One of the staple mechanics of the Fire Emblem franchise has been weapon degradation. Each weapon had a limited amount of uses in it, and when it was all used up it would break. Different Fire Emblem games included different ways around this, including reforging weapons, blacksmithing more powerful weapons, and items that would restore your weapon uses, but in general you had to use weaker weapons on lesser enemies in order to use your stronger weapons for more powerful foes. The only exceptions to this rule were plot weapons, which had unlimited uses but weren’t the most powerful weapons in the end-game.
However, Fire Emblem If , the next game in the Fire Emblem series, is going to do away with this system all together. All weapons will now have infinite uses. As a result, a whole host of new weapons have been added to the game, including more katanas (which traditionally had high crit rates), naginatas, kanabos, and ofuda.
This is part of a push to make Fire Emblem games more easy and accessible to the general fanbase. Fire Emblem: Awakening added a new Casual mode, which did away with permadeath, another staple mechanic of the Fire Emblem series. Instead of dying, your units would simply become incapacitated, and would return to your roster at the end of any map.
Fire Emblem If is going to take this one step further. Awakening’s classic (permadeth) and casual (no permadeath) mode will be included, but an even easier mode will be included called phoenix mode. Phoenix mode doesn’t even remove your units from the battlefield if they die. Instead, it simply incapacitates them for a certain number of turns and resurrects them. Note that if the leader of your party dies, you still lose the battle.
Unfortunately, once you choose a difficulty level you cannot change it back. So make sure that the difficulty you choose is the difficulty you want for the rest of the game.
A few more details about Fire Emblem If have been revealed since its announcement (thanks Siliconera ). Two different versions of the game will be released, each with different stories and challenges. In fact, each version will feature totally different characters, though the story intertwines with the characters from the opposite version. A third version with both original storylines and a new third storyline will be released at a later date.
An important new mechanic in Fire Emblem If is the new Dragon Pulse ability, which only characters from royal families will be able to use. Dragon Pulse allows natural disasters to alter the terrain around you. This can do things like build bridges across water, flatten mountains, and otherwise alter terrain to surprise your enemy and give your allies ways to move around the map.
Why is it important that only royalty be able to use this? Because your creatable character’s class is either Dark Prince or Dark Princess. That means you primarily will be altering the maps, and acting as your army’s lead strategist.
The game will have nine save data slots, and every time you download a DLC scenario, you will get three more slots.
Nintendo says that more information about Fire Emblem If will be coming this E3.
Fire Emblem If will release in Japan on June 15, 2015, and will see an American release in 2016.