I finished Echoes a few days ago. The biggest flaw it had was that the maps weren’t very interesting, but there was a lot of them, so that might make up for it. Otherwise, good cast, good battle system, good music. I was worried because the last FE game (Fates) was awful, but they fixed Fates’ issues from the get-go in Echoes.
Very different to FE7 though. They aren’t too comparable.
I forgot to mention that I finished Echoes like a week ago and holy crap I absolutely loved it. I think it might actually be my favorite in the series and I have played all the localized games except for Shadow Dragon. I just have to say that the features are hella weird and the game feels more like a JRPG than a normal FE game but it’s still really fun to play. The story is fricken amazing and the voice acting is so natural, I love it. I talked to a few people who were like, “I can’t play Echoes because I haven’t finished Fates,” and I’m just like, “No. Stop it. Fates is nothing compared to Echoes. It’s not worth your time to finish it.” So yup that’s my feelings about Echoes now that I finished the main story. I highly recommend playing it; IGN doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about lol.
I feel that that part is already known for a long time. I’m sadly spoiled on the basic story because I watched a plot summary of Gaiden back when nobody knew a Gaiden remake would actually happen, but I still can’t wait to play it (currently other things on my To-Play/Read-List, that’s why I haven’t started yet).
I watched that same video and honestly it didn’t spoil the story too much because they added sooo much new stuff to the story. There are tons of new characters and everyone seems to be written such that they actually have very legitimate sounding motivations, not just having generically evil antagonists.
Also Delthea best girl
I’m glad I’ve found another man of culture around these parts.
Nice!
Then I’ll look forward to all the new stuff!
Alright, I recently got Echoes and I’ve been playing it a lot the past couple days. Currently 15 hours in, with some thoughts about the game:
Obviously coming off the heels of the more recent Fire Emblem titles (being Awakening and…Fates), it’s pretty refreshing to not be dealing with the whole pairing/shipping aspect of the game. The characters are much better, and while not especially deep by any means, they’re still mostly likeable enough given how many there are. Particularly nice is not having a bland self insert protagonist, which I always find tiresome since I never really appreciated character customization enough for it to offset the negatives of the main character having all the personality of a bag of rocks. The villains (with the exception of the Duma cult dudes, who are just your average freaky dark wizard fantasy cult) are much more interesting, although I’d have to again reiterate that I don’t think they’re especially deep by any means.
With THAT out of the way, holy crap is it obvious that Fire Emblem has come so far in its gameplay since Gaiden. I’m still having fun with Echoes but some of the mechanics and map design are so whack that I sometimes just feel an overbearing urge to put the game down after completing one or two chapters. The bosses that just spawn endless waves of enemies make for particularly tedious maps, so I pretty much audibly groan every time I see a boss unit with “conjure” in their ability list.
I’ve also personally found that mages and archers are just ridiculously powerful and the only real reason to use units that aren’t protagonists + ranged units is just because there’s not enough of them to clear maps with. The range archers have is particularly absurd, and half the difficult maps that don’t involve mook spam are only so because there’s a bunch of archers and mages to contend with. Amusingly enough, generally the units that will see you through these situations are…your own archers and mages.
Making matters worse are the witches, who will just randomly teleport anywhere on the map they please, and whether they kill a unit or not is an RNG crapshoot. Their AI is dumb and rarely teleports to and targets weak to magic or low hp units, but when they do that unit is basically guaranteed to be dead. You pretty much have no control over these outcomes, which makes witches probably the number one enemy outside of bosses that necessitate usage of Mila’s Turnwheel.
I’ll be honest. I’m glad Echoes has the Turnwheel. I think it’s entirely dumb for a game like Fire Emblem to have it, but I think Echoes in particular needs to have this sort of mechanic. So many of the maps force you into situations where you just have to keep rerolling RNG until the stars align (Desaix’s fort probably being the first prominent example…), and fortunately Mila’s Turnwheel is there to let you do just that. Unfortunately, this often creates maps where you’re just brute forcing RNG solutions rather than carefully strategizing your way through, but it is what it is.
I have a LOT of other complaints about the gameplay in particular, but this post is already too long winded. Suffice it to say that I’m quite enjoying Echoes, and as far as everything but gameplay is concerned it is vastly superior to Fates. However, the gameplay of Conquest is…obviously years ahead of Echoes, and goddamn does it show.
PS: Why the hell is Delthea so OP. Holy crap ever since I’ve gotten her it feels like she, Alm, and Python are basically carrying me through all of Alms chapters.
While it’s still somewhat random, to me it seems that witches will try to teleport if they see one member of your party as somewhat isolated. So you can manipulate them a little bit.
One problem I had with the protagonists was the duel-story thing. Once I was playing one protagonist I really didn’t want to switch, and going back to a completely different set of units felt frustrating somehow.
Giant waves of enemies, balls of tanks and archers, terrain that only lets you move one step each turn. Very slow paced and annoying to deal with.[quote=“ThePlasticSpork, post:219, topic:1842”]
I’ve also personally found that mages and archers are just ridiculously powerful
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I never really used mages because it felt like if I used them for offense they’d be torn apart by witches and archers. I pretty much gave all the work to my healers, archers and fliers. The Whitewings, Eri, and Jenny were my carries for the most part.[quote=“ThePlasticSpork, post:219, topic:1842”]
Making matters worse are the witches, who will just randomly teleport anywhere on the map they please, and whether they kill a unit or not is an RNG crapshoot.
