Fire Emblem is a series with a storied history and has transformed dramatically over its nearly 25-year existence. Fire Emblem Echoes, a remake of a very early game in the series--Fire Emblem Gaiden--remains a departure of sorts from what most veteran players might expect. Rather than emphasizing character relationships and story dialogue, Fire Emblem Echoes puts its focus on long- and short-term strategy and strength-building. The end result is a fresh take on Fire Emblem's strategy-RPG formula, and one that ranks among the best of the 3DS library.
Echoes follows the dual leads of Alm and Celica, a pair of youths that bear a strange crest upon their hands. They bond together as children in a tiny farming village, only to be torn apart by a sudden dramatic event. Many years after the fact, you're in control of both characters--and their respective armies--in search of a reunion amongst a conflict-ridden yarn spun of large-scale wars, hidden pasts, and shocking truths.
While the story is classic Fire Emblem fare, the emphasis here is centered firmly on the saga of Alm and Celica, with only a few brief interludes that shift focus to other army members. The characters you welcome into your ranks and interact with are a charming and likable bunch with fun, well-written dialogue. Almost all in-game character text is voiced as well, which adds appreciable personality. Players more accustomed to recent Fire Emblem games like Awakening and Fates, however, may feel a bit disappointed in the lack of side character interactions. You don't "pair off" characters in Echoes as you would in those games--while character-to-character support conversations do still exist here, they're much shorter and happen strictly during combat. While this may be a disappointment to some, overall, it helps cement the story focus on the two leads and the various warring factions of FE Echoes' world.
While most of Echoes takes place on grid-based, turn-driven battlefields, you'll also spend a lot of time navigating an overworld map with two armies: one led by Alm and the other by Celica, each with a different group of soldiers under their lead. Interactions between the two sets of troops are limited, meaning you'll have to manage resources, weaponry, and stat-building across two teams. The two take mostly separate paths in their respective campaigns, stopping at towns and dungeons to gather intel, find new recruits, take on side-quests, and discover hidden treasure. Explorable towns, castles, shrines, forts, and dungeons are unique to Echoes, and while interactions with most of areas are somewhat limited--basically restricted to examining environments with a cursor as you would in a point-and-click adventure game--dungeons offer a far more interesting twist for the series.
Dungeons are explored on foot from a third-person perspective. You scout for secret passages and smash pots and crates for loot while avoiding (or seeking out) battles against roaming enemies. Touching a foe takes you to a traditional FE battle, but once you've felled your opponents, it's back to exploring. These areas serve as a great addition that offer variety beyond simply stringing a series of battles together while still keeping the narrative focus on the core story.
Echoes has some crucial differences from other Fire Emblem games that add interesting layers to army management and combat as well. Characters can only carry one item at a time, forcing you to carefully consider if a special weapon, a restorative item, or armaments like a shield or ring would be ideal. Weapon degradation isn't an issue (similar to Fates), and magic is learned through leveling rather than buying tomes--and uses character HP to cast, making high-powered spells a potentially risky proposition.
These are all serious deviations from other Fire Emblem installments, and they might take a bit of time to get used to, but they result in a Fire Emblem game that's both distinct and refreshing.
Combat skills are learned by keeping specific items equipped in battle for long periods of time and are tied to individual pieces of gear, meaning you can't just learn a skill from a specific shield, then equip a sword and keep using the skill. Stamina wears down as characters fight and take damage, degrading their stats and combat capabilities unless they replenish them with food, medicine, or offerings to the goddess Mila. Finally, the rock-paper-scissors style weapon triangle of modern FE games is gone entirely--swords can now clash with spears on equal footing.
These are all serious deviations from other Fire Emblem installments, and they might take a bit of time to get used to, but they result in a Fire Emblem game that's both distinct and refreshing. You can't simply go in with strategies you may have devised in other Fire Emblem titles and expect them to work here; you'll need to really stop and think about weapon distribution and upgrades, consider how to effectively use certain classes, when to take time with optional fights to build additional character levels, and so on.
