So I first posted about Fire Emblem: Heroes what, almost three months ago? February?
And I'm still playing it.
If you give no damns about Fire Emblem (and honestly it's a great game series with a lot of challenge to it, so if you've never played one give it a try) then skip the rest of this post, because I wanted to gush about how FEH is quite possibly one of the best free games I've ever played, because it combines
1) Extremely generous free-to-play segment - like, 5 new heroes costs you 20 points, you get 300 points JUST from the story mode, and can get 160-200 free points a month while playing their updated content.
2) gatcha-style collecting of several hundred different Fire Emblem characters from the games dating over thirty years. It also lets you upgrade the lower-ranking heroes into ones with better stats and skills, so if you really like what objectively is a 'bad' hero, you can MAKE them good.
3) High-end free content is puzzle solving, and the solution is unique to each player because each player has a different collection of heroes to solve said puzzle WITH.
4) The whaling (that is to say, pay-to-play content) is only at the very top end of one segment of the game, and it involves the ranking of players online with not-exceptional rewards for BEING at that top end. If you don't care about that, you can safely ignore the hell out of it.
I mean, last year I played a LOT of freemium games thanks to the stress I was under (time-restricted Farmville style games helped me a lot because I could divert my thoughts to "In three hours I have to log back in...") and FEH really does stand out. Most freemium games clamped down real quick and demanded real money in order to keep playing - I was having fun with the tablet Simcity until it got to the point of "If you want your city bigger, pay real money! We're waiting..."
If they don't demand real currency, then the top-end content tends to be nonexistent - Fallout Shelter is that kind of game, where once you get to a Survival Mode vault that has over 100 Dwellers, can survive Deathclaw attacks with no problems, and you've done all the quests you can before you get sick of the repetitive gameplay... the only thing to do is fill out your list of crafted weapons and armor, and troll for lunchboxes to MAYBE get a legendary Dweller.
Not so FEH. Almost every week there's something new to do. I'm actually looking forward to a week where there ISN'T something intense because there's a lot of little side play modes that have updates I've neglected because of the time restricted events.
The only thing that makes me sad is that I didn't start playing this again sooner. Then again, my internet was unreliable until about the point I started playing it, so probably for the best.
