Review Insights · App Store
Fire Emblem Heroes
Nintendo Co., Ltd. · 130,305 ratings · ★ 4.8
4.8
★★★★★
130,305 ratings
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Top complaints - extracted from 42 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"game"
32 negative reviews mention this · 76% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Utter trash now. Hope you like your new character cause it’ll be power crept within the month.. Five page long text descriptions of overpowered skills that will be power crept with a few months, inability to use any character older than six months competitively, 1400 characters of utter trash. This game has been designed to make all …" - MR <><
2
"characters"
10 negative reviews mention this · 24% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Utter trash now. Hope you like your new character cause it’ll be power crept within the month.. Five page long text descriptions of overpowered skills that will be power crept with a few months, inability to use any character older than six months competitively, 1400 characters of utter trash. This game has been designed to make all …" - MR <><
3
"money"
9 negative reviews mention this · 21% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Utter trash now. Hope you like your new character cause it’ll be power crept within the month.. Five page long text descriptions of overpowered skills that will be power crept with a few months, inability to use any character older than six months competitively, 1400 characters of utter trash. This game has been designed to make all …" - MR <><
4
"fire"
9 negative reviews mention this · 21% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Completely Powercrept and Bloated Gacha. I’m a huge Fire Emblem fan. I played this game upon release and quickly stopped due to balancing issues, the style being a bit too dumbed down, and the story being lackluster. I came back and played for a week and all of those things are s…" - OneNOnlySev
5
"power"
8 negative reviews mention this · 19% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Utter trash now. Hope you like your new character cause it’ll be power crept within the month.. Five page long text descriptions of overpowered skills that will be power crept with a few months, inability to use any character older than six months competitively, 1400 characters of utter trash. This game has been designed to make all …" - MR <><
6
"nothing"
8 negative reviews mention this · 19% of all complaints
★★★★★ "If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. The way this game is balanced makes it so the newest unit is always the must have unit. However, with how they balance this game, and how horrid the power creep has become, units ge…" - geseeley
7
"emblem"
8 negative reviews mention this · 19% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Completely Powercrept and Bloated Gacha. I’m a huge Fire Emblem fan. I played this game upon release and quickly stopped due to balancing issues, the style being a bit too dumbed down, and the story being lackluster. I came back and played for a week and all of those things are s…" - OneNOnlySev
8
"every"
8 negative reviews mention this · 19% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Completely Powercrept and Bloated Gacha. I’m a huge Fire Emblem fan. I played this game upon release and quickly stopped due to balancing issues, the style being a bit too dumbed down, and the story being lackluster. I came back and played for a week and all of those things are s…" - OneNOnlySev
9
"fire emblem"
8 negative reviews mention this · 19% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Completely Powercrept and Bloated Gacha. I’m a huge Fire Emblem fan. I played this game upon release and quickly stopped due to balancing issues, the style being a bit too dumbed down, and the story being lackluster. I came back and played for a week and all of those things are s…" - OneNOnlySev
10
"unit"
7 negative reviews mention this · 17% of all complaints
★★★★★ "If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. The way this game is balanced makes it so the newest unit is always the must have unit. However, with how they balance this game, and how horrid the power creep has become, units ge…" - geseeley
11
"become"
7 negative reviews mention this · 17% of all complaints
★★★★★ "If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. The way this game is balanced makes it so the newest unit is always the must have unit. However, with how they balance this game, and how horrid the power creep has become, units ge…" - geseeley
12
"units"
7 negative reviews mention this · 17% of all complaints
★★★★★ "If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. The way this game is balanced makes it so the newest unit is always the must have unit. However, with how they balance this game, and how horrid the power creep has become, units ge…" - geseeley
📋 All 42 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
Utter trash now. Hope you like your new character cause it’ll be power crept within the month.
Five page long text descriptions of overpowered skills that will be power crept with a few months, inability to use any character older than six months competitively, 1400 characters of utter trash. This game has been designed to make all your previous investments worthless, so don’t bother investing your time or money.
