I’m skipping FE4 (Genealogy of the Holy War) & 5 (Thracia 776) because the fan translations are incomplete and dodgy, so I’m waiting for the inevitable remake for those.

After FE5, the original creator of Fire Emblem left the company to make his own games, which were Fire Emblem in all but name. I’m playing them currently and will report if I have any thoughts. In the meantime, I have thoughts on the GBA games, where the series tried to reinvent itself after the creator’s departure.

Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (GBA)

This game is really, really bad. Remember I complained about RNG in the first post? This game decided it would be a great idea to crank that up to 11. Hit rates are absurdly low in this game; combine that with maddeningly complex and difficult optional objectives that have zero room for error, and you better play with a guide open if you want to have any chance of seeing the whole thing. Even when performing the exact right strategy, you can still fail due to random chance, forcing you to start the whole map over again. The most blatantly offensive example is chapter 11a, which requires you to follow an extremely precise strategy that can be scuppered by an enemy you need to talk to randomly deciding not to move. WHY. They deliberately coded this in just to, what, screw players over? The same map also has a character who inexplicably refuses to join even if you talk to her and she survives the map like every other recruitable character; no, you need to talk to her twice with two different characters, or else she’s gone forever. AGGGHHH.

I ragequit after that map. The game was just so tedious, exhausting, and unfun I could not keep going. This game was supposedly designed to be easier in order to bring in new players, which just makes me wonder how horrifyingly difficult the SNES games must have been.

Also, swordmasters are ludicrously broken and every boss is trivialized by throwing Rutger at the problem, which is terrible for a strategy game. Later games would rightfully nerf their absurd +30% critical chance.

This is the game that introduced the codified support system, which is one of the series’ most popular features. Unfortunately, the implementation was so astoundingly terrible I’m genuinely astonished it made it to market. The way it works is that if characters end their turn adjacent to a character they can make a support with, they (invisibly!) gain a teeny tiny bit of progress towards building a new support, and when the threshold’s hit they can spend a turn talking to each other (in the middle of a tense battle…) to further their support. This is never going to happen if you play the game normally unless you play all maps by moving your entire army as a solid block; the game’s flow just doesn’t incentivize characters ending their turns next to each other often enough for this to trigger. In practice, supports are built by parking characters next to the seize point and selecting “end turn” 30 times. Supports are also stupidly powerful, which they balanced by limiting every character to 5 support ranks total, not that the game tells you this, so you can only see a fraction of the support writing in any given playthrough (and support chains have 3 levels, so you can only see one complete one). Seriously, did no one playtest this?

Plotwise, a peaceful kingdom is betrayed by its former ally who has suddenly gone mad with power and seeks to take over the world… where have we heard this one before? Yes, they decided to rehash FE1 & 3, but in reverse order; the next game is a prequel that rehashes FE1’s plot, while this one rehashes FE3. I should like this, because FE3 had the better plot so it seems wise to jump straight to the good bits. Unfortunately, the writers forgot FE3 relied on player investment. Without knowing anything about these characters, we have no reason to feel pathos about their betrayal at the hands of their former friend and whatnot. Compounding this is that the cast is extremely boring, shallow, and generic, the protagonist most of all. I just don’t care about anyone here.

Also, the teenage protagonist can marry his teacher. The creep pandering started early. But don’t worry, it can and will get worse. So, so much worse.

Case in point, here’s our next dragon loli, Fae. Once again I don’t see anything obviously untoward here — she dresses like a normal kid would and behaves like a normal kid too. She has exactly one support where she crushes on a male character, but the guy is just bemused, implying it’s nonserious puppy love. I even think her dragon form is really cute (it’s feathered!). But knowing where this ends up, I can’t help but be suspicious. (Particularly, I find it interesting that Fae is the only manakete this time — no gross old men, only cute girls. This remains true for the rest of the series.)

