Fire Emblem Heroes

Fire Emblem Heroes (Japanese: ファイアーエムブレム ヒーローズ, Hepburn: Faiā Emuburemu Hīrōzu) is a free-to-play tactical role-playing game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for Android and iOS. The game is a mobile spin-off of the Fire Emblem series featuring its characters, and was released on February 2, 2017. Fire Emblem Heroes received a number of awards and nominations in "Best Mobile Game" categories. As of 2020 the game had grossed over $656 million worldwide, making it Nintendo's highest-grossing mobile game.

Gameplay
Fire Emblem Heroes is a tactical role-playing game. Players control a team of up to four characters ("Heroes") against enemy teams of varying sizes on an 8x6 grid map. Different characters have different movement restrictions; for example, armored units have a shorter range than cavalry units, but cavalry units cannot enter forest tiles. Flying units can enter most tiles, even ones impassable to all other units such as water or mountains. The game strictly alternates between a player phase and an enemy phase every turn. During the player's phase, Heroes can attack enemy characters when in range; if both the attacker and defender have the same range, the defender will counterattack if still alive. Heroes deal either physical or magical damage types; they also have a "color" that informs a rock paper scissors-esque system that makes it so some units have advantageous match-ups over other units. After moving and optionally attacking with all their heroes, the enemy phase occurs where the game's AI does the same for the opposing team of characters. The player, in general, seeks to lure enemy units into disadvantageous match-ups by careful character positioning on the map. Unlike other Fire Emblem titles, there is no element of randomness or chance in battles; an engagement between two characters is perfectly deterministic, as is the enemy AI, so a given strategy will either win or lose consistently. Fire Emblem Heroes has a set of "story" missions divided by chapters for the player to complete, rotating challenge missions, a training tower for increasing character's strength in random battles, fights against other players' teams (albeit controlled by the game's AI) in the "Arena" and in "Aether Raids", special challenges involving "Brigades" where teams with eight or more characters are controlled on a larger map than usual, and a variety of other content to complete.

The game's currency is known as "orbs", which can be used to acquire new heroes as well as several other quality-of-life items. Missions cost stamina to play while stamina is recovered over time; the exact cost of missions and maximum of stamina held has varied over the course of the app. Orbs are either earned by completing in-game activities or with in-app purchases.

Upon its initial release date, Fire Emblem Heroes players could potentially access up to 100 distinct controllable units in the game, with players beginning with access to Alfonse, Sharena, and Anna. These three members of the "Order of Heroes" were created specifically for Heroes, with the remainder of the controllable characters being crossovers from the rest of the franchise. Since release, additional characters have been added to the list, including from games that were previously not featured. In general, most characters are gained via a "Summon" tab which works on a gacha system. Orbs are spent on randomized heroes, with some heroes being common and other heroes being rare. Other heroes are gained for free, by completing in-game missions of varying difficulty and effort. If a player gains duplicates of the same character, the duplicates can be merged to create a single more powerful character.

In March 2017, the game added "skill inheritance", which allows characters to mix skills previously reserved to other heroes: for example, a hero could gain another character's weapon or special ability. In November 2017, the game released "Book II", which included a new animated video, new story missions, added new mechanics, increased the power of some of the weapons and skills perceived as weak, and introduced a new set of Heroes-exclusive allies and villains. Heroes has continued to release new content and new characters. By December 2017, the game included more than 200 unique heroes; in August 2021, the game has more than 600 characters.