Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

Fire Emblem Fates is divided into two titles: Birthright and Conquest, with a DLC called Revelation. Birthright serves as a terrible example to justify such division, offering a narrative that is not only shallow but also incredibly stretched – like butter scraped over too much bread – to form a whole game, while making some troublesome changes to the franchise’s classic gameplay structure.

The protagonist of Fates is called Corrin. The character, despite having her own personality, functions as an avatar for the player, who can modify her name, appearance, and gender. Corrin, a member of the royal family of the kingdom of Nohr, is sent by her father, King Garon, on a reconnaissance mission into Hoshido’s enemy territory, where she’s kidnapped by her opponents. Taken to Hoshido, the protagonist discovers that actually this is the kingdom in which she was born and that Garon kidnapped her as a baby after murdering her real father. Convinced that Nohr has gone to war unfairly, Corrin has to decide whether to form an alliance with the brothers who helped raise her or with the strangers that claim to be her true family. Choosing to help Hoshido leads to Birthright’s story.

The beginning of the game contains its most intense moments. In six chapters – there are 28 in total – the game introduces the main characters on each side of the conflict, exposes what they are fighting for, establishes their friendly ties with the protagonist, and imposes a difficult choice on her in the middle of a battlefield: betray her foster brothers or support Garon’s tyrannical regime?

Since these chapters are present in the two titles that make up the entirety of Fire Emblem Fates, the fact that they are Birthright’s best part is symptomatic. After the alliance with Hoshido, the whole dramatic power of the narrative is quickly drained out and replaced by a one-dimensional conflict, in which good and evil are clearly defined. Corrin’s new family is virtuous, while Garon is a monstrous king who sees not only his subjects as pawns in a board game but even his closest relatives.

The only element in the narrative that is not binary involves the protagonist’s former brothers, Xander, Elise, Camila, and Leo. While the king is one-dimensional in his wickedness, they only keep fighting for Nohr because of their notion of duty. They are soldiers who receive terrible orders and are forced to execute them, even though they feel their actions go against everything they believe. Elise, the youngest sister, is the exception among them, acting like a child who is watching her parents fight: her only wish is for them to stop and for everything to return to normal.

Birthright’s most interesting characters, therefore, are the antagonists. The inhabitants of Hoshido are being unfairly attacked and must defeat a villainous tyrant. Nohr’s are being led by the villain and have to decide what to do about it, falling repeatedly into the same crucial dillema the protagonist had to face at the beginning. No wonder the most intense, though overly melodramatic, moments of the climax involve their actions rather than Corrin’s new friends.

It’s disappointing, however, the fact that Xander, Camila, and Leo seem to be immune to argument, only understanding Corrin’s point of view after losing a fight. This certainly comes from the game’s need to contextualize a battle scenario, but there were better ways to do that. It’s not even that it conveys the questionable message that the best way to convince someone is with violence – that there is nothing like a good beating to fix a person’s problematic worldview – but that it makes everything predictable and fairly repetitive.

The story also falters when it refuses to offer answers to its many mysteries. We have the character of Azura, for instance, who is a Nohr princess that was kidnapped by Hoshido years ago and functions almost like a double of Corrin. Azura has magical powers, activated when she sings, but it’s never revealed the nature of her magic or why her melody – which will be stuck in the player’s head for becoming a leitmotif that is repeated a thousand times – paralyzes people. This is a problem here because the character plays an important role in the main action scenes, using the song to save the group on numerous occasions: since the magic is not explained, instead of being an element connected to the story, Azura’s music emerges as a kind of “Song Ex Machina” to be used when it’s convenient.

Meanwhile, the villain’s motives also fail to be properly developed. It’s not known why Garon wants to invade Hoshido: whether it is for revenge, for natural resources, due to some prejudice, or if he simply doesn’t like them and is bored. Garon simply invades Hoshido because that’s what Garon does. He’s as one-dimensional as one-dimensional villains go.

Birthright‘s worst problem, however, is its incredibly repetitive narrative structure. Corrin will meet her former brothers in battle and more than once try to convince them of the king’s wickedness, begging them to drop their weapons and help her. And this will happen over and over again. She will face numerous random bad guys without any connection to the plot. She will beat the same villains over and over again, who will always flee at the end of the battle to participate in the next. Things only start to really happen in the last three chapters and there are twenty-eight of them in the game. By comparison, the previous title in the franchise, Fire Emblem Awakening, was able to, in less time, tweak the direction the narrative was taking twice (Awakening spoilers) allowing the protagonist to defeat the evil king in the first act, so to introduce a milder medieval version of Donald Trump as a major enemy, and finally conclude with a clash against an ancient god.

In an attempt to insert some kind of tension in the narrative, the writers include not one but two traitors in Corrin’s group. However, when there is only one character entering Hoshido’s army and not becoming playable, the player’s suspicions inevitably fall on them – eliminating any surprise from the revelation. Always repetitive, the writers make this mistake not once, but twice in Birthright, achieving the feat of surprising the player the second time not with the twist, but with the sheer audacity of using the same predictable device again.

