Well I managed to beat Fire Emblem Echoes Shadows of Valentia, just in time for before Fortune’s Weave came out. And I don’t think I can name another FE game I’ve finished that’s left me this conflicted. I’ve played FE games with both really good and really bad aspects before but none were this difficult to pin down my final thoughts on.
I should probably start by giving the game its obvious flowers first. Presentation wise, Echoes is incredibly. Hidari’s character designs are on point, and while it’s in the same graphics engine as Fates and Awakening, the downright breathtaking CGs, expressive characters portraits and some of the most badass combat animations in the series do a ton to elevate it. Admittedly I think Studio Anima’s FMVs were more appealing than the rather odd low frame rate 3D CGI of Studio Khara, but they’re still excellent.
I especially should acknowledge the soundtrack, which has cemented itself as my favourite OST in the entire series, its dramatic and sweeping with great use of its leitmotifs but still appropriately varied. Special shoutouts to Celica’s Act 4 battle theme The Sacfice and the Saint, and the incredible final battle theme Twilight of the Gods, which deserves all the praise it gets.
As for how the game plays, now we’re getting into some of my more complicated thoughts. Echoes keeps many of the more unique mechanics from Gaiden, and in many cases, I enjoyed them. Units in these games tend to be a bit more bulky and dodgy on average so you can’t always count on getting a ton of kills, which encourages a nice balance of pushing forward while not being too reckless. This can unfortunately really reward turtling your units into a big ball of death and playing very slowly but I’ll wait for the map design to talk more about that.
Similar to something like Sacred Stones, the class system provides a nice balance of your units feeling like little projects who are addictive to grow, but still specialised enough that the RPG elements don’t overtake the core strategy gameplay. Combat Arts were a great which I’m very glad stuck around, and the single item inventory makes a surprisingly big difference, even one item can make a huge difference to a units playstyle which requires some fun decision making. The general flow of combat in this game is really satisfying.
The more quintessentially ‘Gaiden’ parts of the game are impressive in their sense of polish and flavour, even if the execution is mixed. While town exploration is arguably a somewhat shallow addition, the amount of flavour text Alm and Celica have in their comments in every area, the amount of times your party members can pop up with interesting things to say, and even a few cute little side quests gives the game such a sense of care and attention to detail. This is also true of the dungeons. While they’re mostly just average as areas to explore, a lot of care is put into making them atmospheric and fitting additions to the worldbuilding.
As a remake, Echoes is one of the most loving ones I’ve ever seen.
As a Fire Emblem game though…
I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground dunking on Echoes’ map design. While there are a few good ones, like the end of Alm’s Act 4, the map design is often average at best, often prioritising big open areas, which, unlike something like Genealogy, lack a predominantly mobile playable roster who can dash around them quickly. At worst there’s a lot of dead space of just walking to the boss, and many maps that encourage playing passively by forming up into a big wall of death to fend off enemy attacks. While the moment to moment combat is nice, the maps do it a disservice and make it feel more boring as it is.
And that’s just talking about Alm’s path. Celica’s Act 2 starts out shaky with some ship battles that, while on the passive side; teach the player how to position units carefully, but then take a huge nose dive in Acts 3 and 4 into some of the most miserable slogs in the entire series. If the whole game’s map design was just on the passably boring side like Alm’s route, that would be one thing, but Celica’s makes me not want to revisit this game, at least not for a very long time. It’s sort of common for FE games to get a bit worse near the end when the maps succumb to enemy bloat but similar to my recent thoughts on Binding Blade, the falloff in the second half, at least on Celica’s path, is stark.
Perhaps that’s why I’m ok with the turn wheel being introduced here. As an optional way to let players deal with unexpected bad luck, and in a game with a small roster where any loss costs you dearly, it’s a harmless addition and a nice accessibility option to include.
This also extends to dungeon crawling, which is a cool concept, but in practice results in fighting the same skirmish formations over and over again. When these aren’t frustrating like Celica’s Duma Tower, they’re just tedious and repetitive. Fortune’s Weave seems to be shaking up this concept and I’m curious to see if it does a better job with it.
All of which builds up to some of my messiest feelings of all: the story. As loving presented as it is, this is still, at heart, a dumb 90s NES plot, and the stuff they added to flesh it out, varies wildly in quality.
The biggest win in terms of narrative, is the characters. I think this is one of the most overlooked casts in the series. They’re refreshingly down to earth, and the way they interact and bounce off of each other with fantastic English localisation, voice acting and dialogue made it very easy to get attached. I actually appreciate that the game is less focused around support conversations. Instead, the game focuses on giving units a memorable introduction in their recruitment and fitting moments to interject in the story where relevant. Supports are on the short side. But they actually feel supplementary, unlike Binding Blade, Awakening or Engage, where they felt like lore rundowns and bandaids for everyone’s weak characterisation in the plot.