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I had to deselect one of my tanks multiple times (don’t remember who exactly) because they were randomly getting one-shot by witches and there was no way to keep him alive. There were a handful of times I just left people dead when they died to witches. My main way of dealing with them has been to charge them and get them so low that they can’t cast spells.
My main way to deal with witches, or anything tbh was invoke lmao. Very often, enemies aggro towards the spirit thingies rather than my actual units so I could use them as endless tanks. If not for invoke I literally would not have been able to beat the final boss because they just take soooo much heat off of me.
I usually used invoke just to block the frontline while I poked with ranged stuff and flanked with fliers/cavalry.
My first Fire Emblem game was Sacred Stones. The combination of turn based strategy along with the RPG leveling combined 2 genres that I already enjoyed. The support system also enthralled me. Being able to see these characters interact and discuss their lives, their hopes, and their dreams really breathed life into them. Which is why I always reset when someone died.
It didn’t hurt that I had the official strategy guide as well thanks to my Nintendo Power subscription. I mostly remember using it to plan out how to promote people and to make sure I found all the secret shops.
I missed out on Path of Radiance due to being a kid with no money and no one ever getting it for me for Christmas. I had that on my list for many years. 
My next experience with a full Fire Emblem game was Radiant Dawn and that fully cemented my love of the series.
Since then, I’ve also beaten Shadow Dragon and have in varying states of not completed yet Awakening, Fates, and Echoes. Currently Echoes has me absolutely hooked. The mechanics are simpler than some of the other games, but for me that makes it so positioning and tactics are even more important. The cantors can be tedious, but I enjoy battles of attrition so those guys are some of my favorite enemies. Also the dungeon crawling is a super fun way to break up the constant battles. The characters make it even better because they are all super fun. I love it when Est says “I could learn a thing or 3.”
I’ve also been playing Fire Emblem Heroes since it came out. It’s like a bite sized dose of Fire Emblem every day. Num num num. 
Oh hey, I had a similar experience where I started with the GBA games (my first one was FE7). I managed to finish Awakening but am finding Fates kind of a bore to go through. I’ve had it on hold for almost a year now. I really like the conquest cast though.
Fun story: on my first playthrough ever of FE7 I made the typical mistake of only ever using the 2nd stage units, which left my lords painfully underleveled. In the final battle I ended up having no other choice but to sacrifice literally all my units as bait so that Eliwood had the chance to make enough damage on the dragon, since he was so underleveled he’d get easily 1HKO’d. Seeing the epilogues of most characters being “died in final chapter” was so traumatizing that I learned not to do that ever again 
What’s your favorite game in the series? I personally love the Tellius games (path of radiance and radiant dawn). I think both of those games have some of the best maps in the entire series.
This is kind of a shame, especially if you still had a Luna tome back then. Since it sounds like you didn’t lose any units before that. Because if I remember correctly, a combination of Athos + Luna + Healer + Nils can win you the dragon fight.
Probably Sacred Stones, it holds a special place in my heart as the first game I played. I also absolutely adore the combat animations in that game. The swordmaster critical hit is so great with the 5 afterimages. I think the way the camera moves and jumps around in the newer games with the 3D animations can make it too hard to tell what’s going on.
Echoes is making a very strong case for itself as well. The characters are delightful and I greatly appreciate being able to get all of the support conversations easily in one play through. And everything else I gushed about in my last post.
Radiant Dawn is a solid 3rd. It had so many wonderful cinematic moments and I don’t just mean the pre-rendered ones. Some of those battles were just so huge and epic it felt like a real war and not a small band of elite troops slogging their way through enemy lines.
Completely agreed. The fantastic 2D animations was definitely the thing I missed the most when the game transitioned to 3D. Honestly I find the all the 3D battle animations so unremarkable that I tend to turn them off after a couple of battles for every new main game in the series.
I think what was lost most in the transition from 2D to 3D was all the subtlety. Every small movement in the 2D sprites was really obvious even for someone like me who has obliviousness down to a science. For the 3D animations I only catch the broad strokes and I miss all of the small movements and slight changes that might occur.
For example, in Sacred Stones the archer crit animation has an extra slight movement on the left hand just before drawing the arrow. Or the thief sways just a little bit before going in to attack. In Echoes there’s the noise and flash when they crit, but I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a change in the attack itself. Granted I think there’s at least 2 or 3 different attack animations for each class in general so it’s not like there isn’t variety. It’s just much less memorable when the camera keeps moving and I can’t soak it in.
It is true that 3D loses a bit of charm compared to 2D in terms of animation, however I feel that at least Radiant Dawn and Echoes try to implement a similar fancyness. Radiant Dawn specifically seems to follow the GBA games’ philosophy of spinning makes things better in regard to its special ability and crit animations. In Echoes I’m finally happy with the spells again, something that was seriously lacking in Shadow Dragon, Awakening and Fates. The Aura spell in particular is a callback to the GBA Aura animation, albeit in a different color. (Or the other way around, would have to check Gaiden’s spell animations for that). Furthermore, the Dread Fighter animations seriously remind me of GBA’s Swordmaster animations, what with the whole jumpiness and disappearing and reappearing and stuff.
I just watched part of a video that was like “What happens to the dialogue in the early game of Path of Radiance if you let everyone except Ike die?” It’s actually like… kinda really sad…
Since Fire Emblem Warriors is almost out, I just feel the need to say that it’s a travesty what they have done with this game. Having Anna as the announcer during levels means that whenever she says “Mission Start”, it’s incredibly upsetting because if Marth did it, I’d have the option of switching to Japanese mode and hearing Hikaru Midorikawa say it.
