Developed by:Â Intelligent Systems, Nintendo SPD
Published by:Â Nintendo of America
Reviewed on:Â Nintendo 3DS
Fire Emblem Fates is the latest game in the series since Fire Emblem Awakening was released a few years ago. This time around its a series of multiple games, Fire Emblem Fates Conquest, Fire Emblem Fates Birthright, and the recently released DLC campaign, Fire Emblem Fates Revelations. We here at CFG have  reviewed each of the games that are out will talk about the differences between the games. This is the review for the Nohr side of the story, Conquest.
Conquest is the game where you play on the Nohr side of the war against the family in the Birthright game, the Hoshido. You play as Corrin, the avatar of this game who fights with swords and Dragonstones. In Conquest you follow the orders of King Garon and go on suicide missions one after another for his benefit. Throughout the story, Corrin becomes determined to attempt to change the views other parties have against the Nohr kingdom. Corrin does this by keeping fatalities of the enemy army to a minimum while several others within the kingdom work against you to keep you from succeeding.
This is the purest of the three Fire Emblem games.  It can be hard and merciless. Birthright is an easier experience, giving you plenty of time to level up your characters experience and their support levels. In Conquest, its only recommended to get more battles to gain experience points for your characters. Pray you don’t lose anyone in this game because it’s far too easy to have your characters lost in Conquest’s more challenging scenarios. You’ll gan new units almost every chapter leading up towards the middle of the game. That does help a bit, but failing to evenly level up your troops and letting the ones you use the most die outside of the main character will be very costly. I’m not ashamed to say that for the sake of competing the game for the review,  I dumbed the game down halfway through to casual after losing all of my units except for Corrin and Camilla on one mission.
Not that it’s a bad thing mind you. The changing objectives are typically more exciting than the simple ‘eliminate all units’ objective. My favorite was defend the harbor against Takumi and his soldiers for 16+ turns. Others involved actively fleeing the battle with all of units in tact while being attacked by wave after wave of enemies. There’s even a little sneaking event that you get with Azura.
One of the things I felt could’ve been better was actually still one of the cooler things about the game: the castle that you can build in between battles. It’s a neat idea and invading other players castles can be a lot of fun. But the only way to get more items for characters such as weapons and healing spells is to invade to get more points for upgrading your stores. This is mitigated by allowing you to go online or through StreetPass but if you don’t take the time you’ll never get a better weapon. I didn’t get through more than halfway to the game before I got a item greater than rank C because I hardly went online. On the plus side, these online/streetpass battles are a great way to grind for relationship points between paired units to eventually access the children characters.
Online sites that I’ve been reading have expressed that it makes more sense to play Birthright before Conquest in terms of story flow. It’s not exactly like the minor differences you’d see with different Pokemon versions such as Red and Blue. Also to complete the whole story, there’s still the Fire Emblem Fates Revelation that’s supposed to bring it all together in the end. So if you want the full story, you’ll spending a lot. Luckily, unless you were able to get the collector’s edition all three games on one cart, you can still get the opposite game for a reduced price. Fates  is still worth buying if you’re a fan of Fire Emblem and strategy RPGs.Â
I would highly recommend getting Conquest if you intend to only play one game and are a long time veteran of the series. I also recommend only playing above the normal setting in order to properly have a challenging game. Or if you’re limited on time, play it casual; unless you’re one of the players who would normally restart the game once a unit dies anyway, then you’d only be saving yourself time powering down your 3DS just to save your archer.  If you’re not ready for the difficulty, maybe start with Birthright first.
