Fire Emblem Shadows

Fire Emblem Shadows is a fine enough game, but once you play it you can understand why Nintendo didn’t bother marketing this much. It’s not quite Fire Emblem enough for Fire Emblem fans, and non-FE fans probably already have a roughly equivalent game to enjoy on mobile. If nothing else, it does what it intends to do relatively well, and the monetization doesn’t actively try to pick a player’s pockets.

Fire Emblem Shadows is not only a poor Fire Emblem game, but also a game that isn’t very fun. The strategic possibilities during matches are reduced to a minimum, and even the investigative component, meant to uncover the team’s traitor, fails to trigger engaging dynamics.

Fire Emblem Shadows is a turgid mobile game that serves up dull automated battles involving pay-to-win nonsense, timers, and cooldowns. The main selling point of a unique social experiment/turn-based battle hybrid is very weak in its setup, with neither enough players nor time in combat to create any semblance of actual strategy, and the game itself looks and plays poorly on the battlefield. There are a few nice cutscenes for fans who persist, and outfits for the outfits fans. But beyond this, it's thumbs down as far as the eye can see for this failed experiment.

It’s atrocious, failing both as a tactical combat game and a whodunnit, instead settling for charging you to win more frequently via its paid battle pass.

There is a nugget of a good idea here, and one that is interesting on paper. Unfortunately, Fire Emblem Shadows' most innovative ideas bump up against its mobile and free-to-play nature, resulting in a game that is both not for Fire Emblem fans and hard to recommend to anyone.

Not a good game by any means but severely underated by people that don't take the time to understand it's systems. The matches become quite fun once you start playing against better players. However, it takes a while to get there, and the game is still very barebones in terms of content. Fun for a few weeks, but that's about it.

It's honestly so sad that such a fantastic franchise with tons of masterpieces in storytelling and gameplay now has entry that completely fails in EVERY single aspect and it's legitimately not just a bad Fire Emblem game, but an awful game in general. Fire Emblem Shadows is a mobile game that feels more like a failed experiment more than anything, everything is so mindless and automated, there's no strategy at all, the social aspects are also terrible and just simply stupid. The graphics and art style is ugly and dumb too. This is just a huge insult to the whole Fire Emblem franchise.

Nintendo turns to an absolute trash company. Gameplay is very shallow. only 3 players means it's very easy to tell who the imposter is as they're usually the last one standing. Unless, they choose to not use their attacks at all. The store and battle pass feels like they're there just because it's a mobile game and there needs to be in-app purchases.

Fire Emblem Shadows misses the point of what a Fire Emblem game should be, on two major fronts. The first is in the base genre, with Shadows being a real time strategy game, rather than a typical turn based, strategy RPG. Heroes established how a Fire Emblem mobile game should play like, monetization aside. They could have tried to blend the gameplay of the mainline series, while also adding different twists for the imposter (like setting up traps for the allies they are deceiving). The second is how the social deduction aspect is integrated. Games like Among Us set the standard for what a social deduction game should be like, and they've refined it in the years since release. The same can be said for the Death Note game, Killer Within, all the while Death Note stays true to the series (and has the ability to use your microphone). In Shadows, it's mostly an auto-battler, with skill cooldowns. If you're the traitor, you have to make sure to damage your "allies", but don't make it too obvious. Hit yourself or the enemies as well, and that can help a little. I normally have high praise for the Fire Emblem series, but even the worse mainline Fire Emblem game is better than this sloppy mobile game. There are both better Fire Emblem options, and better social deduction game options than Shadows. Don't be surprised if this game gets discontinued in the next year, despite the popularity of the franchise.