A fun entry to scratch the Fire Emblem itch.
The inventory management is rough, the beginning is slow, the end is rushed, but all the annoyances aside I still had a pretty good time with it.
The inventory management is rough, the beginning is slow, the end is rushed, but all the annoyances aside I still had a pretty good time with it.
Fun game if I remember correctly. I spent 2000 turns in one of lyn's early tutorial maps to turn her into an unkillable beast with capped str and solid def. I forgot how the support system worked and couldn't get eliwood paired with ninian cuz I already got hector to A support. The end kind of dragged out a bit but overall, very cool fe game with a simple but likable story would play again. Fuck that final dragon though that shit sucked. I should draw fiora one day…
kickstarted my descent into fe AVOID AT ALL COSTS
It was a great FE game, but nothing spectacular
truly the fire emblem game of all time. i have yet to finish hector mode, but after how much eliwood's final chapter exhausted me (i got some really unlucky level ups + picked up from progress from a year ago where i barely trained anyone, so the only character that could damage the final boss without dying was the last unit you get in the campaign), i am in no rush to play this one again.
this game goes hard
Simple, easy, and boring
Neta for the first entry released worldwide
It alright
Mais um ótimo jogo dessa franquia maravilhosa, até o momento esse foi o mais fraco dentre os que eu joguei, entretanto isso não quer dizer que o jogo é ruim, muito pelo contrario, o jogo é muito divertido e gera várias horas de uma boa historia com personagens marcantes.
O meu maior problema com esse game é que ele enrola muito em alguns momentos.
O meu maior problema com esse game é que ele enrola muito em alguns momentos.
The first game that introduce me to Fire Emblem, it was a good journey, at the end I have to use the old man, because all my other units suck, specially Eliwood.
Enter Fire Emblem Blazing Sword, the 7th game in our beloved franchise and the actual debut outside of Japan. And along those grounds the developers of Retrostudios wanted to make sure newcomers would feel welcome adding a leading scenario spanning 1/3 of the game with tutorials.
The first 10 chapters represents varying elements that makes for a fun learning experience offering a good starting-point for newcomers with a simple, cute and well written story about YOU the tactician joining the Nomad Green Haired lass Lyndis to attempt to liberate her kingdom, while making friends along the way.
The game has a pleasant vibrant look with nicely animated sprites during combat and a cute simplistic design for the strategical gameplay out on the maps.
OST has some good jingles, although it's too bad the actual maps lacked in variety. Heck the one track I liked the most they only used for two of the sidequest chapters.
It is fascinating that the tutorial segment of the game is the best part. It is a worthwhile well paced and self contained scenario worth experiencing, but alas it is only the interlude to the larger fraction of the game.
The further you get into the preceeding main scenario starring our new main character the goody shoe hero sir prince Eliwood the father of our boy. the worse it gets as the maps gradually grows bigger, badder and uglier with reinforcement units randomly popping up on maps doing no favour except killing the flow with an already up to and beyond 35 enemy units at display.
As a sidenote you better make sure you dont lose your thieves or drop those door keys otherwise you WILL have to restart some of the later chapters since it's not unlikely you end up unable to progress the current chapter because of a locked door you accidentaly dropped the key to.
Inventory managment in this game is unforgiving, in order to store up items to the convoy during chapters you need to protect the tent automatically placed in the starting area where there eventually will spawn random ambushes. The real killer is that your own unit count more often is LOW and the maps are HUGE and in too many scenarious the win condition is limited to amount of turns, so if you want to open some precious chests or recruit more units, you need to make some compromise. But you also won't know that until you fucked up the first time since mid scenario shit suddenly happens.
I'd say past the first 20 chapters the game really loses steam, maps doesn't introduce anything new and last forever, while the initially promising narrative does a total flip in quality as the localisation team almost seemed to stop giving a rat's ass about making the dialogues flow naturally.
I was literally dead on my chair backbent exhaling mad copium by the time I hit the credits and passed that torture batshittery of a final chapter. It felt like it never was going to end even though it only landed on the 30 hour mark.
The first 10 chapters represents varying elements that makes for a fun learning experience offering a good starting-point for newcomers with a simple, cute and well written story about YOU the tactician joining the Nomad Green Haired lass Lyndis to attempt to liberate her kingdom, while making friends along the way.
