Gameplay
So you may be wondering if there was anything about this game that I liked. The answer for me is yes there is: Conquest has some of the best gameplay in the entire series. What was also interesting for me was that pretty much all of my predictions for this game came true.
- Prediction # 1: The lack of weapon durability would not hurt the tactical depth of the game and the stats mods would provide more strategy than weapon durability ever did.
Unlike most people, I did not consider the lack of weapon durability to be a bad thing. By this time I had already beaten Gaiden, a game that did not have weapon durability and for that game the lack of weapon durability was considered to be neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It was just something that was there that the designers balanced around and in my opinion they did a pretty good job in that game. I laughed at all the mooks who complained about this because to me it was obvious that they hadn’t played Gaiden before.
Personally, I think Fates did a FAR better job than Gaiden did at balancing around the lack of weapon durability. Each weapon had its own stat buffs and debuffs which required a lot of thought on the part of the player to figure out which weapon was the best for which situation. The weapons with higher might were not always the best weapons for each situation. Iron weapons were perfectly valid weapons to use in combat, and in many cases were some of your best weapons due to their lack of stat debuffs. The most strategy that weapon durability ever provided was that it kept the player from using a powerful weapon because they might need it at a later time. It also made the player feel guilty for using rare weapons and it contributed to hoarding which defeated the point of using said weapon. Overall, this is a better system that requires the player to weigh out the pros and cons of each weapon and make the decision for themselves.
- Prediction # 2: Dragon’s Vein was going to be really cool, but the game was going to fail in bringing out its full potential.
Once again, I was correct in this point. The ability to manipulate terrain is an AMAZING idea and it’s one that I have been thinking about since Radiant Dawn came out. This was another example of when my imagination went wild with all of the possibilities that Dragon’s Vein could bring to the table. So how well did the designers execute Dragon’s Vein?
Personally I feel like Dragon’s Vein is an extremely hit or miss concept in its current execution. Some Dragon Vein ideas were well executed. The chapter where the player has to deal with the Ice Tribe and has to visit several villages (I believe this is Chapter 9?) was executed really well. You could freeze over the lake which gave the player another path to travel through. Another example of when this worked was back in Chapter 2 when Corrin has to defeat the Hoshido prisoners. It turned a boring map into a more exciting and better developed one. Thanks to the Dragon’s Vein concept the map had choke-points that could be taken advantage of and it provided a healing spot along with walls in which your maid / butler could attack enemies using hidden weapons.
That being said, there were plenty of other times in which the Dragon Vein gimmick did NOT work. Chapter 20’s gimmick sucked hardcore because it only helped in certain situations and it also had the potential to screw you over big time. Blazer didn’t like this particular gimmick either and I agree that it didn’t add any real strategic value to the map.
Blazer brings up another example of when Dragon’s Vein didn’t work in a particular level:
“For instance, one chapter's dragon vein gimmick involves opening some paths on the map while blocking others and it was so annoying I just didn't want to deal with it, because it was a nice idea that was poorly executed and was far too difficult to effectively use in the way it seemed the developers wanted us to use it (splitting up units and taking them on alone).”
(He’s talking about Chapter 17 and I completely agree with him here. That Dragon’s Vein gimmick SUCKED and I found it ultimately useless.)
I also didn’t like the fact that you could only use the gimmick a limited number of times and that you had to be in a specific spot in order to do so. I think it would have been better if the player were allowed to activate the Dragon’s Vein gimmick from any point in the map and that they could activate said gimmick any number of times that they wanted to provided that they had the sufficient Dragon’s Vein points to do so. I think this concept had more “miss” than “hit”. There were only a small handful of times where it actively contributed to the strategic value of a map. I feel like this game executed this concept poorly more often than it executed it well.
Prediction # 3: Hidden Weapons were going to be awesome and thieves finally had to be taken seriously.
Yeah, I was totally right here. Hidden Weapons are an AMAZING concept and it was way better to give thieves this than knives or swords. The stat debuffs worked both in the player’s favor and against the player at the same time. Even if thieves can’t kill you, they can sure as heck make it far easier for someone ELSE to kill you. Hidden Weapons added a lot of strategic value to the game and I seriously want this to become a staple in the series. Every future installment of Fire Emblem should have Hidden Weapons as far as I’m concerned.
Prediction # 4: My Castle is the Awakening barracks on steroids and this was going to be overloaded with fluffy and superfluous gimmicks that didn’t need to be in the game.