If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck
If your favorite isn’t a lord or an OC you’re out of luck. The way this game is balanced makes it so the newest unit is always the must have unit. However, with how they balance this game, and how horrid the power creep has become, units get maybe 2 weeks of relevance until they’re powercrept by the next batch of characters. The main exceptions are if the character is a lord from across the series or a Heroes original character. If you’re a fan of Sain & Kent, Flavia & Basilio, Hinata & Oboro, or anybody that isn’t one of the lords, one of the devs’ favorites or the questionable community picks, your favorite character will be horribly represented and there’s nothing you can do about it. There is no reason why FE7’s Leila and Karla get more representation than Raven or Matthew. (Spoilers: Leila DIES. She has 3 versions while Matthew is stuck on one. Karla is very easy to miss as she’s only recruitable in a new game after the main campaign is complete, and yet still has more alts than Raven. He and Matthew both serve Hector’s story but both are left behind in favor of URSULA, who also has more alts than both of them combined. That is just one example. The devs put out surveys but clearly they’re thrown away because feedback isn’t accepted. The game is in the midst of a very very boring two year stint of more alts for already overrepresented characters. With the horrid balance too, it’s no wonder they’re losing players. I used to enjoy this game! Now I look forward to EoS.
Eh
Still garbage after all these years; dev team and company have no connection whatsoever with their player base. Also, there’s so many Bot reviews, kinda sad
Completely Powercrept and Bloated Gacha
I’m a huge Fire Emblem fan. I played this game upon release and quickly stopped due to balancing issues, the style being a bit too dumbed down, and the story being lackluster.
I came back and played for a week and all of those things are significantly worse than before.
The game now has 10 years of bloat and powercreep. Every battle is stat check or be stat checked, even the campaigns vs NPCs.
There is no logical, linear approach to the game. You have to essentially play Cookie Clicker for 80 hours before you can get to a point that you even understand relative unit power because before this point you are simply underpowered.
The campaign is still convoluted and boring.
Canto is still ridiculously OP in conjunction with movement/Union skills. It’s even worse now since Harmonized skills exist.
Any strategy that could be in the game is made irrelevant by stat-checking defense builds and/or hyper-mobile builds that simply cannot be caught due to the game’s movement restrictions and small maps.
0/10 would not recommend.
I came back and played for a week and all of those things are significantly worse than before.
The game now has 10 years of bloat and powercreep. Every battle is stat check or be stat checked, even the campaigns vs NPCs.
There is no logical, linear approach to the game. You have to essentially play Cookie Clicker for 80 hours before you can get to a point that you even understand relative unit power because before this point you are simply underpowered.
The campaign is still convoluted and boring.
Canto is still ridiculously OP in conjunction with movement/Union skills. It’s even worse now since Harmonized skills exist.
Any strategy that could be in the game is made irrelevant by stat-checking defense builds and/or hyper-mobile builds that simply cannot be caught due to the game’s movement restrictions and small maps.
0/10 would not recommend.
Some of the worst powercreep I have ever seen
Genuinely, I think this game is one of the worst gacha games on the market as of right now. This game is ten years old this year and it is genuinely not a good game.
This game has had the same festering wounds since the first few years of its release and done nothing to make a good game that is balanced and enjoyable on any merit other than one thing: gambling. If you can and are willing to shell out around a 100 dollars a month for the new meta units you will have a fun time, if you're not and aren't lucky well, you simply won't. There are few attempts to balance the game and its units, while I can understand that not every unit will be good or viable (unless you're willing to invest a lot of money or time and unnecessary work), I think that at the very least keeping your game approachable and flagship units toted as "Legendary" or "Mythical" should be a priority, however the developers simply do not want to because they can milk more money out of their player base by making them deal with FOMO or powercreep every month. They do not care about F2P players.
