I think that title is read as “Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia” but I guess it’s possible that “Echoes” goes at the end.  If I had the box it might be more clear, but I bought it off the 3DS eShop in the last few days before that service closed down.  We’ll just go with “SoV” and ignore the whole question.

Anyway.  SoV was the last of the 3DS Fire Emblem titles to be released, and probably one of the last Nintendo-published 3DS titles inasmuch as it was released a month and a half after the Switch launched, and it’s taken me a while to get around to finishing it.  I’ve put in several bursts of playtime whenever I’ve had an occasion to travel anywhere, but with no upcoming trips planned I figured I should just buckle down and play it at home.

Took about 42 hours spread over a year and a half, all told.

So with that rambling and frankly unnecessary preamble out of the way, let’s move on to Opinions.  SoV is, as I understand it, a remake of a Super Famicom title with a few tweaks to make it slightly less punishing – in particular, it has the “Casual” play style option popularized with Fire Emblem: Awakening, in which you don’t actually lose units upon death.  Because it’s technically an older game, it doesn’t have the same sort of emphasis on relationship building and smushing your units together like your sister’s Barbie dolls until a kid pops out, and it’s missing the rock-paper-scissors mechanic of the Weapon Triangle and a few other things I’d come to expect from a FE game.

I still managed to have fun with it, though at one point I had to go groveling to an FE message board to review the units I was using and their levels and gear and ask them why everything was hurting so much.  It turned out that I wasn’t grinding enough levels and not upgrading my weapons, which were very useful and valid critiques that I was able to correct.  I still had one late-game battle stomp me into goo three times before I emerged victorious, but that was very much a question of how I was deploying and using units.

Which is kind of the point of a tactical RPG? Like, fundamentally?

One thing that is unique to SoV is the presence of a few free-roaming dungeons which let you wander around a 3D map and break crates open for treasure and pick fights with roaming monsters.  Monsters in these respawn, so it’s much easier to grind than in other FE games, and some of them get properly labyrinthine and will absolutely get you lost.  Much love for these.

Also, while the relationship building aspect really isn’t there, the characters are still fun.  It’s probably a good thing I couldn’t ACTUALLY pair the male lead up with Faye, here, but I was rooting for her the entire time.

I also rather enjoyed this bit of dialogue, from a later part of the game that featured a lot of battles in poisonous swamps which combined the two LOVELY design decisions of “swamps slow you down so you can’t move through swamp tiles quickly” and “swamp tiles damage your units every turn.”

Thankfully, swamps were very rare after this bit.

Anyway.  Of the Fire Emblems I’ve played – which isn’t many – I would probably put it as better than “Shadow Dragon”, the Nintendo DS remake of the first game but worlds below Awakening and Fates.

I own both Three Houses and Engage, so I’ll be jumping into one of those the next time I feel like some turn-based tactical combat.  Hopefully it will take me less than a year and a half to finish whichever one it turns out to be.

Also I’ll presumably be able to get proper screenshots instead of relying on my mobile phone camera.  That will be nice.