Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. Mobile
  4. News

‘Fire Emblem Heroes’ players keep reinstalling to get favorite characters

Add as a preferred source on Google

Fans of the newly launched Fire Emblem Heroes game have started using an interesting strategy to start off with their optimum team composition: repeated reinstalling. Thanks to the random nature of starting characters, players have begun downloading the game over and over, in order to find their favorites.

Fire Emblem Heroes is a “Gacha” game, one where randomly generated outcomes form a major part of the gameplay. Since the starting heroes are also randomized, it makes sense for some players to restart the game over and over to find their preferred characters, rather than actually playing it.

Recommended Videos

This is a doubly viable strategy in Heroes because not only are the characters you get from your first orb purchases random, but so are their stats. As Kotaku explains, you can have two of the same hero with wildly different stats, which means that restarting the game can be a strategy that can save you a lot of time.

Unlocking a character the traditional way requires in-game currency, which can take a long time to build up, or cost a lot of real-world money to generate quickly. This is in every sense of the word an exploit, but some would argue that employing so much random generation in a game is an exploit of the players themselves.

While it’s not too dissimilar a technique to the one used in Pokémon games or others with random generation in them, this Fire Emblem trick does require a little more effort. Players must play through the game’s tutorial, spend their orbs, and if they don’t summon the characters they want with good stats, they have to uninstall the game, re-download it, and go through the whole process again.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale covers how to guides, best-of lists, and explainers to help everyone understand the hottest new hardware and…
Modern Warfare 4 brings Call of Duty back to its glory days. I hope the streak lives.
Infinity Ward’s latest campaign goes back to Call of Duty’s roots and recaptures what made me a fan more than a decade ago.
Call of Duty MW4 menu screen

The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.

After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.

Read more
Epic is throwing $50,000 for vibe-code games. What could possibly go wrong?
Epic is rewarding vibe-coded games with real money
Epic MegaJam 2026

Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.

Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”

Read more
Monster Hunter Outlanders arrives on Android and iOS next week with four-player co-op
The free-to-play spin-off launches October 29 with open-world exploration, mobile-focused combat, and a building system.
Monster Hunter Outlanders poster

It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.

Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.

Read more