My thoughts on FE15's overall gameplay experience after beating it!

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia was an addictive and enjoyable experience during the 30 or so hours I spent with it. Here are some of my thoughts on the gameplay for Ch 1-5 (I'm saving postgame for the NA release since I have finals soon):

The Negatives

I’m starting with the bad things first, so that the good things can be highlighted more after the flaws!

1. The game is overall very easy. I played on Normal-Classic, so I’m hoping that Hard Mode bumps it up to more respectable levels of challenge when I play it again for the NA release. The difficulty starts to bump up a bit in Celica 3 and 4, and Alm 4, but the difficulty never feels any harder than a typical early FE6 map. Most of the later difficulty on Alm’s route comes from 3 or 5 range Bow Knights that can gang up and sniper your casters, while for Celica it comes from nuke spell casters so Gold Knights and Dread Fighters become the solution to both of those problems while the other units just sit back and have a picnic.

2. Map spawned encounters are often excessive. When I first got to Ch3, I tried alternating between Celica and Alm, but that resulted in spawning more encounters for the opposite lord! If I had to go back to a town to forge, or an earlier shrine to promote, it would spawn more encounters. This was most annoying towards the end of 3 or beginning of 4, where I’d go back to a shrine to promote a unit to its T3/2 class, only to gain more exp which would cause another unit to reach promotion level, so I’d have to back to the shrine again and spawn more map encounters! Map spawns stop at least for Alm after completing certain maps, but I didn’t know that at first.

3. Celica’s party comes in at endgame were a bit underleveled compared to Alm’s party, so level 5 FK Palla just sat by and did some green cheerleading while level 11 FK Clair with the Gradivus did most of the heavy lifting. Same with Python being level 8 or 9 while Leon was level 3. Conrad, Celica, Jenny, and Saber still contributed enough though and were only slightly underleveled. Still, I would have liked for Celica’s party to have some exploration time of their own in the final party, just because Celica’s last dungeon wasn’t enough to get them on par with Alm’s by the end.

4. Celica’s chapter 3 maps would really benefit from having a warp user. Celica herself and most of the mages can’t gain any exp on the desert maps due to 1 mov in sand tile, and Celica has a fixed deployment slot, which makes things even worse.

5. Lowish number of units per route limits choice over which units to use, especially since the armor knights and the later game unpromoted units are automatically exclusion worthy from your team.

6. Most of the maps just feel a bit dated. Alm tends to have huge open spaces, but he at least as a Silque taxi. The Celica boat maps are really bad, but at least those maps are short and easy.

The Positives

1. Mila’s turnwheel is such a huge quality of life improvement, since it essentially saves time from resetting while still allowing you to go back and use a different strategy. There were sometimes that I did use it just to rig better RNG.

2. Many of the bosses in chapter 3 and 4 and 5 are really tough in a good way, but they also feel ridiculously stronger than most enemies.

3. Saints (promoted clerics) are probably my favorite staffbot class ever, due to their passive ally healing, greater than 4 mov, a terror killing spell, some Nostanking, and unlimited usage of really strong spells like Physic or Fortify. Silque gets a special shoutout for being Alm’s Taxi with warp. Towards the end of his route I just sat back and had Silque warp everyone inside castles and whatnot so I wouldn’t have to go around the tedious route.

4. SoV feels like a classic fire emblem game, in a good way. I think the game benefits from not having pairup, while making old school style 5 range support bonuses feel good to use. While late game unpromoted units are exclusion worthy, they aren’t completely worthless or untrainable, so even though Delthea is basically the same unit as Nino, you can actually train her and catch her up fairly quickly. This is mostly because of dungeon encounters though, and it is not really like you’re actually grinding since you just go through the encounters to get the treasure or whatnot and leave. I found this to be refreshing, since even though these late game growth units were still unnecessary, they felt like a usuable option for once.

5. About unit balance as a whole, it feels well balanced for reasons mentioned previously, and also because the strongest units aren’t so overpowering that they can easily take on the game by themselves. Falcon Knights and Dread Fighters and Saints to an extent are the best units, but they don’t make other classes irrevelevant. The only issues are that female mages have a late promotion time, and it sucks that sages/priestesses and Celica are stuck with 4 move after promotion (and I guess Barons as well).

6. Somehow, Bow users feel the best balanced in the entire series. Yes they have amazing 1-3 or 1-5 range, but meh bulk and speed and shotty hit rates. I’d like to see this style of bow users return in the future, with 1-X range, but meh stats so that they aren’t OP, since something like Takumi with 1-5 range and flight would be grossly overpowered unless his bases and growths and hit rates were reduced.

7. The dungeons are just great, and really remind me on what you’d see in an SMT game. Still, I wish it were possible to flee from dungeon battles, but I guess that wouldn’t make sense.

8. The only turtling disencentive really are summoner type enemies/bosses, which also fulfill the the role of reinforcments in this game. It gives you the option of: Do you want to send your pegasus knight up to this tough mage to try to kill them, or would you rather slowly fend off waves of witches and gargoyles as you make your way to that summoner? I kind of like this mechanic, but I wish their minions didn’t vanish when the caster died, which would slightly raise the challenge.

Well that is all I can think of, but let me know if you have questions about the game!