Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest

Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest is a much better game than its counterpart, Birthright. With a more engaging story and some unique, complex stages, the game manages to maintain the usual quality of Nintendo’s tactical RPG franchise.

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 Nohr leads to Conquest’s story.

Conquest‘s narrative already has a big advantage over Birthright by focusing on Nohr’s royal family. Corrin, Xander, Leo, Camilla, and Elise are tormented soldiers torn between their notion of duty and their moral values: although they condemn unnecessary violence, their nation wants them to commit torture, murder, and ultimately genocide. They are Fates‘ most fascinating characters precisely because of this clash of values, which positions them in an ungrateful role, as their actions, whatever they may be, are always going to be strongly condemned by some of the parties involved.

How to act when your duty compels you to do something horrible? How to follow abominable orders and still keep what is human in you intact? Corrin’s answer to this is straightforward: even after choosing Nohr, she still doesn’t follow those orders. Corrin’s mission becomes not to conquer Hoshido, but to reshape her own nation. Her initial plan is to convince Garon that his venture is barbaric, that war causes only destruction, grief, and sorrow, and that it will not even bring any real benefit to Nohr. Her goal is to change the thinking of her people and leader.

The narrative structure of the game revolves around this task, posing several challenges to the protagonist, who begins to gradually teach everyone she meets about the value of empathy and compassion. Corrin starts to try to convince her brothers that to just morally and ethically condemn Garon’s orders is irrelevant if they are going to keep following them anyway: words and feelings are meaningless if people still let injustice happen. She teaches them that the role of a soldier is to stop violence from spreading and not spreading it themselves.

The development of Xander’s character is crucial to the narrative. His notion of duty is rigid: his loyalty to his father, Garon, is an absolute, unwavering ideal. If Corrin quickly considers deposing the king after understanding the wickedness of the war, such thought is unacceptable to her older brother. It becomes interesting, then, to notice how Xander’s narrative function often shifts from aid to obstacle: if he helps the protagonist several times, his refusal to directly confront his father also makes it impossible for Corrin to realize her plans before it’s too late. If Conquest’s ending resembles a particular episode of SpongeBob it’s precisely because Xander values loyalty more than justice, putting his country above his people, hiding his cowardice behind patriotism.

The narrative in Conquest also avoids falling into Birthright‘s Manichaeism, no longer characterizing Hoshido’s inhabitants in a one-dimensional way. They are being unfairly attacked, there is no doubt about that, but they are not absolutely virtuous anymore, immune to violent thoughts. Quite the contrary, Hoshido’s warriors soon express unbridled hatred against Nohr’s soldiers, generalizing all the people of Nohr: it doesn’t matter that Corrin and her family are trying to help them, for they must pay for what their compatriots are doing. The last battle of the game concludes this idea, revealing that the great villain in Conquest is not Garon himself, but the hatred his actions create. Even when justified and inevitable, hatred only feeds on the person’s humanity, turning them into monsters if they’re not careful. There is a literal dehumanization taking place with the characters in Conquest, which makes them lose their identity when they get carried away by violence.

The game also deserves credit for trying to address gender and sexuality issues in an inclusive manner. When Corrin’s brother Leo fights with his son Forrest for dressing up as a woman, claiming to be ashamed of him, the boy’s response is as blunt as it is awesome (“You’re not worthy of me”). Similarly, a conversation between a warrior named Solei and Xander’s son, Siegbert, has him questioning whether it is appropriate for Solei to be dating girls. The proper answer he receives is that it is only appropriate for a woman to be honest with herself and that if he thinks otherwise, the problem lies solely with him. As for Solei, it’s worth pointing out that her terrible original supportive conversation with Corrin – in which the protagonist drugged her without consent to make her not pass out when seeing girls – was replaced in the American version by a less absurd one.

Nevertheless, despite the many virtues of its narrative, Conquest is not free from some of the issues that plagued Birthright. It shares a similar portion of stupid moments, such as the scene in which Corrin asks the dancer Azura if she managed to see to where a mysterious dancer had fled, when the answer is actually staring Corrin right in the face: “You know, that woman who was singing your favorite song, with the same hair, height, and voice than you, but had a veil covering her face; the dancer who appeared out of nowhere to threaten the king at the same time that you disappeared? That dancer, you saw her?” Corrin basically asks Azura. The narrative also continues to feel over-stretched, packed with repeated events, while Garon remains an incredibly shallow villain, and the main characters, the worst parents in the history of narratives.

As for the gameplay, Conquest‘s main appeal comes from its special difficulty. Unlike its counterpart, units are not allowed to train in random battles between stages. Here, the player is forced to proceed through the story without respite, with almost no extra possibility to increase the characters’ experience. Such limitation also affects the amount of gold acquired, preventing players from forging many strong weapons and breaking the game.

Conquest benefits also from a more inspired level design. Intelligent Systems puts a unique gimmick in each battle to make them more intricate. There’s a certain stage, for example, that is affected by air currents that, at the end of each turn, push all characters five spaces on the map. There’s one where players must deal with enemies that can pass through their units and deal additional damage to mounted ones. In another, players must win under a certain number of turns but have the path blocked by pots that, when broken to make way, can negatively affect the attributes of the characters. Unlike its sibling, Conquest pushes the player to modify their strategy in each stage, which is always commendable.

With a stronger story and more inspired stages, Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest is a superior game to Birthright in every way, coming close to saving Fates from being the black sheep of the franchise.

August 01, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on December 02, 2016.