With the most recent full Fire Emblem game I have played being the Three Houses game on Switch, which was very excellent; I longed for the historical context that I remember from my time spent with the original cartridge and my blue plastic encased Gameboy Advance, without a backlight.
At the time, I had little knowledge that the units I was controlling were something that began on the original Nintendo Entertainment System in the late eighties and early nineties.
The Fire Emblem series is a game of rock, paper, scissors; played with Swords > Axes > Lances > Swords. It's called a weapon triangle, except it is more like a circle, which goes around and around and around. Unlike your characters.
Fire Emblem may have been the first game that introduced me to hardcore gaming principles; where if you have a character die, they're dead, gone and never to be seen again. The game has the option to enable this, and it adds an enormous amount of tactical importance to every decision you make in this turn based strategy game.
Fire Emblem on the Game Boy Advance is carved into several different bits. First, you have "cut scenes" which contain art as seen in the image above, accompanied with text. It is a still frame to still frame transition, which serves to unfold certain story points with more poignancy than sprites overlaid with text.
This is what you see in the screenshot above; where less impactful story and in-mission events are coloured with the relationships being built between characters, and where much of the tale of intrigue around warring realms unfold.
The story is a decent one, too; for a game so old; and with limited graphical capabilities, it is delivered with a competent translation from its Japanese roots, and translates perfectly the hand held factor of the Gameboy.
Playing this on original hardware is a treat that defies the passage of time; and makes me feel like I am twenty years younger than I am now; with the misplaced assumption that I look at this game through the eyes of a significantly more mature human being. In truth; the game stands up just as well as it ever did.
Battles unfold on a strategic map; where you move your units and can take advantage of terrain such as mountains, forests, river fjords and natural bottlenecks in the environment to take down your enemies. While most battles simply involve killing all enemy units; there's some that are far more complex, including defending a location, making your way to a certain individual through the battlefield; or simply passing over terrain to get to the next location.
When you engage in a battle, where you deploy the Weapon Triangle to (hopefully) win; you are treated to some fantastic side on battles showing sprites with excellent levels of detail, a bevy of stats, and the final view in which the game presents its holistic package.
Fire Emblem is a game full of tactics and strategy, and can be known for its unforgiving and uncompromising approach to mistakes that you make. I alluded to this earlier, you can play a mode where if a character falls in battle, they're gone forever; but at the same time, parts of the story force you to use certain characters to succeed, which simultaneously puts them at risk.
It is a fine and well balanced torture, accompanied with easy to grasp controls (having limited buttons on the console helps) without the need for four hundred deeply nested layers of menus for you to access all the details you need to make a decision.
You always feel in control, as you watch the story unfold through the twists and turns of the canyons it weaves you through. The game has around 30 missions to play through; and they gain tactical and strategic challenge at a steady pace as you progress.
Just as you become familiar with a set of characters and their abilities, the game switches perspective, introducing you to new mechanics, before brining everyone back together once more.
It is a finely made game, and I believe there's a reason it still commands a high price on second hand markets.
I'm grateful that I've managed to acquire (or hang onto) my collection of Fire Emblem games over the last few years, and I am looking forward to engaging with them all before I sink my teeth into the next mainline title, Fire Emblem: Engage on Switch, which I will get to... eventually.
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