Thoughts on the game from a newer player

Title! Thought I'd give my thoughts on the game since I've been playing it for a bit now, and having an overall good experience.

As some backstory I love fire emblem, but never quite got into the newer entries due to how convoluted they were with children, romances, and abilities. However, FEH gives me the good part of that and nixes imo the bad. I get access to a huge stable of heroes, I can build em how I want, and I don't have to worry about fucking up a plotline somehow. I enjoyed the small bits of story in the game, and I think for a f2p mobile game, that effort went a long way to make me a paying customer.

I initially did a few chapters, then dumped about 150 into the game and pulled quite a few 5 stars, and leveled all those while beating the game on normal and hard. I got about halfway through lunatic before I realized I was getting my ass smashed. I was initially pretty let down before I found the tempest trials and all that stuff, thinking I'd never be able to finish lunatic (still working on it!) and I had nothing else to do. After messing with TT, the grand battle, the arena and even the training tower, I think the game has enough content to keep it fresh for me, with the escalating rewards and the constantly swapping bonus units for higher points. Around this time I discovered game press, builds, IVs, and sadly, disappointment.

I think a few things really need to be addressed in the long run for the game to survive, and for me, it all centers around IVs and SI. I realize SI is a fairly new addition to the game, but currently there is no real way to farm SP. They should either remove the 1.5 increased cost on learning inherited abilities, or give us an actual way to farm for it. I’ve got almost 1k SP to farm just to kit out the setup I wanted to use for the Ike I pulled, not really a great outlook. Speaking of Ikes and hero pulls, that brings me to my really big letdown, I HATE the IV system. I know it’s a fire emblem staple, but it really kinda ruined a lot of the enjoyment for me. Sometimes I wonder if I lost my streak in the arena due to bad play, or bad IVs. If you’re going to have some abilities and weapons locked behind 3 to 5 percent drop rates, I would at least expect all those 5 star exclusive units to have set in stone IVs. IF you MUST have random boons and banes, have them relegated to 3 and 4 star units that you can seek out much easier than the 5 stars. Or, better yet let us use badges to swap ONE of the IVs for another (either another boon or bane), then at least you only have to have half right. The RNG is just way too compressed in terms of fighting for the pull and the perfect IV setup. Changing them should be expensive, since in theory it would be the last thing you do (pull hero, level hero, inherit skills, learn skills, swap IVs, battle ready). I most likely won’t delete my account or anything, but I might shelve the game for a while, hoping that that’s added in an update somewhere down the line.

Thanks for reading if you did, I’d love to hear some other player’s thoughts on al this if you’ve been playing a while. :3