Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia Part 3 - The Gameplay and the Finale

Gameplay:                                                           D -  / F

                     If I had to pick an element of the game that I thought was the weakest it would most certainly be the gameplay. Shadows of Valentia made the foolish mistake of bringing back many of the more frustrating elements of the original game. Before I get into the negatives I thought it would be nice to first go over some of the positives.

Mila’s Turnwheel: This has to be my favorite addition to the game. It’s a reasonable compromise between the awfulness of Phoenix Mode and having to restart due to getting RNG screwed (and trust me I will definitely talk more about the RNG screwing later on). It’s also limited so you can’t abuse it all game long which means that you still have to play intelligently. It saved me a lot of frustration and I am totally all for bringing this back in future installments.

Combat Arts: When I first heard about this mechanic I thought it was going to be totally unnecessary and while I can see some people not being too fond of it, I personally enjoyed this new addition. I ended up using them a lot more than I thought I was originally going for. The idea of getting a different type of attack that was more accurate, dealt more damage and in some cases had an additional effect was a neat feature to the overall game. While it may need some polishing if it comes back I was an overall fan of this feature, much to my surprise.

                              Another positive came from all the improvements in the mechanics that this game had over the original which were:

• Superior growths combined with better experience gains: In the original Gaiden I always hated the abysmal growth rates. Any growth rate that was 30 % or above was considered exceptional while 20 % was generally the norm. Also, none of the characters had any resistance growths either. Shadows of Valentia thankfully improved this making 40 & 50 % growths the norm for most stat growths. Leveling up doesn’t feel like pulling teeth out like it did with its predecessor which makes the game more fun and gives it a natural progression.

• The ability to see movement ranges, attack ranges and combat windows: Another element of Gaiden (and Fire Emblem 1) that I strongly disliked was the inability to see movement ranges, attack ranges and combat windows. While this may seem trivial to the average player those three things end up making a huge difference in a player's ability to strategize. Not having access to these things was annoying at best and fatal at worst. Thankfully Shadows of Valentia improved all of this.

Now that we’ve got all that out of the way let’s get to the negatives.

• Awful Map Design: Gaiden has arguably the worst map design in the history of the series. If it’s not the worst it should definitely be in the Top 3. The maps are way larger than they need to be, they’re often full of empty space and there’s little to no thought about how terrain is implemented or how the enemies are placed. This hurts the level of thought and strategy required to put into the game. What’s even worse is that virtually all the map objectives are the same: Rout enemy. This makes the maps repetitive and somewhat tedious. Imagine if you killed the enemy boss and yet there’s that one random mook off in the corner that you have to chase down. Not my idea of fun. It was foolish for Shadows of Valentia to not improve this. It’s sad that Conquest is the only 3DS Fire Emblem whose map design wasn’t 100 % atrocious.

• Atrocious RNG: Over 90 % of my frustration with this game came through my abysmal luck. This was another element that seemed to be carried over from the original. I counted 15 instances of an enemy landing a critical hit on me when their chances of doing so were in the single digits. Roughly half of those were 1 % too. That pissed me off to an absurd degree. What’s even worse was what this game did with accuracies. I stopped keeping track of how many times a 70 - 90 % accuracy missed. It was that bad. It was also infuriating when a sub 50 % hit from an enemy unit hit me. Most battles felt like coin flips after a while almost to the point where it simply didn’t matter how high or low the accuracies were. I understand that these things can happen and I can tolerate relatively small dosages of RNG bullcrap, but when this becomes the norm I think there’s a problem.

• Witches that can teleport to any part of the map: Another frustrating element of the original game. This mechanic undermines the value of unit positioning. Why bother meticulously placing units when they can still be attacked at any point in time? There’s practically nothing the player can do except just deal with it and hope the AI is stupid, which imo the AI in this game is rather sub par. I don’t see the strategic merit in it.

• Enemies being able to start skirmishes: I always hated this part of the original game too. Enemies that can attack without giving the player time to prepare seems counterproductive and not very strategic, especially when you’re forced to bring out your characters that you left on the bench.

