2627 reviews liked by kirbb


more like Spyro 2: Rip My Balls Off because this shit is great. these were the best days of my life, when i loved playing outside more than anything else and having to come in and play spyro was like a worst case scenario. i didnt know how good i had it back then

I played through this for this month's TR, as it was one of the only retro SRPGs I own. SRPG is a genre I've enjoyed in the past but am not a massive fan of. Even Fire Emblem is a series I'm not a super huge fan of, despite having beaten half a dozen of them over the years. I have this game on my Super Famicom Mini, and I honestly really didn't expect to finish it. I ended up using save states and rewinds a fair bit, and ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. They were a great way to make the game's difficulty far more appealing to me, and more like the puzzle-ish design of Advance Wars where losing a unit feels a lot less dire (and it also thankfully lowered the time commitment for me significantly). That said, it still took me over 43.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game, and that's just the end time on the SFC Mini and ignores all my restarts XP.

Mystery of the Emblem is actually two games jammed into one. The first is a remake of the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, but with some new mechanics tossed in (mostly re-balancing leveling, as far as I can tell) that help make it easier and less dependent on RNG like the original was. The other changes to it are to make it fit mechanically alongside the second game on the cart, which is actually FE: Mystery of the Emblem, a direct sequel to Shadow Dragon with much of the same cast. The stories are nothing to write home about, especially in the first game, but it's serviceable in both cases. Mystery of the Emblem is a really jarring thing to go to after Shadow Dragon, given that there is just so little text at all in the first game and SO much more in the second, even if it mostly amounts to larger exposition dumps at the starts and ends of chapters. They're quite sad stories compared to later FE games, with far less happy endings beyond the few most central characters. Even most of the end-game resolution text for characters who live (especially in Shadow Dragon) amount to "they disappeared" or had a not so great life after the war. I did enjoy the story that was there, especially in Mystery of the Emblem, but it's hardly a main selling point of the game or anything.

Being that it's SUCH an early entry in the series, and this is also the only pre-GBA Fire Emblem game I've ever played, I expected it to be quite different and my goodness is it. No weapon triangle, no supports of any kind, and the ability to dismount and mount up your mounted units to name some of the biggest differences to later games (a lot of that being innovations introduced in FE4, after all). The mounting/dismounting thing is easily the most annoying mechanic, and mostly seems to be an arbitrary way to hamstring your movement on some levels, and it's something that wouldn't be so annoying if it didn't make mounted units SO much worse (not to mention it's really annoying since you need to swap out their lances for swords whenever you do it).

Beyond that there are just lots of weird design decisions or lacking quality of life features, like there being no way to check threat ranges of you or your enemies (which REALLY sucks in a game with so many long-range casters and ballista to worry about) as well as you needing to do all the math yourself for how much damage you're gonna do across menus on two different screens (and the same goes for hit chance, quite often). At least if there IS a threat-range checker (or even a range-stat-checker) feature, I could never find where it was. Most of my resets and rewinds were down to frustrations with "oh, I didn't know how far this could hit me, so I moved forward and now I'm dead." Then other weird things like some characters like Marth and the entire fighter class (that being anyone who uses an axe, of which you get 3 in Shadow Dragon, one of whom was one of my best characters in that game) simply having no promotion items at all. Thankfully for the latter aspect, Mystery of the Emblem remedies this by simply never giving you any axe-users. and the absence of any weapon triangle makes it fairly inconsequential on an overall mechanical level.

The map designs and such are good fun, and the music and graphics are excellent and hold up great. I usually end up turning off the battle animations in FE, but I never did in this game. Part of that may have been down to me playing so much of the game streamed to my friends over Discord so I could have the anticipation of getting a hit or a miss, but part of it was also just how pretty and nice the animations are~. There are never any missions that aren't "capture the throne", but there are a lot of neat setups for missions that make them have more interesting aspects around that (like a mission where most of the enemy soldiers don't actually fight you, and if you don't pick them off for easy XP, you get more recruitable characters out of it). There are some problems with the game actually giving you the information on how to recruit many characters, especially in Shadow Dragon (you basically need to guess a TON who is actually related to whom so they could talk to and recruit them), but MotE has a lot less of that. Either way, especially if you don't wanna miss the extra final levels in MotE, playing this game with a simple recruitment/item guide to make sure you don't miss people is something I did and I would also recommend doing to help alleviate any stress over missing recruits.

Verdict: Recommended. I think it's age has not been super kind to it, but that's also because of what a definitive game it is. The mechanics and design philosophies laid down in FE3 and then FE4 helped establish the future of the franchise in a big way, and even though it's lacking in a lot of QoL features, these early games still play in a very familiar way as a result. There will likely be some frustrations and resets in both parts of the game, but if you're into SRPGs and want something that isn't too brutally hard, this is yet another game from Nintendo's 16-bit catalog whose main failings come from how well Nintendo and others have innovated on it since.

Marth, you have to stop, your movement too low, your map designs too dependent on you running around everywhere, your stats nerfed from the first game enough to make it so you can't handle yourself easily in combat anymore, they'll kill you.
(First Fire Emblem game that feels genuinely enjoyable to play on a moment-to-moment basis, but the story is all overly long exposition dumps, the Marth reliance is particularly annoying in the remake of the original game, and there are just a variety of QoL things this game doesn't have that are actually sort of unusual for 1994, a point at which other JRPGs were getting pretty polished).

Yeah and if you believe that I've got a big floppy wiener to dangle in your face

Half-life 3 and Silksong fans are so melodramatic when they say how long they've been waiting for a sequel. Try being a Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device fan

tfw that damege be found

the msx (and other personal computers) version of the first ever megami tensei game basically plays like gauntlet. who would have guessed

The three GBA games make clear strides in improving upon the last one. If you actually want to enjoy this I would suggest playing it before Aria of Sorrow and just completely skipping Circle of the Moon. This is basically if SOTN was on the GBA and for the time, SOTN on the GBA was cool. Really cool. But now that it's just another Castlevania game, that you can either emulate or play legally on your Switch, it's basically SOTN, but worse. You can probably play SOTN on your Switch if you try hard enough.

I do enjoy this game, my biggest gripe is not knowing what to do next. You can spend hours traversing the entire castle to find the one spot you need to be at. And this happens more than a few times. I never even knew you could teleport till I found a hint somewhere, so it was basically the end of the game when I finally did start teleporting.

This is relatively easy, probably moreso than Aria of Sorrow and I like that I'm not constantly killing enemies trying to get their abilities, as much as I found that aspect of Aria very cool, I like the simplicity of less FOMO. The bosses are just moving blocks that sometimes attack. There's a lot of them too. You'll need very little strategy for most of them and if you utilize your magic and special attacks, as well as maybe do a bit of grinding, you'll barely take a scratch.

By the time you reach the end of the game it's pretty hard not to be overpowered and by now if you don't know the best magic combos (or combo I should say, ahem, wind/cross) there might be something wrong with you.

Overall a solid game with a blah story, huge docking of points for constantly getting lost and having WAY too many dead ends that you can't pass till much much, much, later.

Oh yeah, just because they needed to place more random items to collect, there's a room that you can furnish. Weird side quest.

I was really getting into the groove of this and was this close to saying I might enjoy it more than Aria, then I proceeded to be stuck for 2 hours, being denied at every previous dead end with another dead end AFTER whatever item i got passed THAT dead end. Oh come on.

I get that this is supposed to feel like a more traditional Castlevania in its gameplay but that also means a level of rigidity that was better left in the past. It's basically added challenge based off the controls. This might be a skip.