‘Fire Emblem Echoes’ offers a season pass that costs more than the game

By Gabe Gurwin May 3, 2017

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia - 'A Master Class in Strategy'

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia releases in just a few weeks and will serve as, presumably, one of Nintendo’s last big-name 3DS exclusives. As with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the company is supporting it with a plethora of downloadable content, but the pricing of the extras could raise some eyebrows.

Available alongside the game on May 19, the Fire Emblem Echoes season pass will cost you an extra $45 for 22 pieces of content, which Nintendo pointed out in a press release is a savings of 30 percent compared to the downloadable content packs’ individual prices. That’s still $5 more than the cost of the standard Fire Emblem Echoes game, however, and some of the season pass’ contents remains a mystery.

The first downloadable content pack, the “Fledgling Warriors” pack, arrives on May 19 and offers a new dungeon called The Astral Temple and two new maps, and will set you back $8. The second and third packs, “Undaunted Heroes” and “Lost Altars,” both release a week later on May 25 and offer new dungeons, with the latter also offering “the power to upgrade characters to exclusive classes that don’t appear in the main game. They’ll cost $10 and $15, respectively.

On June 1, players can purchase the “Rise of the Deliverance” pack for $13, which contains a prologue detailing the “previously untold history of Valentia,” as well as extra challenging maps and the ability to control characters that aren’t available in the main game. The final paid downloadable pack doesn’t have a name or release date, but it will cost another $6 when it releases and contains two pieces of content.

While Nintendo is quick to point out that other downloadable content for Fire Emblem Echoes will be free, and you can also use your Amiibo figures to get extra bonuses in the game, we’d advise anyone considering buying the game to wait until they’ve played it before purchasing such a pricey bunch of extras.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia is out on May 19. A $60 limited edition is also available, offering extra music and a pin set.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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Fire Emblem Engage makes the wait for a Nintendo Switch 2 more tolerable

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If you had asked me whether or not I was ready for an upgraded Nintendo Switch two months ago, my answer would have been an emphatic yes. I had just played Pokémon Scarlet and, like many people, was baffled by its poor technical performance. I began to wonder if Nintendo’s aging hardware had finally hit its limits, unable to meet developers’ growing ambitions. Perhaps it wasn’t just time for a Switch Pro, but a new console altogether.

That desire was a reactionary one. Two months after that Pokémon game's ugly launch, I find myself stunned by the Switch’s latest exclusive, Fire Emblem Engage. The tactical RPG is one of the console’s best-looking games to date. It’s a major step up from 2018’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses, with brighter colors that pop on my Switch OLED screen and silky smooth performance that makes it feel like a playable anime.

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Fire Emblem Engage takes the right cues from Nintendo’s mobile games

Alear clenches his fist while wearing a ring in Fire Emblem Engage.

Given how long the video game development process takes, sometimes we don’t see the full impact of a game’s innovation until years later. That’s something I immediately noticed when booting up Fire Emblem Engage, the latest installment of Nintendo’s long-running tactics series. After a few hours with it, I could see how the project was likely conceived as a direct reaction to 2017’s Fire Emblem Heroes, one of Nintendo’s biggest mobile hits. Though 2018’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses was a major critical success for the series, Heroes seems to be the title that’s shaping Fire Emblem’s future five years later.

Fire Emblem Engage - Announcement Trailer - Nintendo Direct 9.13.2022

Gaming

Nintendo’s mobile games are more influential than you might think

Alear and Marth open a door in Fire Emblem Engage.

