Let's Suffer Through Fire Emblem: No More Heroes

[Refa]

Throughout the past 27 years, there have been 14-17 entries in the popular Fire Emblem franchise.  Deep tactical gameplay and resource management continued to provide refreshing distractions from the main draw of the series, the characters.  Due to a lack of storage space, earlier installments had to rely solely on the characters' designs to endear them to players. Later games allowed characters to form deeper relationships with each other and more importantly with you, the player.  After the recent 3DS entries, user interest in these characters skyrocketed to an all time high.  You don't have to work at Intelligent Systems to know that it was high time to monetize this interest, and here we are with Fire Emblem Heroes.

Well, that's how I assumed it went down anyways.  Fire Emblem Heroes is one of the most cynical cash grabs I've had the pleasure of playing in recent memory.  It takes peoples' investment with beloved characters and forces them to either abandon them and use the best people available to them or spend an egregious sum of money to obtain all of their favourites and then spend even more to make them viable.  If that wasn't enough, it arbitrarily limits play time via a Stamina meter and in some ways, is less user friendly than NES Fire Emblem (e.g. no map preview, no method of re-positioning your units before the map begins).  And do you know what the worst part is?

I can't get this game out of my head.  For all of its flaws, it is a fairly decent approximation of Fire Emblem gameplay on a smaller scale.  It even adds some new additions of its own, such as a greater emphasis on Weapon Triangle and an interesting variation of the skill system used in other FE games.  It also incentives frequently playing through use of the *groan* Stamina meter but more interestingly with daily bonuses & missions, gathering shards through the training tower, visiting the arena (up to three times per day) for EXP and long term rewards for consistent wins, and the promise of future content on the horizon.  Also the presentation values are really good!  I really like the character art (for the most part), and the map/battle animations are pretty adorable as well.  High production values are par for the course for Gatchapon games, but it's nice that they put effort into making the gameplay enjoyable as well.  All of this just makes the Free 2 Play elements all the more egregious in my opinion, but I digress.

The purpose of this thread is to simply catalog my experience playing through this game, partially for other's amusement and partially because this will make me consider playing FE Heroes work and hopefully curb my enthusiasm for it (preferably before I drop any dosh on it).  For the record, this is on a new file that I started yesterday.  This means that I'm somewhat at a disadvantage from people who've been playing since launch, as I'm missing about 10 days worth of freebies (23 orbs if I'm doing my math right, which is enough for a full pull and then some), to speak nothing of all of that lost time.  That kind of blows!  I'm already regretting doing this.

Spoiler

If you're at all familiar with this game, then you know that it's Takumi Emblem.  Fitting that he's front and center on the title screen, then.

This is my least favourite default name of all of the avatars.  Maybe it's just because it's almost the much cooler Kieran.  Anyways, sticking with default for now.

Right away, I get thrust into a download screen.  Thrilling.  For the record, this takes about 5 minutes to finish, so it's not that bad.

There's nothing interesting about these tutorial maps, so I'm not even going to bother explaining them.  For the record, I'm assuming that viewers are familiar with Fire Emblem but not necessarily familiar with this game itself (although I'm expecting the majority to be).  That being said, I'm actually shit at explaining things, so let me know if there's something I could do better (actually, this applies in general).

And then I get hit with another download that's more than 3x as big as the previous one.  Brilliant.  This one takes roughly 15 minutes to finish.

Afterwards though, you can get some of the free goodies that I alluded to earlier.  You start with 15 Orbs, you get 2 for logging in every day throughout the launch window, and you get one for logging in on every weekend day.  The dueling crests, feathers, and stamina drinks are one time log in bonuses.  What do all of these do?  Orbs allow you to summon characters (for optimal value, use 20 at a time) and upgrade your barracks (for permanent EXP boosts), Dueling Crests refresh all of your Dueling Swords (you get 3/day and they are normally refreshed at 12AM; each of these allows you to visit the arena once), Feathers are used for promoting characters into higher * ranks (in addition to other resources), and Stamina Drinks increase your current stamina by 50.  It's worth noting that Orbs can serve as a replacement for Dueling Crests and Stamina Drinks, but it's not worth doing so unless you're dropping cash on this game.

