The first game I played at a young age and became obsessed with. Unfortunately, I'm biased. I saw rainbow-haired anime characters when I saw this as a thirteen year old after seeing Marth and Roy in Smash Bros. Melee, and I instantly wanted to know what it was all about.

This game is golden to me. But it's also a classic Fire Emblem game: its hard. Even on it's normal difficulty, it can be a grueling experience on certain chapters. This game is for people who enjoy some challenge.

It's always fun putting together your own army and choosing the units you like the most to push against the enemy army. Hector is the best lord. You can unlock his story mode after beating Eliwood's.

The writing isn't exactly Shakespeare, but I always enjoyed the tone of it. It's moody sometimes, but the characters have a sense of humor, too. I was really drawn into the story it was telling, and although it starts out small the stakes get high!

Part of the fun is watching the animations of the sprites in battle. It's seriously amazing and impressive! Watching a unit land a crit will ALWAYS be so satisfying. Crits do 3x damage.

Yes, there's no way to get your units back after they die; there's no "phoenix" mode here. Resetting a chapter when you lose a unit you like is part of the process, trust me. You want to keep all your units. Failure is a key part of this game! :) It's all trial and error, and it feels really good when you come back to a map and beat it into the ground.

I've finished this game over thirty times. I like it too much. It makes me happy that Fire Emblem managed to not get canned thanks to Awakening. I'm not a big fan of the newer titles, but the series will always be near and dear to my heart anyway. You always remember your first Fire Emblem game, and this one is mine.

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.

This was my first Fire Emblem game I ever played, and personally I would also recommend this game as someone's first Fire Emblem game. It's the most standard Fire Emblem game, good and simple gameplay, a simple story, and a great cast of characters to get attached to that not only extends to the main characters and villains but to the side characters as well. Along with being a GBA Fire Emblem game which always have some pretty awesome battle animations and spritework.

A lot of people in the Fire Emblem community will call this game "mid" with an awful story that has a lot of holes. And yeah the story does have some plot holes but that doesn't take away from how good of a story it can be without it being a worldwide conflict full of intrigue or complexity like the story of the Tellius or Jugdral games. There's still a fair share of tragedy, mystery, and twists that make this story at least worthwhile to see.
Plus for a game that's on the GBA it offers a lot of story content, having three separate story lines for you to play.

One being about a lost noble heiress of the plains reclaiming what's rightfully hers, not only for her title or noble status but rather to reclaim her own family that was taken away from her.
The second being about a just noble heir looking for his missing father but is thrust into a much deeper conspiracy.
And the third being of the heir's best friend coming to terms with his own image, secretly dealing with loss, and seeing the lengths he will go just to see his friends on the other side safely, even if it means putting the most heavy prices on himself.

But even then you see the stories of so many more characters, each unit has their own unique personality, their own desires, and their own backstories if you look deep enough for them. Prince Zephiel's arc in this game is especially good and in my opinion makes him a better character than before, adding depth to him and fixing some of his 1-dimensional traits in the previous game. The story of Nino and Jaffar are really well handled at being juggled alongside the main story of this game.

The Black Fang members are also all really brimming with personality, I could really only point out two villains that I would say lack any real charm or depth. Along with other members joining your army and having their own separate stories such as Legault.

Overall, the characters really make this game shine, and that's in big part to the Support System and Paired Endings. While it does suck that supports are limited to 5 conversations, just one of those conversations already offers a lot of personality from any character involved with them. And each of the recruitable characters you can get in this game will always be different and unique from each other.

After a long break from the series since binding blade being extremely difficult for me, blazing blade was a much better introduction to the series as it teaches you the various mechanics well through "Lyn mode" where you start off the story with one of the main lords of the series. The levels in this game are more fun to go through as they are less brutal than the ones in binding blade. It was introduced in binding blade, but I really did supports starting off with this game and it really gives more depth to the 3 lords and characters with the only downside being that a character can only A rank with one character so you will end up not seeing most of the supports. I thought the story is great and especially if you completed a certain support it would blend in well with the storyline.

Dora!
Boots!
Come on, Dora!
Do-do-do-do-do Dora
(All right!)
Do-do-do-do-do Dora
(giggles)
Do-do-do-do-do Dora (2×)
Let's go!

Dora, Dora, Dora the explorer!
Dora!
Boots and super cool explorer Dora
I need your help!
Grab your backpack! Let's go!
Jump in! ¡Vámonos!
You can lead the way!
Hey! Hey!

Do-do-do Dora (4×)
Swiper, no swiping! (2×)
Oh, man!
Dora the Explorer!
(click, beep)