Once again, I totally called this one. You could easily remove over 90 % of all the fluffy crap in this game and nothing of value would have been lost. The only things you really needed were the armory, the staff shop and the “Private Quarters”. Everything else was probably for the multiplayer but let me ask you this: What if you’re not going to be using the multiplayer? What value did all of these other things have then?
Also, feeding Lilith didn’t feel like something that came out of a Fire Emblem. I tried this out simply because I knew from watching gameplay footage that you got gold bars from doing it. Also, despite the fact that feeding Lilith certain stuff was supposed to increase her stats in a particular area, it usually didn’t pan out that way. For example milk is supposed to increase her speed but it rarely did that. Feeding Lilith wheat was supposed to increase her defense but I never once saw Lilith gain a single point in defense from doing this. Talk about misleading, as well as pointless.
Since I’ve already devoted an entire topic to the atrocity known as face rubbing I won’t spend a lot of time on the “Private Quarters” part of the My Castle. I wish that the developers had the balls to straight up remove it from the game, but at the very least it was severely limited. Since face rubbing was removed I felt no shame in going into the Private Quarters since it did actually play a part in building up supports.
(Here’s the link for my anti-face rubbing post: http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-take-on-face-rubbing.html)
(Here’s the link for my anti-face rubbing post: http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-take-on-face-rubbing.html)
I also didn’t like the explanation that was given for the existence of My Castle. It’s in an extra dimension? Really? Do we REALLY need extra dimensional stuff in Fire Emblem?
Speaking of fluffy and superfluous concepts:
Prediction # 5: The Awakening characters and the children of the main cast were going to be completely unnecessary and it was a really stupid idea to have them in the game.
Yep, I totally called this one as well. This is a really bad example of over-the-top fanservice that was puerile and calculated to get more sales for the company. You could have cut the Awakening cast out of the game and nothing of value would have been lost. The exact same thing could be said about the children. At least Awakening managed to implement the second generation into its story. This game doesn’t even bother trying to justify the existence of its second generation with a valid in-game story explanation.
This also lends credence to a fear I have that Intelligent Systems will refuse to cut any content that people like regardless of whether or not said content is actually good for the game. The whole face-rubbing controversy is living proof that people will throw complete temper tantrums over any missing content without thinking critically about the quality of said content. I fear that the My Unit and the second generation concepts are going to get run into the ground in future installments because the wrong type of crowd likes these features too much and as long as these games make a ridiculously huge profit Intelligent Systems will continue to do whatever they can to please their fans.
Other observations and impressions:
- I LOVED the fact that enemies attacked in packs and formations. I would argue that Conquest beats Fire Emblem 12 in terms of superior enemy unit placement. Even if an enemy didn’t attack you they could still be used as part of a Dual Strike and it worked BRILLIANTLY! This is how I imagine a strategic Fire Emblem game should be.
Unit placement played a significantly larger role in this game and because of the fact that the designers put so much thought and effort into the unit placement it caused the players in turn to put so much thought and effort into where they should place their units. I want stuff like this to be in future Fire Emblem games. This is a brilliant step forward for the series.
- Breaking up Awakening’s Pair Up system into Dual Guard and Dual Strike made the game a million times more tactical and nuanced. Dual Strike is the reason why positioning is such a huge part of the game. However, I do have a couple of major issues with this system. For starters, why is Dual Guard referred to as ‘Pair Up’ in the game? This is misleading, it makes no sense and it threw me for a loop when I started playing. Also, why is there no option for Dual Strikes? There’s an option for Dual Guard but not Dual Strike. This also threw me for a loop and I didn’t like it. I already know what the counterargument against this is and it’s a valid point.
I really do not like the fact that Dual Strike gets spammed a lot. I felt like Dual Strike got used so much by enemies that it made Dual Guard a complete necessity for survival and rendered Dual Strike virtually useless for the player. I almost never used Dual Strike because if I left one of my characters in a Dual Strike formation during an Enemy Phase they would die pretty fast. I was led to believe that players would need a combination of both Dual Guard and Dual Strike in order to complete certain levels. Sadly, I do not agree with this assessment. There is way too much focus on Dual Guard in my opinion and there doesn’t seem to be much incentive to use Dual Strike. I also didn’t like the fact that most of the cast died in 2 Dual Strikes.
