FE16 is a strange one. There’s an interesting parallel between the granularity of the story and the granularity of the gameplay where they’re both great on surface and intricate levels but have difficulty bridging the gap.

In the story, FE16 is among the series’ best in character writing. Even the characters who are tropey have depth to them and of the entire roster maybe only two characters are truly “one note”. The support conversations are good, easy to get, and timed well. The paired endings are plentiful and feel deserved. The game is also great on delivering its themes and premise, without taking any cheap shots. But if you analyze it from a time perspective, a few things just don’t make sense. Why do we dally a whole month when Flayn and Manuela go missing? That’s just one (admittedly particularly egregious) example, but this game was designed around a calendar and by God does it feel forced sometimes.

The gameplay is similar. You can kind of zone out and ignore most skills and combat arts on Normal and have a good time, or if you’re into what the game has to offer you can truly optimize your team with skills and weapons and quite a lot. Or just make everyone a flier, since wyverns are OP (not the first time in the FE series for this one). But the sheer bloat in skills and what they do can be overwhelming in this game. There’s also the matter of again, the calendar. Near the end of the game you still have to stick to it unless you choose to skip everything. I really found myself getting to the “okay let’s wrap it up” point in the last 3 chapters of the game.

There’s also a bit of a puzzler around this game having four routes yet the replayabiloty being difficult with having to do the monastery each time from the beginning. New Game+ alleviates that a bit, but having to explore, and do basically mandatory quests to unlock basic features of the run is obnoxious as hell for someone trying to replay just to get a different route.

All that though for 3.5 stars. It’s a good Fire Emblem game - I’ll definitely come back to it again some day, probably just not any time soon since I can’t imagine doing Part 1 again in the near future.

I had to let this one go. There's something in here, but it really fizzles out with some very obnoxious design decisions. This review will be long, and I will be breaking it down into eight parts, for each game, and then one longer post about the game as an aggregate sum.

1) Cosmic Gate - basically the walkthrough game for the metagame you're playing. The four challenges you have to do are all super easy and the things it asks are explained via the magazines that you unlock during this part. It's basically a reskin of Galaxian, with not much more to it other than warps. It's the first game, and for what the game asks you to do at the point you unlock it, it's inoffensive.

2) Robot Ninja Haggle Man - There seems to be no clear indication of whether the title is Haggleman or Haggle Man. Anyway, I actually liked this game a lot which is what got me to start really getting into Retro Game Challenge. It has a bit of NES funk to it (which is nontrivially The Point) but for what it is Haggle Man is actually fun? If this was a full game I would play it. It's a simple yet effective platformer.

3) Rally King - If this game's goal was to achieve accurate simulation of early racing games, it achieved it, I guess. Rally King sucks. The drifting mechanic is super awkward and hard to get used to, the courses are confusing with no map so you can't plan too far ahead short of memorizing the courses, and it's easy to spin out and lose all of your momentum. One of Retro Game Challenge's concepts in the metagame is that you do have access to in-game "cheat codes", which I admittedly used here (they're part of the game), but they basically completely remove the difficulty and make you the ONLY character on the track and completely invincible. A slog. Challenge 3 is very difficult if you don't use cheats.

4) Star Prince - It's another space shooter, but far more complicated than Cosmic Gate/Galaxian this time. Not much to say about this one. It seems well designed, even it it's crazy difficult, I did have fun with it.

5) Rally King SP - this is the first time where the game gets outright offensive. Rally King SP is a complete clone of Rally King. The courses, the controls, the cheat codes, everything is identical other than the colors and a couple of graphics. I get it's supposed to be some sort of snide commentary on special editions being not different, but the fact that this game also has four challenges, with one of them being an insanely difficult time trial, is just offensive as hell. Rally King already sucked, we didn't have to do it again.

6) Robot Ninja Haggle Man 2 - I really liked Haggle Man 1, Haggle Man 2 is that but better. You can pull out the bosses early, the stages are wider, you can now use your special power (once you get it) on command rather than automatically when you pick up your third scroll. Much like the first one, I would unironically play this game in standalone.

7) Guadia Quest - I know that RPGs are a classic staple of the era that Retro Game Challenge is meant to embody. The problem is it doesn't really adapt to the meta-challenge format that the game asks you to play. So you get this RPG which is really short and content-devoid from an RPG perspective, but really long and drawn out from Retro Game Challenge's perspective, which just leads to it being a huge slog and not being fun. Which sucks! I like RPGs! The Guadia concept is barely used, it's basically a bonus party member you can pick up who sometimes attacks if you're in a pinch but largely just Vibes. The first dungeon is an enormous sprawling 4 level dungeon, with very dangerous enemies, no reliable healing items (there's a full heal tile bear the start), and worst: no in-game map at all. And sure, it's the 80's, they wouldn't have one, but part of Retro Game Challenge is that you can pause and look at game magazines/guides any time - and there's no map there either! And once you get to the end of the dungeon the boss there is super hard too - grinding is completely non-optional in this game and it drags Retro Game Challenge to a grinding halt with no payoff because the actual RPG content isn't good enough to warrant playing outside of this scope. This one is just offensively bad. The music is banger, at least, but I got very sick of the dungeon theme after spending hours in there.

8) Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3 - To end things off after Guadia Quest, you get Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3, which has gotten a complete facelift and is nothing like 1 or 2. It's fine. Not as fun as the first 2, but I didn't hate it. It was a little annoying though that the game force turned off after completing challenge 1 and 2, and challenge 4 is just "kill 100 enemies in zone 2" which is more grinding (which is brutal after Gaudia Quest, frankly).

If the game ended here I'd be a bit happier, but then after completing the 4 challenges for each, you get a "final challenge", which is to complete all 8 games all the way through. I liked Haggle Man 1 & 2 (and 3 is fine I guess), Cosmic Gate has a "skip the game" shortcut, and I could use invincibility for Star Prince, but playing Rally King twice (even with invincibility), and finishing Gaudia Quest sounds like absolute torture and I cannot bring myself to finish this game.

It's frustrating, this game squanders its creativity because it seems to be so wrapped up in the challenges and the idea of "play all these retro-inspired hits" that it failed to make some of them good, because it both had to fit the challenges and the idea that they had to be retro. If this was just a collection of retro-inspired games I think it would've been way better (if they fine-tuned Guadia Quest and removed Rally King SP entirely), but what we have just burns its goodwill away and misses the mark by the end. Still Haggle Man 1 & 2 are a hell of a lot of fun by themselves at least.

This game was 100% made for the Wii. I know it's a remake of a Nintendo DS game, but it controls just so perfectly (more or less) with a wii remote and nunchuk, the controls are ingenious. The plot is 90% the same as Under the Knife, which I did slander a bit for being repetitive at points and for writing women fairly poorly (I still rated it four stars though), and the same concept applies here: once you get into the grit of doing GUILT missions, that's basically the rest of the game from there on out. A big difference here however is the last chapter (before the X missions) is based on a trip to Europe and dealing with a GUILT outbreak there, including mutated versions of what we've already fought, and multiple strains at the same time in patients.

- Mutated Deftera actually kind of sucks and is just obnoxious with the blood pools
- Mutated Tetarti (not the same one as in UtK2) is a great addition which makes an otherwise easy GUILT strain much more deadly, and frankly it adds some great variety
- Mutated Savato is basically a numbers increase but honestly it's a much more appropriate thematic end to the series than the boat chapter was, and I even liked the boat chapter in UtK!

..speaking of UtK2, why does UtK2 not reference this game at all? I think it's a bit of an odd choice to give Derek and Dr. Hoffman GUILT and then just never reference at any point in UtK2 that they could be afflicted with PGS like the other patients and characters that have it. That's neither here nor there but I find it weird.

Back on track, the other thing that SO majorly diverges from UtK in is that it has a Z-route featuring Naomi Kimishima, who is an excellent character and has fun missions that serve almost as a prototype to some of the ones in New Blood. I wish her route was more fleshed out, but I really like what the game gave us a lot and it serves as a good break from the endless GUILT missions. Chef's kiss.

Ultimately, SO isn't that much different from UtK, but it feels polished and really achieves what it set out to do, which is to make a great remake of the DS game on the Wii.

Shadows of Valentia is a solid half-step up from Fire Emblem Gaiden. It's a very faithful remake, but has little tweaks that makes the beginning two thirds of the game much better. A surprisingly big one being Nosferatu being increased to 60 hit. This first iteration of combat arts is cool, if sometimes a bit impractical. Faye is a welcome addition to your initial villager squad in Chapter 1 and rounds out the team very nicely since this game does not have equal class options for men and women.

When I played Gaiden recently I found the game started to peter out in Act 3 and crumble down into something that was somewhat crap by the end of the game. Only really the very tail end of Alm's Act 4 and Act 5 felt like that to me. The dungeons are largely fun, though the last two are too big and are slogs to go through. Duma got a huge buff and is a miserable slog of a final boss now. The maps are also very largely faithful, and that was a massive failing of the original.

The plot is weird, they did mostly a good job fleshing out FE2's Barely Present plot with Alm's route and Celica's route, but the new characters are largely cringey as hell. Fernand is somewhat bearable but comes across as an asshole, but it as least somewhat realistic. Faye is a good unit and rounds out your team, but her personality is very obsessive and uncomfortable. Berkut is crazy and exists to look crazy and be a superboss at the end and gets a completely unearned last second redemption. Rinea may as well not exist. Conrad is absolutely the worst offender of the bunch and he feels like he exists solely to strip Celica of her agency in critical moments of the game. The writing is very balanced by great moments and awful ones.

