Best presentation Fire Emblem has had, sad we'll never get it again. Beautiful character designs, wildly good music(that I was shocked to find was all just remixes of the dang NES tracks!), peak vibes. Just a joy to go through and see the story through to the end. The Fire Emblem I'd recommend most to people who simply want a nice JRPG/SRPG experience without particularly wanting to get into Fire Emblem, because it's both poorly representative of Fire Emblem gameplay as a whole, and not a very good Fire Emblem to play. On its on, though, as something on the outside - indeed, as a gaiden, it's great.

Possibly the best story of modern FE alongside Three Houses. One of the most impressive 3DS titles visually and having every character conversation voiced was a first for the series and it adds even more emotion to the stories of characters. Unfortunately, the gameplay of later maps and some enemy units begin to suck the fun out of the game. Slow poisonous swamp levels and enemies that teleport to the player and one shot their units are not fun to fight and the start of the game is a bit slow before you get a full team. You do feel like you are truly building an army in this and it is very satisfying to show up to the final few levels with a massive amount of units you trained.

Echoes is strange. I wonder what made them choose gaiden to remake over fan favorites like thracia or GoHW. Echoes is remade and even features new segments which is nice! Unfortunately, it shows its age as a nes game.

The bad.

- Maps are very simplistic. Terrain effects are barely relevant on hard difficulty and most of them are empty spaces with nothing happening. The fault lies with the fact that levels aren't built with as much care as fates or awakening, because a lot of them are little grunt fights.

-The dungeons are neat the first time but you quickly realize how tedious and boring these environments are. The fatigue system is annoying, and the random encounters take forever. Imagine playing Final Fantasy but ever random encounter took 3-4 minutes and didn't give you anything of value and little EXP. These dungeons may hide permanant stat buffs, which does promote actually exploring, sadly it is very bare bones.

-The story is boring, plain and simple. Some characters are interesting and overall better written than fates ever was, but its not enough to carry the nes era story. Also, it has some weird brother sister love thing happening that I did not jive with. With how much alm and celica simp over each other too, it was naseuating at some moments.

The Good.

-Weapons have no durability now and they are function more as stat buffs than required tools. I like this because they also give skills if you use them enough, which makes weapons unique even to non-main characters.

-The music is pretty good. I don't have much else to say on this point, they just took the old composition and remade it with actual instruments this time and not nes boops.

-Again, characters are better here than they were in fates, some are kind of one note like alm's femcel childhood friend whos name I already forgot. But the characters that are required to come with you are actually the best ones and enjoyable.

-The turnwheel is great for the health of the game and the franchise. This isn't xcom, every unit has character and importance so losing them would be annoying, or getting hit by a 5% crit and losing a unit is also annoying. It doesn't happen too often but my units also can't seem to land a attack ever at 90% hit rate so who knows? I do wish that, like in three houses, if main character dies, you could use turnwheel instead of being forced to restart. One level I played, celica got crit off 7% and I had to restart the whole thing.

I do like some of the changes but they changed so much I hesitate to call this a "remake". If you were to change so much of the game, why not just change the whole thing? Modernize the gameplay, touch up the story. Maybe they did do these things, I haven't played the nes game so I can't say, but the old nes game still feels like an old nes game but now theres monotonous dungeons.

I had a blast replaying Fire Emblem Echoes because it is my FAVORITE fire emblem game. Alm and Celica continue to be my favorite characters (they are my children) and surprisingly, Fernand is in my top 3 now all because his english va is Ray Chase and I had little knowledge about va's back in 2017. I LOST MY MIND WHEN I REALIZED FERNAND WAS RAY I HAD A FREAKING MELTDOWN Ray Chase is one of my favorite va's :,) (i had an overall meltdown when i realized how stacked the va cast was but ray chase was on a whole other level)

The music? I'm eating it. that's a fucking 10-course meal right there.

The art? I'm also eating that. Hidari's art is so scrumptious and works so well for the remake because it invokes a sense of nostalgia. It's warm and welcoming.

I love Alm and Celica so much. They both want to save Valentia and bring peace, but don't meet eye to eye. Their deep bond, trust, how much they care for each other ;-; IM GENTLY HOLDING THEM

As much as I love this game to death, it left me thinking about what could be improved. Supports could be improved. Three Houses really spoiled me with support and helped me realize this. Supports could be longer and that could really help flesh out a lot of the characters. Faye's a good character, but all she's known for is her love for Alm. Alm's support doesn't do much and neither does Silque's, stunting her as a character. If you recruit Faye to Celica's team, you get no support conversations, making her very basic and just there to deal damage. Genny is kind of the same way. If you fail to recruit Sonya, she's kind of just there. The same with Berkut, Rinea, and Fernand who have a lot of potential. If there were more supports or memory prisms to dive deep into the character, oh wow then the characters would be so much more complex and intriguing. (So many ideas are buzzing around in my head AAHHHHHHHH)

The dungeon crawler mechanic is really unique and I think it should be in future FE games. Echoes integrate characters from archanea, which expands the world-building and I love it when games do that. Knowing there are characters from other lands opens up Valentia rather than isolates it (and the fact that you can go to archanea in act 6). It also makes me interested in playing the original. I want to get to know these characters more from what I discovered from the supports. One day I'll explore archanea.

For now I'm going to think about Fernand and the game and the doc I'm going to write. Will I post it here? Maybe who knows. Or maybe I'll edit this because I have a lot of thoughts about the game.

Drastically modernized remake of the 25-year-older second game in the franchise with good execution overall.
+ excellent gameplay presentation particularly for the clean zoom into swift battle animations
+ relatively personal storytelling that focuses on both main characters equally in their respective routes
+ clear cast separation making few units truly obsolete
+ outstanding soundtrack featuring the arguably best vocal track of the series
+ neat overworld map for free travel
+/- linear class progression for most units
- interesting but unpolished 3D dungeon crawler segments
- a lot of pointless but unavoidable battles padding out the game time

This game is, if nothing else, a masterclass in how to do a remake. Certainly, I think there's some aspects that could have (maybe should have) been improved, like early Celica maps being repetitive and overall the game being a no-deploy-limit rout-fest. But you know what? So was gaiden, and there's a part of me that appreciates getting to experience it in all its quirkiness with modern quality of life improvements and an excellent soundtrack. Easily the best 3DS fire emblem game and the irony of the fact that its a remake of a Kaga-era game is not lost on me.