#hippoman

#1. Awakening

Awakening is a game that gets a few things wrong but most things right.  What don’t I like about it?  I preferred the art style of the Tellius games.  The maps aren’t very creative.  Pair Up is a thematically cool mechanic that really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and trivializes many encounters.  The story is simple, with the exception of a couple twists, and Validar is a dull villain. I like pretty much everything else.  Awakening managed to be accessible to new fans and still provide a nice challenge for series veterans.  There’s a diverse selection of characters who are all pretty viable, meaning you can use your favorites.  Most characters have a lot of personality and depth to their lines, like with how they turned Frederick from a typical stoic Jagen-type into this goofy obsessive pyromaniac without making him a complete joke character.   The SpotPass characters are also a lovely addition if you adore the series like I do, and there’s just so much to do in this game, so it feels like a celebration of the franchise as a whole.  If I’m trying to get someone into Fire Emblem, I will tell them to play Awakening. Favorite Character: Gregor or Owain. Least Favorite Character: Yarne #2. New Mystery Of The Emblem

This is bias, yes, but I love New Mystery.  I was really excited for this game, because I was pretty new to the fanbase when it was announced, and couldn’t wait for an English release.  I waited, and waited, and waited, and... Once I finished playing my JP copy I just lamented that we didn’t get to play this game here.  I think that while Awakening reinvents Fire Emblem, New Mystery is sort of the pinnacle of “classic” FE.  The game is just fun, the maps are diverse and challenging, and the combination of reclass and the sheer amount of playable characters gives it immense replay value. The plot is nothing to really write home about, but after the vast wasteland of Shadow Dragon Plot, I really liked what was there.  It’s nothing that’ll blow your mind, but there are some nice moments.  I know a lot of people hate Kris, but I don’t mind them.  I won’t go to bat for them being any kind of great character or vital addition to the story, but as a sounding board to give other Archanea characters a little personality, and a way to customize your own unit and give them all sorts of terrible hats, they work just fine.  I also like the idea of Marth as a bit of a shell-shocked, reluctant king who relies on his friends to rise to greatness.  It prevents him from being “too perfect”, like RD Ike.  But I can see where people have problems with this. I wish this were a more accessible entry in the series, because I think it has a little bit of something for every Fire Emblem fan. Favorite Character: Honestly?  I like Caeda and Ogma, they’re cool people. Least Favorite Character: matthis is creepy and I hate him 3. Blazing Sword

Like a lot of people, Blazing Sword was my first exposure to the series (through an LP on Youtube for me), and it does a great job.  You could honestly probably swap these first three around in any order, to be frank. The balance in this one is a little wonky, and it goes on a little too long.  But I like what it does with its extra time.  You get some clever gaidens that mix up the formula, have room to use lots of units, and the sprite animations are just wonderful to watch.  The three lords all bring something to the table, even though you’re honestly probably just going to play Hector Mode once you’ve unlocked it.  Lyn has a story about claiming your birthright and using nobility to help people, Hector’s brash and boorish nature is offset as he learns how to be a better person on his journey (That scene with Matthew on the Dread Isle is great.), and Eliwood...exists. With maps ranging from cramped and objective based to sprawling battlefields, there’s a lot of variety in gameplay and room for different units to shine.  It’s also got some of the best supports in the series.  It’s a must-play for any Fire Emblem fan. Favorite: Hector is a good boy and a friend.  Legault is also a surprisingly involved side-character with some great lines and dialogue with almost every Morph in the final map! Least Favorite: Jaffar, because it’s hard to tell if I hate him more for killing Leila or ramming his face into the paladin in Battle Before Dawn and getting slaughtered so many times.

4. Path Of Radiance

I guess only the top 3 are getting thumbnails, sorry.  PoR sticks with me because it tries a lot of new things and most of them work out.  The bonus experience is a good system, I think this game does support unlocks better than any other, Laguz units are fun to use, and the conversion to pseudo-3D maps feels smooth and never gets in the way of gameplay. There are issues, though.  I’m not a fan of the way the full-body portraits look in the cutscenes of this game, biorhythm is silly, and that Bridge Map sure does Exist.  The reason this isn’t breaking Top 3, though, is that I just never really got attached to the cast.  Characters are a big part of Fire Emblem for me, and while there are some great ones in PoR, there are also several that feel very forgettable.  The plot is also a little...iffy, because it’s all FANTASY RACISM and it feels like it’s trying to punch above its pay grade sometimes.  Like, be honest, did you give a shit that you had to kill Jill’s dad?  That character who showed up maybe once?  The maps also tend to blend together, with a few notable exceptions (because they’re annoying, mostly).   In Minor Nitpick Town, the 3D cutscenes are hilariously goofy and the Trial characters have really awful unlock conditions. Still, PoR is a very solid entry and I’d give it a hearty recommendation. Favorite: Ranulf, probably. Least Favorite: makalov shouldn’t have been recruitable

