This was my first entry back into Fire Emblem after almost a decade of dropping the series. And it was so, so worth it. Just about every unit is lovable in their own unique (and usually simple) way. Building my team around my favorite characters and their supports was so satisfying.

I really can't help but emphasize my love for the characters in this game because, for the entry being as straightforwardly Fire Emblem as it is, little bits of flavor like personality, gameplay feel, and relationships are required to make an entry like this stand out. It succeeds at this wonderfully.

PS: Canas and Nino is my favorite support in the entire game and I love their silly little found family/tutor & pupil dynamic sm. I'd replay solely just to see them again. It's a requirement I use them for every playthrough here on out.

People hyped this game as one of, if not the best FE game.
This is mid.
Map design for the first half of Eliwood / Hector mode is not good at all, and Lyn mode being unskippable tutorial as ass garbage, the characters are charming, and the story works well enough, but GOOD LUCK GETTING THOSE CHARACTER INTERACTIONS ON THE GBA SUPPORT SYSTEM, 3 convos per map if you UBER turtle, did not get fixed from Binding Blade, so on a game with worse map design you need better writing to make up for it, but its gotta be hidden, also 5 convos per character lol, lmao.
This is one of those cases of hype backfiring, and its not the worst one for me, but still, it has great maps after CH 21 or so, and and the like, so its not bad, just medriocre.

The first Fire Emblem game to be localized in the West, it's the seventh installment but better late than never.
This one is a great introduction too because the first campaign doesn't require any previous knowledge and serves as a tutorial for the rest of the game. I should probably mention The Blazing Blade is a prequel to Fire Emblem 6, but it's not necessary to play that in order to understand the plot.
Overall, I really liked Fire Emblem 7. I don't think it's necessary to explain any further since the game speaks for itself and this isn't a particularly obscure series. I'd say it's even good for SRPG beginners.

I may be a bit of a shill for gba fire emblem but this is just the most forgettable game in the series if you ask me. The only real system of note is the lord difficulties which are fucking awful being forced to do a 9 chapter baby lyn mode tutorial to be able to play the real game with eliwood, only to have to beat that one to unlock the actual for sure real game with hector hard mode. Outside of that theres really nothing of note in the game and it just kinda meanders on with some subpar writing.

(first fire emblem in the west lets goo)

it's fun! really fun, actually. lyn mode is a glorified tutorial, so this'll be mostly on eliwood + hector's mode respectively

eliwood mode is a great introduction to those getting into the game and hector mode is step up in difficulty providing some small amounts of new content like side objectives and new chapters which is cool for a second run through.

the hard modes respectively amp the difficulty up by raising levels of enemy units, introducing promoted units at an earlier spot of the game, alternate positions, etc

it's a good time. i like this one a lot, also a direct prequel to binding blade which is something i don't think we've seen before in a future FE title

I played it shortly after Engage and immediately realized how much more fun I had with it. Sure, the story doesn't win any prizes for originality, but at least it's not half as stupid as in Engage^^ You even have some political machinations and complex characters who struggle with themselves and their own actions. I really liked the dynamic between Eliwood, Lyn and Hector, they were very cool characters with some well written and humorous dialog. The difficulty level fluctuated a lot, sometimes I rolled through the missions like a wrecking ball and at other times I was killed by a single enemy attack :D The support system is garbage and not at all self-explanatory, but it wasn't that important. Generally you spend a bit too much time in menus, but hey, it's Fire Emblem. Overall, I really liked it.

El Fire Emblem que inició en la franquicia a los europeos. Una primera toma de contacto magistral en la que nos narran las aventuras de Lyn, Hector y el padre del ya conocido Roy de Smash Bros, Eliwood.
Siempre recomendaré este juego para iniciarse en la franquicia, porque lo tiene todo: Una historia brutal, unos personajes extremadamente carismáticos, una jugabilidad sencilla y fácil de entender (pero eso no quiere decir que sea fácil el juego, todo lo contrario), una banda sonora fantástica y un apartado visual sacando todo el provecho de la potencia de GBA con esas animaciones de combate a 60fps y esos sprites animados en los diálogos con una paleta de colores preciosa.
Una verdadera joya de juego, de verdad

i've owned and adored this game for years, but i had never bothered with the ranking system. in the past, i had always regarded it as a largely irrelevant feature to how i wanted to play and basically ignored it. however, something crawled up my ass last year, and i decided to do a ranked run of HHM. as preparation, i did a ranked run of HNM to get an idea of what it would be like and how to adopt the mindset. and while some things are actually more strict in HNM ranked (for whatever reason, night of farewells has a way tighter turn count), it was an educational experience that steeled me for my real goal: S rank HHM.

i now talk to you as someone who has scaled the mountain that is S ranking HHM. after several months of meticulous planning and arduous resetting, i got my S rank. and while it was extremely shitty to do for a myriad of reasons, this experience has not only deepened my appreciation of the game, but it has reminded me of how constraints make for better design. let's be clear, FE7's ranking system is fucked and its refusal to be transparent with not only its set goals but also how to achieve them is bad. i do not think this game does ranking very well (chapter requirements are literally being broken on hector mode chapters like talons alight and the berserker such that they're considered chapters you should beat in 0 turns to avoid penalization). add all this together, and i understand why casuals are so offput by it.

