It actually didn’t take me as long as I thought it would to finish Tokyo Mirage Sessions. So the good news is it means I’m getting this review out faster than I thought I would. To explain the general story of the game young idols are using their performance power or performa to harness the power of mirages which are portrayed by the Fire Emblem characters.  I’m sure people are wondering first of all is it a great Atlus game and is it something that Fire Emblem fans can also enjoy.

First I want to talk about the story.  It’s pretty good, but very predictable.  There’s not much about the story if anything about it that will keep you guessing but that’s fine because the execution works.  It was surprising seeing a completely light toned story from Atlus but the whole tone of the story is very upbeat and it was really nice.  As far as the Fire Emblem representation in the story there is little.  There are brief references to the story during the game but most of them are the bosses that you fight in the main and sub missions.  The game really doesn’t dive heavy into Fire Emblem references till towards the end of the game.  The references were pretty cool but I was really hoping to see more.  There was also one inconsistency with the story.  While the mirages have lost their memories according to Draug in a side mission they can remember very important people in their lifes.  This is how Cain can remember Abel later on, so how does Caeda not make any indication that she knew Marth when the game starts referencing him. Also another drawback was that the Mirages themselves talk a lot to the people but they rarely ever talk to each other.  I was hoping to see how characters from two different Fire Emblem games react to one another.  I did like how each Fire Emblem character was spot on with their respective characters.  Tharja was till stalkerish and very dangerous and Navarre was still a man of few words.  So the story was nice and entertaining also relaxing to play but they had plenty of room to add more Fire Emblem references.

Another thing to note is the cut scenes.  Most of them are of the performances of the cast members and while I never really caught onto J Pop before I actually found myself enjoying many of the songs that were played.  It was a lot of fun watching the performances especially the song Black Rain which is also on the CD that came with the special edition.

The gameplay is where the game truly shines.  It was a nice vibrant turn based strategy where the enemies had weapons and magic weaknesses and it was your job to figure out which ones worked.  Not only was it fun to plan out moves ahead of time but when you hit an enemies’ weakness it triggers a session that allows your other characters to attack.  It’s pretty cool hitting an enemy and just bombarding them with blow after blow and then realize that your other two characters still have attacks left.  If you plan your sessions out well you can really do some damage in one turn. Also as you do side quests you unlock ab lib performances and duel performances that trigger randomly as you fight and those take sections of different performances done by the characters and turns them into attacks.  Those are pretty exciting to trigger as not only do they do more damage they automatically trigger a session.  The gameplay was amazing I have absolutely no complaints with it.

The game also features dungeons that you have to navigate through to progress through the game. Each dungeon had its own unique challenge that you had to work out in order to progress.  This was pretty fun but the dungeons did have a lot of back tracking.  Some of the back tracking was ok but at other times it got frustrating.  I felt though the dungeons were the right amount of difficulty to not be frustrating to figure out but also not be so easy that you blaze through everything.

So overall the game was a lot of fun to play.  It was not without its flaws but being the first crossover between these two amazing series it went really well.  I’m really hoping that this game does well enough that another crossover is made that really expands on the Fire Emblem references, but if you’re a fan of Fire Emblem you won’t feel compelled to get this game based on that alone.  The game is fun but it felt more like a Fire Emblem cameo than a crossover.  So I actually think the game is a nice purchase and offers enough content and entertainment to justify paying full price.