Why you should play Fire Emblem

[queenlua]

sarasa_cat asked a while back for a pitch on Why Fire Emblem Is So Awesome. As the self-nominated ambassador for all things Fire Emblem, I am delighted to comply :P

So! the snarky pitch that I’ve seen floating around for these games is “fantasy medieval chess but also you can date the chess pieces,” haha. And I mean, that’s not untrue, but!

What’s personally compelling to me, story-wise, is how impressionistic the game is. There’s always a core story, generally some young noble going on a quest to reclaim their lost kingdom or whatever, and while that core story is always competently written and often quite fun, the real fun lies in all the interactions within the ensemble cast.

See, in Fire Emblem, you are not directing an army of faceless footsoldiers. Every single unit on the battlefield has a name, a backstory, and a set of “support” conversations with the other characters in your army—and you’ll see such surprising/different interactions based on who they’re talking to, bringing out different fun and fascinating aspects of their character, and the writers manage to make you care way too much about these characters in a really compressed space.

Which dovetails nicely with Fire Emblem’s main cheesy game mechanic: there are no phoenix downs in this world, so when a character dies on the battlefield, they die for good. Usually, as they die, they say some character-specific extremely gut-wrenching death quote... which, in practice, means you never let anyone die; you just restart the level and try again :P

If you’re at all fannishly inclined, these support conversations are absolutely delicious fodder for worldbuilding, what-ifs, alternate possibilities, and so on. There are never any canon pairings because multiple units can always pair off with each other at the end; the endings are super variable. So what does the postgame world look like if these two sovereigns marry versus these other two? What does the world look like if this prince abandons his duties to go wandering the world with this random mercenary...?

Even if you’re not fannishly inclined, the game does lots of fun storytelling within the mechanics themselves—maybe there’s an enemy you’re fighting who you can recruit if you send the right person to talk to them, or maybe there’s a character who can only have support conversations with one person because they’re so closed-off and icy. Maybe two characters can support each other who you totally wouldn’t have expected. It’s delicious fun unearthing these.

Also, gameplay wise: if you’re at all into turn-based tactical RPGs, I think this is hands-down one of the best in the genre. And it manages to be far more accessible than most games in that genre. While the gameplay is deep, it doesn’t overwhelm with walls of numbers or stats or too-much-stuff-to-keep-track-of; the basics of the combat system are learned within 1-2 tutorial maps, the number of units is always tractable, and while there’s always emergent complexity in terms of positionality and pacing and so on, I always feel like it’s possible to keep it all in my head. If I mess up, it’s because I miscalculated, not because I was overwhelmed or cognitively drained.

As for where to start: like Final Fantasy, most Fire Emblem games are standalone, so you can kind of start wherever. I’d probably recommend Fire Emblem: Three Houses, largely because it’s the newest in the series, and thus the most polished, accessible, comfortable, etc. Plus, the storytelling in the game is... wildly ambitious, and while it definitely overreaches (read: some plot threads get dropped, some parts aren’t as smooth as they should be), I adore how much stuff they packed in and how much there is to play with. The whole schtick is that, during the first half of the game, you’re all buddies at an officers’ academy, with folks from three different nations... and, of course, halfway through the game, all the nations go to war with each other, there’s a timeskip, and now you’ve gotta go do battle against your former classmates. Ah, the built-in angst! the betrayals! the drama!

Three Houses is very much a choose-your-flavor Fire Emblem as a result. Choose Edelgard’s route if you want the standard JRPG fun of killing God and destroying this world to save a better one, and so on. Choose Dimitri’s route if you want sad homoerotic knights in cold places dealing with trauma and broken childhood friendships and dealing with Too Much. Choose Claude’s route if you want best boy, perfect man, character I would die on a battlefield for, etc the goofy theatre kid troop led by The One Dude Who Actually Reads A Book, who winds up unearthing some of the deeper mysteries-behind-everything. Or, y’know, choose all three. That’s certainly what I did when I went into a fugue state and blasted through every route in like two months:P

Drawbacks: this is one of those games with a self-insert character, and the self-insert character does warp the plot around them a bit—you end up feeling a bit like you’re playing a Mary Sue / Gary Stu, haha.

I personally started with Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, which I still love dearly. While the gameplay’s a bit on the easy side, the GBA-era sprites and animations were absolutely gorgeous, and the core story focuses around a really wrenching and well-done childhood friendship trio, which makes it feel more intimate than the typical Fire Emblem fare.

My personal favorites are Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, which together tell one awesome, sprawling adventure + political story. In the latter game, in particular, you’ll know and love characters on both sides of many battles, and the game will have you swap out which army you’re playing as several times—it was such a shock to me, the first time I had to go cut down some allies, and really drove home the war is hell thing, haha. It’s got a satisfyingly large/rich/varied cast (by endgame I think over half the continent’s ruled by women?), and I loved basically all of them. (Caveat: these games do lean into the whole “here is a fantasy race that exists, we will use them to prop up our racism-is-bad metaphor” thing. While the game’s heart is in the right place and I don’t think the game’s handling of this sort of trope is egregiously bad, and in fact there’s a lot of interesting nuances drawn, there’s also some eyebrow-raising moments, and I know folks who are turned off by this sort of thing altogether, so—yeah, skip these games if that sounds like a hurdle!)

But like, honestly? Start with Three Houses. It’s fantastic fun. And while I think its central story arcs are a little weaker than average, its raw ambition, plus the richness and diversity of the cast, makes up for that.

(Mandatory brief head-nod to the other FE games that I don’t generally recommend but someone’s going to wonder about: Awakening is a blast, gameplay-wise, but unfortunately the gameplay is very easy once you figure out The Correct Strategy TM, and also the plot’s silly. I didn’t finish Fire Emblem: Conquest, but from what I played of it, I can verify the plot is very silly but the gameplay is probably the series’ best. And by best I mean hard. Unfortunately, I want story and gameplay in my Fire Emblem games, so, that crosses that one out for me. Genealogy of the Holy War is a favorite among hardcores, but it’s... mad crufty. Not a great entry point, haha.)