This was the game that introduced Fire Emblem to the western audience, and I gotta say, damn what a great first game. Going into it, I thought it would be a middle of the road, 6/10 experience, but it honestly surprised me that this game was excellent.

Yeah the story isn't really all that special and gets pretty after awhile, but the cast of characters is really strong. My personal favorites were Lyn, Hector, Sain, Matthew, Florina, Ninian, Nino, and Jaffar; all were excellent characters that had me invested in their stories.

The gameplay was also really fun. From what I've heard, this game is pretty much the most down to earth Fire Emblem game with its mechanics and combat. However, that didn't really hinder my experience. In fact, in ways, it was a bit of an improvement from Three Houses, which at times felt a little overcomplicated with its gameplay. That isn't to say that there isn't any strategy involved in this game, though, because you still need to think about your choices carefully due to some of the maps in this game being pretty difficult, which made it fun to play through.

The graphics also hold phenomenally well. The pixel art for each of the characters is gorgeous and battle animations are also really flashy and fun to watch. It kinda made me wish Fire Emblem nowadays was still a 2D game, not gonna lie.

I do have my issues with the game, though. As stated before, the story in this game got pretty boring by about halfway through the game, and, aside from Sonia (the evil bitch), none of the villains could distract me from the boring writing. The bloated tutorial also really didn't really give that good of a first impression since it was slow and tedious to get through (although once you finish Eliwood's story, you don't have to play through it again when starting a new game, which is a nice addition). Also, even though I love the characters in this game and their support conversations were fun to listen to, the support system in this game is whack. I only learned that there was one in this game through complete accident, and even then, the way you get supports (having two characters stand next to each other for a certain amount of turns) is unintuitive and having a limited number of supports for each character per a play through is really questionable.

Overall, though, this game was a lot greater than I thought it was going to be. It was fun going through the first western FE game and learning why a lot of fans are fond of it and consider it their favorite game in the series. I still love Three Houses more, but I can understand the appeal of this entry and I would love to get around to Hector's story sometime in the future.