News: Fire Emblem Cipher Prerelease Stream Shows Rules, Gameplay, Box Opening

June 22nd, 2015. Kitanishi of Intelligent Systems Co., Ltd., actress Lynn (voice of Fire Emblem Fates' Azura), and Fire Emblem Cipher producer Kawade Ryouta hosted a Niconico Live stream in commemoration of the upcoming launch of Cipher's first booster set and starter decks. Nico streams of this type are common in the promotion of Japanese media, and Cipher's was particularly notable for drawing in a massive crowd despite being a new trading card property--which typically need more time for the public to warm up to. The broadcast in its entirety can be viewed below.

Kawade provided an overview of the Fire Emblem Cipher demos held across Japan in the past month, which began on the 12th and carried through up to the day of the stream. The game's producer showed a surprising familiarity with the major card shops of several regions, hosting demos and interviewing players at game store Ma-ya in Kasai (Edogawa) on the 12th, and in card shop Fire Ball in Koshigaya on the 13th. Both of these retailers are two of the largest in their local areas, with Ma-ya having been in operation for fifteen years. The game won over many of those Kawade interviewed, as even the players that expressed first-time difficulty with the game's rules remained interested in trying a second time because their history with Fire Emblem and familiarity with the characters. One man who demoed the game had been playing Fire Emblem for sixteen to seventeen years, which kept him open to trying Cipher.


(Game begins at 0:18:40 and ends at 0:45:48, box opening at 0:56:44, loose packs at 1:03:52)

The broadcast then cut to a live play of Cipher with Lynn and Kozaki Yuusuke, character designer for Awakening and Fates. They were introduced to the rules by Cipher teacher Umata. In the interest of time both players played with less than the standard number of Orbs, three instead of five. Lynn played Starter Deck 1: War of Darkness with the Crown Prince of Altea, Marth as her main character, using Archanean units from Fire Emblem 1, 3 and 12. Her strategy in the game was to use archers and mages to attack from outside the range of Kozaki's units, while promoting her lord to increase his base attack power and thus make it difficult for Kozaki to successfully defend.

Kozaki played Starter Deck 2: Awakening with Crown Prince of Ylisse, Chrom as his main character, using the Ylissian characters from Fire Emblem 13. His strategy was to use prepromoted allied units with higher costs but also higher base attack power to prevent Lynn's attacks from hitting.

Umata explained that to begin the game, each player draws five cards, then places five cards from the top of their deck into the Orb Area (three in this demo game.) If either player is attacked while they have no Orbs, their main character is defeated and they lose the game. Each player's turn is made up of five phases; the opening phase, bond phase, deployment phase, action phase and then the end phase.

In the opening phase the current player's turn begins and their units return to an action state, vertically-oriented. (Equivalent to being untapped in Magic or stood in Vanguard.) They also draw one card--except during the first turn of the game when they are the first player to take a turn.

In the bond phase, the player puts a card from their hand into the bond zone horizontally. They may only play one card in this way each turn. (Equivalent to playing a land in Magic or attaching energy in Pokémon.) During the deployment phase, the player can play units from their hand whose costs are less than or equal to the number of cards in the bond area. (So with one card in the bond area, a card with a cost of 1 can be played, and with two cards in the bond area, two cards with a cost of 1 can be played, or one card with a cost of 2.)

In the action phase, units with skills that say Action can use those skills by paying costs like reversing bonds (turning them face-down) or turning them to an acted state. In the action phase the player can also use their units to attack other units within their range, either sending the opponent's allies to the retreat area (discard pile) or dealing damage to their main character and breaking an Orb. Attacking requires a unit to move from the action state to an acted state, and so is mutually exclusive with using some skills. In the end phase, the turn passes to the next player.

In Lynn's action phase above, Gordon and Merric are in Lynn's rearguard, while Navarre and Marth (her main character) are in her vanguard. Chrom and Lon'qu are both in Kozaki's vanguard. Marth and Navarre can both attack Chrom and Lon'qu because they have a range of 1 and those enemies are adjacent to them, and Gordon and Merric can also attack either unit because Gordon has a range of 2 and Merric a variable range of 1~2. When Lynn attacks one of Kozaki's units, both players reveal the top card of their deck, and the support values of the revealed cards are added to their respective side's attacking and defending units. (If the revealed support card has the same character name as the unit, it has no effect.) The revealed cards are then sent to the retreat area. As long as Lynn's attacking unit's power is greater than or equal to Kozaki's defending unit's, she will win the battle, and if that unit was the main character an Orb will break and be sent to Kozaki's hand. Towards the end of the game Umata introduced one last game mechanic; by discarding any card with the same character name as their attacking unit, a player may have that unit perform a critical hit with twice the attack power. The defending player can do the same to perform evasion, completely nullifying the attack, which gives purpose to otherwise-dead cards--as each player can only have one copy of a unit in play.

