Fire Emblem loves looking back. Fire Emblem Awakening, the Nintendo 3DS title that rescued the franchise from permanent retirement, is packed with references to the series’ history: one character adopts the name Marth, another shouts the names of previous Fire Emblem games on critical hits, and a third character comes straight out of Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, the first-ever Fire Emblem game.
Fire Emblem Engage took Awakening’s emphasis on the series’ legacy to an extreme. Though released three years after Fire Emblem’s 30th birthday, it functions as an anniversary game. Core to Engage’s story and gameplay are Emblem Rings, which summon the spirits of practically every notable protagonist of Fire Emblem’s seventeen games.
But for a series so invested in its own history, Intelligent Systems has remade only three Fire Emblem games: twice for the DS and once for the 3DS. That 3DS game, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, remakes 1992’s Fire Emblem Gaiden, the second-ever Fire Emblem game. Like fellow early Nintendo sequels Super Mario Bros 2 and Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, Gaiden stands out against the rest of its series. Features like open exploration, dungeon crawling, and controlling two separate armies would remain unique to Gaiden for decades.
Echoes came out in 2017, as Fire Emblem’s last 3DS title. Twenty-five years after Gaiden came to Famicoms across Japan, Echoes brought its story to audiences worldwide. Echoes expanded and modernized many aspects of Gaiden, adding new characters, free-roam dungeons, and the support conversation system established in 2002’s The Binding Blade. But Intelligent Systems, sticking with Echoes’ roots, did away with several mechanics of modern Fire Emblem. Marriage supports and the weapon triangle were both dropped — they didn’t fit with the story developers were telling and the characters in the story.
Echoes got mostly positive reviews, particularly for its art, storytelling, and full voice acting. But for many people, its gameplay left something to be desired. It’s sort of the opposite of Engage, which received near-universal praise for its gameplay despite its abysmal script and a protagonist that looks like a bottle of Colgate toothpaste. Though its story was pretty simple Fire Emblem fare, Echoes was a delight to look at and listen to. The problem was its maps.
Echoes’ maps are annoying. They’re big, they’re covered in swamps and sands that can slow your army down, and they’re repetitive. You may find yourself having routed every single enemy on a map, only to realize there’s a single, unmoving cavalier 30 spaces away. Three turns later, when you finally reach him, you realize he’s standing on a tile that buffs his ability to evade attacks, so you spend three more turns swinging blindly at him before he finally dies. That’s not particularly fun, and it’s not challenging either. It’s just tedious. Every criticism against Echoes’ map design is perfectly reasonable. It’s the weakest part of the game by far.
That said, I still liked the maps. Sorry.
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