Spending $1,000 in Fire Emblem Heroes still won’t guarantee you every character

In what may be a community first, a Fire Emblem Heroes player spent $1,000 to max out their barracks, hitting the 500-fighter limit in the process. While that sounds like an exorbitant amount of money to spend on Nintendo’s new free-to-play game, it turns out that dropping a grand on the grab bag still didn’t win Reddit user Kookoo22 every available character.

Kookoo22 posted their full collection in an “Ask Me Anything” thread on the Fire Emblem Heroes forum. Other players mostly asked about character stats (Takumi “is great,” obviously) and what kind of job the user must have to maintain that level of disposable income (“Chemical analyst/software developer”), but what’s most fascinating is how many characters they still doesn’t have. Even with 500 heroes in their arsenal, Kookoo22 needs seven more characters to have them all. These include popular heroes like Hector, Leo and Nowi, among others.

Imgur via Reddit

That just highlights how frustrating Heroes’ random “gachapon” mechanic can be for completionists. At a rate of 20 orbs per five-character summoning spree, players need about 2,000 orbs to call up 500 totally new characters. While the game’s story missions offer those up, as do login bonuses, spending cash is the way to go for those who are serious about testing fate and hoping to win all the characters. Since they’re doled out at random, though, there’s no knowing just how many tries it will actually take to get everyone — so some players could be looking at dropping a ton of cash on the game, if they’re that serious about finding a five-star Takumi.

Spending a ton of money to get characters is “the only quick way” to do so, another user wrote. “Spending money really just means you get stuff quicker. But in many cases people won't be playing this game long enough to ever get what OP has I would guess. Think about how you get orbs and how long it takes, especially after going through story mode and getting all the free ones you can. There is a major fall off, and then only money can bring you to new heights unless you save up for months as F2P person.”

For their part, Kookoo22 was not compelled by the desire to catch ‘em all, according to their thread. The main reasons?

“Fun, curiosity, and data,” they wrote. Later, they added jokingly that they also did it “for the waifus” — otherwise known as Fire Emblem’s many eligible bachelors, although they’re sadly not dateable in Heroes.

Correction: The characters that Kookoo22 are from different classes, not the same one, as previously stated. Also, it costs 2,000 orbs to summon 500 characters. We’ve corrected both above.