I originally played the first two acts of Echoes years ago but found it was a little slow paced. Particularly going from the end of Act 1 to starting completely fresh with tutorial maps in Act 2 kind of killed momentum for me. It wasn't until my amazing experience with Fire Emblem Gaiden that I decided to give the remake a second chance, and I'm glad I did.
Shadows of Valentia is a very faithful remake, almost to a fault, which manages to expand on the characters and story in a very strong direction. The presentation of the game is stellar, with outstanding music, artwork, voice acting, prose, and new 3D dungeons which manage to feel right at home in the game.
However, such a faithful remake also made many of the flaws of the original much more apparent. The pacing of the original, while also very slow, was accelerated by having less story beats, dungeon encounters, time taken for deployments, etc. It could be just from playing the games back to back, but SoV felt like a much longer game. Granted I played the DLC and extra maps, which added some time to an already long game, but it did feel like the pacing for this game was a little worse than Gaiden on 3x speed.
On the topic of new characters it had its ups and downs. Cleric Faye was a powerhouse and I thought she was a positive addition to make it feel like less of a boy's club. , I did not like the introduction of Conrad. I think he kind of ruined some of Celica's character development by telling her the act 3 twist, rather than her figuring it out herself. Fernand was a bit of a cartoonish villain for my liking, but I really enjoyed Berkut's final turn at the end. I thought his character had pretty believable motivation for doing what he did, and they handled it well. In terms of the DLC, I thought the new characters were interesting but they never really felt part of the team. I challenged myself to use Emma and Randal through chapters 4 and 5, but it came at the expense of appreciating Zeke/Titania who join late and have a much better story.
Story-wise, I think some of the twists, namely Alm's background and King Rudolf's motivations do seem a little more out of place than they did in FE2. I would have liked to have seen them change it up a bit more than they did, at least to make Rudolf's actions make a little more sense.
I beat the game on hard, and while I was happy to revisit the maps, I think they could have gone further revamping them. I don't think FE2 is particularly well known for its map design, and some of the uninspired choices made it over. The simple weapon system worked fine, and the consumables were a nice addition. The growths in this game were not as abysmal as Gaiden but still the growths are much lower and it always felt like it killed momentum when a character you like leveled up twice and only gained 2 points to a stat like Skill. I played around with reclassing a bit, but it felt a little like a dry run for Three Houses. Having everyone on the battlefield is nice and some of the endgame maps felt appropriately big. It is unfortunate there's no maddening, especially one with no grinding possibilities, but c'est la vie.
Overall, I feel great about the game, but I think I still prefer Gaiden as crazy as that sounds. Something about the minimalism was lost in translation, but this is still an excellent game that feels like a real mix of old and new Fire Emblem.
Shadows of Valentia is a very faithful remake, almost to a fault, which manages to expand on the characters and story in a very strong direction. The presentation of the game is stellar, with outstanding music, artwork, voice acting, prose, and new 3D dungeons which manage to feel right at home in the game.
However, such a faithful remake also made many of the flaws of the original much more apparent. The pacing of the original, while also very slow, was accelerated by having less story beats, dungeon encounters, time taken for deployments, etc. It could be just from playing the games back to back, but SoV felt like a much longer game. Granted I played the DLC and extra maps, which added some time to an already long game, but it did feel like the pacing for this game was a little worse than Gaiden on 3x speed.
On the topic of new characters it had its ups and downs. Cleric Faye was a powerhouse and I thought she was a positive addition to make it feel like less of a boy's club. , I did not like the introduction of Conrad. I think he kind of ruined some of Celica's character development by telling her the act 3 twist, rather than her figuring it out herself. Fernand was a bit of a cartoonish villain for my liking, but I really enjoyed Berkut's final turn at the end. I thought his character had pretty believable motivation for doing what he did, and they handled it well. In terms of the DLC, I thought the new characters were interesting but they never really felt part of the team. I challenged myself to use Emma and Randal through chapters 4 and 5, but it came at the expense of appreciating Zeke/Titania who join late and have a much better story.
Story-wise, I think some of the twists, namely Alm's background and King Rudolf's motivations do seem a little more out of place than they did in FE2. I would have liked to have seen them change it up a bit more than they did, at least to make Rudolf's actions make a little more sense.
I beat the game on hard, and while I was happy to revisit the maps, I think they could have gone further revamping them. I don't think FE2 is particularly well known for its map design, and some of the uninspired choices made it over. The simple weapon system worked fine, and the consumables were a nice addition. The growths in this game were not as abysmal as Gaiden but still the growths are much lower and it always felt like it killed momentum when a character you like leveled up twice and only gained 2 points to a stat like Skill. I played around with reclassing a bit, but it felt a little like a dry run for Three Houses. Having everyone on the battlefield is nice and some of the endgame maps felt appropriately big. It is unfortunate there's no maddening, especially one with no grinding possibilities, but c'est la vie.
Overall, I feel great about the game, but I think I still prefer Gaiden as crazy as that sounds. Something about the minimalism was lost in translation, but this is still an excellent game that feels like a real mix of old and new Fire Emblem.