5. Sacred Stones I balked a little at putting this one this low, like “Really?  This is FIFTH?”  But I guess that’s just a testament to how much I enjoy all these games.  Like with the top three, you could probably swap this with PoR. Sacred Stones gets a lot of shit for being “too easy”, and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, but I also don’t think it’s that big a deal.  This game takes risks, but they’re good risks that frequently pay off.  This was the ideal game for the Trainee classes to come in, because you can actually feasibly use them!  The monsters add variation to the types of enemies you encounter!  Split promotions are interesting tactical decisions that give the player more control over their personal experience! There’s just...not a ton of substance to SS, though.  The monsters, at heart, aren’t really interesting to fight.  The game’s plot often feels like it’s on fast forward, and it ends before any real tension builds.  The villains are, with the exception of Lyon, who’s great, mostly just cardboard cutouts of bad guy stereotypes.  The postgame is mostly just grindy and once you’ve beaten the Tower or Ruins once, you’ll probably say “okay, I’m done!”  Well, you aren’t, not if you want 100%!  Get back in there and kill more Dracozombies to unlock your underleveled Druid! If you really crave that “challenge” as an essential part of your FE experience, although I think SS is often made out to be easier than it really is, you can probably skip it.  But for most fans, it’s not to be passed up. Favorite: L’Arachel, of course. Least Favorite: I usually forget Syrene is in the game until she appears. 6. Fates: Conquest Yes, I’m dividing Fates into three games.  Sue me.  Conquest feels like the best of the Fates routes, because it’s creative.  In... a lot of ways.  The maps are creative.  While some just amount to gimmicks, several are, in my opinion, series standouts.  Chapter 9 is a Defense map that actually feels like a Defense map.  You’ve got anti-siege weapons, you’re scrambling to keep the Hoshidans from flooding in, and when Takumi drains the water the whole dynamic of the map suddenly changes.  It rules.  To me, that map encompasses all the best parts of Conquest. It’s too bad it’s still in Fates, though.  Let’s get it out of the way: Plot Bad.  But, unique to Conquest, I think, is a plot so utterly ridiculous and convoluted that it actually becomes actively enjoyable.  This is a story where your cousin puts on a different colored costume to COMPLETELY FOOL your adoptive dad, who she reveals is actually a jelly monster, but cannot tell anyone else because of a terrible curse inflicted by the King Of The Jelly Monsters, so you organize an invasion of an entire country to unmask Jelly Dad by making him sit on the Super Special Chair that will reveal his gelatinous form.  I love it, to be honest. Otherwise my issues are mostly just the standard Fates Problems.  The game tries to take what worked in Awakening and amp it up to 11, which ruins most of it.  The child characters are unmemorable and the plot explanation is bafflingly nonsensical (BABY DIMENSIONS), the characters often feel like they’re just gimmicks that smash into eachother and then get married for some reason, and the game tries to be so many things at once that most of them feel half-assed or over-complicated. Jelly King Dad though. Favorite: Arthur cracks me up. Least Favorite: Peri Peri Peri peri peri p e r i   p  e  r  i 7. Echoes: Shadows Of Valentia

Confession time.  I still haven’t finished this one all the way.  I’ve seen the ending, though. Let’s get the problems out of the way first.  The gameplay is not very fun.  The map design delights in sticking you in poisonous swamps, slow and dreary deserts, or Nuibaba’s Abode, which I would personally say is the worst map in the series.  While some of Awakening and Birthright’s maps feel lazy, most maps in this game feel like they were designed either just to frustrate you or with a series of random dice rolls that somehow plant a single Cavalier at the ass-end of nowhere and extend the map for three turns with zero rhyme or reason.  Class balance is all over the place and you basically just want all the Dread Fighters possible, with a Cleric to summon more Dread Fighters.  The dungeon crawling doesn’t add much, most of the game mechanics go woefully underexplained, and the voiced supports feel minimalist and shallow. But when Echoes works?  It really, really works.  I don’t like playing it, but watching someone play Echoes is a treat.  The game is bursting with personality thanks to some phenomenal voice acting, which leaves the story with some unforgettable moments, both comic (the boey scream) and dramatic (Berkut Loses His Shit).  Even though the characters don’t have a lot of explicit backstory, their voices and conversations are so expressive that it’s easy to sort of form your own ideas about their personalities and lives.  The art is some of the best in the series, and each portrait is expressive and well done.  It’s clear that this remake had a lot of care put into it, and it produced some of the series best lords and a wonderful new villain in the sinister Berkut. 8. Radiant Dawn