The game does have lots of modern QoL, but oddly takes a couple of steps backwards from FE11 and FE12, both remakes, in the names of faithfulness. One major thing that's missing is reclass. Of course there are villagers and the Dread Fighter Loop (which is very impractical), but all you're otherwise given is a few DLC villager fork items if you want to reclass a single unit down to a level 1 villager. They keep their stats, but lose class benefits and have to slowly rebuild them. I don't think this is bad in a vacuum, one of my favorite Fire Emblem games is Sacred Stones, which has no real reclass (only branched promotion), but the problem with this in Echoes is that the roster size of units is very small, and you pretty much end up using everyone every playthrough, so there's very little different you can do on subsequent playthroughs. A very good Single Experience - the last time I played this was 2017, the year it came out, and I can't see myself playing it again for another 5 or 6 years at least.

I appreciate Shadows of Valentia, as someone who played FE2 before it came out, and it's an odd one where it's faithful in some aspects only, but if you want to keep the things that made Gaiden what it is, you get stuck with its drawbacks, and that's what FE15 is. Worth a shot, but probably not sitting in the top half of Fire Emblem games.

If FE1 came out of the gate sprinting, FE2 walked out at a leisurely pace after it with some stumbling, but managed to finish the race at the end of the day.

FE2 is extremely not FE1. It's kind of a step down from FE1 but it's hard to make a direct comparison because things are so different. So while I can say the not-very-good convoy management system is technically no longer here, they changed the game so that there are a finite number of infinite-use weapons instead. There are also area maps where you can walk around and talk to NPCs, albeit a bit primitive, but I can't really hold that against a game from 1992.

Overall the game is alright. The first two acts start off quite strong and they're a lot of fun. The world map structure combined with the optional dungeons is a nice format which rewards exploration, again as much as it can in 1992. You're introduced to a variety of unit types including the versatile villager class, though there's not much indication as to what's good and what's not, having choice Is a good thing at the end of the day.

Then Act 3 starts and the game slightly begins unraveling. Cantors become commonplace, Witches start showing up, the FE2 hit rates start getting in there (they are very bad), and the maps start getting very questionably designed. And here is a direct comparison I can make: FE1's maps were very well designed and each represented something, FE2's maps include "green field with trees", "green field with river", "90% desert tiles", "70% swamp tiles", "boat", and the same two indoor maps forever. The map design in this game truly is terrible.

Act 3 and Act 4 you just sort of meander through, and it becomes more apparent this game is fairly obscure. The Lost Woods is a maze and the hint for if you're "lost" is extremely subtle (one extra tree tile. that's it.), as is Alm's promotion which you can entirely miss. The level curve is also somewhat slow, especially on Alm's route, and god help you if you don't find the Secret Shrine to grind EXP on and go into the final map on the second tier of class promotions. I'm sure it's doable but I'm not sure it's fun at that point.

I'm ragging on FE2 a bit. It's not particularly good, but I will say it does release dopamine when you do clear a map or train up your uber units to crush and kill enemies and sometimes cheese maps. I'd be lying if I said I had a miserable time. I think FE2 is the type of game that you'll have more fun with if you fully know what you're getting into when you start playing it, and if it's not for you that's completely understandable.

I don't think by FE3 the Fire Emblem series had found it's footing yet. FE1 was a great start, and FE3 tried to branch out by doing new things with an old cast. It sort of works for a bit. Book 1 is Discount FE1 - some things are better like not having to deal with the convoy, and more fair promotions (General no longer being Lorenz's exclusive class, and Castor being able to promote). The graphics are also much better and the music is nice. However - it is very apparent that FE1 was not made with dismounting in mind. A lot of FE1 maps have the enemy starting on one side of the map and you on the other, and you either approach them or meet in the middle and clash. It's good design, but when you're dismounted it makes the maps slog just a little more and it makes it more obvious. They also removed a few characters, including the Chapter 1 healer you get!

Book 2 is the New Content and it is all over the place. The star shard hunt you're basically immediately thrust on (and not actually told about for a bit) is particularly unfun, and several maps have you trying to do things very quickly, whether that's catching thieves or running from Astram and his goons. Some of the new maps are outright terrible (the All Desert Map tiles comes to mind) and there's only one map that dismounting is actually an interesting mechanic on (Fire Dragon Valley chapter on Anri's Way) - which is a big discredit given dismounting was one of this game's things. Book 2 also introduces new spells, which are mostly good, and new staves, which range from "completely useless" (Unlock, Watch) to "completely overpowered" (Silence, Again). Then, you have to drag characters you may or may not have used to endgame just to recruit the sisters. At least the deployment slots are more generous in this game than it's remake, with most chapters having 15.

I can appreciate that Book 2 tried, but I don't think it stuck the landing. And that coupled with a slightly worse version of FE1 makes FE3 not fall into my good graces. I'm glad to be done with it.