a quiet moment to rest & make a fool out of yourself, where the war can’t hear us
i drew this piece for @fefateszine! i'm honored to have participated in a zine that celebrates such a momentous event. whether it was just doing dailies, doing support convos, or waking that slugabed up, i really enjoyed the slice of life quality of my castle. and of course i had to draw takumi, but another archer (i literally always reclassed her into one) that never failed to carry me was mozu, and i honestly love the dynamic in their supports. i’m biased, but it shows off takumi’s moe in a beautiful way, okay. trust me. it captured my heart in such a way that i made a whole illustration based on it. that’s how this piece came to be!
What Fire Emblem Fates Loses Without Online Functionality
As many know by now, Nintendo announced that they will be shutting down the online functionality for the Wii U and 3DS in April 2024. Among these affect will be the Fire Emblem games for the 3DS, all of which I love dearly.
So out of curiosity about what we are going to be losing, I decided to turn off my 3DS's internet and see how Awakening, Fates, and Echoes: Shadows of Valentia reacted. As it turns out, the My Castle feature in Fates was heavily designed with online in mind. Without online, out of battle prep is going to be harder for the average player, and worryingly so.
The first thing is rather obvious: players will lose the ability to visit any other castles (outside of potentially via Streetpass, but I have no easy way to test that). This of course means no more buying player skills for your units (including the fun yet illegal ones like Aptitude) from quick castle battles. You will also lose the ability to recruit any other players' units or form Bond Units between those you visit and visit you frequently. While sad, I would say these features are mostly not needed for Fates' overall gameplay loop.
However, quick castle visits are also used to obtain other resources like ore and food, as players randomly start with different ones. Ore can be traded in at the Smithy for other ore types (at the steep price of 5 for 1). Since ore is needed to forge weapons, you will need to grind for the required amounts. As for food, you're going to have to hope that someone in your army finds some to give to you while wandering the castle. If you have at least one of any ore or food, you can use it at the Arena in an attempt to gain more of it.
Very unlikely players will have 99 of each item in post-online files without the long grind (or hacking).
Players will also lose access to the other paths' shops and vendors from other castles. Unless you're playing Revelation, you will be forced to primarily stick to weapons of the country you've sided with at Chapter 6. This includes weapons like the Dual Kanata that flips the weapon triangle or the Armorslayer that is effective against armored units. Players with the Museum Melee DLC will be able to farm for out-of-path weapons, but it will be a luck-based grind.
Quick castle visits are a great source of Dragon Vein Points, or DVP, as well. DVP is used to build and upgrade facilities around My Castle. Outside of castle visits, you can still obtain DVP through chapter battles, skirmishes, invasions, DLC battles... This is actually a major blow to Conquest in particular because, unless the player has previously downloaded DLC before the shop went offline, they might have no infinite source of DVP! This also makes thing like support grinding difficult, especially if you want second generation units. Birthright and Revelation will still have the infinite skirmishes at the very least, but it will certainly take longer.
Unfortunately for Fates, losing access to online features might end up harming the game's Streetpass functions as well. I hope I am wrong about this, but it appears that you can only update your castle if you are connected to the internet. In other words, once the 3DS online is taken down, you might not be able to update your Streetpass castle, and any future new players might not be able to send out a Streetpass castle at all!
Losing online also comes at the cost of losing your Visitor Points (VP) and Battle Points (BP). Along with showing off how popular your castle is, VP and BP are used to unlock rewards. Many of these rewards are harder to obtained weapons and permanent stat boosters. Without being able to update your points, any future files you start will not be able to access and use these rewards.
Visiting other castles has always be fun!
In short, while none of the online features are absolutely necessary to complete any path in Fates, it does hamper one's abilities to obtain many valuable resources. Forging will be much harder, building up My Castle will take much longer, and it will be trickier to build supports. Conquest players in particular will have to care much more about resource management in general (unless they have DLC).
But what about Awakening and Echoes: Shadows of Valentia? Do they lose anything?
I checked these two as well, and fortunately for them, losing online is basically a non-issue! (Unless you want the DLC, in which case you are already out of luck.)
Unlike Fates, both Awakening and SoV can continue to update their Streetpass (even though it's just a player card for the latter). In fact, as far as I can tell, all SoV really loses is the ability to see how the player ranks in the Global Rankings, which is inconsequential for the gameplay.
Priam, a character exclusive to Awakening's Spotpass chapters.
I've seen some people bring up the possibility of losing Spotpass in Awakening, which contains bonus content like extra paralogue chapters, bonus units, and unique, harder to obtain weapons. As it turns out, as long as you have previously downloaded Spotpass at least once before, all content related to it will continue to be available for all current and future playthroughs! So only future new players will be losing out on it once the online functionality is gone.
Will Fates still be playable overall?
Oh, absolutely! Just because players will lose many of the wonderful features My Castle has to offer doesn't mean it's all gone. You should still get enough weapons and resources to reach the end of the game regardless of the path chosen. I suspect several players have already done so, either for not caring about My Castle or just not having their 3DS connected to the internet in the first place.
My hope is that Intelligent Systems will put out an update to alleviate the loss of online functionality. Perhaps it could be a resource pack, containing 10 of each ore and food and some weapons. Sadly, I believe this to be very unlikely, especially this late in the 3DS's life...
While more a replacement, a port or remake of Fates would be nice as well! It could contain the three paths (à la Three Houses) along with all of the DLC (including the two festival maps that never left Japan). I for one would absolutely be down for it, as Fates is unironically one of my favorite games.
Azura from Fates, and one of my all-time favorite characters!
In the end, this is all merely speculation on my part. We won't know for certain how much will truly be lost until the day Nintendo shuts down the 3DS and Wii U online services for good.
TLDR; Fates will likely lose easy access to obtaining resources and weapons once the Nintendo shuts down the online service for 3DS and Wii U, primarily related to My Castle. Overall this will make items much harder to obtain or, in a few cases, outright unobtainable. The game will still be completely playable however, just a bit harder.
Fire Emblem Fates / My Castle 2022 and onwards (Pt.2)
Yesterday I finish my re-playthrough of Fire Emblem Fates: Birthrights. An easy re-experience of this playthrough, but now we move on to the next one.
At the same night and to kick start 2023, the start of Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest begins now in stage two in the level dificulty. Hard Mode and Casual Mode, which means if a unit falls, they return in the next chapter.
Never did these condition before so its a blind and re-playthrough at the same time in my playthrough of Conquest again.
And just like in my birthright playthrough, let us visit, battle and bond our realms together as we face a force greated that the conflict than the war between Hoshido and Nohr.
Check my first post of this here: https://at.tumblr.com/joseftheerazor/fire-emblem-fates-my-castle-2022-and-onwards/bqfpipbgpxls
