Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia Echoes

[DANGERMAN]

My understanding is that Fire Emblem Shadows of Valentia is a remake of an old Fire Emblem game, and while there's no reason you'd know off hand, it does seem to show in that some of the more dubious gameplay additions of the last few years don't seem to be here. There's still some sort of friendship system in play, having people attack the same enemies, talk on the battlefield if the opportunity arises, but it's not the waifu fest the last couple of games seemed to be

 

There's still quite a bit going on though. I'm sure the rock/paper/scissors mechanic of who is strong/weak to which type of attack is still in play, it's Fire Emblem's main mechanic after all but it's not really been presented to me front and centre. Terrain still plays a part, as does recruiting people, getting more XP for a kill, and if you turn it on perma-death (I turned that off). 

 

You don't equip weapons as such, instead when you find them, or take them from an enemy, you can give them someone to hold. So far everyone has been able to hold 1 item, so they can't heal if they're holding a bow for example. Said bow, if given to an archer, might increase their attack a bit or the range of their attack. I've given my mage a shield to hold, she''s not directly getting in to fights, but it means her defence if she does get attacked has gone from 1 to 4. Once people have held an item for a while they can learn 'Arts', these Arts are special moves where you trade a little bit of HP to launch an attack (which is also how your magic users attack as there's no SP in the game).

 

Gameplay wise it's fairly usual Fire Emblem top down grid strategy, except there's now dungeons you can explore. When you hit these you get to roam around a 3d environment, it's basically the dungeon set up from Persona or the mainline Shin Megami games, but fights are still the usual stuff. It's this bit that's shown up a bit of an issue though. I know the 3DS didn't have the best battery life but for the most part there's nothing going on that should be stressing the machine. For the most part it looks like a SNES game, there's 3D but I have that turned off, still though my battery seems to go from full to empty red light showing in a few hours. The only thing I can think is that Nintendo, to get the 3d environments running smoothly as they do (they're better looking and performing that SMT4) have upped the clock on the 3DS, something they do with the Switch for their own game (Mario puts the Switch in a more powerful mode than other developers can access). The 3DS was warm at the back, and it would explain why the battery is draining so quickly

[DANGERMAN]

I've been playing quite a lot of this. It's initially quite breezy with short fights, uncomplicated mechanics, but it's taken a bit of a turn. 

 

I'm still enjoying it but there's not a huge amount of variety in the maps. This is compounded as some of them are skirmish fights, so once they've been beaten they'll reappear and the next time you land on that tile you fight them again. Obviously this is good for levelling up a bit, and the fights aren't hard, but if you're going back and forth to talk to people or hand missions in then you can be doing them a lot. The worst example I've seen of it is on a map with lots of sand, sand restricts movement so the fight took forever, not one I wanted to repeat 

 

It is still fun, the core gameplay is still really good, and while it is fairly punchy it could still do with some trimming here and there