hector in smash when?

one of the few fire emblem games i've played (still playing), and it's a great time! the story is engaging and i rly like the different units and their abilities. the sprite work is insane!! animations are so fluid and dynamic, makes battles that much more enjoyable. my only complaint is that the combat can get a little tedious after a bit, but luckily this game allows you to get through it at tremendous speeds if you want! pretty accessible, pretty fun, i think im turning into a fire emblem fan?? uh oh

If you've played a fire emblem game before, playing Lyn mode for the first time is complete poop. It feels like an endless tutorial that forces you into wasting a knight crest. I actually don't hate the characters in Lyn mode though, since they get (some) development outside of supports which 30 years to build in GBA FE.

As for Eliwood mode, the gameplay is better but I really didn't find the story interesting. I can't remember many things that happened even though I'm writing this review not too long after I finished the game. Still a decent enough game thanks to FE gameplay, but very far from my favorite.

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.

J'ai craqué docteur. Après avoir fait Fire Emblem : The Sacred Stones, me voilà à finir le deuxième jeu de la série sur GBA. J'y ai joué parce que un des personnages principaux était Lyn, présente dans Fire Emblem Engage. Jeu très agréable pour mon téléphone quand je n'ai pas de connexion. Les soutiens sont vraiment excellents, meilleurs que ceux de Sacred Stones selon moi. L'histoire est toutefois plus brouillonne, tire un peu en longueur et recycle très souvent les mêmes maps. Mais les personnages portent vraiment le jeu : Hector, Lyn, Canas et surtout ELIWOOD ET NINIAN. Le meilleur duo des jeux Fire Emblem qui m'ait été donné de tester. Très belle expérience. Mine de rien, je commence à avoir une bonne culture de la licence.

Pretty good and solid Fire Emblem experience without too many crazy things to explain about it. I do love the main trio and there are some really great characters in the cast of units, but the story is mid. I appreciated some of the challenge that a lot of these maps brought but the final map was kinda cheapened by only really being able to use Athos and a couple other of the units that could use the legendary weapons. Ultimately this is a solid game with plenty of replay value but when set against the rest of this series it doesn't stand out much. Poor Eliwood gets the short end of the stick, his son owns him