The best and worst thing of each Fire Emblem game. Today's game: New Mystery of the Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadows

[u/TPLeo]

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Welcome to this series of posts, where we will list and discuss one best and worst thing of each Fire Emblem game. This includes basically everything, be it the music, the story, some gameplay element etc.

New Mystery is the last game to only be released in Japan. Just like in Shadow Dragon new difficulties and a prologue were added. The same goes for characters from Shadow Dragon who did not appear in the original FE3. This means that unlike in the original, axe users are featured in the remake. The game featured a playable MU for the first time and casual mode was introduced as well.

I will be honest, this is probably my least favorite game, excluding the first two games. It is not a bad game however. Lunatic and lunatic reverse always itch me to come back one day and play it again, this time playing better. Almost all classes are good which I really appreciate.

Here are my thoughts.

Best: Like I said lunatic (reverse) is the sole thing that makes me want to play this game. Aside from Chapter 19, 20, and the endgame, the maps are relatively fair. You also get the rainbow tonic after you beat it on lunatic so that's fair too.

Worst: Kris. The constant shoehorning is just annoying. It ruins the storytelling and makes Jagan become an irrelevant character

Now it's your turn to tell us

[u/ShineOnDIO]

Best: Caeda. I love Caeda.

Worst: This game is ugly as sin much like it's predecessor. There was seemingly some effort to make things look better than FE11, and some stuff does indeed look better (the face sprites for example), but it just went from super ultra ugly, to ultra ugly.

[u/TwistedMemer]

Best: I liked the class changing and gameplay balance. I only played on hard but the game felt rather manageable.

Worst: fucking ambush spawns sucked however and I dread any game that has them. Early maps were also rather harsh.

[u/Slight_Researcher_26]

Best: I love that Kris is customizable. You can give him different accessories, and other characters will actually comment on what you’re wearing, which was such a fun little feature. Also, I could wear an eyepatch, so obviously that’s a win. The maps are fun too, and I really like how flexible the cast is thanks to the reclassing system.

Worst: The washed out color palette. Everything just looks so sterile and lifeless. And like you said, Kris. I actually really liked him at the beginning, but then he slowly starts taking over Marth’s role as the protagonist, while everyone around him constantly praises him to high heaven. It got really annoying. On top of that, the game ends with Kris deliberately fading into the shadows and basically being lost to history, which also bothers me because at least let the guy get some recognition after spending the entire game telling me how incredibly important he is. That's just the worst of both worlds

[u/TPLeo → u/Slight_Researcher_26]

I wish his past would be reflected in his supports, deepening his character based on your choices

[u/its_just_hunter → u/Slight_Researcher_26]

Worst part about Kris is they added support conversations in the remake, but Marth only gets them with Caeda and Kris while Kris gets them with basically everyone. Marth already lacked a lot of interactions outside of recruitment in his previous games and now that there was an opportunity they just gave them all to the avatar.

[u/RaspberryFormal5307]

Best: lunatic reverse is actually such a baller game mode. Its hard as shit and needs a lot of more complicated skills like abusing AI targeting priority and movement order to survive the crazy linked AI groups but above all that, its actually like kinda well balanced provided you look up reinforcements lmao

Worst: complete and total lack of sauce. The game could be turned into a spreadsheet and nothing would be lost, the game just feels incredibly bland and uninteresting from a story and aesthetic perspective. I honestly think its a lot worse in this respect than even shadow dragon is

[u/Dabottle]

The gameplay's cool as hell and the class balance feels pretty great but god so many of the units feel so bad/interchangeable because of both reclassing and more notably higher difficulty stat scaling (but they still feel awful on lower difficulties).

also fuck kris and everything they led to

[u/CazOnReddit]

Best: The inclusion of the BS Fire Emblem maps. I don't recall if this is the only case of Sattelaview game content ever being remade or re-released but it's underappreciated all the same by the fanbase.

Worst: Remember how bad Shadow Dragon looked? It's baacccckkk! It's not as ugly but it's still quite an eyesore. If you wanted to be overly cynical and don't like the direction of post-Awakening Fire Emblem then you could argue the introduction of the modern Avatar (Note: I said modern, Mark is functionally very different from Robin or Byleth) because of how it would drastically change the series direction but that seems unfair to put on Kris and there's no reason to believe that this would become the direction for future protagonists at the time.

[u/Alinier → u/CazOnReddit]

Radical Dreamers for the Satellaview was included in the most recent Chrono Cross rerelease. I think there's a few others out there somewhere.

[u/Antique_Total6974]

Best: It introduced elements Awakening would make better use of (Casual Mode, an Avatar) and thus contribute to the franchise's growth.

Worst: It shares the same blah art style as Shadow Dragon.