This review contains spoilers
FE16 is a strange one. There’s an interesting parallel between the granularity of the story and the granularity of the gameplay where they’re both great on surface and intricate levels but have difficulty bridging the gap.
In the story, FE16 is among the series’ best in character writing. Even the characters who are tropey have depth to them and of the entire roster maybe only two characters are truly “one note”. The support conversations are good, easy to get, and timed well. The paired endings are plentiful and feel deserved. The game is also great on delivering its themes and premise, without taking any cheap shots. But if you analyze it from a time perspective, a few things just don’t make sense. Why do we dally a whole month when Flayn and Manuela go missing? That’s just one (admittedly particularly egregious) example, but this game was designed around a calendar and by God does it feel forced sometimes.
The gameplay is similar. You can kind of zone out and ignore most skills and combat arts on Normal and have a good time, or if you’re into what the game has to offer you can truly optimize your team with skills and weapons and quite a lot. Or just make everyone a flier, since wyverns are OP (not the first time in the FE series for this one). But the sheer bloat in skills and what they do can be overwhelming in this game. There’s also the matter of again, the calendar. Near the end of the game you still have to stick to it unless you choose to skip everything. I really found myself getting to the “okay let’s wrap it up” point in the last 3 chapters of the game.
There’s also a bit of a puzzler around this game having four routes yet the replayabiloty being difficult with having to do the monastery each time from the beginning. New Game+ alleviates that a bit, but having to explore, and do basically mandatory quests to unlock basic features of the run is obnoxious as hell for someone trying to replay just to get a different route.
All that though for 3.5 stars. It’s a good Fire Emblem game - I’ll definitely come back to it again some day, probably just not any time soon since I can’t imagine doing Part 1 again in the near future.
In the story, FE16 is among the series’ best in character writing. Even the characters who are tropey have depth to them and of the entire roster maybe only two characters are truly “one note”. The support conversations are good, easy to get, and timed well. The paired endings are plentiful and feel deserved. The game is also great on delivering its themes and premise, without taking any cheap shots. But if you analyze it from a time perspective, a few things just don’t make sense. Why do we dally a whole month when Flayn and Manuela go missing? That’s just one (admittedly particularly egregious) example, but this game was designed around a calendar and by God does it feel forced sometimes.
The gameplay is similar. You can kind of zone out and ignore most skills and combat arts on Normal and have a good time, or if you’re into what the game has to offer you can truly optimize your team with skills and weapons and quite a lot. Or just make everyone a flier, since wyverns are OP (not the first time in the FE series for this one). But the sheer bloat in skills and what they do can be overwhelming in this game. There’s also the matter of again, the calendar. Near the end of the game you still have to stick to it unless you choose to skip everything. I really found myself getting to the “okay let’s wrap it up” point in the last 3 chapters of the game.
There’s also a bit of a puzzler around this game having four routes yet the replayabiloty being difficult with having to do the monastery each time from the beginning. New Game+ alleviates that a bit, but having to explore, and do basically mandatory quests to unlock basic features of the run is obnoxious as hell for someone trying to replay just to get a different route.
All that though for 3.5 stars. It’s a good Fire Emblem game - I’ll definitely come back to it again some day, probably just not any time soon since I can’t imagine doing Part 1 again in the near future.