The story does exactly one interesting thing, which is that the evil king is not under mind control by the evil sorcerer; it’s actually the other way around, with the evil sorcerer revealed to be a mindless husk operating on his orders. The evil king is instead evil because, uh, he’s traumatized from his dad trying to kill him. Remember, abused kids are the real evil! We also get unnecessary dragon genocide again, but at least this time you can save the evil dragon. …If you jump through a bunch of invisible hoops to collect all the MacGuffins you need to get the true ending, that is. (It is also extremely gross that the one time we get an evil girl dragon, she’s a mindless monster who was driven insane so she could be a brood mare endlessly churning out babies.)

The one and only thing I’ll say in this game’s favor is that the art direction is phenomenal. As you can see in the earlier gif, character sprites are astoundingly detailed and well-animated, with every class having an amazing amount of personality and charm. I even love goofy details like axe fighters rotating their entire body 90 degrees when they swing. I feel the art direction really peaked here; as you probably know, I prefer sprites over models, and while some of the 3D games do have good models, I don’t think they can match the crispness and energy of the GBA sprites.

Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (GBA)

This was the first FE game to get an official international release. This is probably a good thing, because it is much, much better than The Binding Blade. Unfortunately, it left me rather ambivalent; maybe I was just sour coming off The Binding Blade, but it didn’t really live up to the hype for me. The beginning is really solid, but by the end I was just tired of it.

Because this was the first international FE game, they included a tutorial, because they were worried the dumb Americans would be too intimidated by complex strategy games. (No, really, the devs said this.) I don’t mind the condescension because the games really do need tutorials, and this one is actually really good. It’s not just a single toy map divorced from the rest of the game (as with FE6’s tutorial), it’s an entire campaign of 11 chapters that teach you tons of mechanics, including more complicated stuff like how to use chokepoints and terrain effectively. All the tutorial maps are very tightly designed to teach you mechanics at an even pace without ever being overwhelming, while still being good, fun maps in their own right (as demonstrated if you play on hard mode, which turns the tutorials off). This is definitely where I would recommend new players enter the series.

But most impressively, the tutorial doesn’t just teach you mechanics. It is its own complete story, with compelling conflicts and characters, and several of the tutorials are actually provided by the characters in-story, which I thought was genius. The story is much smaller in scale than other FE stories, and much more personal as a result. It follows Lyn, a swordswoman from not!Mongolia who is left the sole survivor of a bandit attack; she discovers she is the granddaughter of a duke in the neighboring kingdom and, desperate to find family again, runs off in search of him. She meets up with the duke’s knights and a few other misfits along the way, who help her repel assassins sent by her evil uncle, who is trying to kill her grandfather to take his territory for himself. Ultimately, she rides to her grandfather’s rescue, killing her uncle and saving her grandfather, who explains the circumstances of why her parents left and accepts her as his family. It’s a really tight, poignant, and satisfying story precisely because of the smaller scope and lower stakes, allowing us to have a realistic and relatable conflict rather than a spooky demon war so far removed from reality I just check out.

So of course the real game is about a spooky demon war with ludicrously over-the-top villains, because that’s what we must always return to. Otherwise we might say something beautiful and true about the nature of human evil, and we can’t have that now can we.

I said this one was a rehash of FE1’s plot and that’s true in broad strokes: the big bad is an evil sorcerer trying to summon dragons to take over the world, and you’re assisted by an ancient sage who turns out to be a hero from myth. They did, however, add a lot more details to flesh it out; though personally I feel they fell short of the mark.

The first arc is pretty okay, and actually remarkably similar to Lyn’s story: The hero, Eliwood, sets out to investigate the disappearance of his father and hopefully rescue him, but finds himself embroiled in a plot by a nefarious cult. This builds to a pretty satisfying climax where the heroes try to defeat the villain but fail, forcing them to limp home with their wounds and rethink their strategy. Unfortunately, that strategy is to go on fetch quests while fending off cackling evil cardboard villains, so I quickly lost interest. Eliwood himself is just kinda bland; he’s better than Roy, but that’s a low bar. I liked that he was emotional and sensitive at times, I guess? But they already did that with Marth. I don’t hate him but I didn’t find him compelling outside of his quest for his father, which is resolved halfway through the plot.