The game has a pleasant vibrant look with nicely animated sprites during combat and a cute simplistic design for the strategical gameplay out on the maps.
OST has some good jingles, although it's too bad the actual maps lacked in variety. Heck the one track I liked the most they only used for two of the sidequest chapters.
It is fascinating that the tutorial segment of the game is the best part. It is a worthwhile well paced and self contained scenario worth experiencing, but alas it is only the interlude to the larger fraction of the game.
The further you get into the preceeding main scenario starring our new main character the goody shoe hero sir prince Eliwood the father of our boy. the worse it gets as the maps gradually grows bigger, badder and uglier with reinforcement units randomly popping up on maps doing no favour except killing the flow with an already up to and beyond 35 enemy units at display.
As a sidenote you better make sure you dont lose your thieves or drop those door keys otherwise you WILL have to restart some of the later chapters since it's not unlikely you end up unable to progress the current chapter because of a locked door you accidentaly dropped the key to.
Inventory managment in this game is unforgiving, in order to store up items to the convoy during chapters you need to protect the tent automatically placed in the starting area where there eventually will spawn random ambushes. The real killer is that your own unit count more often is LOW and the maps are HUGE and in too many scenarious the win condition is limited to amount of turns, so if you want to open some precious chests or recruit more units, you need to make some compromise. But you also won't know that until you fucked up the first time since mid scenario shit suddenly happens.
I'd say past the first 20 chapters the game really loses steam, maps doesn't introduce anything new and last forever, while the initially promising narrative does a total flip in quality as the localisation team almost seemed to stop giving a rat's ass about making the dialogues flow naturally.
I was literally dead on my chair backbent exhaling mad copium by the time I hit the credits and passed that torture batshittery of a final chapter. It felt like it never was going to end even though it only landed on the 30 hour mark.
finished lyn mode, stuck on hector hard mode 😔
A solid Fire Emblem game, some good maps and characters, but it's just not as memorable on the whole compared to some other games in the series. Worth playing as a fan, but not a must play.
gameplay was a step up from fe6, i liked the maps here better. i was not a fan of how the lords needed to wait for what felt like an eternity to promote. story was forgettable but i liked how the lords interacted with eachother. i didn't like that the lyn campaign units are severely underleveled if you didn't do the tutorial. lyn's also surprisingly awful as a unit.
First FE game. I didnt use my brain until end game
I own an original copy of Fire Emblem that I probably bought at a GameStop with my allowance back when it released in 2003. Since then, I've started and stopped playing the game many times, first on GameBoy Advance, then GameCube using the GameBoy Player, then Nintendo DS via backwards compatibility, and finally on my iPhone 14 Pro using the recently released Delta emulator.
It feels a bit surreal to roll credits on such a formative title, which kickstarted my life-long love of strategy games, and it was thanks entirely to the portability that Delta enables. Fire Emblem is a perfect sessionable game; you can play a chapter while eating lunch, then put it away until tomorrow. As they say, the best gaming handheld is the one you have on you at all times, in my case an iPhone.
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Fire Emblem follows the story of Lyn, Eliwood, and Hector as they grapple with geopolitical intrigue unfurling across the continent of Elibe. It starts off small, on the plains of Sacae, when Lyn discovers she is the heretofore lost heir of Caelin and sets out to reunite with her grandfather. In subsequent chapters, the player guides Lyn and company to victory over her great-uncle who seeks to take the throne for himself.
This short campaign functions as an extended tutorial and does a great job introducing players to the series' mechanics, such as the weapons triangle, item durability, unit types, and permadeath. For most Americans, myself included, this was our first experience with the series—unless you could read Japanese—so it makes sense to thoroughly introduce the combat system.
From there, Fire Emblem raises the stakes as players take control of the red-headed hero Eliwood (who looked suspiciously similar to Roy from Super Smash Bros Melee). Now we're tasked with stopping a civil war in Lycia, which eventually boils over into an even larger plot by the mad wizard Nergal to plunge the continent into chaos by unleashing dragons to wreck havoc.
