Using both pre-rendered and gameplay footage, Nintendo unveiled to gamers earlier this week that a new Fire Emblem game is in the works for Nintendo 3DS. I. Cannot. Wait.
Seriously, I loved the latest Fire Emblem game, subtitled Awakening and out on 3DS a few years ago. If you haven’t played it, prepare yourself for a beautifully written, mechanically-moving strategy game with deep role-playing elements and a cast that you’ll quickly fall in love with. It’s OK, we’ll wait. Pairing characters up so that they could work together, compliment each other’s skill sets in battle, and fight for you in StreetPass skirmishes proved intensely satisfying.
Now that a new Fire Emblem game is on the way, let’s try to capture a few of the details that set it apart from Awakening and how it looks to improve on the last game:
- The opening cinematic starts with armies fighting in a wooded area. The soldiers on horses look like they’ve got ancient middle-eastern garb, including a Spartan-looking tuft of hair on each helmet while the ground forces seem to be dressed in slightly more eastern-inspired armor and facemasks. Will the opposing forces feature even more variation?
- Flying forces and keeps will return to the game, though the archers defending the castle appear to be using flame-tipped arrows. Will players be able to use poison-tipped weapons or ice-infused projectile attacks from mounts?
- A large rock-boss monster appears and puts a massive mit on the castle walls. This rock-boss has a flattened, tablet-looking face with a stern looking expression on it. Will Fire Emblem’s miniaturized military units have to bring down bigger bosses, like those that take up multiple spots on the battlefield or actually change the level as they attack, creating a valley with a smash attack, for example?
- One heroic-looking sequence in the trailer appears to feature an enemy on a horse with a central figure wielding a very Japanese-looking blade. The character’s face isn’t shown, so could this be the player character or is it another central figure like Chrom was in Fire Emblem: Awakening?
- A dancer-class character is featured prominently in the new game’s teaser trailer, but I always felt like the dancer in Fire Emblem: Awakening was meant to be a comely and sympathetic unit the player would want to protect and use for high-strategy. Will this dancer feature more prominently in the game’s story? Will she have a fellow dancer to interact with at camp and will players be able to power her fighting ability up with specific partners?
- The battle transition now swings the camera around the field map and into the scene with their hero or heroine and the opponent. This looks really cool and seems to give a better sense of the players surroundings in battle, but the game also appears to feature a lot of new animations.
- Whole armies sit in the background of some of the battles shown in the gameplay portion of the trailer, but they’re just watching the player kick ass! I can’t help but wonder if Fire Emblem aficionados can expect the biggest battles the series has yet seen.
- There are lots of stern-looking soldiers, but there’s also a maid character shown during the dialog clips. The next Fire Emblem game seems to feature the same character exchanges and types of interaction, though we’ll still hope for new ways of seeing relationships grow back at camp.
- The settings shown in the trailer feature Japanese-style castles, huge battlefields, a port with big battleships, a desert town with windmills, and (towards the end of the trailer) an inter-dimensional-looking space with islands floating upside-down and sideways.
Could you catch any other details in the latest Fire Emblem trailer? Share with us in the comments and be sure to click here for our impressions of all the software and the “New” 3DS XL hardware from this week’s big Nintendo presentation.
