Buttery smooth to control (most of the time) and monstrous in volume of content. I love that it employs a similar design philosophy to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, always encouraging you to play your own way, find creative ways to bend the game’s systems, think outside the box to create your own path. Only two things keep me from calling this the ultimate collect-a-thon. One, the motion controls. Whoever thought throwing your hat upward should be tied to flicking the whole switch needs to be shot out of a cannon. Two, I think a lot of the moons feel like filler. Many of the challenges and the hiding places floored me, but then there were some that were just placed out in the open, not even somewhere particularly challenging to get to. Coupled with the fact that you don’t even need every moon in the game to see the real ending, it seems like they were trying to make the endgame more accessible to kids, but I think they ended up trivializing it a tad.

Several days ago I had a sudden, conflicted whim. On the one hand, I was overwhelmed by a long-suppressed appetite for Fire Emblem's particular brand of tactics gameplay; on the other, I wanted to play a game in said franchise that was new to me but without feeling bad about potentially not sticking with it for the long term. For the first time, I was in tune with the Venn diagram of appetitive desire that has kept Fire Emblem Heroes in business for nearly five years.

In retrospect, it's surprising this didn't happen sooner. I'm an easy mark for free-to-play mobile games when they're branded with Stuff I Already Like™, and I've burned more money at the altars of games like Marvel Future Fight and Pokémon Shuffle than I'm willing to admit. Considering that Fire Emblem is one of my favorite video game franchises (despite the fact that Awakening is the only entry I've sunk a truly substantial amount of time into), you would think I'd have been a day-one player.

But the combination of free-to-play mechanics and Fire Emblem gameplay has always seemed contradictory to me. I'm the type of FE player who plans battles meticulously and leaves combat animations on, in order to amplify the role-playing experience. Battles are long, hard-won affairs that follow their own emotional arcs, many of them of my own making. The unique appeal of the franchise, for me, is feeling like an actual military tactician who charts out a battle plan, then watches with equal measure of pride and horror as my friends and loved ones attempt to execute it. The stakes could not be higher.

The absence of permanent death, critical hits, and other chaotic-neutral gameplay elements certainly is one factor impeding that sense while playing Fire Emblem Heroes, but even more than that it's the amount of content to complete each day. There are the main story levels and their side missions, which together appear to number in the hundreds, but which the game also discourages you from playing in favor of 24-hour Special Maps and the Training Tower. There are limited-time events such as Hall of Forms (in which you control pre-built characters) and Mjölnir's Strike (a tower-defense mode). There's asynchronous PvP in Aether Raids as well as the Coliseum. The latter area includes modes like Arena, Arena Assault, Allegiance Battles, and Resonant Battles; I'm unable to meaningfully distinguish between any of them. There's a FarmVille-esque social hub where your characters congregate, and in which you harvest crops and cook recipes.

Most of these modes refresh each day. Many are also the primary destination for farming a particular resource that's necessary for character-building. Speaking of which, did I mention there are nearly 800 characters in Fire Emblem Heroes? Sure, some of them are the same character in different outfits, but they still count as different units when it comes to battle. You can have multiple copies of the same hero (at multiple different star levels), which you can merge into a single copy for better stats. And because apparently this game wasn't already enough like Pokémon, you have to be careful of sacrificing a copy with good internal values (IVs) in order to build the character optimally. Each character also has seven skill slots, which can be individually leveled and/or swapped by sacrificing a different character with access to the desired skill. An optimally built Brave Lucina, for example, would require sacrificing five or six other characters with access to the skills that best complement her base stats. The system itself is legible, but as you can probably already tell, it's... a lot.

That's not to say you can, or should, try to create optimal endgame builds for all of the game's characters. That's one of the game's strengths, actually: any character can be viable for practically any game mode. The uphill progression battle is just more uphill for some characters than others. If you don't already have access to a favorite, though, the process of selecting which characters to focus on is daunting. It's comparatively easy to look at the roster of a game like Marvel Future Fight and say, "Okay, Iron Man is probably a better character to invest in than, say, Karnak." (Occasionally you would be wrong, but you would at least be right in principle.) Much of my time spent "playing" Fire Emblem Heroes was actually spent consulting wikis to determine which characters were most worth upgrading.

Luckily, the characters I was able to access are among the best in the game. I was able to freely select a 5-star Brave Edelgard, and I pulled a Fallen Corrin (Female) and Ninja Corrin from random selectors. The latter apparently is considered the game's absolute best character by many in the FEH community. I acquired her on my first and only attempt at her selector, and I pulled plenty of other 5-star characters using free premium currency (which the game dumps on you by the bucketful), so I have nothing negative to say about the gacha rates. Your mileage may vary?

Together, these three characters veritably deleted my enemies with minimal resistance. For a few days, this was fun. But as I discovered increasingly more game modes lurking in the game's submenus each day, I began to feel dismayed: I'd wanted a casual Fire Emblem experience that would be rewarding to play casually, not a game that required several hours of commitment each day!

At first, I met the sheer volume of daily content by turning off my beloved combat animations. When that wasn't enough to work through all the game modes in less than several hours, I began to play levels at a faster, almost reckless pace. But still, there were just too many modes to play and too many characters to comb through, research, and upgrade. It may not demand real-world cash for the player to be successful, but Fire Emblem Heroes demands the player's time in spades.

In my last few sessions with Fire Emblem Heroes, it became clear that whatever itch this game may initially have scratched, it wasn't doing that anymore. The charming characters and colorful artwork became increasingly difficult to discern. All I could see ahead was hours and hours of senseless grind.

To be fair, I suppose, the game doesn't put a gun to your head and demand that you play every single mode, every single day. It doesn't require that you build characters to their optimal or maximum potential. But that's how I've traditionally approached free-to-play games (and I've played a lot of them): I'm all in or I'm all out. Perhaps Fire Emblem Heroes ultimately will prove the exception, and I'll return to it in the future just to play the story mode. In fact, I rather hope that's the case; that's why I'm marking this game "Shelved" rather than "Abandoned." For me, returning to this game simply for the story would clearly mark the progress I've been trying to make in terms of my relationship with free-to-play games: namely, to either stop playing them altogether or to stop playing them as intended by the developers.

After years of hopping from one free-to-play game to another, I'm exhausted by the infinite treadmill they represent. Fire Emblem Heroes, an obviously compromised version of a preexisting game franchise that I already loved, threw this into greater relief than the likes of Marvel Future Fight or this year's Marvel Future Revolution, both games that I played arguably to excess before ultimately quitting them. Becoming more active on Backloggd in recent weeks has helped as well. There's a satisfying conclusiveness to "completing" games, to formulating finished thoughts about finished cultural productions, and to engaging with others' responses to those cultural productions, that I've missed while lost amid the dark forest of free-to-play.

Thank you for being a part of my recovery.

My dad bought himself a Switch recently and fell in love with Gris. He sent me $5 to buy this during a sale a few weeks back. He loves the idea of a platformer starting out grey and gaining more and more color.

I liked that aspect in this game, too. I liked the silent story telling and gorgeous visuals mixed into one. I liked the spread out reward of new move-sets, and how not everything is given to you at once. I liked how it makes you take it slow, and pay attention to all the little details put into the game, really making this more of a playable coloring book.

I went into it not expecting much more than a short, pretty game, and that’s what I got. Worth the $5 and is now a nice game to talk to my dad about.