Lyn, the character I actually liked, promptly fades into irrelevance. She tags along because they had to integrate Lyn’s story with the main plot I guess, but she just sort of hangs out in the background pretending she’s a main character. She has basically no personality and could be removed without affecting the plot at all (as evidenced by her not appearing in FE6), which is a real letdown after the tutorial mode gave her such a strong showing. She also sucks as a combat unit, which just adds insult to injury, and she doesn’t even get a real legendary weapon at the end like the boys do, even though they absolutely could have given her the Mulangir.

I did like the third character, Eliwood’s BFF Hector, however. He displays personality traits beyond generic heroism: He’s impulsive, rude, and hotheaded, yet fiercely loyal to his friends and willing to do what’s right even if the world is against him. He has a foil in the form of his older brother, who is much more reserved and stately; however, as Hector discovers, he’s also dying, forcing Hector to mature as he realizes he will soon need to fill his brother’s shoes. Like Lyn’s story, it’s an impressively personal and poignant story about coping with the grief of losing a loved one while having to put on a brave face and shoulder great responsibility. Unfortunately, Hector’s mode is locked behind a second playthrough but is 90% identical to Eliwood’s anyway and I’m not playing this again. If you do play yourself, download a savefile or a hack that unlocks Hector mode from the start and just play that.

Aside from the trio of protagonists, the biggest difference from FE1 is that they try to flesh out the villains some more. Unfortunately, this was a swing and a miss for me. The secondary villains are a family of assassins who started out as chivalrous heroes protecting the weak from the powerful, but then they got infiltrated by the villain’s cult, at which point they decided that as long as Daddy says it’s okay, they’ll do whatever horrible things are asked of them. I don’t know if this is a cultural thing and filial piety to the exclusion of all sense looks more reasonable in Japan, but I’m baffled that I’m expected to be sympathetic to people who chose to switch their morality on a dime and commit atrocities for years because they couldn’t be bothered to question whether their obviously evil stepmom was evil.

Similarly, they try to give the main villain a tragic backstory, but it just left me with “Cool motive, still murder.” See, if you jump through a million invisible hoops on a second playthrough, it’s revealed he was originally a good guy who banged a dragon during the ancient dragon genocide (yes, we’re doing that again) and turned to dark magic to bring her back after she was abducted by evil humans. However, using dark magic steals your soul and also your memories, so after cracking a few eggs to eat their life energy he forgot he was doing it to make an omelette and just started pursuing power for its own sake. So sad! So tragic! He was only willing to kill innocent people a little before he went off the deep end! What a nice man.

This begs the question I always ask whenever this trope comes up: If people know dark magic always blows up in your face, why does anyone use it? “I need power to accomplish my goal, therefore I will get power through a method that makes me forget my goal. I am very intelligent.” What is this supposed to be commentary on, people being corrupted by power? That doesn’t rewrite your personality; this is too enmeshed in fantasy logic to have any real-world relevance. This wasn’t even necessary to make him a villain, because committing mass murder to bring back your wife is already monstrous. Though perhaps the writers think it isn’t?

Also, despite dragons being genocide victims, the final boss is an innocent dragon you murder because it’s gone crazy and has to be ~put down for its own good~. No one questions this even though they’re supposedly traumatized from murdering an innocent dragon five minutes earlier. The dragon girl at least looks like an adult this time (which is good, because Eliwood can bang her), and instead we get a precocious dragon boy. He’s not sexualized at all and we’re not constantly reminded it’s okay to hit on him because he’s technically a bajillion years old. I wonder why! (Don’t worry, the pedophilia will become equal-opportunity later.)

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (GBA)

This game is another reboot, with a completely unrelated story in a different universe. It’s a throwback to Gaiden, reintroducing mechanics like a world map, random encounters, and monster enemies. It even does a split storyline with two protagonists… but unlike Gaiden, you can’t see both on the same playthrough, which like Hector mode is just disrespectful of the player’s time. There’s no reason we couldn’t have played both routes simultaneously, especially since they’re only split for a short time and then reconverge. As it was I ended up really confused because I played Eirika’s route, where she dicks around in the boonies while all the actual plot is done by Ephraim and he has to bring you up to speed when he rejoins. Why this.