As expected, the gameplay is simplified compared to modern entires. You can't date anyone or raise ubermenschen children; there are no mini-games, definitely no tea parties, and you don't have a home base to decorate or defend. Instead the game consists entirely of brief narrative sequences that play out visual novel style and series of tactical battles that propel the plot forward. Each fight includes a short preparation stage during which you analyze the map, pick and equip units, and set their formation, followed by the turn-based battle itself. It's wonderfully simple and you get into the core gameplay after just a few minutes. I certainly don't miss running around Garreg Mach for hours to maximize supports and accumulate minor stat boosts between each battle in Three Houses.
The music by Yuka Tsujiyoko is great. The Fire Emblem theme evokes massive nostalgia for me. I also love the detailed sprite work, which is some of the best on the GBA. Both the idle and battle animations are top-notch as well, not to mention the flashy, sometimes rarely seen critical strike attacks!
My chief critique of Fire Emblem is the inconsistent difficulty. On normal mode, battles fluctuate from stupidly easy to frustratingly difficult. Sometimes reinforcements will pour out from all sides, other times what you see if what you get and you're left thinking "Is that it?" That said, I refuse to allow any characters to die, which resulted in more than a handful of reloads (thankfully Delta has save states, which takes some risk out of the equation). Overall, I think the physical map design is superior to the relatively featureless tableaus of the modern games, I just wish the difficulty was more consistent and slightly higher.
The combat also feels bland compared to modern titles. There are no combat arts, gambits, or personal skills and magic is fairly weak, so often the best move is to let enemies bash themselves against Oswin. Since you can't customize how units behave in battle, your army ends up feeling like a bunch of chess pieces—each class is strong in it's particular niche, but individuals are largely interchangeable (i.e., an archer is an archer). Luckily, Intelligent Systems agreed and began to address the lack of unit diversity in the sequel Sacred Stones, where players are given a choice of two advanced classes when promoting characters.
Overall, I'm glad I replayed this childhood classic. Superior to the modern games in some aspects, while showing its age in others, Fire Emblem is definitely worth experiencing in 2024.
It feels a bit surreal to roll credits on such a formative title, which kickstarted my life-long love of strategy games, and it was thanks entirely to the portability that Delta enables. Fire Emblem is a perfect sessionable game; you can play a chapter while eating lunch, then put it away until tomorrow. As they say, the best gaming handheld is the one you have on you at all times, in my case an iPhone.
----
Fire Emblem follows the story of Lyn, Eliwood, and Hector as they grapple with geopolitical intrigue unfurling across the continent of Elibe. It starts off small, on the plains of Sacae, when Lyn discovers she is the heretofore lost heir of Caelin and sets out to reunite with her grandfather. In subsequent chapters, the player guides Lyn and company to victory over her great-uncle who seeks to take the throne for himself.
This short campaign functions as an extended tutorial and does a great job introducing players to the series' mechanics, such as the weapons triangle, item durability, unit types, and permadeath. For most Americans, myself included, this was our first experience with the series—unless you could read Japanese—so it makes sense to thoroughly introduce the combat system.
From there, Fire Emblem raises the stakes as players take control of the red-headed hero Eliwood (who looked suspiciously similar to Roy from Super Smash Bros Melee). Now we're tasked with stopping a civil war in Lycia, which eventually boils over into an even larger plot by the mad wizard Nergal to plunge the continent into chaos by unleashing dragons to wreck havoc.
As expected, the gameplay is simplified compared to modern entires. You can't date anyone or raise ubermenschen children; there are no mini-games, definitely no tea parties, and you don't have a home base to decorate or defend. Instead the game consists entirely of brief narrative sequences that play out visual novel style and series of tactical battles that propel the plot forward. Each fight includes a short preparation stage during which you analyze the map, pick and equip units, and set their formation, followed by the turn-based battle itself. It's wonderfully simple and you get into the core gameplay after just a few minutes. I certainly don't miss running around Garreg Mach for hours to maximize supports and accumulate minor stat boosts between each battle in Three Houses.
The music by Yuka Tsujiyoko is great. The Fire Emblem theme evokes massive nostalgia for me. I also love the detailed sprite work, which is some of the best on the GBA. Both the idle and battle animations are top-notch as well, not to mention the flashy, sometimes rarely seen critical strike attacks!
