Dealing with backlog: Fire Emblem Heroes

I started playing this ages ago, months ago. The first time I picked it up was probably last year, then corona came around and I suddenly found myself with time to play it properly.

So I've only played Fire Emblem since Awakening, which isn't very long, which also meant that a whole bunch of characters in this game were new to me. Obviously I mostly used the ones that I knew from before, but I did get a few favourites from games I haven't played; Altina and Nils being two of them. Although it became obvious he wasn't a top-tier character later on, I kept using Sandwich-Leo throughout Book 1, just for the hilarity of it. He literally throws sandwiches at the enemy! xD

The story is about the Kingdoms of Askr and Embla and their summoning stones. The stones can summon heroes from a lot of different worlds and different timelines of those worlds (which is how you can have like a dozen Camillas). The first storyline (Book 1) is about the initial fight between the kingdoms of Askr and Embla. They're at war and both are using the summoning stones against the other. Imho the first storyline was a bit bland, but it worked well as an introduction to the game.

"Long ago the four nations lived together in harmony, then everything changed when the Fire nation attacked" ... No?

Book 2 is when things start to get interesting. We have two new kingdoms at war; Nifl and Múspell. Múspell's aggressions spill over into Askr and Embla and they join forces with Nifl against them. Princess Fjorm became one of my favourite new characters.

Book 3 is my favourite storyline so far. In this storyline we fight against death, literally, and Hel. Hel and her undead soldiers travel from realm to realm, timeline to timeline, and completely obliterate them. The characters of Askr and Embla get to meet alternate versions of themselves and see firsthand of how they would (or wouldn't as it happens) handle the trauma of seeing everyone and everything they love get taken from them. Eir was an instant favourite of mine.

Book 4 is not yet finished but shows a lot of promise. It's a bit darker, just like Book 3, which I definitely approve of. This storyline takes us to the realm of dreams and the realm of nightmares respectively. Light and dark fairies create dreams and children usually spend a lot of time with the fairies in their dreamlands. Freyja, the ruler of the nightmare realm, attempts to plunge all of the real world into an eternal nightmare.

And then we have the massive amount of paralogues, which are usually season or holiday themed. The easter ones seem to be made for innuendos, and several of the seasonal paralogues made for a lot of giggles.

 Omg, Lorenz! Please make sure that your speedos cover your thing O_o

In general, I really like the whole Norse mythology take on the realms and stories, although the main characters (Alphonse and Sharena) leave a whole lot to be desired. I played this game mostly for the story and characters, but I have played around a bit with the arena and things like that. Even did a couple chapters on Lunatic difficulty with my lvl 40 A-team :3

Definitely will continue playing around with this when I have some time to kill.