IS introduces new game mode in Fire Emblem Heroes – Pawns of Loki. This is the 3rd new game mode that IS introduced this year. The first was Resonant Battle and the second was Frontline Phalanx. I think it’s amazing that the company is still pumping out new ideas to an almost 4 years old game. Book IV is coming to an end in the next few days.
Let’s talk about this new game mode – Pawns of Loki. It’s a pretty interesting new game mode. It’s definitely much better than Frontline Phalanx. It’s more like a card and board game then a typical Fire Emblem game. IS made this game mode as an event. At this time, we don’t know how often Pawns of Loki (POL) will be available. Since it’s an event, I think it will be on rotation, may be every other month. Though POL is an interesting game, it’s not without any drawback. Lots of players are already complaining about the game.
There are 3 rounds in POL. The first round lasted for 2 days. It was pretty fun at first, but it becomes tedious pretty soon, that we need to reach 200,000 score to get all of the rewards. There’s really no instruction, so many people, including me didn’t know that we didn’t have to get the max score by end of round 1. We have 3 rounds to get those rewards. There’s no consistency in Fire Emblem Heroes. Some events, the rewards were reset between rounds. Some like this, don’t get reset. So, I wasted my effort in round 1.
Since it’s a new game mode, 1st round was interesting that we simply fought random enemies. Though some of them are really annoying, but they are still manageable. Now that we’re in 2nd round, the difficulty is sky rocketed too much. There were 8 turns per game in round 1. There are 10 turns per game in round 2. The first 3 turns in round 2 are against random generic enemies. However, as soon as turn 4 started, we have to fight a highly optimized other player’s enemies. POL mechanics rely mostly on combo, hero skills and hero levels. By turn 4, our heroes are still low levels (like in the teens). Enemies we fought already on level 30+ with all their skills. On top of that they already have 20+ combos. By turn 4, depending on the RNG luck, on average, we have may be 10 combos. Basically, the higher the combo, the stronger the hero become. So, starting turn 4, we’re mostly at disadvantage, unless the RNG is on our favor. As with any other part of this game, I felt the RNG is always against me.
There’s no limit on how many times we can play this game mode, which is nice. However, when the enemies are that much higher and the only way to win against them is to use whale’s unit (from your whale’s friend) and RNG, it’s not really that fun. Temporary workaround is to simply play at lower difficulty that resulted in lower maximum score. Since there’s rank and tier rewards involved, players only want to play at the highest difficulty that have maximum potential score. So, it’s frustrating. This feels like the very first tempest trial game, back when IS introduce tempest trial game mode. Back then, many players complained about that. May be IS will adjust this game mode difficulty in the future. But for now, this is the difficulty we have to deal with.
Now, this week is the first time POL is available to players. There are about 185K total ranks in round 1. This is much smaller number if we compare it with Mjolnir Strike game mode that was introduced last year. Mjolnir Strike had more than 310K total ranks in the 1st battle. So, POL’s total rank is only about 60% of Mjolnir Strike. It seems that FEH player base shrinks quite a bit. FEH is facing a lot more competition now. There’s Genshin Impact, new Xbox, new Playstation and many other new mobile games. I don’t see how FEH can withstand all of other competition. With the current FEH monetization strategy, this game will never come back to it’s glory year. If there are no big change in FEH monetization strategy, I predict that FEH may come to an end in the next couple years.