3. I LOVE the personal skill system. It gave each character their own unique and distinctive flavor. Some personal skills worked really well while others didn’t. The execution wasn’t perfect, but I think this system worked more than it didn’t. If future Fire Emblem games are going to have a skill system they need to have the personal skill system.
Speaking of skills, I actually liked a large number of the new skills that we got. My 2 absolute favorite skills were Wary Fighter and Live to Serve. There are others that I enjoyed too. I liked how this game changed up the abominable Counter skill in Awakening and made it more tactical by splitting it up (Awakening Counter can go die in a burning lake of fire). In short, this game’s skill system is AWESOME!
4. I feel like this game is the living embodiment of everything I talked about in my post titled “Ten Tips to Improve Fire Emblem # 2 - Balancing the Classes: Part 2 - Buff the Lamer Classes”.
Archers and bows finally stopped sucking, an Armor Knight is one of your best units for a change (Effie in my opinion is the perfect example of how an Armor Knight should be designed. All future Armor Knights in the series need to get on her level) and thieves stopped sucking too. It feels really gratifying to see your tips and advice being made into a reality and seeing these ideas benefiting the game. I’m not trying to suggest in anyway that the game developers saw my blog, but my point is that I can point to Fates as proof that my ideas actually work and it’s a really nice feeling to have. Archers, thieves and armor knights have been needing a massive change like this for a long, long time and I’m glad that we finally got it.
5. I’ll just leave a quote from Blazer’s review since he said it far better than I could have:
“To start, the game is just highly inconsistent in its balance. Some characters have extremely low HP and defense stats/growths, making them so weak they can't even stand up to single attacks from weak enemies, or they can't attack directly because they're glass cannons. Furthermore, using lower-leveled characters or using characters that are just plain not very good will make things very difficult. The enemies stats tend to be rather high, especially later on. At one point the enemies' stats and levels increased and they were just as strong if not stronger than me. End-game enemies felt like bosses in other games, and it was extremely difficult to win fights without resorting to my strong units doing most of the fighting, which would only put the weaker units behind even more.
This might be ok on lunatic or even hard, but I was playing on Normal mode and quite frankly, I felt like if I didn't resort to strategies like turtling or using only my good units, I would be screwed over. I get that they were trying to make it challenging, but the challenge was inconsistent: sometimes it was due to gimmicks, other times it was due to a combination of map design, unit design, and unit placement (good), and other times the enemies were just too strong in quality and quantity and there was little I could do strategically to take it, because simply put, the numbers were against me.”
There was a MAJOR problem that I had with a few parts of Conquest that Blazer covered perfectly here. For starters I felt like this game was more akin to Fire Emblem 12 in terms of its difficulty in the sense that a huge chunk of the cast died really fast and that dodging didn’t really exist in this game. I also HATED the fact that characters like Azura and Elise both died in one hit. It makes the game feel more punishing rather than strategic in its nature. This is the same problem that I had with the Dawn Brigade and its also my biggest gripe with Fire Emblem 12. Simply put, I HATE IT WHEN FIRE EMBLEM GAMES GIVE YOU A LARGE PORTION OF CHARACTERS THAT ARE FRAGILE! This is compounded by the fact that the HP growth rates in this game are atrocious! Take a look at the growth rates for both casts. 50 % is considered to be high for an HP growth in this game while 25 - 30 % seems to be the norm
Prediction # 6: HP was going to be really low and these games were going to have a significantly smaller margin of error. Characters were going to die fairly fast.
Sadly, I was correct. HP in this game is atrociously low and when you combine that with low defense you get uber glass cannons. Something else that I consider to be really baffling were people’s reactions to these growth rates when this information came out. People were praising this game for its low growths and I cannot for the life of me understand why this is. Something that I love about FE 12 and Awakening were their higher growths. Higher growth rates for me equate to better level-ups which means that you’re less likely to get RNG screwed. Lower growth rates have the exact opposite effect. For those of you who like lower growth rates I highly suggest that you play Gaiden. Gaiden has the lowest growth totals in the entire series. 20 % is considered average for growths that aren’t HP or Resistance. Personally, I hated this aspect of Gaiden. More importantly, having extremely low growths in Gaiden forced enemies to have lower growths as well. I have a file where I’ve recorded the stats for the enemies in Gaiden which you can see here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/fire-emblem/enemy-stats-in-fire-emblem-2-gaiden/10153226632447500
Basically, if the player’s units have low growths than so do the enemies. The stats of enemy units tend to be literally the same for good chunks of the game and when enemy stats do grow they tend to be sporadic and way too high. Case and point: Freaking Uber Merc. You go from roflstomping enemy mooks to getting double attacked by Uber Merc and having your attacks missing him all the time. By contrast, Fire Emblem 12 has the second highest growth totals out of all the games in the series and it’s one of the best designed games in the series. I guess this is my long winded way of saying that I hate low growths and I think that they’re bad for the series so I’m giving Conquest crap for having low growths.