My chief critique of Fire Emblem is the inconsistent difficulty. On normal mode, battles fluctuate from stupidly easy to frustratingly difficult. Sometimes reinforcements will pour out from all sides, other times what you see if what you get and you're left thinking "Is that it?" That said, I refuse to allow any characters to die, which resulted in more than a handful of reloads (thankfully Delta has save states, which takes some risk out of the equation). Overall, I think the physical map design is superior to the relatively featureless tableaus of the modern games, I just wish the difficulty was more consistent and slightly higher.
The combat also feels bland compared to modern titles. There are no combat arts, gambits, or personal skills and magic is fairly weak, so often the best move is to let enemies bash themselves against Oswin. Since you can't customize how units behave in battle, your army ends up feeling like a bunch of chess pieces—each class is strong in it's particular niche, but individuals are largely interchangeable (i.e., an archer is an archer). Luckily, Intelligent Systems agreed and began to address the lack of unit diversity in the sequel Sacred Stones, where players are given a choice of two advanced classes when promoting characters.
Overall, I'm glad I replayed this childhood classic. Superior to the modern games in some aspects, while showing its age in others, Fire Emblem is definitely worth experiencing in 2024.
This review contains spoilers
I owned Fire Emblem (I did not know it had a subtitle) in 2004. I remember progressing no farther than chapter 10. It’s one of the game in my past I wanted to get through all the way. It’s a hard game, but it’s also pretty difficult in tone.
One of the most intriguing elements of Blazing Blade is its clever narrative device of making the player an active character in the story. The player character is the tactician in Fire Emblem games, but in my experience there’s always been an avatar character that you, the player, also control. They don’t do that here. It’s a good trick.
What you’re asked to do is move your army around the field. If you place two characters together, sometimes they’ll have a pleasant chat and become better friends. Sometimes this works with enemies! You can sometimes convince them to leave the forces of evil. That’s cool! You can enter little villages on the map, often to comfort the afflicted. The characters usually get a treat for doing that. You’re hanging with the good guys in this story, and you’re here to help. Sometimes, you’ll be in defense-mode, guarding people against an onslaught of violence. But all of this is for variety and character-building. The main thing you do is mow down the enemy.
Blazing Blade gets its hands dirty. The themes explored here touch on blind colonization, disregarding cultural differences, the destructive allure of magic, and fields of murder. This is a war story full of power-hungry assholes. Nearly every chapter ends with a heel turn. Lots of people die. A lot of your people die. There’s no removing perma-death in this Fire Emblem, save for a couple of plot-related resurrections. If you make it to the end of the game, your surviving party get nice “what happened later” summaries. The dead just get a single sentence, letting you know the specific battlefield where they perished.
Where you, the player, let them die.
Blazing Blade is structured into three distinct acts, each concerned with different main characters. The game moves to new acts when you, the player, decide it’s time to move on (you’re not given a choice. The game just tells you that’s what you wanted to do). It gives the game a short-story-anthology feel for a while until everyone comes together for the climax. Other Fire Emblem games deal with a big cast by having A-B stories running concurrently. Here, it’s just in sequence.
The game explores the consequences of war-torn colonization through the backstory of the various lands and peoples within its world. Kingdoms crush nomadic tribes. Humans drive out dragons. Dragons drive out humans. Both think of one another as evil others. Evil magicians pull strings in the background in misguided attempts at grasping power, as they do.
As you go through each field, you meet people on every tier of society. Landowners who sold out their towns. Helpless merchants just trying to get by. Thugs. Goons. Ruffians. Nobles who didn’t know who they were dealing with when they made a deal with the devil. Actual human traffickers. You kill the human traffickers pretty early on.
This all sounds bleak, but that’s just the themes. The presentation is much lighter than, say, a Game of Thrones. Characters joke, flirt, fall in love, and laugh. They laugh a lot. Most chapters end with a still of your soldiers having a blast with one another. Moment to moment, it doesn’t feel as dire as all that. They’re having fun. You’re having fun.
The final chapter of Blazing Blade rips. Right before the final boss, you’re forced to confront a boss-rush of felled enemies from previous chapters. They’re possessed by the big bad, their own motivations for fighting long forgotten by these resurrected bodies. As you kill them, each display the slightest of smiles. You’ve set them free. Their war is over.
Screenshots: https://parosilience.tumblr.com/tagged/Fire%20Emblem%20-%20The%20Blazing%20Blade
One of the most intriguing elements of Blazing Blade is its clever narrative device of making the player an active character in the story. The player character is the tactician in Fire Emblem games, but in my experience there’s always been an avatar character that you, the player, also control. They don’t do that here. It’s a good trick.
