Fire Emblem Echoes - Complete. 41 hours, which is higher than the average for a FE game, but I had very few true resets because of the turnwheel. Final battle spoiler notes: I didn't figure out how to kill Jedah, though this didn't ultimately matter. The final boss's mechanic of "regen 5 until his HP is below a certain threshold, then regen 40" was really weird though; I kinda had to hope for a crit to push past the last little bit. Enjoyable enough final fight anyway.
~Gameplay~
Gaiden has a reputation of being the weird/different early FE, and Echoes decided it wanted to be a reasonbly faithful remake, with modern polish. Some of Echoes weirder ideas work quite well, some not as much.
The good:
-Bows have extremely good range instead of being shitty javelins! This gives archers a niche. Archers still generally have worse stats than your other units, but unlike the Wils and Rolfs of the series, this is actually justified.
-Magic and skills costing HP is an interesting design choice and I'd say I like it overall. Mages are quite strong generally but needing to hurt themselves to do damage is certainly limiting.
-I like that supports build if you're within 2 squares instead of forcing adjacency like most (non-Tellius) games in the series.
-Ninja reinforcements are still gone. In fact, reinforcements in general are gone outside of summons (which you can deal with my killing the summoner). I can't say I miss them!
The bad:
-The game is weirdly light on documentation for FE at times; it feels unpolished. Hit, Avoid, Crit, and Dodge are not shown on the status screen. Evolving weapons using forging tells you nothing and seems to just encourage FAQ use.
-Dungeons are bad. I find how many JRPGs handle on-map randoms kinda obnoxious at the best of times (punishing me with an enemy ambush if I try to avoid them and fail = bleh). It's worse in a game like this when randoms take a while since it's a SRPG. Said randoms are also generally very dull since they're procedurally generated on uninteresting maps.
-On-map randoms are weird and potentially unfair for reasons Snowfire outlined a while back. As a more neutral point, the way they spawn with time can definitely discourage backtracking, though that's not necessarily a bad thing (unless you're an Atlas fan).
-Map design is definitely a mixed bag. Some maps have spread out pockets of individual enemies which are just "why". But there are some reasonbly cool moments where you need to press into a fortress or something and the game makes you feel like you are working for it. Special shout-out to that lategame Celica map with the mage who could cast Upheavel and his crazily well-defended fortress; I generally found Celica's maps relatively easy but that one was good.
-Witches, the RNG enemy, are kinda dumb. If they teleport and OHKO someone with a crit, tough luck kid. But usually they do something useless! There's nothing especially fun about this design.
The... I dunno:
-Mila's turnwheel. It's a neat option! I like being able to take back misclicks. But part of me wonders that it encourages extreme laziness and removes tension. I'll never dock the game points for it since it's optional, and I did end up using it, but I wonder if it would have helped or hurt the game if I'd chosen to never use it, like I was kinda intending originally. I feel like the game has enough clunky moments that I enjoyed THIS game more because of it, but it would have made a game with tighter design less enjoyable for me? Dunno.
~Writing~
Let's start with the positive. The game has quite crisp dialog which makes some of the characters more fun. Alm and Celica are generally rather generic but they're pretty enjoyable; not great characters or anything but they're functional. Alm is kinda like PoR Ike but with a better sense of humour and lacking Ike's weird self-righteousness about racism. Like Ike the game tries to sell him as a commoner but LOL, more on that later. Celica's passion for saving people is engaging. Mae and Boey have great interactions with Celica and with each other. There are many things wrong with the later stages of Celica's route but Mae/Boey getting steadily less screentime is certainly part of it.
But yeah, overall, there's a lot more negative to say. Spoilers from here on, I ain't using tiny text so feel free just to ignore most of this if you're the sensitive type.
-Celica's self-sacrifice. This COULD have worked. As CK said, if they'd tried to sell me on Celica losing faith in humanity and thus sacrificing herself was the only way to save them, okay, maybe. But they don't do this at all. Instead, Celica does nothing but ignore her friends and her brother (who ends up bizarrely irrelevant in the plot) and decide that trusting super-evil Jedah is a sensible plan. This is an incredible, stupid mistake that pretty much dominates the entire Chapter 4-5 plot for Celica. Celica is often compared to Eirika. Eirika, of course, has a pretty big stupid mistake of her own. The difference is that (a) it's a spur of the moment thing, not drawn out over a quarter of the game as every other character tells her not to do it, (b) Lyon is someone that Eirika would logically trust, Jedah is not. Fuck this plot point.