So I have a confession to make: I hated Conquest so much that by the end of the game I was more focused on getting the game over with rather than trying to challenge myself. If I wasn’t enjoying the game then why bother prolonging my suffering? I started out playing on Hard / Classic, but after I’d had enough with Chapter 20 I decided to switch to Normal mode because I just wanted to beat the game quicker so I could get to my hate rant sooner. You want to know what the sad part is? I felt like Normal mode was just as difficult as Hard mode. If a character got killed in 1 hit on Hard mode, than they died in just as many hits on Normal mode. If a character was tanky in Hard mode, they were just as tanky in Normal mode. Blazer noticed it first and I totally agree with him. This game did NOT have a proper difficulty scaling at all. There needs to be a noticeable and significant difference between your difficulty levels and there wasn’t one between Hard mode and Normal mode. I honestly should have just kept on playing on Hard mode. It’s not like it would have made a difference. Compare and contrast this to Fire Emblem 12 which has 5 different difficulty modes and having played 3 of them, I can personally assure you that there’s a HUGE difference between the three. That’s how you want to scale your difficulty Conquest.
That being said, I do appreciate the fact that it is legitimately difficult. Most of the time the difficulty is due to powerful enemies who travel in groups. I also really loved the improvements the game designers made to the A.I. The AI was more unpredictable and intelligent overall. I want to see better AI in future installments.
6. The Map Design. So the map design for most of the game is pretty sweet! Plenty of maps give you side objectives, there are plenty of anti-turtle mechanics put in there and the fact that each map is accompanied by a diversity of map objectives is a huge bonus for me. That being said, not all of Conquest’s maps were perfect. The last two chapters of the game were straight-up Awakening tier in their design and then there was the infamous Chapter 20 map with its really stupid gimmick. The map where you have to fight Hinoka for the second time was also really lame. That being said, the lame maps in this game were the exception rather than the rule. By and large, this game has some of the best map design in the series. Personally, I consider Thracia 776 and FE 3 / 12 to have consistently better map design but outside of those games Conquest beats the rest of the series in terms of map design so good job developers!
As someone who’s close to beating Birthright and started playing Birthright around the same time as Conquest I’ve noticed that there are A LOT of recycled maps that both versions use. In my opinion this is downright lazy design on the part of the developers! Of course, whenever Nohr uses the same map it’s always better designed than Birthright’s. I’m not a fan of the fact that I’ve had to play many of the same maps over and over again. This also led to recycled plot points in the story that I personally didn’t care for either. Here’s an interesting Reddit article that covers this topic more than I could:
As the article stated, you’re still getting bang for your buck, but I still don’t like the fact that these games couldn’t use 100 % original maps.
Three more things before I end:
- I’ve been RNG screwed from one playthrough of this game more times than all of my playthroughs of Holy War, Path of Radiance and Binding Blade COMBINED! There were WAY too many times were I missed an attack that had between 70 - 90 % accuracy. Judging from what I’ve seen on Facebook and on serenesforest.net I can tell that this isn’t limited to me and apparently other people are having problems with this as well. This aspect really pisses me off and there were so many times where I had to restart because I missed an attack and then got killed by an enemy who had a lower accuracy than me.
- I was also disappointed with the fact that Corrin is a Robin clone in terms of mechanics. Both units start out with a skill that increases experience by a lot (Veteran and Nobility) and both have a powerful skill that increases damage (Ignis and Dragon Fang). Also, I wasn’t a fan of the fact that this game basically gave you the equivalent of an asset / flaw like in Awakening. Lame!
- Bosses were legitimately challenging in this game. That was really cool. Also, I hated the fact that ballista can’t kill in this game. Oh and while I’m at it, treasures and villages in this game were actually worth getting. I was quite pleased at all the stuff I got. It was totally worth it!
Gameplay Score: A
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