Fire Emblem loves looking back. Fire Emblem Awakening, the Nintendo 3DS title that rescued the franchise from permanent retirement, is packed with references to the series’ history: one character adopts the name Marth, another shouts the names of previous Fire Emblem games on critical hits, and a third character comes straight out of Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, the first-ever Fire Emblem game.
Fire Emblem Engage took Awakening’s emphasis on the series’ legacy to an extreme. Though released three years after Fire Emblem’s 30th birthday, it functions as an anniversary game. Core to Engage’s story and gameplay are Emblem Rings, which summon the spirits of practically every notable protagonist of Fire Emblem’s seventeen games.
But for a series so invested in its own history, Intelligent Systems has remade only three Fire Emblem games: twice for the DS and once for the 3DS. That 3DS game, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, remakes 1992’s Fire Emblem Gaiden, the second-ever Fire Emblem game. Like fellow early Nintendo sequels Super Mario Bros 2 and Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, Gaiden stands out against the rest of its series. Features like open exploration, dungeon crawling, and controlling two separate armies would remain unique to Gaiden for decades.
Echoes came out in 2017, as Fire Emblem’s last 3DS title. Twenty-five years after Gaiden came to Famicoms across Japan, Echoes brought its story to audiences worldwide. Echoes expanded and modernized many aspects of Gaiden, adding new characters, free-roam dungeons, and the support conversation system established in 2002’s The Binding Blade. But Intelligent Systems, sticking with Echoes’ roots, did away with several mechanics of modern Fire Emblem. Marriage supports and the weapon triangle were both dropped — they didn’t fit with the story developers were telling and the characters in the story.
Echoes got mostly positive reviews, particularly for its art, storytelling, and full voice acting. But for many people, its gameplay left something to be desired. It’s sort of the opposite of Engage, which received near-universal praise for its gameplay despite its abysmal script and a protagonist that looks like a bottle of Colgate toothpaste. Though its story was pretty simple Fire Emblem fare, Echoes was a delight to look at and listen to. The problem was its maps.
Echoes’ maps are annoying. They’re big, they’re covered in swamps and sands that can slow your army down, and they’re repetitive. You may find yourself having routed every single enemy on a map, only to realize there’s a single, unmoving cavalier 30 spaces away. Three turns later, when you finally reach him, you realize he’s standing on a tile that buffs his ability to evade attacks, so you spend three more turns swinging blindly at him before he finally dies. That’s not particularly fun, and it’s not challenging either. It’s just tedious. Every criticism against Echoes’ map design is perfectly reasonable. It’s the weakest part of the game by far.
That said, I still liked the maps. Sorry.
Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter
A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no
commitment — just saving for later.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
I found Echoes’ map design novel. Battles demanded a different approach from previous titles, like Awakening and Fates, where my strongest units could often get away with rushing in. My most mobile units — pegasi — were also my squishiest. I had to be careful with how I baited enemies, or how far I sent them from the range of an ally healer.
Further, while sending every single one of my units across desert sand for four battle-free turns is objectively pretty boring, it offered a sense of narrative foreboding. I imagined my army trekking across a quiet desert for what felt like ages, knowing a horrific fight was up ahead. Rather than the urgency of a quick battle, Echoes drew from the unease and tension of a siege. Regardless of how big Echoes’ maps actually were, they felt sprawling and intimidating.
Tacked onto these big, spaced-out maps was one more enormous upgrade to the Fire Emblem formula: Mila’s Turnwheel. This relic allowed players to rewind turns, undoing the sorts of mistakes that can lead to a fallen unit or lost battle. If you turned back time in Three Houses after an archer with a 1% crit chance obliterated your favorite unit, you have Echoes to thank.
Many believe that a turn rewind mechanism exists to attract more casual fans to Fire Emblem, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Casual mode still exists for that exact purpose, and was a resounding success for Fire Emblem’s first two 3DS titles. Mila’s Turnwheel served a different purpose. While it certainly made the game more accessible, it also made some of its more modern elements possible in the first place.
Older Fire Emblem games were designed around occasional unit losses, offering you a steady stream of new units throughout the game. But as characters and their relationships became more fleshed out, players became more attached, and more inclined to restart an entire battle to save a single unit. I can attest — the L, R, and Start buttons on my 3DS are worn away from the number of times I slammed the soft reset shortcut after losing a unit.
Echoes pioneered the direction for modern Fire Emblem. If Intelligent Systems wanted to balance increasing life simulation and character relationship elements against bigger, trickier maps, something like Mila’s Turnwheel was necessary. Players needed to feel okay taking the strategic risks to clear a hazardous map without the calculated unit loss that previous titles were built around. With maps taking longer and longer to clear, a rewind was a much cleaner solution than yet another reset. That mechanic made Three Houses, which has virtually zero recruitment opportunities after the midgame timeskip, possible in the first place.
Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave comes out in under two weeks, and it owes a lot to the Fire Emblem games before it. In both story and gameplay, Fortune’s Weave is most obviously a follow-up to Three Houses. But Three Houses itself owes a ton to Echoes. From turn rewinding to combat arts to 3D exploration, core Three Houses mechanics were first tested and proven in Echoes. Echoes also originated some of the most talked-about additions to Fortune’s Weave, such as dungeon crawling and parallel routes.
With Echoes, developers knew where the franchise was headed. A sometimes too-faithful remake of Fire Emblem’s odd-duck title proved to be one of the series’ most forward-looking games.