-Damsels, damsels everywhere. With Celica joining in on this late, we have the following list of female PCs who need to be rescued at some point: Silque, Clair, Mathilda, Est, Delthea, Tatiana, Celica. Here's the list of female PCs not on the above list: Faye, Mae, Genny, Palla, Catria, Sonya. For those of you who can't be bothered to count, the first list is longer than second. What the actual fuck.
-Rudolf's plan is horrendously batshit and makes no sense, and killed thousands of people for no damn reason (and the game sees no problem with this). It's pretty much Conquest's worst plot point recycled. At least he's an antagonist I guess.
-Berkut. Oh, Berkut. This character went on an... interesting trajectory. Early on, I didn't like him, because he came off as maddeningly incompetent. The game hypes up this big Rigelian general and what does he do? Alm and his little ragtag band of rebels kick him out of the country almost as soon as he exists.
But midgame I started to come around on him more. See, there's this scene where Rudolf torments him and baits him and oooh, I get it! Rudolf is intentionally setting Berkua up to fail in order to manipulate him! Berkut is gonna be like Ramsus, neat. He's been built up to have everything cut up from under him and do something crazy that serves Rudolf and/or Nuibaba/the Duma Faithful in general. I wonder what Rudolf's plan is!
Lategame, LOL NOPE. Rudolf actually loved his nephew, really! He just treated him like total shit, driving him insane. (Don't try to tell me he couldn't have prepared Berkut for Alm to become leader. He told Zeke who he'd know for like a year at most. Literally ANYTHING would have been kinder than what he did.) The game does not acknowledge this, since Rudolf at this point is a cool dude (fuck Rudolf). Berkut then decides to sacrifice his wife for power. How does he do this? Rinea clearly doesn't want it to happen; I guess his wife is his possession or something. After this very gross scene, you kill him and he ascends to heaven with his wife who still loves him even though he pretty much just mindraped + murdered her. This may be the single worst scene in all of Fire Emblem.
-The main villain cares about nothing but reviving a dark god just like most other FEs, and this is as boring as ever. Still better than Rudolf or Berkut.
-Alm being secretly Rudolf's heir utterly pisses on the "hey commoners can be pretty cool too" theme the game had going early on. The game's other theme is "humans shouldn't be reliant on gods" which mostly just manifests in Celica being dumb and Alm being great. FE is often pretty shitty about communicating its themes effectively but this one does a worse job than most.
~Aesthetics~
The game's art is pretty! I knew early on that I was enjoying this game notably more than Shadow Dragon/New Mystery and I definitely think the incredibly superior art is a big part; it's my favourite since RD. Celica looks so freaking cool. I just wish the Duma Faithful didn't look so comically evil with their blue skin.
Music is nice enough, though few tracks really stick with me. The most noteworthy one is certainly Mila's Divine Protection, especially this version with the strings; it plays for a lot of the game and I was still disappointed when it finally got replaced. It's not as good as Awakening/Fates for music but solid enough and certainly better than any other previous FE's soundtrack to me.
Overall, hmm. The game is better than the previous remakes at... most things. On balance I think I like it more than Binding Blade, too; Binding Blade has enough clunky things of its own, and ninja reinforcements suck. But I'm not seeing much to recommend it above any of the non-remakes from FE7 onwards. 7/10, but low.
Unit notes! Starred folks were used in the final dungeons, kills in parentheses. Since you have to use everyone until the final dungeons, some characters I didn't find as useful still managed to get lots of kills overall.
*Tatiana (5) - Fortify is god. MVP of the lategame just for that, it breaks the game's action economy in half.
Zeke (5) - Had notably worse stats than my main paladins, but still functional enough.
*Mycen (7) - More a less was a coinflip between him and Zeke for a final dungeon spot. Mycen was slower but tankier, and I figured having SOMEONE with over 15 defence would be a good idea. He's basically a Baron with 5 more move.
Atlas (7) - Archer. Total trash unless you take a major detour to promote him ASAP. I waited until after Grieth due to not wanting to do that and he never caught up.
Valbar (10) - Generals are pretty bad in this game without pair up/etc, to get them places, plus so many actually dangerous enemies being magical. He tanked Grieth though, and that was cool.
Lukas (11) - Mine struggled to gain any stats at all and was utter garbage.
Clive (14) - Awful res and mediocre speed made him generally worse than other paladins, but he's still a tier 2 unit really early so he saw good use for a while, even if I knew he wasn't headed to the final team.