The game's difficulty is high overall, which makes conquering the toughest battles relatively unscathed feel like a real accomplishment. While the difficulty level makes formulating a sound strategy highly rewarding, it can also lead to some cases where you might feel stuck unless you grind out a few more levels or backtrack to the shrine to change classes, especially if you're playing with permadeath on. But it always feels worth it; when you face a huge armada on a molten lava-covered battlefield, enduring assaults from constantly respawning foes while trying to keep your army's stamina and health above critical levels, and you somehow manage to pull off a victory with a lucky arrow planted in a wizard's cranium, pride and elation come in equal measure.
Helping you to secure those feelings is a brilliant new addition to gameplay called Mila's Turnwheel. Each battle grants you a limited number of uses of the Turnwheel, which effectively acts as a rewind button. Missed several attacks in a row? You can opt to spin back time to a few attacks earlier and attempt them all again, hopefully with better luck. Realize that your brilliant "divide and conquer" strategy is actually going to leave your best soldiers dead? Go back several turns and take a totally new approach--you can rewind time as much or as little as you'd like, provided you still have enough cogs in reserve for that battle. This wonderful system allows players to take back critical combat mistakes without having to reset a long and arduous battle and is a tremendous boon whether you are playing with or without permadeath enabled. Once you run out of cogs, though, you'll have to restart the level to take back mistakes, adding yet another nice layer of strategy--is it really worth a cog to reroll for a critical hit, or should you save it for when you plan your final assault on the tough-as-nails enemy commander? Only you can make the call.
Fire Emblem Echoes is a fantastic remake and a striking departure from modern Fire Emblem staples. What it lacks in interpersonal character relationships and user-controlled "shipping," it makes up for in meaty, challenging strategy gameplay, engaging exploration sequences, and a tighter overall narrative. Taken both on its own and as part of the larger Fire Emblem franchise, Echoes's unique elements help it stand out from its contemporaries. If you feel like you're up to a lengthy, engaging challenge, then Echoes will satisfy in spades.
NetherRealm has been on a roll since 2011's Mortal Kombat reboot, and with the release of Injustice 2, it's come one step closer to perfecting its particular brand of fighting game. Injustice 2 is dense, deep, and refined, but also accessible to newcomers thanks to relatively simple move lists and a variety of rewarding new gameplay opportunities. The addition of gear makes the biggest splash in this regard, allowing you to craft a personalized hero or villain, both inside (with stat boosts) and outside (with elaborate costume upgrades)--all while maintaining the game's balanced roster. There are some complications to gear management that may frustrate, but minor gripes aside, character growth and customization proves to be the biggest boon for an already strong fighting game set in a fractured DC Comics universe.
It may sound unusual for a fighting game, but Injustice 2's story is a prominent feature, told through a multi-hour campaign filled with NetherRealm's most impressive cutscenes to date. An ideological gulf divides the Justice League; Superman's desire to execute criminals is at odds with Batman's non-lethal approach to justice. This conflict is woven throughout the story, but the arrival of Brainiac temporarily unites the League against a common enemy. Though some interactions and events come off forced as you battle mind-controlled allies and true enemies alike, these narrative shortcuts are ultimately there to introduce you to the large and eccentric character roster.
The cast sees the return of familiar faces--the likes of The Flash and Green Lantern--but also introduces unlikely fan favorites such as the blood-barfing Red Lantern Atrocitus and the plant-based behemoth, Swamp Thing. The nearly 30 characters offer a broad range of super powers and fighting styles, and each has a distinct trait that can instantly trigger a status buff or summon an underling in the middle of a fight.
DC's famous faces have never looked better, but the real star of the show is the fighting system, which consists of a mix of hand-to-hand combat, super powers, weapons, and environmental hazards. How characters fit into these styles of combat differs, but as is the norm for NetherRealm's games, most attacks feel hefty and deliberate at first. Special moves and combos are easy enough to learn, but it takes time and practice to get combo timing under your skin--to move fluidly from one attack to the next.
Still, newcomers can easily impress each other with simple two-button Super moves that pause the action for an absurd and cinematic combo attack, or halt an incoming combo attack by activating Clash--a move that forces players to gamble segments of their Super meter in hopes of regaining health or inflicting damage. In the hands of a new player, clashing can provide an escape plan. In the hands of a pro, it opens up a mind game that can drastically alter the playing field.
With AI battles, online and local versus matches, the diverse and ever-changing Multiverse, and an impressive story mode, Injustice 2 offers numerous ways of engaging with its characters and testing your abilities without feeling repetitive.