A lot of good things from Path Of Radiance carry over to Radiant Dawn.  Namely, the stuff I mentioned earlier, I won’t go into it all again.  All of that is good, but the new additions and changes often don’t work. The multiple viewpoints has a few cool moments, like facing down Ike and friends in 3-13 (with the greatest faceless NPC of all time on your side), but often just contributes to making the game way too long and making the characters often appear outright stupid or contradictory for the sake of moving the plot along.  Remember when Micaiah, who spared one of the most vile people in FE history in Part 1, dumped flaming oil on a 13 year old girl and her guards in Part 3?  Remember when Ranulf just walks up and tells you who the Black Knight is, ending a mystery that had been developed since the previous game with the dialogue equivalent of showing you a spoiler on the internet?  Remember blood pacts? The massive split in characters also makes some of them completely worthless.  Never forget the sad case of Vika, who suddenly disappears and doesn’t return until almost the final chapter, still at her Part 1 level.  Yikes. I do enjoy the Finale maps a lot, however, and the final boss encounter is fairly memorable, though it does carry its own problem with Ike being basically hero worshipped by the entire cast, to the point where only he can strike down Ashera.  I like Ike, but RD kind of feels like it’s forcing him down your throat sometimes. Favorite: Out of the new characters, Nolan, probably? Least Favorite: surprise it’s still makalov 9. Shadow Dragon I’m sure this is bottoming out a lot of people’s lists, but let me make my case. 1. Reclass is cool and they introduced it in this.

2. Hardin’s turban.

3. The Prologue, where IS got to make new stuff, is a lot of fun and has personality.

4.

Okay, so Shadow Dragon is disappointing.  It’s a remake that did not change enough, and if the FE games were yogurt flavors, Shadow Dragon would be the batch they just forgot to put flavoring in.  Everything, down to the graphics, is covered in this thin veneer of blandness, and it’s sort of a muddy march to the finale, so you can finally take down a villain who literally gets about four lines in the whole game. The Gaiden chapters also feel like a rude prank.  If you want to get at the fun maps with the interesting characters with good dialogue, you have to slaughter all of your friends on purpose!  At least it’s in Shadow Dragon so you probably won’t like most of them anyway! Favorite: The guy who calls Gordin “Gaggles”. Least Favorite: surprise it’s still makalovmatthis 10. Binding Blade I admit that this is bizarre placement.  I just...don’t like Binding Blade.  It’s mostly due to stat distribution in gameplay, honestly.  The skill/luck formula in this one results in a lot of boss fights that are just two 40% characters whiffing on eachother for ages.  Several of the maps are giant slogs, especially 14, but I don’t remember any in particular that I really enjoyed.  The plot is okay, but not memorable.  Idunn is a bit of a letdown encounter.  Hector deserved better.  To summarize, I guess I just don’t think this is a game that does anything that Blazing Sword didn’t do better.  So I’m gonna play that one instead. Favorite: Bors because of a terrible stupid inside joke I have with a friend. Least Favorite: I don’t remember anyone I cared enough to dislike, really.  Let’s go with Cath for having the worst recruitment for a Worse Chad. 11. Fates: Birthright Remember all those cool things Conquest did?  What if they didn’t? Birthright! While the story is still bad, it’s not nearly as funny-bad, although I do have to give props to the scene where Flora sets herself on fire and Jakob spends about a solid minute screaming out how pointless this is, echoing the player’s thoughts perfectly.  The maps are mostly just stat-checks and open fields, and the answer to your problems often isn’t “make a better plan”, it’s “go grind a bit and then just roll through it”, especially on some late-game maps.  Iago’s comes to mind, with the whole Entrap into Berzerker combo?  Screw that. Favorite: Azama is a treasure.  On the NPC (in this route) side, Elise is a beacon of rationality and kindness.  I sure hope nothing happens to h-Oh. Least Favorite: I remember literally nothing about the personalities of Hana and Hinata so them, I guess.