New Fire Emblem Heroes info: difficulty levels, Assist Skills, ranking up Heroes, more

The release of Fire Emblem Heroes is just 2 days away, but quite a few of the game’s details are still unknown at this point. Thankfully, a couple members of the press got the chance to try out the game for an hour last weekend. Below, we’ve compiled all of the new info from GameXplain’s and Polygon’s preview:

• You can view all of a character’s special illustrations on their status screen and listen to their voiced lines
• Units have “Assist Skills”, which can be activated when they’re standing next to an ally
• Bow users still deal extra damage to flying enemies
• Your chances of getting a Hero with a high star count increase each time you don’t get one when Summoning Heroes using Orbs (the game’s gacha system)
• If a unit reaches level 20, they can rank up, which increases their star count by 1
• The game’s first limited-time event apparently is centered on Lissa
• Story missions have several difficulty levels – Normal, Hard and Lunatic, with higher difficulties yielding better rewards, but requiring more Stamina to play
• There are different summoning “banners”, which each focus on a different group of Heroes
• You can turn off combat animations, portrait cut-ins and voice overs
• Special skills need several turns to charge; they are then used automatically next time the character attacks
• At any time during a battle, you can spend one Orb to revive and heal all your units – you can also use this to resume a mission if you get a Game Over
• There is an auto battle option
• Each character has a brief biography that describes their character and which Fire Emblem game they’re from
• The Arena uses a different Stamina mechanic called Dueling Swords – you get three Dueling Swords per day, and you need to use one to fight in the Arena. You can use Orbs to refill your Dueling Swords.
• You can use Orbs to upgrade your Castle, which is essentially your base – the first upgrade costs 1 Orb and permanently increases all experience gained by 20%
• You can also change the design of your castle
• Nintendo Treehouse localized the game

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