Intelligent Systems also makes the mistake of killing a playable character midway through the game, causing unnecessary frustration: yes, this makes the player, like Corrin, feel the loss of the character, but the death doesn’t work because the events leading to it are not caused by villains or any particular conflict, but by a random accident. Suddenly this character is no longer there and the player just wonders “Why? What’s the point?” There is no connection to the rest of the story and the event is no longer mentioned. There is a way to avoid this result, but the player is not warned beforehand and the solution is as arbitrary as anything that leads to the death in question.

Corrin doesn’t help matters by proving to be an unremarkable protagonist: she doesn’t work well as an avatar because the game does not allow the player to shape her personality or project their own onto her. And she doesn’t work as a fully developed character, because she’s superficial in her beliefs: her only moment of doubt is the big question in chapter six. After this point, she is a pit of altruism and virtue, showing compassion and mercy foolishly: it is not enough to allow an enemy captain to live, advocating against the death penalty; she must leave the guy to roam free in her camp without even arresting him. There is compassion and there is stupidity, and Corrin has a bunch of both.

Also problematic is the justification for the characters’ children to accompany them in battle. The idea, introduced in Awakening, is that when two characters get married (reaching level S in Support Conversations) they have a child, who becomes a playable character. In the previous title, this worked because the story dealt with time travel and the children came from a post-apocalyptic future to try to prevent it from ever materializing. There is no time travel in Fates and the explanation offered here is simply absurd: after getting married, the female character in question immediately becomes pregnant, gives birth within a few weeks, puts the baby into a kind of shelter in a pocket universe where time passes faster; and then the child grows older – even older than their parents in some cases –, and happily leaves their private universe to participate in the war between Nohr and Hoshido. The moral and ethical repercussions – and they are many – of such a grotesque situation are never discussed and they all treat the existence of these shelters outside of time and space as if they made perfect sense, although they are never mentioned in the main story.

The game’s only saving grace regarding ints narrative is the Support Conversations. All members of Corrin’s group have interesting things to say to each other, exposing their longings and passions, which helps make even the flattest of characters more engaging. The knight Sophie, for example, is unable to control her mount, losing control of the animal all the time. She is defined by this trait, which is always mentioned whenever the character is in a scene. She’s a flat character, but the support conversations give a few more layers to her, gradually developing the reason for Sophie’s problem while opposing it to her main quality: despite destroying everything with her horse, Sophie inspires her colleagues with her energy, always giving her all to fix whatever is broken around her. With more complex characters, these conversations are even more fundamental to the narrative, showing some character growth that the main story never touches upon, such as working with Azura’s feeling of loneliness, which gives her tragic tones while also explaining her omissions and sacrifices in the main story.

These conversations are unlocked by having two characters fight together in the battlefield. Fire Emblem is a tactical RPG in which the player moves characters on a square-based grid to eliminate other units in combat. In Fates, it’s possible to place two characters of your team in adjacent spaces, making them attack at the same time – the second with a reduction in damage so as not to unbalance the battles. Before Fates it was only possible to merge two characters in one unit, increasing their defense instead of the damage output. Since the bonus received is proportional to the bond between the characters, the developers encourage the player to not only take into account the attributes of each other in battle, but also the friendships outside it, seeking to position them together.

Combat in Fire Emblem has always been simple, consisting of a “Rock, Paper, Scissors” system: swordsmen beat axemen, who beat lancers, who beat swordsmen. Outside this triangle, archers defeat flying units, which in turn have movement bonuses. Fates enhances this system by adding new weapons such as the Shuriken and inserting both archery and magic into the weapons triangle – now defined by color for simplicity. These, however, are probably the only welcome additions to the franchise.

A problematic change in gameplay is that weapons no longer break, reducing character attributes instead. This becomes an issue when it’s at odds with other systems in the game. There is some equipment that reverse the weapon triangle, for example, and because they no longer break, they will remain in each character’s inventory forever, leaving them prepared for any situation – thus rendering the weapon triangle irrelevant. Forging equipment also allows the player to increase the strength of weaker weapons, virtually eliminating any downside of using them forever.

The available online mode also allows the player to circumvent the limitations of character classes. Acquiring skills that are different from a character’s class normally takes work: you need to spend an expensive item to change the unit’s class and then train them again. However, after beating an opponent under certain conditions in an online match, you can purchase one of their team’s abilities. Players, then, can upload whole teams whose characters are unarmed to ensure the victory of anyone facing them. If it’s possible to acquire skills without any challenge online, why does Intelligent Systems make the process so laborious normally offline? It’s true that this is only optional, but it is the duty of developers to make every effort to maintain game balance and avoid making it so easy for a player to break their game.

Now, a well-crafted aspect of Fates, present in both of its titles, is the visual design of each kingdom. Hoshido is characterized by warmer colors, especially red, which highlights the nobility of Corrin’s new family. Nohr, on the other hand, is marked by an opposite color palette, full of cold, lifeless colors – and it is also appropriate that its royal family is defined by purple, as it reflects Garon’s nefarious purposes. Still on the purple (spoilers ahead), it is interesting to notice how the only character on Hoshido’s side to present the color in his garb is precisely the one who can die randomly in an accident.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright, then, ends up being one of the franchise’s weakest titles, featuring a poor story and some gameplay changes that bring more problems than benefits to the mix.

July 21, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on April 04, 2016.