Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade
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biaza

reviewed Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade

Completed
Truly baffled as to why this was recommended to me so highly. I love the other GBA FE games, as well as Tellius and FE4, and I heard so many people gas this game up and recommend it as the peak of this era of FE. On the contrary, this is my least favorite FE game that I have played. Painfully bland characters, mediocre maps, absurd requirements for actually fighting the final boss, horrible ambush reinforcements and worst of all are the bosses. Too many instances of bosses with 30+ crit rates, making them effectively a coin flip at the end of the chapter. Having your own coin flip to combat them with Rutger is very little consolation, I had to reset at the very end of a chapter due to the boss getting a lucky crit too many times. Just obnoxious while offering nothing to bring me back to it over another FE game. Do not play this on original hardware like I did, at least not on a first playthrough, because this game is so full of garbage, unfair bullshit you could never properly prepare for without prior knowledge of the game, forcing you to reset. Play on an emulator and savestate every turn. I am not joking, it is truly cruel. The visuals are all that saves this from being lower, as a GBA FE game, it is full of gorgeous animations and character designs, and deserves credit for being the basis upon which the other GBA FE games built off of/reused.

Reviewed on Mar 29, 2023

2 Comments

Ninjabunny

1 year ago

As one of the three people who actually like this game's cast the most out of all the gba games, I can confirm that even if you like the characters the game is still impossible to get through without exerting a lot of willpower. I believe the design principal behind its bosses is to compensate how this game will just vomit units at you, but that's contradicted by the requirements for the true ending. Each route you take will give you 51 units total. Any given playthrough of Path of Radiance will only give you 43 units, The most you can ever get in the route with the most available characters in Three Houses is 36, and Awakening is 43 (49 if you count the post-game bonus dlc maps). What's interesting is Binding Blade has the exact same number of units you'll get in a playthrough as Fe1. So, like a lot of the game, it was probably emulating fe1. Although fe1 had better bosses. And also better map design.

biaza

1 year ago

I think I laid it on a bit thick with the bosses honestly, it's only a handful of bosses that are that bad. I've heard Hard difficulty is actually more enjoyable because the units with stat bonuses get an edge that dramatically changes things, but this game is still one you have to play very differently from other FE games due to ambush reinforcements. I'll probably give it another go on Hard one day but it likely won't be for quite some time.