Fire Emblem (2003)

I keep coming back to this game because I'm avoiding continuing Three Houses. This time I beat Hector mode. Quick thoughts, some of them specifically for this game and some about Fire Emblem as a series:

• I really like the characters in this game. The overall story is pretty okay, although there are plot points and scenarios that make me scratch my head, but I was able to look past them just because I love how the characters are written. I don't really get this feeling with most newer entries in the series. Hector is also a great character and unit.
• Older Fire Emblems were super tedious locking you to only having 5 supports per character per playthrough. It'd take forever to see them all. There's a ton of characters where I know nothing about them outside of what was shown in their introduction.
• This is a prequel to a Japanese exclusive game. I find the units they decided to include in this game interesting. Some of them are the parents or children of characters in the previous game. For the characters that are introduced in this game that don't show up in the previous one, it's a bit bittersweet either not knowing what happens to them or knowing that they have an unhappy future. I'm really hoping FE6 gets a remake or gets localized to the west in some fashion. This game is enjoyable regardless of the player having familiarity of the events of FE6, but it'd be great to give everyone the chance to experience the FULL story of the Elibe Fire Emblems in an official capacity.
• I got locked out of getting the true ending and I'm salty about it. The gaiden chapters and the requirements to unlocking some characters is hidden to the degree where I refuse to believe people found out the conditions without consulting a guide. I couldn't play a bonus chapter because I failed to accomplish something 10ish chapters earlier, but the game doesn't telegraph it in any way (to my knowledge).

The more that I think about the series, the more I realize that I'm a bigger fan of Pre-Awakening Fire Emblem than I am of Post-Awakening Fire Emblem. Awakening literally saved the series from being cancelled, but I find them lacking when I reflect on those games.

Edit: Forgot to mention my thoughts of Eliwood and Hector mode. It honestly feels silly that Hector mode gets exclusive chapters and characters. If you only play Eliwood mode, you will never get the full context of the story. I find myself thinking why couldn’t some of the scenes of Hector mode been implemented into Eliwood mode? They basically made the players have to play the same game twice in a row to get the full story. This isn’t the last time Fire Emblem will do this.

Also forgot to mention how tedious grinding for supports is in this game. Some of them are ridiculously slow. I really wish they did it the way Path of Radiance did with having supports grow by the amount of chapters units are deployed together rather than having to make units be adjacent together.

I started replaying this because I started 3 Houses and found it to be pretty slow to start.

I binged Eliwood mode over the weekend. I think I enjoyed it more now than I did when I first played it, super fun. I wish units weren’t limited to 5 supports and they didn’t need unique promotion items to advance their job class, but overall I still had a good time.

Well, I'm back on this bullshit! Turns out the Steam Deck makes GBA look stupidly nice, and so now I get to moon over Lyn on a whole new platform.

But damn is the tutorial stuff in this game too much. They should just ask you if you've played a Fire Emblem game at the start of every one of these and then let you free.

Finished up the Lynn/Tutorial story arch and just got started on Elliwood. Enjoying it so far... still very worried about hitting that peak frustration moment.

I remember so clearly now that I've played again what made me fall off my last attempt at this game a decade ago. You can make characters too strong to survive, which I know makes no sense... But, if they are strong enough to kill characters in a counter attack, then the enemy can hit them over and over again in one turn because the space opens on the death of the previous guy. /sigh