Ah yes, Nintendo, why not just drop a new mobile Fire Emblem game out of nowhere?

Fire Emblem Shadows introduces “a new style of battles featuring role-playing and social deduction”.

The game is available to download now for Android and iOS, in over 70 countries.

Press release can be found here.

Update: Now that I’ve played the game and had some sleep. Here’s a bit more info.

Official Twitter account is here.

The story begins with Prince Kurt from the Kingdom of Ast fleeing from his homeland after an invasion from the empire. It’s very similar to the beginning of Shadow Dragon, which is definitely on purpose.

Kurt himself has design elements inspired by Marth, there’s a Jagen character and even an Abel and Cain who are literally a panther and bull.

Oh, that’s interesting… Every character seems to have animal-like features, akin to the Laguz. Although they don’t transform…normally. Another example, the Navarre who joins later is a raven. Even guest characters from other games have animal traits (more on that later).

As you progress the story, it’s very typical Fire Emblem. The kingdom of Ast worships Naga, the goddess of light, while the empire serves Fenris, the goddess of shadow. The royal family of Ast is just one of the 12 ancient bloodlines.

To begin with, the dialogue is voice acted, which is a nice change from FE Heroes. Once the game begins for real, the dialogue only has those short voice clips like Awakening and Fates. Which is a shame, but makes sense.

The story is split into books, presumably similar to FE Heroes. The first book focuses on the plight of Prince Kurt. Unlike other Fire Emblems, the story is split into two sides. The light side and the shadow side. You progress the story by earning fragments from participating in battles. Fighting for the light side will give you fragments for the light story and so forth.

The animated cutscenes are the usual great quality. There’s the one featured in the launch trailer and which you see at the start of the game. But there’s also a very cute and kind of random cutscene for when you first enter the Bazaar menu.

Battles are divided into two halves. One where you fight shadow monsters together and another where you team up for a boss fight against the traitor, who transforms into their shadow form.

There are 3 characters on the blue (light) side. You control one of them, while the computer or other players control the other 2. The twist is that one of the 3 characters is actually on the red (shadow) side. They can summon shadow monsters and secretly hurt the other 2 characters.

Each turn, there’s a timer along the top of the screen that gradually decreases. Your characters move automatically and, if an enemy is close enough, they will perform an auto attack when the time’s up.

You’ve also got 4 skills with a shared cooldown along the bottom that you can drag onto the battlefield before the timer is up. Some of these are area-of-effect and they can also damage your allies if they’re in the way.

After the first half is over, players vote for who they think the traitor is–the one fighting for the shadow side. If they guess right, they get an extra health bar for the second half. Which gives them a slight advantage.

The second half is the two remaining players fighting the traitor in their monstrous shadow form and more shadow monsters. It doesn’t matter too much if you die in the first half, because you get revived.

Also, if you die in general, you can still use skills, although the cooldown is doubled. So you’re not completely dead weight. Furthemore, if everyone dies in the first half, you all proceed to the second half anyway.

Overall, winning or sussing out the traitor doesn’t seem like a massive deal. At the end, you still get rewards depending on your achievements. Obviously, you get more rewards if you do well. But battles don’t take long and there’s no stamina that I could see, so you could theoretically just keep grinding battles.

Characters in this game are called Disciples. Similar to FE Heroes, they’re grouped into three colours: red, green and blue and there’s a colour triangle. Also, they have something akin to movement types, like horseback and flying.

Right now, there are 14 Disciples. You can get a bunch of them easily by progressing the story. I think some of the later ones may require grinding. You unlock Disciples by collecting 12 of their souls. Early on, you’ll get 12 souls for a bunch of Disciples, which instantly unlocks them. Other times you’ll get 3 souls, etc.

Unlike FE Heroes, this is not a gacha game, but it is a freemium game. Money can be spent on battle passes to unlock characters like Lyn, who’s a horse girl in this universe, or cosmetics like outfits.

Ah, yes, Lyn from Blazing Blade. There’s also Dimitri from Three Houses who you might’ve noticed in the roster pic. Besides their animal-fied appearance, they also have a shadow form like all characters, where that aspect has been cranked up to 11. So Lyn fuses with her horse, for example…

Well, that’s everything I gleamed after playing for a few hours after midnight.