If you want to play a good RPG that actually has balanced gameplay and allows units to be viable in your team composition and beautiful art, play Granblue Fantasy instead. The game is criticized for being overwhelming to new players, but at least skill descriptions aren't so convoluted that I need a microscope to read them and put Yu-Gi-Oh cards to shame.
This game needs a complete overhaul to be good and I have left feedback to the developers for years that it is suffering the same issues that led to games like Kingdom Hearts Union Cross becoming unplayable and eventually shuttering. Look elsewhere for a good game.
This game has had the same festering wounds since the first few years of its release and done nothing to make a good game that is balanced and enjoyable on any merit other than one thing: gambling. If you can and are willing to shell out around a 100 dollars a month for the new meta units you will have a fun time, if you're not and aren't lucky well, you simply won't. There are few attempts to balance the game and its units, while I can understand that not every unit will be good or viable (unless you're willing to invest a lot of money or time and unnecessary work), I think that at the very least keeping your game approachable and flagship units toted as "Legendary" or "Mythical" should be a priority, however the developers simply do not want to because they can milk more money out of their player base by making them deal with FOMO or powercreep every month. They do not care about F2P players.
If you want to play a good RPG that actually has balanced gameplay and allows units to be viable in your team composition and beautiful art, play Granblue Fantasy instead. The game is criticized for being overwhelming to new players, but at least skill descriptions aren't so convoluted that I need a microscope to read them and put Yu-Gi-Oh cards to shame.
This game needs a complete overhaul to be good and I have left feedback to the developers for years that it is suffering the same issues that led to games like Kingdom Hearts Union Cross becoming unplayable and eventually shuttering. Look elsewhere for a good game.
Became P2W.
Title says it all. It started out fine, but they pulled a Nintendo. 😑
Bad drop rates
I have seen very little 5 star units drop. Literally chose summon that has highest 5 star drop rate. 26 draws and it is at 10 percent now. Not a single 5 star unit. I know it is a percentage, but that is insane when the damn orbs cost 20 dollars for 5 draws. I ain’t going to endorse Nintendo a multi billion dollar company being this greedy. I think drop rates are not accurate to what is advertised and hope someone can prove it for an easy lawsuit.
Overheating
Game makes iPhone 17 pro overheat like crazy. Fix this
Lowering my rating
I rated this 3 stars a long time ago because it was fun but could also get more expensive than what I found reasonable for the content, but things have since gone downhill. The latest maps are now fully unwinnable unless you have a very specific set of characters with very specific abilities applied. On top of that, the paywall has only gotten more ridiculous. No exaggeration, it can cost hundreds of USD to unlock a full banner of new characters even with FEH Pass (Pass isn’t worth the cost, BTW), and if you want to get everything, you’re looking at thousands or even tens of thousands of USD to do it. Winning the latest maps is practically hidden behind a paywall now (I’ve unlocked nearly 1,000 heroes and don’t have time to try each and everyone for each and every map), and as a result, the fun is gone. This is no longer a good game, and that’s sad because I really like the Fire Emblem series.
What’s balance?
Have fun having your 100+ damage attack reduced to 0 by the newest broken unit and not being able to decipher how from the giant paragraphs of texts each unit on the map has. This game has gotten so bad that it makes me worry about the future of the series.
Arena :(
9 years of dealing with broken arenas. I can’t even do the dailies because I get dropped into battles pairing my f2p team against some person who can afford to pour three times my monthly salary into their waifus. Every time. Give me a damned f2p tier or at least make the tiers reflect the actual meta of the game. You guys made the heroes. Surely you know how unbalanced the new ones are!!!
hm
put awakening and fates on switch instead of milking them for a gacha game
Meh
I know it’s SOP, but being asked to review an app that I have used for less than 5 hours is incredibly silly
Bleh
Loved this game in its early years, but now it has become a blatant cash grab.
IS will burn
Burn
Account
I lost my account twice and I have to restart this game I’m so sick and tired of this. I’ve never had this problem with any game before.
Money hungry thieves
This is basically a game that takes advantage of people that cannot control their impulse to gamble.