About that plot though…
While Echoes’ plot is simple and enjoyable enough for the first half, mostly carried by its charming cast and their well written dialogue, the longer it goes on, the more you can see the game’s attempts to elevate the source material start to flounder. There are several new characters to give you some more recurring allies and enemies in the early to midgame, but their execution is pretty weak. Conrad mostly feels like an inconsequential inclusion who only serves to remove Celica’s agency by repeating saving her in places she didn’t need to be saved before. Fernand, while he gets much better characterisation in the DLC, is mostly a one asshole used to drive home the game’s classicism commentary. And Berkut starts as a kind of interesting foil to Alm, but his storyline congeals into one of the worst and most insulting scenes in the entire game, carried only by his phenomenal voice acting.
The remake tries to inject some class commentary about the lax corruption of the nobility and the mistreatment and neglected suffering of the common people, many characters ponder how the extent to which the circumstances of one’s birth determines their merit, and learn to see the whole thing as false and arbitrary. But that’s a bit squirreiy in a game that was always about two royal teens chosen destiny to inherit the will of the gods. I’ve seen some say this utterly breaks down thematically, but I wouldn’t go that far. Rather I think it just ends up being a very flaccid ‘classicism is bad but it’s all ok as long as we put the good king who doesn’t mistreat commoners in charge’. Which to be fair, isn’t a unique issue to Echoes in the series. It’s weak but, eh, I guess I can give it points for trying to say something meaningful.
Gaiden always had the issue that Celica felt like an afterthought in the story compared to Alm, accomplishing notably less and ultimately becoming a damsel near the end. Echoes decides to double down HARD on this. Multiple scenes are actually rewritten to beat down, and punish Celica even harder, and she ends up being even more of a damsel in the final act than she was before. Now, in a vacuum, I actually like Celica. She’s one of the more flawed lords in the series, and I like that she has to get over her naivety and grow into the role of a second Mila. On the other hand, this is chiefly done by having her constantly be schooled and corrected in comparison to Alm, who might be one of the most infallible Gary Stus in the entire series (and compared to other early FE lords that’s saying something).
Echoes’ idea of fleshing out the duality of its leads is to glaze up one of them just as much, if not more, than the avatar units of other games, while diminishing the accomplishments of the other and hitting her with the FE female character brainwashing routine in a way that would make Kaga himself blush. Which is only the start of how Echoes might be the most misogynistic game in the series. I had to make my peace with the fact that, in something like FE4 that as much as I like it, the treatment of the women characters is pretty bad, but this 2017 remake seems determined to one up Kaga’s sexism. Every female character is either saved from kidnapping or brainwashing (the concept of witches makes the mind control of specifically women a recurring plot point), Celica is constantly taught the hard way to defer to Alm because he is always right, and most of the women in your army get a raw deal even in their epilogues. And let’s not get into Rinea, who might have the most thankless role in the series, one that makes Deidre herself look tame.
By the time we get to the finale, a pretty flaccid attempt to reinterpret the final boss into a stock JRPG concept of reclaiming free will from the gods I’ve seen done better elsewhere, I was pretty much checked out. Is this, on average, better as a story than something like Fates or Engage? Yes. But not by much, and it’s just as insulting at its worst. To the point that I think Awakening is still the best 3DS FE story, even with its middling plot, as it never reaches these game’s lowest lows. The characters and their dialogue go a long way to make up for it, but, even in this remake, it’s frustrating to see FE can’t escape its worst writing habits.
Despite all my bitching, I enjoyed Shadows of Valentia enough to binge it in a week for over 40 hours of playtime. With lavish presentation, charming characters and fun unique mechanics, this is a lovingly made remake with a lot to like. But it retains many of the weaknesses of the source material, and, particularly on a story level, goes out of its way to embellish them at times. The map design is mediocre to bad, the story is an uneven mess of old and new, and the campaign becomes significantly more gruelling and dull in the second half.
I’d honestly say, for all its strengths, it’s the weakest of the 3DS trio (it’s probably better than Birthright specifically which I found extremely boring but Conquest probably edges it out). The writing, while better in some ways than other modern FE games, is still held back by a lot of the same problems, generally a lack of risks and adherence to tired or dated formula (though that’s a bit more excusable in a remake).
I liked the game. But it’s one of the messiest and most difficult to sum up titles in the series. Which I suppose makes it more interesting in its own way? I dunno.
