Fire Emblem Heroes Review

Once in a blue moon a mobile game catches our attention. This is an extra review, our regular PC review will follow soon.

Fire Emblem Heroes is a free to play (F2P) turn based strategy game in which your goal is to win as many battles as you can. As most F2P mobile games it has monetization strategies that are part of the game loop and we will discuss its implication at the end.

Gameplay is quite simple, in order to battle you need stamina, a resource that recharges one point every five minutes, capped at 50 (4 hours and 10 minutes for full charge). You control a party of four characters and each have one action per turn. As any strategy game positioning is key to victory. On top of that there are 3+1 "colors" of characters, each having strength over another and weakness under the third. The fourth is the "colorless" and has no strengths or weakness based on color. Been able to assemble a party that exploits this triangle is as important as positioning.

The game progresses in two ways: The first is by leveling your characters as they defeat enemies, increasing the units attributes. Unfortunately if your hero die in battle, even if he got enough to level up, even if you win the battle, because he died, he gets nothing. The second is by increasing the rarity of your characters (the number of stars they have, from 1 to 5), but in order to do that you need to compete against other players team (controlled by the computer). You get 3 battles per day and can accumulate score up to seven victories in a row. Arenas reset every week, so you get a total of 21 battles to define your top score.

Unfortunately the strategy to monetize the game negatively hits all this systems directly. Let us enumerate for ease of understanding:

1) The stronger the challenge, the higher the cost of stamina. Lv 1 battles cost 1 stamina, Lv 40 battles costs 9 stamina (18 once the lunch discount period ends). This means that the more you play the game, the least you will be able to play, unless you pay to recharge your stamina.

2) The amount of resources needed for turning a 3* (three star) character in a 4* is 2.000 feathers (arena currency), roughly 2~3 weeks depending on your performance. In order to upgrade a 4* into a 5* you need an astounding 20.000 feathers. That means about 20~30 weeks worth of resources!! We got 1.000 feathers in the first week with a 5* and 4* in our team. You can see how this takes a long time... Or, you can pay until you get all 5* characters out of the batch.

3) You can merge equal characters to make one of them stronger... The implications (and limits) of this system is anyone guess, but they point to a nasty pay to win loop. A Lv40 5* character (current max level) can be further improved by combining another copy of that 5* character. Again, how do you get 5* characters? Oh yeah, you either pay or farm for months...

The game has great art, nice music and effects. But it ends being more of a money pit than a meaningful long term entertainment through gameplay. At the moment there is no indication that you will have a reliable way through play of building a strong party. Maybe in a future patch...

Update (28/03/2017): After keeping up with the game for almost two months Nintendo decided to increase the quantity of Orbs and Feathers you get by casually playing the game every day. Although you will never be on the frontier of the trends unless you pay, you will be able to build a full 5* team and compete with strong opponents with dedication.

PS: Character attributes are random. So equal characters with equal stars are not equally good! That means even if you get lucky and get a 5* character, it might not be better than a good 4* character roll! And they also do NOT level up equally. A character that starts bad might be a late bloomer, which makes that much harder to compare them (although our experience has shown that a bad starting status never picks up). Here is a high definition image step-by-step.