Fire Emblem: Tactics at its Best

[Tlc2011]

Soooooooo yeah.

Fire Emblem... Where to start? Well, to put it simply, it's a strategy series made by Nintendo. Initially, it was Japan-only, but after the inclusion of Marth (the hero of the first game) and Roy (a guy who actually made his debut in SSB, main character of Sword of Seals, the only Japan-only GBA Fire Emblem game) in Super Smash Bros Melee (and Marth's reappearance in Brawl, alongside Ike, a more international FE Hero), the series began to head off to America.

All of the GBA games are available as ROMs nowadays, and modding them is popular. Hard, but popular. Most recently, the 3DS game Fire Emblem: Awakening (intended by Nintendo to be the last game in the franchise, if it didn't get good sales) wound up getting over a million sales within three months worldwide. In addition, FE Awakening includes DLC, allowing you to utilise the characters of old FE games to lower the difficulty or just to make it cooler.

The basic mechanics of the game are simple: You start with a small amount of units, and move them around the screen, trying to kill enemy soldiers and eventually the leader of the enemy soldiers, which is the Boss. Fire Emblem is not unlike, oh, say, Final Fantasy Tactics with those mechanics, but here comes the unique little bit that changes everything.

Once a character runs out of HP, they're gone forever. Considering you don't get infinite units, this means that if you're not real good at the game, Hard Mode will be impossible. Recently, FE Awakening gave players the option to turn off Perma-Death, instead having units just retreat.

Also, there's the Support Conversation feature, which, as of FE: Awakening allows players to pair characters. And, of course, then there's the all-new, badass ability you don't get in any other handheld tactics game: Your own unit. You can customize everything about him/her, even changing their class at will.

Here, have a few screenshots from the Fire Emblem games:

Talk about everything Fire Emblem here.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

I played the hell out of FE7 when I first got hold of it (in ROM form). Since then I've grown wiser and come to realize that the best game in the series, OBVIOUSLY, is FE4, by far. Basically yeah, it's just a great series. The problem with Strategy RPG's in general these days is that most of them appear to be designed to be played by below-average 3 year olds. There is no difficulty, there's just grinding through the story never feeling challenged until you get to the end and go "oh, okay, time for a new game". FE games are the only ones that are still trying to provide a sense of challenge. And I mean a REAL sense of challenge, not a Disgaea "Getting to max level will take 9000 hours, the challenge is to have enough patience" nonsense.

FE FTW.

 

[Maniacal]

I forget which one I have, but it was great until I realized I had to have carefully leveled EVERY hero I had as otherwise losing a couple later on was devastating as my back ups were not up to the same level as the enemies I was now fighting and it turned into a game of reloading saves as I couldn't let anyone die :/

 

[Tlc2011]

Same thing for me on Sacred Stones and Shadow Dragon, except for SS it's not because my backups are (Tower of Valni can take care of that) but because I want every character to be alive by the end. For SD, it's because I need as many heroes as I can get, and you can't recruit enemy units like Beck without, for example, Caeda.

 

[civvver]

I have a wii one radiant dawn and I don't like it. Poor graphics (they tried to do 3d on wii, just looks grainy), poor explanation of mechanics (don't understand stats and leveling at all, what's this biorhythm thing?), couple of the levels are super hard. I can imagine it's a great series, soft of a mix between final fantasy and advance wars, but the wii version sucks.

On the good side, I got the game for $20 two christmas' ago, now it goes for $50 used because it's out of production!