• Stupidly high terrain bonuses: Here’s small a list of terrain bonuses from this game:

• Supplies / Fort / Oranges: 40 %
• Graves: 60 %
• Forest, Woods: 40 %
• Thicket, Pillar, Coral: 30 %
• Bulwark / Mountain: 30 %

Source: https://serenesforest.net/fire-emblem-echoes-shadows-valentia/classes/terrain-data/

                           Most of the bonus giving terrain in this game averages an extra boost of 30 % avoid or higher. That’s ridiculous! Especially the 60 % avoid on graves. 30 % is at the super high point for what I’d consider acceptable but 40 - 60 % is high enough to practically determine the outcome of a battle. It reminds me of the elevation bonus in Radiant Dawn. Thankfully magic users can ignore these things but that doesn’t change the fact that these boosts are too high and too battle defining for their own good.  

• The Dungeon Crawling: Yeah, I’m not the biggest fan of exploration in most of the games I play. Exceptions exist for stuff like Xenoblade Chronicles but the general rule is that I much rather prefer to get from Point A to Point B in as little time as possible. I’m not the best at directions or finding things so I when do exploring like that it usually takes me longer than I’d like to find stuff. This means that long portions of the game are spent for me trying to find where Mila’s Shrine is or where the important parts of Duma’s Temple / Tower are. What’s worse are the continuously respawning monsters you have to fight whenever you enter one of these dungeons. The maps for monster fights in the dungeon are repetitive, tedious and a slog to get through. Toward the end of the game I actively went out of my way to avoid them at all costs because I didn’t want to sit through another tedious fight.

Just as I predicted the “fatigue” system in this game was way too nerfed and watered down. It only applied to dungeons and it never impacted how I played the game. Characters didn’t start getting fatigued until the end of the game and by that point you’ve already acquired so much food and other stuff that you can easily cure it. Heck, you can cure fatigue at every Mila’s Shrine you come across which pretty much neuters any potential consequences that come about from this game. Thracia 776 is the only game that’s done fatigue or capturing correctly.

• More Difficult to 1 Round KO: Is it just me or is it harder to 1 Round KO enemies in this game than in other games? This was something that the original game was notorious for. Enemies seem to have higher HP and Defense values which means that you may need 2 or more characters to kill the same enemy (depending on which enemy and which unit you’re talking about) which makes the fighting at times more tedious than it has to be. Combine that with my awful RNG rolls and now you’re taking longer to kill than I should be.

                           Overall: I wish that Shadows of Valentia did more to improve upon the mechanics of the original. There are just too many frustrating moments to consider this aspect of the game to be good. It may seem harsh to some people, but I do consider Shadows of Valentia to have mechanics that range from subpar to downright awful. My dislike of the gameplay here was enough to turn my enjoyment of it down a notch.

                      Final Thoughts: Shadows of Valentia does everything great except for gameplay. The characters, soundtrack, story and art are among some of the best this series has to offer. It’s a major step up from Awakening and Fates and it’s enough to convince me that the Fire Emblem series hasn’t gone to crap. It’s about time we got a high caliber game like this. I was starting to worry that all future installments would go down the route of Awakening and Fates. Now that there’s an Echoes series I have faith that Intelligent Systems won’t leave its veterans behind in the dust. I hope they remake the other older games as well (although I am nervous as crap about a potential Holy War and Thracia 776 remake). However, this game is living proof that Intelligent Systems can make great Fire Emblem games.  #TheyMadeFireEmblemGreatAgain

                          It’s too soon to tell for me where specifically this ranks in terms of overall enjoyment. Right now I’m thinking that Shadows of Valentia is somewhere between # 4 - 7 in terms of overall enjoyment for me. I don’t think it ranks as high as Path of Radiance or the Jugdral games, but outside of those three this game’s ranking is free game. There’s a really good chance this game will end up in my Top 5 Favorite Fire Emblem games.

                           It’s good to see that my initial skepticism of this game turned out to be mostly wrong. Shadows of Valentia is a great game and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it yet. I’m glad it’s getting praise from the fanbase because it deserves every bit that it gets.