Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright Review

“A song of Birthright and love”

            Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright plays just like Fire Emblem Awakening and that is not a bad thing. I adored Awakening as a long time Fire Emblem fan, I even will go as far as to say that it was my favorite entry in the series, until Fire Emblem Fates came along.

            Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright isn’t a complete copy and paste of Awakening; it’s actually quite different in many ways. Birthright introduces new weapons into the series and it’s cool that there’s more types of weapons in the series. The Hoshido, your family from birth, are more feudal Japan-like. Because of this, you get more feudal Japan weapons like: clubs instead of axes, katanas instead of swords, yumis instead of bows, festals instead of staves, shurikens instead of the Nohr counterpart of knives and naginatas instead of lances and more. The variety of weapons and customization was a neat change from the more European style in the other entries in the series, and I quite enjoyed the changes.

           

            The story is the crux of Fates, a lot of people were quite butt-hurt that there were two different titles; even a third one if you include Revelations, but let’s be honest, if it was a Pokémon game you would probably buy both versions. However, I will defend Nintendo for choosing to make two titles, because both are vastly different in comparison in the way they play and it’s fantastic. Birthright’s maps have more simple objectives which primarily consists of route the enemy, which is to essentially kill all enemy units, and other objectives such as kill the boss, or escape the map or seize the base. Route the enemy was the objective in practically all the maps, and I’ll be honest, the lack of objective variety in this version was disappointing. I understand Birthright is made to be the easy version while Conquest is the more traditional Fire Emblem game, however it was still disappointing nonetheless.

           

            The story of Birthright is well written. I really enjoyed it, and there were a lot of moments within the game that tugged on my emotions that some scenes actually made me cry. Some moments were huge what the heck moments because of what happened in the cutscenes. Birthright is like a completely different time line after chapter 6 when you have to choose to side with your birthright family: the Hoshido. Likewise for Conquest you have to side with Nohr, your adopted family. The story was great, and filled with charming characters. Having played Birthright first before Conquest and played Conquest second, I felt Birthright complimented the story of Conquest very well by giving more details to certain things that was barely touched on in the Birthright campaign.  Likewise for the Conquest campaign making both experiences of the game fresh and completely different to one another. This created a fun experience and was not at all a chore to be playing what many people believed to be the same game twice with slight differences. There are a lot of differences that I will not go over in this review that I will be saving for the Conquest one.

            Video game music is very important to me. It enhances the experience and helps push the immersion in the game and story. I love video game music, and Fire Emblem Fates soundtrack was phenomenal. The Nohr’s theme of music was very European-like with bagpipes, and many other European based instruments that it set that Nohr was very European-like kingdom. The Hoshido’s theme of music was more Japanese with gongs, water drop-like sounds, wind instruments, and oriental sound to it. I really enjoyed the sound track, and Azura’s song, which is literally everywhere in the trailers for the game so no spoiler there, and the English singing was quite good, I have read some complaints about it in comparison the Japanese version, and I happen to like both as much to each version.

           The graphics appear to be in the same engine as to Awakening, however, the cinematics were completely different in comparison. The cinematics in Fates are absolutely gorgeous and very fun to watch, they have more of an anime feel, while Awakening was more of just a cel-shaded cinematic splice which isn’t bad thing since I love cel-shading graphics, but I adored the art style for Fates a lot, it was a very pretty game and absolutely stunning to see it push the 3DS hardware’s graphics. I have no idea if there’s a difference in comparison to the original 3DS/3DS XL models since I played it on the ‘new’ 3DS XL and there are slight changes in comparison to some existing 3DS games, such as Smash Bros. loading times on the ‘new’ compared to the original which I did experience, so bear that in mind for my opinion. I did enjoy that the cinematics were tailored and completely different depending on which version you are playing and it made the experience more fresh and fun to know I’m not playing the same exact thing.

            One new gameplay mechanic I really enjoyed was the Dragon vein. They are sigils on the ground that are activated by the royalty members of the respective games, and they change the landscape of the maps battlefield dramatically. There was a level inside a volcano-like area, and I would use the Dragon vein as a way to create a bridge for my units to cross-by which was really cool and effected my strategy in the game, making me be specific on which unit I want to waste that round to use the Dragon vein.

            Fates, continues the child unit thing from Awakening which was a mechanic I absolutely loved and was happy to see again. However, I was disappointed on how few children you get from the pairings in comparison to Awakening, but I will cut slack on that because that was a part of the story in Awakening. I was very happy to see this feature return in the game since it was one of the things I really enjoyed in Awakening.

Overall Score: 9/10

Gameplay: 8.5           Graphics: 9                Story: 9          Sound and Music: 9      

  

Replay-Value: 9