but, i do mourn it retroactively now, as i think we lost something significant when IS decided to ditch it instead of improve and refine it. ranked runs require a different mindset and encourage you to think of the game as purely tactical as you can. turtle and grind strategies suddenly become inoptimal and the last thing you want to do. meanwhile, the experience rank obligates you to use units that you would otherwise almost certainly have not touched, forcing you to use basically everyone in at least some capacity. the strangest thing is that they already revamped how the game would judge the player via a ranking system in going from 6 to 7, so it adds on to the disappointment that they abandoned it in sacred stones. hell, sacred stones could've been like 20x better if there was anything resembling a challenge in it. the closest thing we've gotten since then was the bonus experience system in the tellius games, and while that is good, something all-encompassing like elibe's rankings is preferable to me. i've realized that i'm a huge sucker for when a game assesses and grades your progress, whether it be on micro scales like in MMBN and FFXIII, or on a playthrough-wide scale like Resident Evil and this game. it was a flawed system and needed polish, but, fuck, i kinda miss it now.

that said, i love this game, but, i confess, this ranked run did inspire great amounts of anger and hate out of me. on top of S ranking HHM being one of the hardest things i've ever had to do in a video game, i think i can confidently say that fire emblem is one of the most infuriating games on earth. with how pivotal RNG is to not only character progression but even just basic offensive interactions, it is the perfect simulator of "i made no mistakes and still lost" in video game format. i get that RNG is invariably going to affect personal experience in both extremely positive and extremely negative ways, i just deeply wish there was some way to curb it a bit. for instance, all three of my lords were complete dogshit this run, and i had to use boosters on all three at some point just to get them to their average stats. granted, you don't have to use lyn and eliwood, but see me after class if you think i'm doing lloyd's FFO. plus, they're mandatory deployments on certain chapters (including but not limited to the final one), so it's frustrating when diceroll level ups turn against your favor and give you completely trash units. it's still a wonder to me that a fixed stats mode was only ever used in path of radiance and it's never been used ever again. it's truly baffling considering how convenient and consistent it would make replays of any of the games. in that sense, the most appealing method of ever playing this game again is on emulator with tony's mod, a player-made fixed stats mode.

either way, this is still one of my favorite games of all time, in spite of the colossal deep fissures of flaws i have with fire emblem as a series and even this individual game (seriously, why doesn't eliwood use lances?). i can rest easy now and say it's going to be a looooooong time before i do another playthrough of this beast. yet, tellingly, when i do get that urge, i've already got a plan of what i want to do next. imagine if i used these autistic impulses to do something of value. what if.

I was always a huge Fire Emblem hater despite never having played a game, because the gameplay looked boring as shit and, above all else, for the petty reason that it started getting way too much representation on Smash Bros. with all those generic anime-looking swordsmen. I never EVER imagined I would give this franchise a try, but one day I was bored on the voice chat with some friends and decided to open the GBA app on NSO to play something. Then I saw Fire Emblem there. Decided to open it just for shits and giggles, to see how boring the gameplay would be. What happened next? I kept playing for 2-3 hours.

I got HOOKED! The first campaign of the game is basically just one massive tutorial, which I know is a bit divisive among the Fire Emblem community, but for someone like me who had no idea how to play the game and how its many mechanics worked, it was very welcome and it didn’t bother me one bit. It speaks to the quality of the game that even its tutorial had me engaged!

Once the game lets go of your hand is when the real fun begins and fun I sure had. Strategizing my way across maps and enemies that kept getting increasingly more difficult as I tried to keep all my units alive was some of the most invested I got into a game in 2023. Few things felt as satisfying as landing critical hits, getting a good level up, and beating a tough enemy unit by the skin of your teeth, especially during longer skirmishes that I REALLY didn’t want to reset in case a unit died (yes, I did end up resetting quite a few times when a unit I really cared for died, but sometimes I’d just let go).

I just couldn’t put that game down. I got so invested I started reading a lot of info online about the game and its inner mechanics that aren’t properly explained due to the limitations of it being a GBA game, such as its many classes, hidden battle stats and the support system. I always kept a sheet open while playing it to see the units I should try pairing together at the end of each turn to get extra support buffs and some endearing dialogue between them. While the story is your standard medieval fare, revolving around politics and dragons, the characters are what keep you interested in it, because this game has such a charming cast. Most of them have a great dynamic, especially the main trio, Eliwood, Lyn and Hector. I actively wanted to make them support each other to see what their interactions would be about, and they’d always put a smile on my face.

That’s why the permadeath mechanic is so devastating, because you start caring so much about some characters you don’t want to see them gone forever. They’re not just disposable units anymore, they’re people you want to protect as hard as you can. That’s why it’s so satisfying to see a character you love getting great level ups and upgrading to a new class and starting wrecking every enemy on their way. That’s what happened with my favorite unit, Florina. She became a goddess of destruction, raining despair over her opponents atop her white pegasus.

And I’d be remiss to not talk about the visuals of the game. Good lord, this game might just have one of the best sprite work of any GBA game. The battle animations are always a treat to watch, ESPECIALLY the critical hits. Their over-the-top animation is smooth and dynamic and packs such a punch, along with the crunchy sound effects that accompany it. It’s so goddamn satisfying. But yeah, that’s the story of how I went from being a pathetic hater of a franchise I had never even played a game of to someone who became invested enough to want to play every single Fire Emblem game.