I'm just going to summarize the details in a list and drop the links at the bottom.
A lot of the info here is also basic information about how modern Japanese mobile games work, but this game is going to attract a lot of people who haven't played them before, so I felt it was good to include.
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/31/1...roes-nintendo-free-to-play-mobile-game-launch
http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/31/f...put-nintendo-into-the-free-to-play-spotlight/
http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/01/31/fire-emblem-heroes-isnat-a-mobile-knock-off
http://www.polygon.com/2017/1/31/14450538/fire-emblem-heroes-video-gameplay-preview-ios-android
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBVETwIoyfQ
A lot of the info here is also basic information about how modern Japanese mobile games work, but this game is going to attract a lot of people who haven't played them before, so I felt it was good to include.
- Nintendo let a bunch of websites play an hour of the game and they released their previews today.
- IGN was told by Nintendo that the game's development was led by Intelligent Systems, with DeNA and Nintendo providing assistance. Treehouse did the game's localization.
- The game starts off with a prologue that also doubles as a tutorial and has a bunch of narrative setup in it. If you're bad at remembering things, the weapon triangle is displayed in the corner at all times during combat.
- While the game starts with a three character team, you move to a four character team later.
- There are two control methods. The first is to click on your character and select actions from a menu like you normally do. The other is to just drag and drop.
- Your characters can have a weapon, a support skill, a special, and up to three passive abilities.
- As you use characters, they get more skill points, which they can use to unlock new and/or better skills.
- The way specials work is they activate after X number of turns, and then the next attack they do (or support for support skills) uses that special automatically.
- There is a story mode, along with a special mission mode, a PvP mode, a training tower mode, and a mystery mode. I'll get to more on those in a minute.
- There is a stamina system, though the previews note that for the regular story mode, you're generally never going to run out, whereas it serves as more of a barrier in events and harder difficulties.
- The story mode missions can be played on Normal, Hard, and Lunatic difficulty, with increasing rewards, difficulty, and stamina cost.
- The story mode seems to have voice acting throughout, but the preview videos were only allowed to use screenshots.
- The PvP mode matches you up against an AI controlled version of another player's team. You get a reward based on your best performance in offense and defense, which rewards you a special type of currency. I'm guessing this is what you use for star-level rank ups, but that's a guess. You get bonuses for how well you do along with what characters you use. You get to try this three times per day (unless you refresh it with orbs), and it only tracks your best score. The seasons seem to be about a week, but that's me guessing off of screenshots.
- The special maps are for special events such as recruiting characters through defeating them in battle. You can do harder versions of the special map to get the character at a higher starting star value. The first one seems to be Lissa from Awakening.
- The Training Tower is where you get the resources that let you level up your characters.
- Characters use Shards to level up from levels 1 through 19, whereas they use Crystals to level up past 20. You can get both of these from the Training Tower. You can't buy these and have to earn them. The re-leveling system where you can go back to zero and get more stat ups from the traditional games also returns.
- There are a bunch of monthly quests that can be completed five times each for various rewards.
- There is a home base castle in the game that you can upgrade. Each upgrade grants permanent bonus experience gain for your characters, though also costs orbs. The castle also upgrades visually as you do this.
- In the castle, you can tap characters to hear various lines of dialog from them along with them giving you some small rewards.
- There is currently no relationship or pairing up system in the game. Edit: Apparently it's coming in a future update though. Thanks Aveyn Knight.
- There are no permanent character deaths in the game.
- When summoning characters, you select from a theme that has a particular set of characters you want to go after. For example, one bucket is called "Devoted Characters" and has people like Roy, Lyn, and Camilla, whereas the Legendary Heroes bucket has characters like Robin, Lucina, and Marth.
- The summoning system works by displaying five orbs you can summon a unit from. Each is color coded, so you can tell what type of unit you will get by unveiling that orb.
- Based on IGN's description, it sounds like the discount summoning rate only applies when you summon everyone at once, so you should only summon when you have 20 (5 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 3) orbs. If you're a crazy person who only wants a specific blue unit, you can pay more and only unveil the blue orbs so that your odds of getting them are higher.
- You can also use an orb to revive during a mission or to restore your full stamina bar. Stamina regenerates at a rate of 1 per 5 minutes.
- You can an orb per mission plus a bunch of other unspecified ways according to Nintendo.
- The summoning rates for heroes are 3% for 5-star, 36% for 4-star, and 61% for 3-star. Every time you summon, the odds of a 5-star goes up until you get one. Keep in mind that you can just upgrade your heroes until they're 5-star.
- Your base can hold up to 200 heroes. You can also fuse duplicates to raise the stats of existing characters, so that would be 200 unique heroes.
- If your diet consists of millions of Krill per day, you can buy orbs at prices ranging from $2 to $99.
- The game runs on Android phones with 2 GB of RAM and Android 4.2 or iOS devices (including the iPod Touch) with iOS 8 or higher.
- This game does require an internet connection.
- As a closing note, I feel I should note that basically every preview was very positive on the gameplay.
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/31/1...roes-nintendo-free-to-play-mobile-game-launch
http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/31/f...put-nintendo-into-the-free-to-play-spotlight/
http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/01/31/fire-emblem-heroes-isnat-a-mobile-knock-off
http://www.polygon.com/2017/1/31/14450538/fire-emblem-heroes-video-gameplay-preview-ios-android
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBVETwIoyfQ
