Nintendo just dropped a new Fire Emblem mobile game, and it’s bad

In classic Nintendo fashion, the company made a new game announcement out of nowhere on a Wednesday evening.

This one, though, was different than usual, as it marks the Japanese gaming giants first mobile release since 2021’s Pikmin Bloom. Enter Fire Emblem Shadows, a free-to-play title that was, rather appropriately, shadow dropped last night. The company describes it as “real-time strategy meets social deduction,” which sounds pretty neat on paper.

The problem, however, is that the game kind of sucks. After a classic flashy Fire Emblem cinematic that initially seems promising, you immediately are thrown into battle with little chibi characters. That isn’t inherently bad, but it’s what you do with them that proves so underwhelming.

Basically, Shadows‘ combat has you “managing” a party of three in a tiny grid. I use quotation marks because they move and attack automatically, so all you’re doing is occasionally selecting one of a few special abilities (such as a healing spell or an area of effect flame) that operate on cooldowns. This is the extent of the aforementioned “real-time strategy.”

But the “social deduction” element is especially undercooked. As you head into each battle, two of your units are designated “Disciples of Light,” with the third being the “Disciple of Shadow,” who’s essentially the “Imposter” from Among Us. At the end of each battle, you have to guess who’s the Disciple of Shadow, and whether you choose correctly will affect the next skirmish.

However, the three-unit party means you automatically have a 50/50 shot of getting it right, given that you know you’re not the imposter. That also means that if one of the NPCs is KO’d between rounds, you’ll immediately know who did it. It would be like if the only murder suspects in Knives Out were Daniel Craig, our hero, and douchey Chris Evans, instead of, you know, an entire cast of characters. The party members’ AI also makes it pretty obvious who the imposter is.

Frankly, it’s such a baffling system. It’s possible the three-unit party was a creative choice to keep battles bite-sized for mobile, but if that’s the case, then it just fundamentally breaks the game. And because the actual “combat” side of things is so automated, there’s really little incentive to play, even with the unlockable rewards and multiplayer mode.

Meanwhile, other Fire Emblem staples are missing entirely. For instance, the series’ signature Support conversations, which generally offer great characterization and develop synergistic stats in battle, boil down here to a character just saying their name.

This means that Shadows actually having voiced versions of popular Fire Emblem characters (like my personal favourite, Three Houses‘ Dimitri) ultimately feels wasted here. I suppose furries might get something out of seeing these characters have animal transformations, but even then, they’d be better off just sharing the new artwork online.

Of course, a mobile game isn’t going to be as deep as the console Fire Emblem titles, but the massively successful Fire Emblem Heroes still shows you how to do it well enough. Whatever (likely valid) criticisms you have of that gacha game, it at least has layers of strategy, a surprisingly deep metagame, and a better overall handling of classic FE characters.

As a massive Fire Emblem fan, I’m definitely not going to put any more time into Shadows. If you’re interested, you can download it for free on Android and iOS. But honestly, we’re better off waiting for Fortune’s Weave, the recently-unveiled (and highly promising) next mainline entry, on Switch 2 next year.

Image credit: Nintendo