#Fire emblem echoes character art full#

Playing on Normal mode (there’s also an Easy difficulty), Echoes feels somewhere in-between the relative breeze of Fates' Birthright and the crushing desperation of Conquest, in our estimation - perhaps not the challenge the hardest of core are looking for, but it should be a nice balance for most. In the main story missions victory is usually secured by besting all enemy units. This is one of Echoes’ new additions, and it’s a pleasantly downtempo pastime that we really enjoyed villages and explorable towns, shrines, and castles in this format usually bookend the traditional story battles, and go a long way towards giving Echoes more of a JRPG feel. When you gain control of Alm in Chapter 1, the first thing you’ll see isn’t the overhead chessboard view of an SRPG battlefield, but rather a first-person view of a charmingly pastoral village, complete with a Professor Layton-style interface for speaking to villagers you move from scene to scene and examine the background for items and information. Right away, the fact that you’ll be switching between two heroes commanding two different armies will clue you into the fact that Echoes isn’t Fire Emblem as usual, but the action kicks off with an even more unexpected twist than that.

It helps that the characters themselves are likable and well-drawn Alm and Celica especially are eminently appealing, but their friends and followers are likewise lovingly portrayed, and though Celica’s forces start off with quite a bit more personality than Alm’s, things even out quickly enough. It was the last Fire Emblem on the Famicom, and now the last on the 3DS, and we can’t think of a better swansong - this is a brilliant strategy RPG that has something for everyone, from Fates and Awakening fans and old-school Fire Emblem fiends to JRPG junkies in general.Įchoes’ narrative arc is engaging, snappily-paced, and sweetly character-focused it’s also almost reassuringly straightforward after Fates’ timeline-hopping epic, and we appreciated the storybook-style approach.

#Fire emblem echoes character art full#

After the hugely successful Awakening and Fates showed the series is right at home on the 3DS, Nintendo has brought it full circle with Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, a remake of Gaiden for the modern age. Those first two examples are well known, but as a Japan-only sequel to the first Famicom Fire Emblem, Gaiden hasn’t had much of a place in the Western gaming cannon - until now. 2 (in the West, at least) exchanged running-and-jumping for ballistic gardening, and Fire Emblem Gaiden turned the then-young tactics series sideways by adding dungeons, towns, random battles, and all sorts of RPG trappings to its chess-like core. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link famously swapped overhead adventuring for side-scrolling action, Super Mario Bros. Nintendo has a habit of switching things up in sequels, and especially in the NES days that tendency resulted in some gloriously divergent sophomore installments.