between
pairs of units to give them advantages on the battlefield. When you talk
to your siblings in Birthright, they speak in ways that indicate
mistrust or--gradually--a desire to make up for lost time. Members of
the same sex will make idle chatter or talk about how much you both
admire each other, and those of the opposite will drop hints they want
to know you better. When you marry someone, they will always be waiting
in your room. You'll be asked to use the 3DS stylus to caress them away
or blow on the mic to waft steam over their faces, and they'll murmur
huskily to you and pucker up for a kiss. It's enough to make you a
little tingly, and flirting with multiple units and playing matchmaker
opens up new dialogue opportunities allowing you to get get to know them
better. The vast majority of all character development happens in these
scenes, and with so many varying personalities it's a delight spending
time being a fly on the wall here. There are also a few moments of
genuine sadness, and watching these characters feel pain--all gorgeously
rendered in vivid, bright cutscenes of course--is oddly affecting. A
combination of sultry, impassioned voice acting and stunning visuals is a
recipe for heartache.
The
one plot point that never paid off was your ability to morph into a
dragon. After the initial encounter where you do so, it's rarely
mentioned again, and when people treat you like you're special, it's not
about your odd ability at all. This piece of plot felt unnecessary, and
is dangling in front of you like a foreshadowed macguffin only to have
it never pay off. It's disappointing, given the strong emotional payoff
of other plot threads like the mystery behind Azura's nature and how you
reconcile (or don't) with your families.
Mercifully, if
you're in Birthright for the story or new to the Fire Emblem series,
there are several difficulty options. There are Hard and Lunatic modes,
which apply to the strength of enemies, as well as three separate
gameplay styles that affect the units available to you. On Classic mode,
the rules of permadeath apply, and when a unit dies on the field you
never get them back. In Casual mode, units who die in battle will still
be available to you once the fight ends. And in Phoenix mode, the most
forgiving of the three, fallen units come back after each turn. It's a
smart move for bringing in new players normally intimidated by the
hardcore strategy elements--perhaps those looking just for a
high-fantasy story where you get to flirt with cute boys or girls.
Birthright
also includes a Scouting feature, which can be used to endlessly
generate random optional missions on the world map. This is a great way
to grind out experience points, and spend an hour or two outside of the
storyline levelling up characters' skills or relationships. This was a
boon to me; when I was too underpowered to progress the narrative, a few
quick battles brought me up to speed. When I wanted to hurry two
characters up and make them procreate, I paired them up and ran them
through a few maps with minimal fuss. It keeps you engaged in the world
and its politics, but also gives you a chance to get stronger with
minimal fuss.
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright is an absolute delight
to play, from the battlefield to the bedroom. If you loved its
predecessor Awakening, you'll enjoy the heightened tension and intimacy
imbued in every moment of Birthright. Between the strategy, the dating
sim elements, the can't-help-but-swoon-over-it melodrama and some truly
gorgeous visuals and music, you can overlook things like repetitive maps
and cringeworthy-dumb parts of the writing. The series that kicked off
the strategy RPG genre still has it, and you'll enjoy getting wrapped up
in the conflict.