Today, Nintendo announced several new Fire Emblem games coming to 3DS, the Nintendo Switch and mobile.
The new mobile games is called Fire Emblem Heroes, which is a pretty fitting name for a mobile game. Plenty of other games use "heroes" in the title, so it's very familiar for mobile gamers.
Unlike Super Mario Run, Nintendo's first big mobile game, Fire Emblem Heroes is free-to-play. It's also coming first to Android instead of Apple's App Store, where Super Mario Run debuted. [Update: According to Nintendo, the game will now launch on both Android and iOS at the same time.]
The game will be familiar to any fans of the franchise. It's the same basic concept as the rest of the series. The most dramatic departure from something like Fire Emblem Fates is the use of tiny, mobile-friendly maps. Each battle takes place on an area no bigger than the screen itself, like so:
The game is portrait mode only, and uses simple swipes to manipulate the turn-based combat. It's very much a watered down Fire Emblem, though how the F2P elements will work remains to be seen.
The game is coming to Google Play on Feb. 2 according to the official website with a later release date on Apple device.
You can vote on which heroes you'd like in the game here.
Here's the announcement trailer:
And here's artwork for some of the game's characters which is pretty great -- the artwork is always better than the in-game avatars, which is one reason I'm so excited for the Switch game which may bring us closer to these types of fully realized in-game characters. Anyways, images in the gallery below:
I get the feeling this game will be pretty controversial. A lot of Fire Emblem purists will say it looks too mobile, that free-to-play will ruin the game and exploit gamers, and so forth. All that may be true, but I also think Nintendo needed to go this route. It can't release every game as a premium pay-to-play experience. F2P is the most popular and lucrative revenue model for mobile gaming, and I never expected Nintendo to release only premium titles like Super Mario Run.
I think it looks fine. Not as good as a 3DS Fire Emblem game and not as exciting as a Switch Fire Emblem game, but pretty much what I expected from mobile. I do worry those maps are going to be way too small, but for short games (the standard type of game on a phone) it may be just right.
Read more about all the Fire Emblem announcements from today's Nintendo Direct here.
What do you think? Will you try this one out?
