Those visiting Dutch Comic Con this year at Jaarbeurs Exhibition Centre in Utrecht, Netherlands got a surprise, as there were demos for Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia available to play. This is the first event in Europe for the game at all.
A reddit user, /u/superkyon, has done an AMA on their experience with the demo which you can find and be a part of here.
For starters, supports are confirmed at this point, and are going to be more akin to that of the GBA era. User superkyon mentions in this particular post, Tobin & Kliff having a basic conversation for a C rank. It’s hard to say if this will set a precedent for the entire games set of supports or not.
Remember those various ???’s on the character screens?
They are now confirmed to be tied to the weapon that the character is currently wielding, which also levels up with usage. The skills weapons give are currently vague, but as an example, superkyon touched on Kliff having one that sacrificed 1 HP for 30 Avoid on their next attack. Clive learned a skill on his Steel Lance that allowed him to deal piercing damage to armors for an HP cost as well.
The blonde Paladin from the trailers is confirmed to be named Fernand, as of this string of comments on superkyons AMA. Comments also mentioned Berkut (The black haired rider next to him). Not much is known about Berkut, but he does have a girlfriend who reminds superkyon of Azura from Fates.
Fatigue is confirmed to be in the game, however its not quite like how it was handled in Thracia 776, instead your stats get lowered as opposed to the unit being unusable for a map or 2. This is reflected by the smiley icon on a unit, as was predicted by my colleague Vincent in the last Echoes article.
A few other points were lightly covered in superkyons AMA, like healing actually providing EXP unlike original Gaiden, which should take the stress off of raising a couple of the units. Also, Food seen on units in the various trailers is one way to combat fatigue, but can also be used like the series staple Vulnerary.
Finally an auto-battle mechanic apparently exists while in dungeons, however this wasn’t described in detail so we don’t know if it works like Awakening & Fates auto battle or if it just completely skips the battle automatically.
From this alone, we can see that while Echoes is remaining faithful to its source material, it seems to want to play around with mechanics as well, perhaps as a testing ground for FE Switch ideas? Stay tuned, we will be for sure.
