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The story
Nintendo’s new release Fire Emblem: Banshi Senkou has been drawing a wave of positive comments on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board. Users who bought the game after seeing the exploration segments shown in a Nintendo Direct praised the short load times, the smoothness of fast travel, and the depth of character development. At the same time, some pointed out that while the game is rated highly overseas, opinion in Japan is more divided, and the thread saw discussion of how differently longtime simulation-RPG fans and newcomers are responding to the new map-exploration feature.
What people said
None of the usual issues you get with this genre, like long load times or half-baked fast travel between towns — movement feels great.
The characters are charming and training them is fun, and exploring the field to train them is fun too. Time just melts away.
Even so it's not annoying at all, that's impressive.
Nintendo prioritizing load times even while staying at 30fps is impressive.
The manipulated reviews ("kousaku") will probably get filtered out eventually and it'll settle around 4.4 anyway.
One of these doesn't belong…
Metascore: 8.9
User score: 8.9
Amazon reviews: mostly ☆5
Amazon reviews: mostly ☆1
Now → Part 1, Chapter 12… huh? This is actually kind of fun
(Same thing happened with) Derby Stallion 2 → wait, this is a masterpiece
Seriously don't have enough time for this
I've been hooked on it until 3am every night lol
Is 4 stars the least common because the reception is genuinely good there? Or is it being deliberately spread out across 3→4→5 stars evenly to disguise review manipulation ("kousaku")?
The fact that ☆2 is the third most common is probably the result of manipulated reviews ("kousaku"), right? Wolverine had a lot of 9-point scores too, for the same reason.
You can get outside using the + button.
You can get out though.
There are 4 routes, so you don't need to recruit everyone at once — and even if you had everyone, you couldn't train them all anyway. Training resources are limited.
but Japanese users seem split on it.
That's because a lot of longtime fans weren't asking for the map exploration the OP is talking about.
Though most of the people criticizing it haven't even put in 50 hours — they're just talking without actually playing ("eapure").
It comes down to playstyle.
If you enjoy trial and error, it's fun.
If you're chasing completion or efficiency, it's a drag.
Which, conversely, means it might click with people who normally don't get along with Nintendo's games.
Doesn't make sense.
It's a pretty Nintendo-like game with few of those cheap, unfair-feeling deaths ("kanku").
That's because it's a game that feels like it's spilling out at the seams in every direction.
You could say it still has that passion you used to see from Japanese third-party studios back in the PS1 era.
I'm enjoying it, but in an era dominated by kids chasing instant dopamine hits ("dopa-gaki"), it's probably not going to get the recognition it deserves.
Compared to Persona, which has a similar structure, this has a longer tutorial-like stretch, which is probably a weak point for reaching that younger audience.
Though these days even Persona feels too "middle-aged" to kids and they won't touch it either.
That's probably also a side effect of the series having shut itself up in a hardware base with a mostly middle-aged audience.
But dopamine-chasing kids ("dopa-gaki") go nuts when rare weapons or rare materials drop while exploring, don't they?
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
This installment stands out for adding a major new layer to the series’ traditional simulation-RPG formula: exploring your base and its surroundings to train your characters. Praise in the thread was concentrated on how smooth movement feels and how much content there is to play through. At the same time, user scores on review sites tend to show a “polarized” distribution with lots of both high and low scores at once — a pattern commonly seen when a long-running series makes a major change to its formula — and nothing in the thread actually proves that either end of that distribution is the result of manipulated reviews. The view that gained the most traction in the thread was that the split between overseas and domestic reception comes down to whether players embraced the new exploration element or were expecting the series’ traditional command-battle-focused gameplay.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “Fire Emblem: Banshi Senkou is unbelievably fun — Nintendo is amazing for making this.”
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