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Fire Emblem: Fates feels bigger than the games that came before it. Bolstered by the surprise success of 2014’s Fire Emblem: Awakening, Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems have literally doubled down on the franchise, offering not one, but two inter-connected games under a larger banner. However, in attempting to make a bigger, flashier Fire Emblem, developer Intelligent Designs weighed down the game’s core pleasures with bloated new features and unrefined mission design.
In Fates, players control Corrin, a hero whose complicated genealogy and childhood amnesia plays directly into starting a war between neighboring nations of Hoshido and Nohr. The narratives for the two versions of Fates, called Birthright and Conquest, follow Corrin’s campaign based on whether he or she chooses to fight for one side or the other.
Aside from its double-sided narrative, the two versions of Fates serve both sides of a potential rift in the series’ fanbase that’s grown out of the series’ evolution towards a more forgiving, RPG-style experience. Mechanically, Birthright gives players more characters, resources, and, like Awakening, offers random battles so players can earn money and experience. Conquest offers a tougher, more spartan strategy game that expects players to make calculated decisions in and out of battle.
Though they have separate stories, the two parts of Fates form a single game built on the strategy RPG core that has defined modern Fire Emblem games for more than a decade. Players control a cadre of soldiers, navigating them through a series of turn-based battles with increasingly difficult odds. Traditionally, the stakes of those battles have been heightened with a potentially heart-wrenching combination of a relationship mechanic, where characters become friends and even fall in love based on how often they’re paired in combat, and the fact that characters who die in battle stay dead.
While Fates returns with those core mechanics intact, the game uses flashy mechanical conceits to bolster levels that do not feel as polished or intricate as past games have. Many of these conceits revolve around specially marked squares called “dragon veins,” which certain characters can trigger to alter a level in some way, such as freezing a lake to make it passable, or cast a large, area-based spell. While a magical sigil explains, canonically, why a character might be able reach a spot on the map and heal every character, the dragon vein is used, and overused, as a catch-all for “switch.”
For every interesting level designed around them, there’s another that feels propped up, and that, with a little more time and care, might have been more enjoyable without them. This seems doubly damning in light of the fact that game rarely uses many of the devices that Fire Emblem games have used and reused to great effect for “spicing up” levels, such as late-arriving allies or split formations.
Strategy games, like any kind of puzzle, make you feel clever for pulling off a complex maneuver or figuring out a loophole that turns the tide of a battle. While its novelty mechanics make for challenging fights, the battles in Fates never really need to be “cracked;” you simply figure out how survive long enough to complete them.
The biggest changes to the series, however, occur between battles. After every fight, Corrin and his party are transported to a castle outside of the story — don’t ask — that serves as an upgradable overworld where Corrin can speak to his or her comrades and buy new equipment before the next fight.
The nerve-wracking decision over risking a character’s life with every move has not diminished.
The game has been streamlined to make choosing what gear your characters have much more important. While players no longer have to worry about weapon durability — spells and items still have limited use — a larger array of special use-case weapons makes micro-managing equipment as important as position your fighters against the right enemies.
In addition to the essentials, players can build and shift around a variety of improvements, such as a garden for farming vegetables, which can be used at the “mess hall,” which turns vegetables into stat-boosting meals for troops, or to feed the player’s guardian pet.
Yet, while the castle offers many more things to do between every battle, much of the time spent factors into a self-contained and ultimately hollow castle-building metagame. Every upgrade technically offers some kind of practical benefit, though many are geared specifically towards players’ time within the castle, either between fights or during optional “invasion” battles, which take place on the castle map.
Players can share and invade other players’ castles with other players via Streetpass, though, frankly, the customization options are such that, once you’ve laid siege to one castle, you’d laid siege to them all.
Even the areas of the castle that do impact the main game feel superficial. Players can, for example, invite other characters to Corrin’s “personal quarters,” which triggers a brief first-person dating-sim style interaction, which allows players to view characters “face-to-face.” Despite the change of perspective, without any meaningful conversation or gameplay, it’s a strictly mechanical way of gaining relationship points.
The castle isn’t the only aspect of Fates lacking depth. The narrative focuses intensely on the relationships between Corrin, his or her siblings, and the royal family of the opposing army, often to the neglect of the game’s wider cast.
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As a game driven by relationships, character development has always played a key role in making Fire Emblem compelling. Perhaps because the game’s focus remains squarely on the two games’ core casts, secondary characters rarely get even a one or two battle story arc. Too many characters join your team simply because its expected. Even characters that show hints of personality are often relegated to simple emotional caricatures or tropes.
While there may be kernels of information spread across the many relationship conversations one could earn by pairing characters in combat, those insights are too slight and buried too deep to be meaningful for anyone except for the most committed fans.
While so many of the game’s new features fall flat, it’s worth noting that Fire Emblem Fates may be the most interesting one to look at in modern memory. Both parts of Fates, but especially Birthright, trade in the series’ standard medieval fantasy aesthetics for a Japanese-influenced art style.
The series embrace of its Japanese pedigree, from new classes, such of the spirit-summoning Diviner, which are borne of a non-Western mythology, to the decidedly Japanese dating-sim style “personal quarters” activity, gives the series more aesthetic character. Though the gameplay may feel similar, you will not mistake Fates for a different Fire Emblem.
Fans waiting for the next Fire Emblem will certainly not feel cheated by Fates: The nerve-wracking decision over risking a character’s life with every move has not diminished. That said, with its many attempts at innovation falling short of their marks, and its core gameplay lacking the refinement seen in its predecessors, perhaps Nintendo should signal a tactical retreat and focus on making the best Fire Emblem possible.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.