Oh right, the gameplay.  Basically it costs Stamina to do each map, and the maps that I'm currently doing are the Prologue chapters (the Tutorial chapters above only serve to teach players about the game and give Anna some EXP, as they neither give you rewards for completing them nor allow you to replay them at any point).  Besides Anna and Virion, this game also gives you Matthew and Raigh at the end of the tutorial chapters.  It also hands you the respective main characters, Alfonse and Sharena, in the first two Prologue chapters (shown above).  I'll talk more about them later, but these are the only freebies you get for the entire game.  The Prologue maps are easy as fuck but fairly enjoyable, at least.

Anyways, time to talk about the Gachapon elements.  Basically, you pay five orbs to enter a summoning screen like the one pictured above, except with randomly colored orbs instead of units.  Each of these orb colors corresponds to a set of unit types, with there being Red, Blue, Green, and Colorless.  Afterwards, you can spend 4 more orbs to "open" another orb, 4 for the next two as well, and 3 for the last unit.  This is why it's optimal to spend 20 orbs at a time, by the way.  You can already see the problem here.  You don't get to know what colored orbs are available ahead of time, so if you really needed a blue unit and no blue orbs showed up (or a small amount of them), then you're shit out of luck.  Anyways, the units themselves can be from rarities 3* to 5*.  What does this mean?  In short, higher rarities sport better base stats and expanded skill selections.  Additionally, some characters only come in higher rarities.  You can find more about the rarity ratios and the mercy pull systems on this site, but the most important one is the odds of pulling a 5* rarity character, a paltry 3% chance (and depending on what color the orb is, an additional 3% for featured characters).  It's fun to win big, but more often than not you'll find yourself disappointed with the odds so heavily stacked against you.

Speaking of, all of your starting characters are notably below par at 2*.  Additionally, you cannot pull Anna, Alfonse, or Sharena using the Gatchapon system.  Therefore, the only way that any of them are going to have long term use is by upgrading them (which is done at level 20, increasing their * rank by 1 and resetting their stats to the bases of that rank).  From my experience, Anna and Alfonse aren't particularly useful until the higher ranks and Sharena is one of your best starting units.  Anna comes with a mediocre damage dealing skill (after 4 rounds of combat, her next attack does +50% damage), and Alfonse comes with a mediocre healing skill (after 4 rounds of combat, his next attack heals 30% damage).  Anna's doesn't compensate for her paper thin defenses and Alfonse's certainly doesn't compensate for his shit speed.  Meanwhile, Sharena starts with Rally Attack (+4 Attack on the targeted unit for a turn), which would make her more useable than the former two even if she didn't have far more balanced offensive/defensive stats.  I haven't upgraded Virion, Raigh, or Matthew, but based on their 2* variants, the former two are only really useable in the earlier chapters whereas Matthew can be an effective support unit for a longer while.

Of course, since this pull isn't to my liking (nice variety with a 4* sword/lance/bow user as well as a staff user, but no 5* units), I'm going to reroll.  Of course, this isn't actually a feature in the game, that'd be way too convenient.  Basically, I'm going to restart the game and do everything I did above again (including the ~20 minute load times).  Be sure to do the same for each pull pic I show below for the authentic experience.  If you're really hardcore, you'll also stare at each of the map screens for a minute as well.

Spoiler

For the record, I did around 5 more pulls before I decided to start recording this whole escapade.  But yeah, assuming 25 minutes for each attempt, it took around 300 minutes (5 hours) for all of this in total.  Luckily I spent most of that time doing other things, because I don't have that kind of dedication to a game I not so secretly hate in me.  Anyways, with that out of the way, what was my final pull like?

WE DID IT REDDIT

Takumi is the star of the show here, potentially being the best unit in the game, but a 4* Chrom and Caeda are nothing to sneeze at.  3* Bartre and Selena are nothing more than filler, but I'll be using Bartre anyways seeing as he fills a niche in my soon to be team.

These are their base stats, for those curious.  As you can see, higher * units not only start out with better weapons but also additional skills as well; very useful!

Anyways, next time I'll actually play the game and not be such a boring tl,dr; ham.  Sorry about that.

 

Edited February 13, 2017 by Refa

[maybe]

please don't forget about this

Edited February 15, 2017 by unique