Best and Worst of the 3DS FE Era

[The Geek]

Story:  SoV > Awakening > Birthright > Conquest > Revelation

SoV has far from a perfect story (It's a remake of a NES-era RPG with the only additions being Conrad (who is rendered fairly pointless) and Berkut/Fernand/Rinea (which is a mix of good and bad parts)) but it's the excellent presentation that sells it with a beautiful artstyle and excellent voice acting in cutscenes.  I will admit that Alm's storyline is fairly pointless but I'll defend Celica's story.

Awakening and Birthright are both mixed bags of good and bad things with some good things marred by a lot of bad.  Awakening has the Gangrel arc making up the first third of the game, which is a fairly standard Fire Emblem story but with fairly few flaws, followed up by the pointless Valm arc which pretty much exists only to pad the game out (Walhart himself gets praise from some but I personally don't get it, he's a pretty cookie-cutter "might makes right" type of villain), and wrapped up with the storm of cliche plot twists, ass pulls, and Deus ex Machina known as the Grima arc.  Birthright is much the same story except it's very filler-y in the beginning, good around the middle, and then gets caught up in plot twists, ass pulls, and Deus ex Machina in the very end.

Conquest's story has been picked over time and time again from before most of us here got to play it.  It's a very confused story, since Nohr is very much set up as the indefensible villain in the Hoshido/Nohr conflict (despite the Fire Emblem series having done similar conflicts much better with the Zofia/Rigel conflict in Gaiden and the Leonster/Thracia conflict in the Jugdral games) yet the game is unwilling to portray Corrin as anything but a hero.  It had a fairly good set up for it near the beginning (Corrin has no choice but to fight Hoshido or else they will likely be killed by Garon) but it then falls off the deep end when Valla (though unnamed) is revealed and Azura reveals her brilliant plan of unveiling Garon as evil by conquering Hoshido and having him sit on the throne of plot convenience.  If the writers had kept the angle of Corrin being an unwilling villain it would have worked much better.

Revelation gets my down vote for being a plot framed entirely around the idea of creating a "golden ending" for Fates as a whole but it wasn't put together very well (much like the rest of Revelation but I'll get to that later).  The plot was very much written with this conclusion in mind and it feels like the authors had an idea of where the story starts and ends and then just wrote by the seat of their pants to make it from Point A to Point B.

Gameplay:  Conquest > Birthright > SoV > Awakening > Revelation

Much like the complaints of its story, the praise of Conquest's gameplay has been repeated many times.  It's challenging but not unfair, it has varied objectives (though most maps are still "rout" or "kill boss"), well designed maps (with only one really glaring exception), and relatively good character balance (by FE standards).

Birthright is Awakening 2.0 in its gameplay, but with the added bonus of the innovations that Fates brought as a whole.  The revamped Pair-Up system makes for more interesting gameplay, as do the new classes and the weapon system.  The one big complaint I'll make towards Birthright's gameplay is that is falls apart near the end.  The total number of enemies in the last few chapters is absurd, and since most characters in Birthright rely on dodging in order to survive (the only exceptions being Rinkah and Oboro against physical and Hinoka and Sakura against magic) coupled with Fates' notoriously finicky RNG can make late game very frustrating.

SoV wins points mostly for the unique elements it brings as a remake of the black sheep of the FE series.  Gaiden's unique magic system, the Villagers acting similar to the Onion Knight or Freelancer from Final Fantasy,  as well as the additions unique to SoV such as dungeon crawling and the Arts system.  But aside from that, SoV very much feels like a 25 year old game with a fresh coat of paint and some quality of life improvements which sadly keeps it from being the best.

Since Birthright is Awakening 2.0 with extra bells and whistles, Awakening is concurrently a less refined Birthright without the bells and whistles.  It's not bad, but unremarkable, regardless of how fun it may be to marry all of my army together.

Revelation is just badly put together.  The maps tried to be unique, but most of the time the extra gimmicks they add ended up being more cumbersome than anything else especially in late game.  And the unit balance is just terrible, the vast majority of characters you obtain are underleveled for the point in the game they are recruited making it necessary to grind.  And by the time you get to Valla in the last 3rd of the game, the number of deployment slots means that you'll pretty much just be using Corrin, Azura, the royal families of Nohr and Hoshido, and maybe one or two other characters for the rest of the game.

 

I'd also like to make a separate category for character preference, since that's also an important part of FE games and is largely distinct from the gameplay and the story but combines elements of both. So I present my Cast category.

Cast:  Awakening > SoV > Fates

While Awakening's cast is often criticized for being "tropey" of "gimmicky" I have to say that Awakening gave us one of the most memorable and lovable casts in the series.  Each character is distinct from one another and has their own established personality that you can enjoy or not.  While I like characters from all FE games, Awakening has the most characters I like as well as the ones I like best.

SoV is a mixed bag as I find myself loving the cast of Celica's side of the story while finding most of the cast on Alm's side of the story bland and forgettable (I've heard that many of them get more fleshed out in the Rise of the Deliverance DLC but that seems kind of dumb to me that the best parts of their characters are restricted to DLC).

While both Conquest and Birthright have many characters I like, I find myself liking more characters in Conquest while the characters in Birthright I like I tend to like more.  It's weird.  I put them below Awakening and SoV since I felt that the "tropey" and "gimmicky" problems that people said were in the Awakening cast are even more pronounced in the Fates cast.

