Fire Emblem Shadows and Finding the Fun in “Bad” Games

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 2, 2025 | 1:22pm

Video Games Features fire emblem shadows

Fire Emblem Shadows and Finding the Fun in “Bad” Games

On paper, Fire Emblem Shadows doesn’t make much sense. For those who didn’t catch the news when the game surprise launched last Wednesday, it’s a mobile spin-off created by Fire Emblem developer Intelligent Systems. It also happens to be the first Nintendo-published mobile game to launch worldwide in six years, following the largely abandoned Mario Kart Tour (while Pikmin Bloom came out in between, this was actually published and developed by Pokémon Go studio Niantic).

On top of it being strange that Nintendo suddenly shadow dropped a game on a platform it has been more or less ignoring (except to add new units you can spend money on in the gacha game Fire Emblem Heroes), Shadows’ core premise seems like an odd fit for this particular series: this is a social deduction game that ditches the turn-based tactics the series is known for in favor of auto-battler combat.

Beyond not being what you’d expect from Intelligent Systems, things only get more bizarre and seemingly nonsensical when you learn the details. Each match, which is played against other players online, takes place over two rounds. In the first, a trio of players cooperate to battle a board of computer-controlled shadow soldiers. The twist? One of your companions (or you) is an imposter, a servant of the Goddess of Shadow, Fenris, who is secretly working to bring down the heroes. During the first round, this betrayer has access to shadow-fueled abilities that they can use to secretly attack their “teammates.”

This initial round usually lasts less than a minute, and after all of the units on one side die, you move to the voting phase, where each player picks who they think is the secret killer. If a hero guesses right, they get two additional lives for the final round, while if they guess wrong, they only get one. If a given hero died in the first round, they are automatically revived in the second, although this expends one of their extra lives. Once the votes are in, the servant of Fenris is revealed and transforms into a big monster with a beefy health bar who battles the good guys until there’s only one side left standing. Basically, regardless of whether the heroes picked right or not, matches always end in a big ‘ol battle. This round also usually doesn’t last for more than a minute or two.

Most Popular

Fire Emblem Shadows

As for why this premise doesn’t seem to make sense, those who’ve played board/card games like Werewolf or video games like Among Us will probably spot the issue right away—how could a social deduction game possibly work with only three people? For starters, in any given round, you have a 50/50 shot of picking out the killer on a completely blind guess. Additionally, with such a limited player pool, you would imagine it’s difficult to attack your adversaries without it looking suspicious—if everyone besides you is getting pelted with magic, it’s sort of clear who the traitor is.

However, on the other side of things, rounds are also so rapid-fire that you don’t have a lot of time to gather data. There’s no real method of in-game communication, which means there isn’t room for 12 Angry Men-style impassioned soliloquies delivered over a match of The Resistance as your buddy spends several minutes lambasting an overly silent ally for being a counter-revolutionary plant, only for the card flip to reveal that they were the no-good agent of the state all along. Sure, you can play Fire Emblem Shadows in a private lobby with some friends and try to recreate this experience over Discord or something, but the rounds are so quick that I’m not sure this would add much.

As for the other half of the game, there are the auto-battles. These also don’t seem to make much sense, but for different reasons. Here, the light and dark teams take turns attacking, with a bar at the top of the screen counting down until they perform their next strike. Units move and perform combat by themselves, seemingly by chasing down the closest enemy within their movement and hit range. The only direct control you exert over the battle is by utilizing one of several equipable spells that let you do things like launch lightning bolts or perform AOE healing. By default, using one of these spells results in a six or so second cooldown before you can use any spell again, with some particularly strong skills upping this time even further. Again, at first glance, it seems like they took a series known for its tactics gameplay and removed almost all semblance of strategy by robbing you of the ability to position or control your troops directly.

However, the thing is, despite Fire Emblem Shadows not really working as a Fire Emblem game or even as a traditional social deduction experience, I have a confession to admit: I’ve sort of been having fun with it. Not because it secretly bears more resemblance to this series than it lets on, but because it’s a perfect example of how, no matter how seemingly barebones, minimal, and “solved” a PvP game appears on the surface, as long as it isn’t entirely luck-based or straight up broken, players will wring out every last drop of nuance. At least from what I’ve played, even as a free-to-play player, there is a lot of room to go on win streaks, showing that things don’t come down to a coin flip or who has spent the most money.

I’m not sure how intentional this was, but much of the room for player expression in the game comes from a particular type of spell: the ones that let you move. While I mentioned earlier that you can’t control where your troops go on the battlefield, this isn’t entirely true, as a handful of abilities let you push or pull a unit one space forward, switch spots with another unit, or even move enemy units across the board. While moving a single space doesn’t seem like a big deal, it’s more than enough to trick the AI’s rudimentary behavior—if you are going to get impaled by three shadow soldiers at the end of the enemy’s next attack phase, moving one space can dodge this damage entirely. On top of this, the most powerful spells that the traitor can use are telegraphed two seconds before they land with a flashing red icon, giving you time to duck out of the way with an ability, or, most satisfying of all, to switch places with your foe so they blast themselves with their own magic.