Although Lynn could not attack due to going first, being able to always have one more bond than her opponent as a result of being the first player to place a bond let her always have more allies in play than Kozaki, overwhelming him with multiple attacks. However, her archer strategy was hampered by the low base power of the archer characters, as Gordon and Y only have 30 base power while Chrom's is 40. This means that Lynn needed to consistently check higher support value cards than her opponent in order to hit with the archers, introducing an element of chance to the game that effectively gave her a smaller margin of error than her opponent for hitting with attacks. The outcome of the game could have been changed in Kozaki's favor had he protected Chrom by moving him to the rearguard early on. Although Marth has the ability to move one enemy per turn, this requires tapping both himself and one of his own units, which would decrease the number of attacks Lynn was making per battle phase by 2 each turn.

The stream was not without incident, as minor technical problems repeatedly inhibited its airing; several times cameras had to be repositioned to get them out of shots, and microphone errors interrupted the audio at times. For this broadcast neither player used card sleeves, likely to avoid further camera trouble. Sleeving cards creates a reflective surface so that the face of the card cannot be seen in recordings when placed under direct lighting.

After the demo game, the group showed off four character sleeves from the first wave that will launch along with the set; "Lodestar, Marth," "Protector of the Halidom, Chrom," Bewitching Shaman from Plegia, Tharja and the 25th anniversary dot character sleeves. For the second wave of sleeves fans were able to vote during the broadcast for what character they would like to see out of those introduced in War of Darkness and Awakening.

From The Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light cast Tiki won the majority vote, with 52.2% of all votes going to her. Second place was Caeda with 17.9% of the vote, third Navarre with 11.1%, fourth Ogma with 10.5% and fourth Cain with 8.2%. From Awakening, Gaius won a considerably more divided contest; 28.1% of responders voted for Gaius, 23.7% for Cordelia, 23% for Olyvia, 13.6% for Owain and 11.5% for Lon'qu. Viewers could also participate in a raffle for a box of Booster Set 1: Warblade of Heroes, with the winner receiving several signed cards pulled by the hosts during the stream.

The group then did a live box opening of the first booster set, B01: Warblade of Heroes. Kitanishi was forced to briefly intervene when Kawade did the opening, to hide the character download code for Fire Emblem Fates packaged inside. Every sealed booster box contains a code to download Pegasus Knight Minerva into the Japanese edition of Fates. The stream also revealed that each box also has a promotional print of Corrin from Fates. The standard version of the card will be printed in B02: Soulful Flames of Light and Dark, which launches this September.

Although the opening was intended to show off the availability of signed cards, an awkward moment arose when none of the Super Rares pulled were signed. Kitanishi then brought out a box of loose packs, from which Kawade immediately pulled a signed Liss.

Notably, the box opening seems to demonstrate a packaging bias common to new card games. Two of the three Super Rares pulled came from the left side of the box; due to the way in which cards are automatically cut and inserted into packs from a printed sheet, packaging biases sometimes emerge due to a failure to properly randomize the distribution, and B01 may be victim to this same mistake. This primarily matters when buying packs from a shop, as if the packaging bias holds true it's better to buy packs from the left side of a box to guarantee higher-rarity cards.

"Everyone please look forward to the launch! Thank you very much! Goodbye!"

Each of the hosts closed out the livestream with their own special farewells. Kozaki made the announcement that he will be expecting his first child in the fall, receiving his fellow hosts' congratulations as well as those of the viewers'. Kitanishi encouraged those watching to keep trying even if they don't understand the rules at first, to participate in events and take a look at the homepage. Producer Kawade spoke to each of the "strong and thoughtful" fans of Fire Emblem, stating that it would make him happiest if everyone could enjoy playing in the world of Cipher. Lynn stated that she had fun with the game even though it was her first time, and asked all of the viewers to look forward to playing Cipher.

Over 24000 viewers tuned into the broadcast, posting more than 16000 live comments during the stream. Afterwards a poll conducted for the remaining viewers showed an enormously positive reception to the game, with 77.2% of responders ranking the livestream "Very fun," 17.7% "A little fun," 3.2% "plain," 1.1% "Not very fun," and 0.8% "Not fun."

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