[Alastor15243]

Best gameplay: Conquest, hands down. Excellent map design, great objectives and challenges, and the enemies actually use skills in focused and interesting ways, something I've wanted in the series since forever. My only real complaint is that a lot of the endgame maps are less aggressive than they should be with nearly all enemies waiting until you come to them to do anything, whereas a lot of the most tense moments in fire emblem games in my opinion come from enemies that actively rush you. But that's a small gripe and really a lot of the earlier maps actually do do that, it's just the endgame ones that often don't.

Worst gameplay: Revelation, also hands down, because it's the only one where I can look at it and objectively conclude with 100% certainty that the people who made it just plain didn't care. I mean the mid-game recruited character balance has some of the most hair-pullingly unacceptable balancing decisions I've seen in the series since Seisen No Fucking Keifu. SoV has various niggles and features that are obvious relics of the past that would have been better-off changed, but it's still pretty fun.

Best story: SoV. Though as others have said, it's largely for the presentation, and the game doesn't really do anything particularly special or different. But the presentation and voice acting is fantastic, and compared to Fates the characters just feel so human and sane, and emotional moments actually feel like they have depth because the writers actually understand the concept of pacing and weight (the sheer number of times Fates does things and expects you to care about them without actually trying to make you care is staggering). Granted, this may just be with Fates being the last game I played for comparison. I never actually found anything too outrageously objectionable about Awakening's plot.

Worst story: Conquest. I realize that Revelation is a more poorly-constructed story that's basically a neverending cavalcade of plot contrivances and blind luck, but Conquest's plot infuriated me so much more because of the main character. Nohr Corrin was a selfish, cowardly, idiotic monster, and the game continuously refused to admit it. If they had even just depicted the horrible things he does throughout the last third of the game as human weakness due to familial love, being willing to destroy an entire country rather than lose the love of their siblings, I could even possibly understand that, but they didn't. If that's what they had planned, they would never have had Hinoka forgive Corrin in the end, or had Corrin and Azura continuously insist that this was somehow the best way to win the war. I hate Conquest's plot, I hate Conquest's Corrin, I hate its every failure to be what it promised to be, and I hate the fact that it's this this grotesque brown stain across what is otherwise my new favorite game in the series.

[Cute Chao]

Best Story: ...Well, to me, the most memorable was Awakening. The moments in it hit me harder than pretty much anything in Echoes, even though I liked that. I actually like the time travel plot elements, personally, and liked to see the kids in it. Plus where you see yourself killing Chrom really got to me. 

Worst Story: Eh, I get that Conquest had such an odd reasoning, and people say Revelations invalidated the other two stories, but to me, Birthright just had fewer moments I cared about. Even Elise's fate just didn't get to me because Xander went ahead and fought anyway, making it all rather pointless. At least in Conquest, Ryoma's death actually got to me, and I quite liked the way Takumi's is done, too. And, honestly, the fact that Revelations exists helped me get through the game since I hate character death as a whole (it's why HW will always be my least played game). I don't want anyone to try and change my opinion on this, even though I know it's a debate forum. That's personal to me, and I know it. I am also aware that I play FE, a series renowned for characters staying dead if they die... but then I always reset the chapter to save them. My punishment for them dying is having to replay the chapter ^.^

Gameplay: I enjoyed all of them, to be honest. I'm not really a person who's here for a challenge, so I only play on normal mode. People say Awakening's gameplay was bland, so I went with that as I had to vote, but honestly, I didn't mind any of them. I did enjoy the way Conquest mixed it up, so I went with that for a favourite. Echoes had some stupid moments where I wished they'd changed the maps around a little, but I still didn't have too many problems with it. In the end, I'm pretty happy playing through any of them.

[Infinite Dreams]

Best Story: Awakening.  I'm a sucker for anything to do with time travel.    

Best Gameplay: Conquest (Fates).  So much fun.  

Worst Story: Conquest (Fates).  I don't think I need to explain this one.

Worst Gameplay: Shadows of Valentia.  A lot of the maps drove me crazy because the enemies were so damn far away.  I missed the weapon triangle as well.  

[Ownagepuffs]

Best Story:  It's hard to beat SoV. Its presentation was top notch and the rest of the games are just pretty bad in the department overall.

 

Best Gameplay:  Conquest shits on everything else. All of them are easy to trivialize, but CQ definitely had the best ideas.

 

Worst Story:  Birthrout because it's just so uninspired. CQ story was a shit show but the ideas they tried to pull were admirable. What's that saying? Better to fall for something than to stand for nothing? Yeah, that's how I feel. SoV is routine FE as well but it was just so well polished sans Celica's streak of dumb that it gets a pass. Also dat voice acting gave it a whole new layer. Birthright combined the worst of FE's cliches with the typical problems that we all know Fates for.

 

Worst Gameplay:  Birthrout again. At the highest level, Awakening at least still has a very meaty and fulfilling early game in Lunatic and tough difficulty throughout with L+ (Robin cheese aside). Revelation has its problems, but when you appreciate it as a sandbox mode for you to just go crazy with cross route pairings and class changes then it's actually pretty fun. I've done more runs of Rev than I care to admit, but when you do no royals it's a super fun exercise in exp and resource allocation. Taking those shitty early units and feasibly turning them into war champions without endless turtling is really fulfilling (and easier than it may seem). On the other hand, nothing can save Birthrout from being horrible. It's nothing but braindead routs with too many resources and weak enemies. SoV is kind of a shit show as well and is definitely a distance 2nd place in this category but it was at the very least an extremely unique experience compared to the rest of 3DS FE, what with its dungeons and odd weapon systems and promotions. Promoting to class bases and lower stats also made it feel like super throwback Kaga FE to some extent.