Injustice 2 provides basic, practical tutorials for every mechanic and each character's notable attacks, though neither avenue goes in-depth enough to satisfy prolonged research. The most specific info you can find pertains to frame data for each attack, but this will only be helpful if you already understand the esoteric terms therein and how their measurements apply in action.
Ultimately there's no better teacher for a new player than experience. In this sense, Injustice 2 is packed with learning opportunities in the Multiverse, a mode that benefits from randomly generated battle modifiers and the temptation of gear-based rewards. Not all Multiverse challenges are enjoyable, like the modifier that causes the screen to black out every few seconds. But sometimes you get a satisfying leg-up over the competition, such as the ability to summon an off-screen assist character. Regardless of whether modifiers make the act of fighting more or less difficult, they nevertheless serve as a valuable opportunity to see your character's abilities under a different lens and study their potential.
Perhaps more importantly, depending on your love for loot, the Multiverse is your primary means of acquiring gear, item boxes, and experience points--though most modes will allow you to earn a little of each. Specific types of gear are often teased before you choose a mission, and a shiny new helmet for Dr. Fate or a sword for Wonder Woman (for example) can often prove to be tempting enough to walk into the game's more troublesome modifiers. Otherwise, random gear drops after individual battles, and blind loot boxes are rewarded based on a score derived from how efficiently and dominantly you fight.
With five gear slots, two extra ability slots, and custom shading unlocks for each fighter, there's a lot of character-specific gear to collect. By default, gear is distributed in the Multiverse with a slight bias towards the character you're playing. Regardless, you will ultimately earn items for other characters, practically to the point that you rarely get what you're looking for. Even when that unexpected epic-grade item drops for your favorite hero, you may still find that it's temporarily out of reach, as all gear is level locked--the current cap is level 20. It's not uncommon to earn items that are one to ten levels higher than your assigned character. That is, unless you have enough funds to get around this pesky rule.
Watching a character's traditional outfit transform into something fresh or unexpected, and seeing their stats grow through leveling up and equipping gear, grants a satisfying sense of ownership over your accomplishments and possessions.
Injustice 2's currency system has many layers but can be broken down into two use-cases: Spending relatively common credits, guild credits, and regen coins to earn random gear; and trading in source crystals (which can cost real-world money) to have total control over the items in your inventory. In the latter scenario, you are spending large amounts of a valuable resource to use or manipulate items that you already own. Though you can earn some source crystals by playing Injustice 2 over dozens of hours, they come few and far between to seemingly make spending real money seem like a necessary evil.
This misgiving aside, you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of collecting gear and outfitting characters without spending additional money. Watching a character's traditional outfit transform into something fresh or unexpected, and seeing their stats grow through leveling up and equipping gear, grants a satisfying sense of ownership over your accomplishments and possessions. Your character's appearance will carry over to every mode, from the Multiverse to online battles. Gear stat boosts, however, will only count in unranked online matches when both players agree to do so, and never in ranked matches. This allows Multiverse to serve as the anything-goes variety show without negatively impacting the balanced roster for the competitive community, all the while preserving the use of expressive custom costumes.
The introduction of automated AI battles is a nice touch for people who want a taste of online competition without the pressure to train and master a character, and an easy way to earn free item boxes every day. After creating a team of three fighters--who retain any and all stat boosts--you pit them against another player's online team and watch fights play out in front of you. Because these fights are simulated, they can be sped up to four times their normal speed. While you can pick fights manually, you can also rely on other players to fight your AI team while you're away from the game. You retain a win-loss record and are often treated to item boxes whenever you login--an occurrence that will fluctuate based on how often your team defeats incoming challenges while you're offline.
With AI battles, online and local versus matches, the diverse and ever-changing Multiverse, and an impressive story mode, Injustice 2 offers numerous ways of engaging with its characters and testing your abilities without feeling repetitive. This variety is further bolstered by gear. Despite the needlessly complex economy tied to item management, the value of customization and expression that comes with gear ultimately makes up for it. And with over 25 characters to explore, it's easy to look forward to watching your next character grow while your understanding of the game continues to expand. NetherRealm has delivered a fighting game that can be enjoyed by new players and pros alike in ways that go beyond pure competition. It's a bar that every fighting game should meet, but one that has up until now seemed out of reach.
No comments:
Post a Comment