We speedrun straight to the FE3 plot this time: Peaceful kingdom is invaded by a former ally, turns out it’s the fault of a spooky demon man, yada yada. It does this better than FE6, largely because anything would be better, but also because it provides a lot of flashbacks to establish why this is such a betrayal and how shocking it is that their former friend has turned evil. It’s not perfect, but I’ll take it over having to sit through an entire game of fantasy cliche storm to set it up. There is one genuinely surprising twist as well, but it happens on Ephraim’s route so it just got told to me anticlimactically, which sucked.

As with FE7 they tried to make the villain more developed, but it once again fell pretty flat, mainly because they tried to do too many things at once and ended up making his motivation incoherent as a result. The villain is the prince of the neighboring kingdom, who was childhood friends with the protagonists. His national treasure (because this is Fire Emblem so of course every country has a national treasure) is the evil dark MacGuffin of evilness, but he thinks he can use its power for good. However, he’s in love with Eirika and jealous of Ephraim (if that sounds like incest subtext, oh boy we will get there) and the evil MacGuffin is able to use these insecurities to possess him. (Oh yes, the evil MacGuffin is actually a demon in a box who is the real final boss, because we can’t have a plot without a spooky demon man.)

They do actually answer the “What kind of idiot would use dark magic?” question this time: a) he’s a dumb kid, b) he successfully used it to do a good thing before, c) he saw a prophetic vision that his country would be destroyed and it’s made him desperate. Oh, you thought that last one would have plot relevance? No, it only comes back briefly in the epilogue to say by the way he was completely right and his kingdom was destroyed while the protagonists were dicking around, but it’s okay the protagonists will totally fix it somehow. Instead the writers thought a better use of his screentime would be to spend it all on how much he loves Eirika and only turned evil because love makes you crazy, which is just so blah I do not care. I said they did a better job of establishing their relationship than FE6, but they still didn’t do a good enough job to make this work. (Additionally, he only gets to have a personality at all on Ephraim’s route, which is just, why did they bother giving Eirika a route at all?)

Maybe I was just burned out on Fire Emblems by this point, but the whole thing just left me feeling kinda meh. It wasn’t bad, but it never strongly compelled me either. It could have been good, the pieces were there, but it never came together. Maybe I’d have come away feeling more favorable if I had done Ephraim’s route, which is where all the plot was apparently hiding.

We also get a new dragon loli, Myrrh. This one is where the creep factor starts to ping for me. Something about her feels distinctly different from Tiki and Fae. I think it’s the face — despite her other proportions being childlike, her face looks the same as the adult characters, as if someone grafted an adult’s head onto a child’s body. Which is rather fitting, because this is the first manakete that doesn’t act like a child. This is where we first get the constant reminders she’s not a girl, she’s 1000 years old and she wants you to treat her like an adult! She also has not only a paired ending with the male protagonist, but a support confirming she gets jealous when he’s around women, so the sexual subtext is very much deliberate this time. If they weren’t pandering to the lolicons with Fae, they definitely are now.

…Let’s talk about something positive. The gameplay is the real standout here. As I said, they brought back a lot of mechanics from Gaiden, but kept more of the series mainstays: the game is split into chapters as usual and is much more linear, and breakable weapons are still present. The latter detail interacts badly with the random encounters, in my opinion — random encounters do drop money, but they tend to be pretty small amounts, making it a crapshoot whether you’ll make enough money to recoup the cost in weapons. (You also run the risk of using up your irreplaceable weapons, which is a particular problem for your manakete.) Fortunately, inventory management is a lot easier, because any map that contained a shop can be revisited from the world map at any time, hallelujah. No more letting the battle drag on for ages to make sure you got everything you want from the armory; no more biting your nails over if this will be enough to carry you because you don’t know when you’ll see an armory again. It’s a bit tedious to trek all over the map if you need to track down something that’s only sold by a specific shop, but that’s a minor issue.

Some series fans are critical of the random encounters on the basis that grinding potentially trivializes the game, and while I agree in principle, you never have to grind if you don’t want to. They also provide a solution to a problem I identified in the overview: If you lose a character you’ve invested everything into, it’s now actually possible to whip a B-lister into shape to replace them, reducing the chance you’ll experience a softlock or death spiral.