It’s a very poorly balanced game with massive power creep to maximize their revenue at the cost of the quality of the gameplay.
Terrible game.
It’s a very poorly balanced game with massive power creep to maximize their revenue at the cost of the quality of the gameplay.
Terrible game.
Greedy and F2P nightmare
No free tempest trials units for us, and on top of that giving us useless !!!SHARDS!!!, that means no money for you. BOYCOTT TOGETHER
Tempest trial changes ruining the game
This game used to be a great game that celebrates all of fire emblems history. But recent changes have ruined much of what made this game so great. Rampant power creep, the same character getting 3+ alts a year, and finally removing the new free character that everyone would obtain each month from tempest trials. That is why it pains me to write this review of a game I once loved.
You’ll never summon the units you want
40 summon. 40 summons and NOTHING. NOTHING. TRASH GAME THAT GIVES YOU NOTHING
Terrible, overpowered characters
This game used to be fun. It used to be a game in which you use strategy and tactics to win and complete challenges and such.
Now the newer characters are so overpowered, you just sit there and watch as one enemy character is invincible to all damage, and just keeps taking infinite turns until all your characters are dead. The developers should be ashamed of themselves.
Now the newer characters are so overpowered, you just sit there and watch as one enemy character is invincible to all damage, and just keeps taking infinite turns until all your characters are dead. The developers should be ashamed of themselves.
Update locks my device out
Gee, thanks IS. Bad enough the jerks behind my device aren’t supporting it anymore, now you’re locking me out of the game entirely, after YEARS of support. Real good customer service, guys.
🧌
mid
Gatcha game
This game is horrible, it ruins fire emblem, they should focus on the actual games and not this horrible cash grab that preys on people with gambling problems
Buggged or something
Everytime I try to claim something it just gives me a loading wheel and not claim anything
Game’s on life support
It was a good run, but every gacha game eventually gets powercrept into oblivion. The only reason the game’s still chugging along is a mixture of sunk cost fallacy and brand recognition. It’s borderline impossible to play without being a whale because skills become obsolete too quickly for you to ever really catch up. I have never once touched online modes other than the arena, but now even the solo content is so powercrept that I can’t even damage the enemies anymore. There’s nothing left to do other than collect provocative images of Three Houses characters because IS never represents any other game.
Unskippable Tutorial
Title
READ THIS PLEASE OR I WILL START TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO PLAY THIS!
I don’t usually write reviews but I want to be heard. Please bring back Tempest Trials and Forging Bonds that have already happened, there are plenty of people who never got to play the early ones. Please also add more food to the farm in Aether Islands, I’ve already made all the recipes in the cookbook and I’ve gotten tired of making them to get rewards. Please add more recipes I’m begging you. Finally, please add characters you don’t already have. So tired of getting the same characters that just have been reskinned, that really needs to stop. Also when allowing players to vote on characters that they want in the game, how about making it so we can only vote on characters that aren’t already in the game. I have friends who deleted this game because they got tired of the repetitive nature of the game, and they are telling people not to download it. They have deterred fifty people from playing your game, so that should tell you alot about how repetitive and annoying your game has gotten. If I wasn’t obsessed about the game I would also delete it and warn people away from playing it.
Power Creep is Ridiculous
I started playing this game when it launched, and took a break from it at the end of 2023. I come back just to see that almost every unit I had become nearly obsolete towards completing the newer content, and that building the heroes you actually care about doesn't matter. If you aren't pulling the new best hero every month, you'll fall behind and ultimately feel like you HAVE to spend money just to pull something good. Don't waste your time, and definitely do NOT spend your money.
the developers of this gacha
today i decided to reinstall the game cause i was carious on how the game is now i did 2 story arc and got 325orbs for the focus banner “Black Knight” and….i didn’t get a single copy of him unless i give I.S. $10 for feh pass. i just proved fire emblem heros is a scam it doesn’t matter how many orbs you have saved because they ALWAYS pair the money making unit of the focus banner with other useless same color unit as that money making unit to scam you of the idea that you could get him and when you dont they dangle a little paywall to get a free copy of him after 40 summon for $10. its not worth it when you can use your brain and tell their gonna make some female unit to hard counter BK in the future. this game is literally “get one meta unit that can tank the entire enemy team and one shot all of them with that one unit”.
