![]() The question Fire Emblem Fates asks is: What would happen if that choice were practically the first one you made? What if you could choose your family? In and of itself, this presents a radical alternative to the kind of end-game decision-making that you see in games like Mass Effect (2007) or Bastion (2011), where the player finally makes a choice with world historical consequences and is rewarded with one of a few end cutscenes depending on what they chose. Here, though, that absent memory forks your path: you must decide whether to side with the people you just met who claim to be your real family ( Birthright ), the warmongering family who raised you as one of their own ( Conquest ), or strike out on your own ( Revelation ). Leadership within a collective poses a radical alternative to the heroic individualism of war stories Fire Emblem Fates ‘ excellent predecessor, Fire Emblem Awakening (2012), has a protagonist fundamentally like this. Normally this manifests itself as a simple cipher, allowing for role-play that doesn’t have to be sensitive to ideas of memory or character that precedes your intervention. ![]() As is conventional in this series (and, indeed, across a whole range of related genres), your character has forgotten a key part of their history. Fates contains three full games: Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation. Fire Emblem presents ideas of war and leadership that cut against hero worship by making you responsible not only for troops’ movements in combat, but, with the castle-building and support mechanisms, responsible for their well-being away from the battlefield, too.įire Emblem Fates expands on this series-long theme of war as a collective tragedy rather than a place for individuals to prove themselves as heroes by making you choose not only how you care for your army, but which side of the war you’re on. It’s a pernicious tendency less common in Hollywood, where we might rightly expect a jingoistic good guy with a gun, than in videogames-specifically in the kinds of games Spec Ops: The Line (2012) immanently critiques. Thinking about leadership within a collective poses a radical alternative to the kind of heroic individualism that war stories love to traffic in. We see the former constantly in games the latter has, for the most part, stubbornly remained the purview of film and the novel. Throughout the series, Fire Emblem has brought with it an idea about leadership that is as much about tactics and bravery as it is about community and empathy. If you haven’t played a Fire Emblem game before, this is the best simile I’ve got to explain it: Imagine if, in order to play Chess well, you not only had to know how to use each piece most effectively, but also had to know which pawn loved which knight, who the left bishop would die for, what that rook wants to be when he grows up, etc. But mastery here is not only a thorough knowledge of its systems, but also includes its characters, the people who you’re leading into combat. It demands masterful play at anything other than the lowest difficulty. But I doubt that we would find it satisfying to conclude that, a thousand hours later, we were “just playing.”įire Emblem Fates capitalizes on the time you spend with it-days, certainly weeks, possibly-in both a narrative and ludic sense. No doubt psychoanalysis would have a few things to say about these compulsively repetitive relationships. The repeated and revised encounter lets us learn the systems that comprise the game. If reread and rewatch are exceptional, replay is the normal condition of games. “play” seems like a reductive way of describing the lengthy relationship with videogames
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