‘Fire Emblem Echoes’ offers a season pass that costs more than the game

By Gabe Gurwin May 3, 2017

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia - 'A Master Class in Strategy'

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia releases in just a few weeks and will serve as, presumably, one of Nintendo’s last big-name 3DS exclusives. As with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the company is supporting it with a plethora of downloadable content, but the pricing of the extras could raise some eyebrows.

Available alongside the game on May 19, the Fire Emblem Echoes season pass will cost you an extra $45 for 22 pieces of content, which Nintendo pointed out in a press release is a savings of 30 percent compared to the downloadable content packs’ individual prices. That’s still $5 more than the cost of the standard Fire Emblem Echoes game, however, and some of the season pass’ contents remains a mystery.

The first downloadable content pack, the “Fledgling Warriors” pack, arrives on May 19 and offers a new dungeon called The Astral Temple and two new maps, and will set you back $8. The second and third packs, “Undaunted Heroes” and “Lost Altars,” both release a week later on May 25 and offer new dungeons, with the latter also offering “the power to upgrade characters to exclusive classes that don’t appear in the main game. They’ll cost $10 and $15, respectively.

On June 1, players can purchase the “Rise of the Deliverance” pack for $13, which contains a prologue detailing the “previously untold history of Valentia,” as well as extra challenging maps and the ability to control characters that aren’t available in the main game. The final paid downloadable pack doesn’t have a name or release date, but it will cost another $6 when it releases and contains two pieces of content.

While Nintendo is quick to point out that other downloadable content for Fire Emblem Echoes will be free, and you can also use your Amiibo figures to get extra bonuses in the game, we’d advise anyone considering buying the game to wait until they’ve played it before purchasing such a pricey bunch of extras.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia is out on May 19. A $60 limited edition is also available, offering extra music and a pin set.

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Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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Given how long the video game development process takes, sometimes we don’t see the full impact of a game’s innovation until years later. That’s something I immediately noticed when booting up Fire Emblem Engage, the latest installment of Nintendo’s long-running tactics series. After a few hours with it, I could see how the project was likely conceived as a direct reaction to 2017’s Fire Emblem Heroes, one of Nintendo’s biggest mobile hits. Though 2018’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses was a major critical success for the series, Heroes seems to be the title that’s shaping Fire Emblem’s future five years later.

Fire Emblem Engage - Announcement Trailer - Nintendo Direct 9.13.2022

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Alear and Marth open a door in Fire Emblem Engage.

Nintendo’s mobile games don’t get enough credit. While Nintendo had some undeniable hits like Pokémon Go and Fire Emblem Heroes, many consider the rest of its mobile efforts fairly underwhelming and even somewhat disappointing for a video game company of Nintendo’s stature. While nothing ever quite reached the high bar Pokémon Go set in 2016, Nintendo’s mobile games are a bit more influential than they get credit for.
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Nintendo’s mobile gaming efforts kicked off in the mid-2010s. Niantic created the AR game Pokemon Go, which quickly became a smashing success in 2016. In the six years since, the game has generated around 678 million installs and $6 billion in player spending, according to data from Sensor Tower.
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Meanwhile, other games like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Mario Kart Tour, Dr. Mario World, and Dragalia Lost launched, and while they’ve still made lots of money for Nintendo, most haven't matched the success of the most popular mobile titles. The biggest exception to this is Fire Emblem Heroes, a gacha game where players can summon classic Fire Emblem characters. It’s had over $1 billion in player spending alone as of June 2022 and is Nintendo’s “flagship title on the [mobile} platform,” according to Sensor Tower.
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Nintendo has the masterful ability to find the strongest elements of an idea, draw those out, and then expand upon them to create something uniquely memorable. We’ve seen it do this time and time again with subsequent entries of its flagship series, but it’s a mindset it has applied to its mobile games upon closer inspection.
As far back as 2018, Pokemon: Let’s Go! Pikachu and Eevee recognized the charm of not needing to battle a Pokemon to capture it, and incorporated that into a traditional RPG experience. More recently, items and mechanics like gardening and cooking from Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp made their way into Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was able to revive its live service offerings by repurposing the best tracks and assets from Mario Kart Tour.
Fire Emblem Engage – Announcement Trailer - Nintendo Switch
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