Should be rated AO
Any game where you can spend an indefinite amount of money and still have no chance at getting what you want should have the same restrictions as actual gambling since it is conceptually the exact same thing.
Unfair and unbalanced; devs don’t care.
PVP has turned into an unfair, lawless wasteland and the developers are doing absolutely nothing to rectify this as the meta gets more and more absurd. The game has been on a steady decline since roughly summer of 2023 and it’s only getting worse as the months roll by. This game should be shut down immediately and the developers blacklisted.
The game was like 5GB
I downloaded it to give a review (I’m doing reviews on all Nintendo apps) and using up 5GB wasn’t worth it at all
This game is aweful
This game is nothing like the fire emblem that is near and dear to our hearts.
This game is such a joke, words cannot describe the disappointment of how broken and unenjoyable everything is. IS has never been more out of touch with reality and its fan base.
This game is not Fire Emblem.
So if you love the franchise, do yourself a favor and save yourself frustration.
This game is such a joke, words cannot describe the disappointment of how broken and unenjoyable everything is. IS has never been more out of touch with reality and its fan base.
This game is not Fire Emblem.
So if you love the franchise, do yourself a favor and save yourself frustration.
Pull odds aren’t correct
The pull odds are not correct. Game lied to you so you spend money. I can’t wait for games like these to become illegal.
Not Good To Newcomers!
Gotta play catch up, especially to players who started this game since day one.
power creep is unbearable
i get that the game wants you to summon more, but characters become obsolete within months. it make it difficult to enjoy.
Overly complicated abilities for newer units
Newer characters have 2000 word descriptions for each of their 3 abilities & weapon due to how OP they are and the insanely long,complicated descriptions make it difficult to plan for strengths/weaknesses in battle.
Powercreep and skillcreep has become a real problem…
The walls of texts for skills and the blatant irrelevance of units as far back as just a year is ruining the game… the game needs complete rework cuz as of now it’s not about your skill in strategy but the skills your units have and how much you’re willing to spend on orbs to attain said units and skills- for now this game will just be a glorified collection of my fav Fire Emblem characters nothing more
Generic mobile game with a Fire Emblem skin
I’ll start this off by saying I hate mobile games. But I thought I’d give this a try because I really like the Fire Emblem games. Unfortunately, this is no different than any other mobile game I’ve tried. 100% designed to drain people’s wallets. Completely overwhelming amount of stuff but surprisingly little substance… It just has everything I hate about mobile games and nothing I like about the Fire Emblem games (the compelling story, relationship building, etc.) I like the artwork though, and it does have some of the Fire Emblem strategy in the fights, so I’ll give it 2 stars for that
No longer fun
Been playing since launch, and held on long after all my friends quit. I’m throwing in the towel. The game is no longer enjoyable with the ridiculous power creep and the requirement to read/analyze walls of texts every combat.
Pay To Win or unplayable
They will keep introducing new characters with overpowered skills every two weeks or so making the old ones powerless against them. Even if you pay to get some new ones, there will be more new ones just a week or two later to nullify and outdated the ones you just got. And they keep doing this forever. The kus side is the artwork is pretty and voice actors generally do a good job but they usually only do five sentences or so. It is not at all worth the endless money you have to spend to play the game. And the game is basically unplayable without their subscription, the feh pass. It’s just shiny gacha cow milking with this game. Game ok ay never really changed at all. It’s like a chino form of a real fire emblem game. Stick to the real ones and avoid this like the plague. This is just a scam game at its finest.
Sentiment summary
95%
Positive (4-5★)
2%
Neutral (3★)
3%
Negative (1-2★)