I just finished Path of Radiance and kind of wanted to talk about the series.
Mine would probably be Blazing Blade or Mystery of the Emblem, BB because having some weird cult terrorist group as the villains was more fun than Evil Nation nº12837, MotE because i think it has some of the best gameplay and maps of the franchise while having a way better story than the other newer FE games (that i have played, Awakening and Fates).
i really liked three houses mostly because of comrade class traitor edelgard
I'm playing Three Houses right now and enjoying it. I've tried other FE games and bounced right out of them, this might be what gets me to try again
Blue Lions, because that's what everyone says to start with and I didn't realize the whole thing with Edelgard.
In the middle of Black Eagles now.
did you finish the blue lions? because i haven't played it, and i'm curious what you thought
Yeah, I did. It was fine.
Making Dimitri a tortured edgelord in Act 2 is really cringe, and then having him just suddenly get over it makes me wonder what the point even was. There were also a lot of plot threads from Act 1 that just get entirely dropped- which would be less annoying if they didn't telegraph "you're about to get answers!" right before you don't get answers. Like,
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the whole question of what Rhea did to Byleth to give her Goddess powers. For all of Blue Lions' Act 2, they keep building up "Rhea's in Enbarr, once we rescue her you can find out what she did to you". Then the final battle of the act is in Enbarr, and you just get an epilogue slide saying "and then they rescued Rhea" without the game actually giving you any of those answers.
I like the characters though. Ash and Dedue are my sons, and even though they gave us an annoying fuckboy character like Sylvain they at least had the decency to give him a little depth. The starting members of the house also feel better- Mercedes is a much better healer than Linhardt, Annette is a better mage than Hubert or Dorothea, Dedue is a better wall than Edelgard or Caspar, Sylvain and Felix are basically identitical to Ferdinand and Petra (Ferdinand even looks like Sylvain with smoothed-down hair lmao). Act 1 is also structured to make them all shine a bit more- like, in both routes (and presumably also in Golden Deer), you fight Ash's adopted father and Sylvain's brother, but that's allowed to mean more when you actually have Ash and Sylvain in your party.
iirc there are some things that you just don't find out about unless you play all the routes or look stuff up. and i think there's some major plot threads that just never come up in the blue lions.
i think all three houses feel pretty good to play, but i mostly agree with your assessments of the characters. something i find interesting is that blue lions feels like it was the intended main route for some of the reasons you specify there, and also because it's the most generic fantasy story of them all, but it wasn't.
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the first route designed was the church route, since the game started out with the idea of 'what if edelgard was your lord but then she betrayed you' and then i guess they decided they wanted to try and do fates but better. so the first act black eagles was actually the only way the game was going to be played originally, though obviously that was fairly early in the design cycle. but as a result both crimson flower and verdant wind feel a little underdeveloped for reasons i won't get into.
I'd be more fine with some plot threads not getting answered in every storyline if they wouldn't have kept teasing that we were gonna get answers for them
Disclaimer I've never played that game.
Unfortunately I have played Fire Emblem.
I’ve never played Fire Emblem, but I did play Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle and it’s far from the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s basically babies first Xcom. The game mechanics in and of themselves are pretty good, but it’s faaaaar too easy and there’s not a lot of depth to it. I didn’t finish it.
I know a lot of people don't like this one, but for me it's Fates: Conquest. A story about the bad guys, who are portrayed as a group of siblings trying desperately to please their father who grows more demanding and irrational with every passing day, was immensely more compelling to me than "bad country is summoning monsters".
It also helps that the gameplay is super tightly designed. There's no ability to level grind in that campaign, so the designers were able to carefully map every single battle out.
the gameplay in fates is great. and i really like the premise, but they just didn't pull it off (at least for me, obviously it worked for you.)
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i think we might have had this conversation before, and i think i said i hadn't played it while paying attention to the story since it came out, and that's still true, so this is mostly half-remembered and based off the vibes more than anything else.
i have a soft spot for awakening, since it was my first and it has a lot of replay value, but i don't think the writing is all that good. it also doesn't have anywhere between 'incredibly easy to snap this game over your knee like bane' and 'game wasn't lying that difficulty was lunatic
genealogy of the holy war has a lot going for it, but i don't actually like it all that much. it's got a lot of cool (and really impressive for the snes) stuff going on, but i just think the maps are too big for any real unit diversity to be worth it.
three houses has a lot of problems, but also edelgard is great and you get to tear down the catholic church and the landed nobility, so i think it all evens out as the best game in the series. plus i really like the teaching mechanics, even if the teacher thing makes the supports kind of skeevy
Awakening has a weird charm to it that actually make its silly jokes work, and I don't know why.
the nowi and nah stuff all sucks, but otherwise it's just a fun time imo
Are any of the mobile phone versions actually worth playing?
I liked one or two of the GBA ones but was always more into Advanced Wars. Also if I had more free time I would make a lightly inspired clone of one of the GBA Advanced Wars.
If you don't have an addictive personality and can resist the gacha elements, Heroes is okay. But yeah emulating the earlier games is better.
you can emulate the earlier ones pretty easily on a phone, and those might be worth playing, but heroes is a gacha and you shouldn't play it.
Sacred Stones, I really liked the fact that there were just extra fights you could do for fun and the challenge dungeon. I really disliked the 3d artstyle in PoR, and didn't play any after that. The waifu-ization of modern Fire Emblem proves me right.
Genealogy of the Holy War! It's a little tricky to understand compared to newer FE, but it great and should be mandatory for any SNES JRPG fan.
It's also the origin of the matchmaker stuff from Awakening. Only it makes more sense since the second half of the game has you playing with all the children as your units.
Radiant Dawn is probably my favorite with interesting mechanics and I dig the normal difficulty. It also has kickass character designs and third tier classes. I do have a real soft spot for Sacred Stones as my childhood entry point. I struggle with keeping up with older ones with fan translations on emulators. I recently got into Symphony of War: Nephelim Saga and it really scratched my FE itch even though it's about squads of characters. Story is pretty boring, though.