Then, when you’re playing as the bad guy faction, you have the ability to spawn cronies on the map, and how you place your minions can make the difference between victory and defeat. Beyond this, you’ll need to focus on bursting down the right opponents at the right time and min-maxing your loadout to make sure that, whenever possible, you can kill an enemy unit in a single hit. If you don’t, it’s very possible that they or their ally will lay on healing spells.

And when it comes to the social deduction side of things, while this aspect is admittedly quite simplified compared to its peers, there are still plenty of small hints and cues that an experienced player can pick up on to make a very informed guess, as well as methods of throwing your foes off your trail.

If you’re the traitor, you generally want to attack yourself and an enemy unit with an AOE spell to frame one of the other two players. You need to be careful not to be too obvious, though, and ideally mix in some healing spells for your enemies while also attacking some of the shadow creatures—you don’t want to be too helpful, though, and feigning incompetence by “accidentally” missing a moving target can be a good way to go.

As for when you’re trying to figure out the traitor, there are lots of clues: which character are they playing (some are better when playing as a traitor than others), and what spells are they using? Do they seem like a “good” player? If so, they may be more likely to be trying to frame someone else rather than just blatantly attacking their foes.

But of course, this is only the beginning, and while playing the game with the previously mentioned strategies can help you blow through the earlier ranks of those playing with very straightforward strategies, you’ll eventually meet other people who are past the first layer of subterfuge and onto layer two, three, or more. Sometimes foes will use AOE spells to counter movement abilities, or will use reverse psychology and non-optimal strategies to deceive.

Like with many games, while things seem simple on the surface, there is enough leeway for players to become little freaks about it, and the more you play, the more you’ll try to maximize the little pauses in between spell cooldowns to absorb as much information as possible—while at first it, “playing” the game mostly felt like sitting around, now I find myself almost overwhelmed by the amount of data you can pick up on if you’re attentive. And on top of all of this, matches are only three-ish minutes long, which works perfectly for a mobile game.

That said, if I have an issue, it’s the game’s monetization: it’s another free-to-play game with microtransactions. While the game surprisingly doesn’t use any gacha mechanics for acquiring new characters, it does let you purchase an overpriced in-game currency to boost your characters’ levels, which, as you can imagine, is a bit of a problem in a PvP game. While there are level caps that minimize how overleveled a given player can be, as you climb ranks, small differences in character stats really begin to matter. If you’re the traitor, playing the final battle of a match “optimally” frequently revolves around one-shotting your foes so they don’t have a chance to heal, and because of this, having a few extra points of damage or HP thanks to being a level or two higher than your opponent can make the difference between victory and defeat.

And in general, the game’s incentive structure for ranking up truly doesn’t make any sense: the higher you climb, the more difficult it is to get the match-based accolades that unlock chests with better rewards. Basically, it’s easier to get good rewards with low-level characters than with high-level ones, meaning you’re punished long-term for playing the game.

As is the case with the vast majority of mobile games these days, I wish this wasn’t a free-to-play experience and I could just pay a flat fee—you know, like how games used to work. I’m not entirely convinced the rewards you get for paying are even that good, but the temptation will end up psychologically manipulating at least some folks into dumping money into the game for minimal gains, which very much sucks.

Still, while I can’t give the game a blanket recommendation for the reasons just mentioned, I’m glad I did check it out, mostly because it is pretty dang weird. It serves as a strong reminder of why somewhat surface-level, “this game is Fire Emblem plus Among Us” style descriptors aren’t particularly useful: really, the game has way more in common with DOTA Autochess, and even that comparison falls short, because its social deduction elements and ultra-short matches give it a very distinct vibe. Auto-battler obsessives may get the most out of it, but it’s still best to play it on its own terms.

And I say all of this while acknowledging that I’m not sure I’d call the core design of Fire Emblem Shadows “good” in a traditional sense. Considering that its auto-recommendations and hints for what you should do—i.e., bluntly attack everyone else if you’re the traitor, etc.—are the kind of limited strategies that would make the game deeply uninteresting, I’m unclear on how much intention went into movement spells and other aspects that add complexity. I imagine that many of its playtesters and developers adopted some of these strategies and knew that they were there, but I don’t know if how the game plays at higher ranks was “supposed” to look that way.

But honestly, does it matter? Whether it’s people breaking the physics of shooters with bunny hops, finding infinite combos in Marvel Vs. Capcom, or wavedashing in Super Smash Bros. Melee, intention doesn’t really matter much when the object reaches players’ hands or when a critic appraises the end result. That’s true when it comes to intricately designed, hardcore experiences targeted at an e-sports demographic from the jump, or with Shrek SuperSlam for the Nintendo GameCube, which apparently has a range of advanced movement techniques (I was 90% positive this video is satire, but then I found another video about “swoocing” and “onion boosting” so I truly don’t know anymore—the author is dead, and crumpet dashing killed them).

All this is to say, games are complicated. While it’s tempting to use reductive descriptors and criticize a thing for what it isn’t, it can be much more informative to engage with what the game actually is, especially when other players are involved. While I can’t give a blanket recommendation for Fire Emblem Shadows for a few reasons, including the fact that it unfortunately came out during one of the most stacked release months in recent memory, it’s yet another example of how human beings can be wonderful little min-mixxing weirdos who take games, or anything else really, “too seriously,” making the target of their obsession much more interesting than it would be otherwise. Never change my beloved obsessives, never change.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.