As far as I’m concerned, we are entering a new chapter in mobile gaming: on February 2nd, Fire Emblem Heroes was released on iOS and Android. And Fire Emblem Heroes isn’t just any kind of game: it comes from a long line of great strategic RPG.
Still, if you’ve never played a Fire Emblem game before there’s no need to worry. It’s not a sequel or a prequel in the storyline. It has the same characteristic gameplay, with turn based battle on a battlefield grid. Plan your moves carefully, choose the best weapons to use, and try to defeat your opponents as quickly as you can.
If you have played some of these games before, you’ll see it’s  typical Fire Emblem gameplay, though on a smaller scale. You can only bring four characters into battle, as opposed to the larger units of other games. The remaining characters hang out in the barracks if you feel like stopping in to check on them.
Fire Emblem Heroes is a free to play game, that uses a stamina system that essentially acts as a time gate. Missions require stamina, and stamina recharging requires orbs (or patience for stamina to rebuild over time). You can either earn orbs for free in-game or buy them through in-app purchases. Orbs serve other purposes in-game, like helping you summon heroes, so quickly it becomes tempting to stock up.
You need a constant internet connection to play the game. Downloading the game can take a bit longer then expected. The servers were extremely busy on releaseday. Plus, after the intro, the game requires extra data to be downloaded. Twice. So be sure to have a wifi connection, otherwise it’ll cost you a lot of data.
Are you going to give the game a try? Can’t go wrong because it doesn’t cost anything. The visuals and the sound look great, it’s about  time for me to check out the gameplay!
Yes, it is downloaded and I’ll give it a try later this evening! Pretty excited. But I only plan on playing it when playing on my 3DS isn’t handy which is almost never. 🙂
I do hope it will be a good game to bring more casual audiences to gaming! At least, I will do my best to entice colleagues to give it a go too, event hough they never play games!
I downloaded it earlier and played for a bit before going to work. Seems fun, but time will tell if the stamina limitations become an issue the further I get into the story.
As much as I despise this shift towards mobile gaming, Nintendo isn’t giving up on dedicated mobile devices any time soon, so I’m all about this! Introducing more people to the IP is always key, and a series like Fire Emblem can be pretty daunting to try to get into.
Downloaded and will check this one out tomorrow!
I would have loved to give that game a try, but the necessity to be constantly online to play it in the first place kinda douses my enthusiasm. I guess I’ll just wait for Fire Emblem: Echoes on the 3DS instead. Heck, it’s not like I don’t have enough Fire Emblem games to play already. 🙂
True, we seem to go from hardly any choice to multiple games to choose from. What riches!
Fire Emblem Heroes is certainly a different take to standard Fire Emblem, but I actually enjoy it despite that. It’s probably better than Super Mario Run for me at this point, just based on how much closer the gameplay is between mainline FE and mobile FE. It probably helps that I’ve gotten good pulls and multiple 5-star heroes, haha.
I’m enjoying it a lot too, though no 5-star heroes for me yet. I resisted the urge to keep starting the game over as many people have done to get better heroes.
Still, a good game!
I haven’t rerolled either, and didn’t get any 5-stars early on. But I have been recently blessed with some awesome 5-stars, so there’s definitely hope!