There’s another big change: Promotions are no longer fixed! Instead of every class having only a single promotion, now when you promote you’re given a choice of two prestige classes. This is a great system that allows for more character customization and player agency, and can make same-class characters more unique by promoting them into different classes. This is further enhanced by the addition of “trainee” units who level quick and promote into one of the base classes. This allows for even greater customization, as they end up with potentially four final class options. This is such a great feature I’m honestly surprised it took the devs this long to come up with it.

Skills are also explicitly named now instead of being hidden, but they’re a bit sloppy. They’re only listed in the class description, with no explanation of what they actually do or how they’re triggered. They’re also poorly balanced, with some skills being good on paper but useless in practice; the worst offender is probably Deadeye (guaranteed hit if it activates), which is given to snipers, the class that has the best accuracy in the game. Great Shield is also a terrible skill that should not exist; it’s infuriating when it activates on an enemy but far too unreliable for a player to use, and generals hardly need it when they take negligible damage from most attacks anyway.

One last note to leave on, because it will have followup later. The protagonists this time are twins, and blood related unlike Alm and Celica. Their relationship is…

Tana: You and Ephraim are so close… You understand one another. It must be…so nice. I wish my brother and I shared that kind of connection.
Eirika: Well, we are twins, you know. I think that makes us slightly different from normal siblings.
Tana: But you two never fight or anything, do you? How do you two maintain such a close relationship?
Eirika: I… Well… Isn’t that normal for twins?

…very…

Ephraim: Eirika, are you all right?
Eirika: I am fine, Brother.
Ephraim: I’m right here, so please call me if you need anything. I’ll always be nearby.
Eirika: Yes, thank you. But you do understand that I am here to fight, don’t you? I cannot ask you to watch me constantly. I am your sister, not your ward.
Ephraim: Eirika…
(Ephraim approaches Eirika)
Eirika: Wait, don’t… What are you–?
Ephraim: You looked a little upset… I thought I would stroke your face like I used to…
Eirika: Please stop it. You’re treating me like a child…
(Ephraim moves away)
Ephraim: Oh, I’m sorry. It’s just an old habit… Besides, you were always the one who pestered me to do it when we were little. Don’t you remember?
Eirika: N-no, I don’t remember! That was such a long time ago… Ahh… Dear brother, please try to remember where we are right now. What would our companions say if they saw us in such a personal moment?
Ephraim: Yes, that would be embarrassing… Forgive me, I did not mean to do anything you would find unpleasant.
Eirika: N-no… I didn’t mean that… It’s just–
Ephraim: So, you really do want me to stroke your face?
Eirika: No! I mean, look…
Ephraim: Ha ha, you always did blush so easily! You haven’t changed at all!
Eirika: E-enough! Brother…you are starting to anger me!

…uh…

Eirika: Brother… Brother…please promise that you won’t ever leave me alone. Please…promise…
Ephraim: Of course. I would never leave you. Why would you ever think I could do something like that?
Eirika: Brother…
Ephraim: I know better than anyone how you feel, dear sister. Ever since we were born… No, even before… We two have always been together. And together…we will always stay.
Eirika: Yes, dear brother…

…close.

Innes: No, Eirika. Do not answer now. I have not yet bested Ephraim. I have not earned the right to woo you.
Eirika: Wha–? Why are you bringing my brother into this?
Innes: With a man like him around, I can see why you show no interest in suitors. If I prove myself his superior, you will surely accept my hand. If I fail, I release any claim to your affection. But I swear it on the depth of my love that I will destroy that man. Eirika, I will expect your answer then. That’s all I have to say.

Even their love interests pick up on this.

Now, believe me when I say you’ve seen nothing yet; later games will make it painfully clear the writers have a definite incest kink. What’s notable, however, is that it’s always the “not blood related” flavor of incest; in one game they even scuttle the story’s main themes just to assure you that you aren’t blood related so you can screw your siblings without guilt. That’s clearly an essential part of the kink. But Eirika and Ephraim are blood siblings, and yet. I’m left to wonder if the writers didn’t intend for the twins to read as incestuous, they’re just incapable of writing siblings that don’t sound like they have the hots for each other.