Coming from Philipp Doschl of FDG Entertainmen...
“I wouldn’t call myself the biggest Fire Emblem fan, still I played a couple of releases in the series and quite liked them. I miss a bit of the series’ depth in the strategic and story sides of the original series, but that’s a question of taste – and of target audience and platform.
I definitely had to check out the mobile release and started playing Friday night. I kept playing it over the weekend. Right now, at the end of the 3rd day me playing Fire Emblem Heroes, I have mixed feelings. I keep going back to it to play a few battles though, level up my heroes and see if there’s any new Mission I can clear. And this is what I love and hate at the same time about the game. The 4vs4 fights make sure that the average battle time fits mobile play sessions, perfect for when you have a few minutes on the bus. The downside is that epic battles are completely missing (which for me always were important in Fire Emblem and the like). And the “story”… Oh boy, it’s presented in such a dull way that I couldn’t care less. Some could say it’s typical for this kind of free to play games. I would say a chance has been missed to push mobile free to play games to a new level where story is more than just a few random text boxes with nicely drawn art.
Sometimes the battles felt more like a puzzle game, due to their fast paced nature. Talking of puzzle games. The whole game design reminds me a lot of massively popular Japanese free to play games like Puzzle & Dragons and Monster Strike. Both of these games have more or less the same meta gameplay and only differ in gameplay mechanics. Same goes for Fire Emblem Heroes. Quick battles, an endless amount of characters, hero fusions, the way monetisation works through the orbs, etc… It feels like a perfect mix of Fire Emblem’s gameplay and Puzzle & Dragons’ meta gameplay and monetisation.
But hey, not everything’s bad in the game! The strategic gameplay of the console and handheld games has been perfectly adapted to the new format. The battles are fun, entertaining, with a moderate difficulty level. I wonder if Nintendo plans to add a real time vs mode, which could be very fun. There’s a certain sense of progression in the game and somehow I want to upgrade my castle and discover new characters, their abilities and what strategies I’ll have to think of in harder missions. I just hope it’s not pure pay to win (which it luckily doesn’t seem to be, yet.)”
from GoNintendo
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