*Silque (17) - Doesn't get nearly as good a skillset as the other clerics. No ranged healing, Invoke super-late, etc. Warp has occasional use at least, and clerics are nice to have in general early.
*Genny (18) - Quietly kinda amazing. Invoke! Physic! Certainly part of why Celica's maps are easier.
Forsyth (19) - Is a knight, so kinda bad.
*Conrad (28) - Paladin with nice res. He was functional, I don't have much to say about him.
Luthier (32) - And here's our first mage. Mages are pretty excellent because they excel at killing hard-to-kill foes, either because they have high defence or camp on terrain that gives huge avoid boosts (which they ignore). Luthier's stats aren't too great, but Excalibur is a good spell. Really came into his own when I gave him a Speed Ring, allowing him to double Excalibur and thus murder most things he looked at.
Gray (39) - Archer. He just didn't get enough speed to be useful at the archer job. Apparently there's some obscure bow that gives them a double-hit skill but without it, an archer who can't double much just isn't very useful, and of course his own durability was wretched.
Palla (41) - Probably the worst of the Whitewings due to her relatively low speed, but still decent.
*Python (42) - Turned out somewhat better than Grey since he actually did get speed. Archers are interesting in this game. Not great, but interesting
Tobin (43) - Mage. Tobin, like Luthier, didn't really have great stats, but having a mage was really nice early; he fell off once I got Delthea but stayed useful even then because he gets Physic!
*Mathilda (45) - Just had great stats all-around, in a great class. Really solid.
*Est (47) - She starts underlevelled (though not as much as usual for her) but had the best stats of the Whitewings once she got going. Neat, they actually balanced her!
*Sonya (51) - Mage with Excalibur and good stats. Yeah, she's pretty badass despite joining underlevelled. Split-path with another PC, not sure how good he is.
*Delthea (52) - Mage with a bunch of good spells like Seraphim and Ragnarok, and great stats. Underlevelled but started being awesome even before she caught up. Her biggest problem is that she lacks a 3-range spell... but if you give her the Mage Ring (which is silly OP, +2 spell range), that problem goes away!
*Saber (55) - He was so-so at first, basically having speed but nothing else, but gets better as time goes on. Dread Fighter, despite a derpy aesthetic and a bad name, is actually quite a good class, with surprisingly high movement and massive magical tanking. Great against mages and fast enemies (unless they were so fast he couldn't double them, which definitely happened sometimes).
*Catria (57) - Pegasus knight. Not much to say, she's solid. +10 damage vs monsters and javelin access is good times.
*Boey (60) - Kinda tanky but not really, the low speed ruins that. Male mage stats < female mage stats generally. That said, he still dealt out good damage with Excalibur/Saggitae and anything slow enough that he DID double them had a very bad time.
*Kliff (64) - Cavalier. Kliff just had generically solid stats in a high-move class, pretty similar to Mathilda though not quite as fast or high-res.
*Kamui (67) - I think I took him into a big dungeon where I didn't take Saber because he needed to promote and Saber didn't, only reason I can explain the kill difference. Kamui was a lot like Saber, though low res was a liability before tier 3 (and even somewhat after) as was low luck. Still had the same perks as Saber otherwise.
*Celica (76) - Mage with solid stats across the board, can hit defence and use swords if you want. I gave her Beloved Zofia and the payoff is neat as its final skill could OHKO many enemies, including Mogalls. Her main problem was only having 4 move (a problem most mages share sadly).
*Mae (86) - My Mae got speed-blessed and was some unholy killing machine with great attack/speed. Durability's not so hot but whatever. It's also funny how this game only has one attack stat, as later on she can use swords and does stupid damage with them despite never having trained with them before.
*Clair (87) - Falconknight. Not so hot defence but incredible speed and good attack (the latter apparently isn't normal). I like Clair pretty well so I'm not gonna complain.
*Faye (87) - Pegasus knight. Apparently she's OP as a cleric, as a pegknight she was merely good. Better def than Clair but worse speed/res, so not as good overall, but she should have better attack normally.
*Alm (99) - Alm is terrific early (one of the few lords who STARTS as one of the best PCs), with incredible base HP, decent stats otherwise, and the Levin Sword which is amazing. Then the Levin Sword falls off and everyone else promotes and he doesn't, so he starts to fade. Then he finally promotes and also gains Double Lion, a silly strong tech (2 hits, damage/hit boost) which can OHKO frailer enemies before they counter. He's very good. Mine was 1-2 points down on def which did make the lategame solo section with him relatively tricky, but I still beat it on the second try.