What you’re asked to do is move your army around the field. If you place two characters together, sometimes they’ll have a pleasant chat and become better friends. Sometimes this works with enemies! You can sometimes convince them to leave the forces of evil. That’s cool! You can enter little villages on the map, often to comfort the afflicted. The characters usually get a treat for doing that. You’re hanging with the good guys in this story, and you’re here to help. Sometimes, you’ll be in defense-mode, guarding people against an onslaught of violence. But all of this is for variety and character-building. The main thing you do is mow down the enemy.
Blazing Blade gets its hands dirty. The themes explored here touch on blind colonization, disregarding cultural differences, the destructive allure of magic, and fields of murder. This is a war story full of power-hungry assholes. Nearly every chapter ends with a heel turn. Lots of people die. A lot of your people die. There’s no removing perma-death in this Fire Emblem, save for a couple of plot-related resurrections. If you make it to the end of the game, your surviving party get nice “what happened later” summaries. The dead just get a single sentence, letting you know the specific battlefield where they perished.
Where you, the player, let them die.
Blazing Blade is structured into three distinct acts, each concerned with different main characters. The game moves to new acts when you, the player, decide it’s time to move on (you’re not given a choice. The game just tells you that’s what you wanted to do). It gives the game a short-story-anthology feel for a while until everyone comes together for the climax. Other Fire Emblem games deal with a big cast by having A-B stories running concurrently. Here, it’s just in sequence.
The game explores the consequences of war-torn colonization through the backstory of the various lands and peoples within its world. Kingdoms crush nomadic tribes. Humans drive out dragons. Dragons drive out humans. Both think of one another as evil others. Evil magicians pull strings in the background in misguided attempts at grasping power, as they do.
As you go through each field, you meet people on every tier of society. Landowners who sold out their towns. Helpless merchants just trying to get by. Thugs. Goons. Ruffians. Nobles who didn’t know who they were dealing with when they made a deal with the devil. Actual human traffickers. You kill the human traffickers pretty early on.
This all sounds bleak, but that’s just the themes. The presentation is much lighter than, say, a Game of Thrones. Characters joke, flirt, fall in love, and laugh. They laugh a lot. Most chapters end with a still of your soldiers having a blast with one another. Moment to moment, it doesn’t feel as dire as all that. They’re having fun. You’re having fun.
The final chapter of Blazing Blade rips. Right before the final boss, you’re forced to confront a boss-rush of felled enemies from previous chapters. They’re possessed by the big bad, their own motivations for fighting long forgotten by these resurrected bodies. As you kill them, each display the slightest of smiles. You’ve set them free. Their war is over.
Screenshots: https://parosilience.tumblr.com/tagged/Fire%20Emblem%20-%20The%20Blazing%20Blade
[played via the MiSTer FPGA's GBA core]
Excited to finally finish one of these at last with a nice entry in the series!
What starts as a traveling tactician teaming up with the last surviving member of a village turns into a fight against a dark conspiracy to flood the world with dragons. You amass a small army that fights in tiles against different foes with some impressive animation for a GBA game.
My main complaint is that there's a support system for chatting amongst your teammates that I frankly found not clear. Having played a decent chunk of awakening (but didn't finish it), I found that system to be much easier but I know this came out well before so I'll cut it some slack.
Excited to finally finish one of these at last with a nice entry in the series!
What starts as a traveling tactician teaming up with the last surviving member of a village turns into a fight against a dark conspiracy to flood the world with dragons. You amass a small army that fights in tiles against different foes with some impressive animation for a GBA game.
My main complaint is that there's a support system for chatting amongst your teammates that I frankly found not clear. Having played a decent chunk of awakening (but didn't finish it), I found that system to be much easier but I know this came out well before so I'll cut it some slack.
eliwood<3
lyn fire emblem
Low enemy quality, high density, lots of rout and defense maps with a nice mix of staff bot spam. Top it off with the most pointless story ever. Wow this game sucked
It's not a great game, but it IS a comfort game. One of my favourite games to come back to. Also kinda fits my playstyle of getting distracted by other games and dropping all the ones I'm currently playing for 6 months! I can come back and hop into any chapter of this game anytime I want!