Nintendo’s mobile games don’t get enough credit. While Nintendo had some undeniable hits like Pokémon Go and Fire Emblem Heroes, many consider the rest of its mobile efforts fairly underwhelming and even somewhat disappointing for a video game company of Nintendo’s stature. While nothing ever quite reached the high bar Pokémon Go set in 2016, Nintendo’s mobile games are a bit more influential than they get credit for.
Over the past few years, games like Pokémon: Let’s Go! Pikachu and Eevee, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe have built upon their mobile counterparts. Then, during the September 13 Nintendo Direct, Fire Emblem Engage’s announcement and main gimmick cemented that Nintendo isn’t just viewing mobile games as a mostly failed side experiment. While they might not be the most successful games out there, their DNA is creeping into the Nintendo Switch’s bestselling titles.
Mediocre mobile returns
Nintendo’s mobile gaming efforts kicked off in the mid-2010s. Niantic created the AR game Pokemon Go, which quickly became a smashing success in 2016. In the six years since, the game has generated around 678 million installs and $6 billion in player spending, according to data from Sensor Tower.
While working with Niantic proved fruitful for The Pokemon Company, Nintendo partnered with DeNA for most of its initial mobile games. Unfortunately, none of these quite reached the heights analysts and Nintendo expected. Super Mario Run was a smash hit at launch but failed to sustain much interest and consistent revenue, so it’s considered a disappointment by Nintendo.
Meanwhile, other games like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Mario Kart Tour, Dr. Mario World, and Dragalia Lost launched, and while they’ve still made lots of money for Nintendo, most haven't matched the success of the most popular mobile titles. The biggest exception to this is Fire Emblem Heroes, a gacha game where players can summon classic Fire Emblem characters. It’s had over $1 billion in player spending alone as of June 2022 and is Nintendo’s “flagship title on the [mobile} platform,” according to Sensor Tower.
More recently, Nintendo tried to recapture the success of Pokemon Go with Niantic’s Pikmin Bloom, although that game has reportedly disappointed as well. Overall, it’s understandable why some people are surprised to see only a couple of surefire mobile hits from a company with the pedigree of Nintendo and consider it a side venture that never realized its full potential. If you look closely at the console games in these series that Nintendo put out since, though, it isn’t ignoring everything learned while making mobile games.
Mobile's monumental impact
Nintendo has the masterful ability to find the strongest elements of an idea, draw those out, and then expand upon them to create something uniquely memorable. We’ve seen it do this time and time again with subsequent entries of its flagship series, but it’s a mindset it has applied to its mobile games upon closer inspection.
As far back as 2018, Pokemon: Let’s Go! Pikachu and Eevee recognized the charm of not needing to battle a Pokemon to capture it, and incorporated that into a traditional RPG experience. More recently, items and mechanics like gardening and cooking from Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp made their way into Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was able to revive its live service offerings by repurposing the best tracks and assets from Mario Kart Tour.
Fire Emblem Engage – Announcement Trailer - Nintendo Switch
The legacy of Nintendo’s mobile games could also be felt in the September 13 Nintendo Direct. The showcase’s first announcement was Fire Emblem Engage, which is turn-based strategy game where the main gimmick is being able to summon classic Fire Emblem characters with a ring. While it doesn’t look like Fire Emblem Engage goes full gacha, it’s clear that Nintendo recognized how people liked collecting and using classic Fire Emblem characters in a new adventure, so the developers drew and expanded upon that idea for Fire Emblem Engage.
Before the announcement of Pikmin 4, Shigeru Miyamoto also took a lot of time to highlight Pikmin Bloom. While we don’t know much about Pikmin 4’s gameplay, Nintendo could find some aspects of that game’s exploratory experience, weekly challenges, or something I’m not even thinking of to freshen up the next mainline game. The same could even happen with Super Mario Run the next time Nintendo decides to make a 2D Mario game.
While watching Fire Emblem Engage’s reveal during the latest Nintendo Direct, it became clear that Nintendo’s mobile games have quietly become influential forces in the company's console games. Nintendo has slowly plucked the best ideas out of them and brought them into Switch games without extra monetization. While the future is cloudy for Nintendo's seemingly stalled mobile push, I hope the company can still find a place for its games on mobile, using the platform as a space to experiment with its beloved series.