This review/playthrough/rating is of Book 1 specifically. It’s fine. I like it, but it lacks a lot of maps and story elements to deliver a truncated remake. There’s not a ton of reason to play this specific version of this story. The NES version at least has the “so old it’s a curiosity” factor whereas the DS version has a lot of gameplay changes that makes the experience even better, though very different. This one looks nice, I like the SFC music, and I love that Marth is actually very busted for once. It lacks too much from the other versions for me to recommend it in earnest though.

I played through this for this month's TR, as it was one of the only retro SRPGs I own. SRPG is a genre I've enjoyed in the past but am not a massive fan of. Even Fire Emblem is a series I'm not a super huge fan of, despite having beaten half a dozen of them over the years. I have this game on my Super Famicom Mini, and I honestly really didn't expect to finish it. I ended up using save states and rewinds a fair bit, and ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. They were a great way to make the game's difficulty far more appealing to me, and more like the puzzle-ish design of Advance Wars where losing a unit feels a lot less dire (and it also thankfully lowered the time commitment for me significantly). That said, it still took me over 43.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game, and that's just the end time on the SFC Mini and ignores all my restarts XP.

Mystery of the Emblem is actually two games jammed into one. The first is a remake of the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, but with some new mechanics tossed in (mostly re-balancing leveling, as far as I can tell) that help make it easier and less dependent on RNG like the original was. The other changes to it are to make it fit mechanically alongside the second game on the cart, which is actually FE: Mystery of the Emblem, a direct sequel to Shadow Dragon with much of the same cast. The stories are nothing to write home about, especially in the first game, but it's serviceable in both cases. Mystery of the Emblem is a really jarring thing to go to after Shadow Dragon, given that there is just so little text at all in the first game and SO much more in the second, even if it mostly amounts to larger exposition dumps at the starts and ends of chapters. They're quite sad stories compared to later FE games, with far less happy endings beyond the few most central characters. Even most of the end-game resolution text for characters who live (especially in Shadow Dragon) amount to "they disappeared" or had a not so great life after the war. I did enjoy the story that was there, especially in Mystery of the Emblem, but it's hardly a main selling point of the game or anything.

Being that it's SUCH an early entry in the series, and this is also the only pre-GBA Fire Emblem game I've ever played, I expected it to be quite different and my goodness is it. No weapon triangle, no supports of any kind, and the ability to dismount and mount up your mounted units to name some of the biggest differences to later games (a lot of that being innovations introduced in FE4, after all). The mounting/dismounting thing is easily the most annoying mechanic, and mostly seems to be an arbitrary way to hamstring your movement on some levels, and it's something that wouldn't be so annoying if it didn't make mounted units SO much worse (not to mention it's really annoying since you need to swap out their lances for swords whenever you do it).

Beyond that there are just lots of weird design decisions or lacking quality of life features, like there being no way to check threat ranges of you or your enemies (which REALLY sucks in a game with so many long-range casters and ballista to worry about) as well as you needing to do all the math yourself for how much damage you're gonna do across menus on two different screens (and the same goes for hit chance, quite often). At least if there IS a threat-range checker (or even a range-stat-checker) feature, I could never find where it was. Most of my resets and rewinds were down to frustrations with "oh, I didn't know how far this could hit me, so I moved forward and now I'm dead." Then other weird things like some characters like Marth and the entire fighter class (that being anyone who uses an axe, of which you get 3 in Shadow Dragon, one of whom was one of my best characters in that game) simply having no promotion items at all. Thankfully for the latter aspect, Mystery of the Emblem remedies this by simply never giving you any axe-users. and the absence of any weapon triangle makes it fairly inconsequential on an overall mechanical level.

The map designs and such are good fun, and the music and graphics are excellent and hold up great. I usually end up turning off the battle animations in FE, but I never did in this game. Part of that may have been down to me playing so much of the game streamed to my friends over Discord so I could have the anticipation of getting a hit or a miss, but part of it was also just how pretty and nice the animations are~. There are never any missions that aren't "capture the throne", but there are a lot of neat setups for missions that make them have more interesting aspects around that (like a mission where most of the enemy soldiers don't actually fight you, and if you don't pick them off for easy XP, you get more recruitable characters out of it). There are some problems with the game actually giving you the information on how to recruit many characters, especially in Shadow Dragon (you basically need to guess a TON who is actually related to whom so they could talk to and recruit them), but MotE has a lot less of that. Either way, especially if you don't wanna miss the extra final levels in MotE, playing this game with a simple recruitment/item guide to make sure you don't miss people is something I did and I would also recommend doing to help alleviate any stress over missing recruits.

Verdict: Recommended. I think it's age has not been super kind to it, but that's also because of what a definitive game it is. The mechanics and design philosophies laid down in FE3 and then FE4 helped establish the future of the franchise in a big way, and even though it's lacking in a lot of QoL features, these early games still play in a very familiar way as a result. There will likely be some frustrations and resets in both parts of the game, but if you're into SRPGs and want something that isn't too brutally hard, this is yet another game from Nintendo's 16-bit catalog whose main failings come from how well Nintendo and others have innovated on it since.

Marth, you have to stop, your movement too low, your map designs too dependent on you running around everywhere, your stats nerfed from the first game enough to make it so you can't handle yourself easily in combat anymore, they'll kill you.
(First Fire Emblem game that feels genuinely enjoyable to play on a moment-to-moment basis, but the story is all overly long exposition dumps, the Marth reliance is particularly annoying in the remake of the original game, and there are just a variety of QoL things this game doesn't have that are actually sort of unusual for 1994, a point at which other JRPGs were getting pretty polished).

(this review is only for book 2)
mystery of the emblem is a pretty cool game. the mechanics aren't really very different from fe1 (apart from the inventory management being greatly improved, thank you kaga) but this game has much better balance than that game ever did. in fe1 and gaiden it often felt like you were allowed to ignore playing maps "correctly" in favor of just stat checking with strong units; here, it's much more difficult to do that and the early game is much tougher, which does a good job of teaching how the game is supposed to work. the star shards make the game a lot easier when they get introduced, but mystery is still a game where you can't play recklessly or rely on unrealistic mechanical quirks like marth's global taunt. enemies felt much more aggressive here and you can't really gamble with their ai anymore. i felt like i had actually gotten a lot better at fire emblem by the end of the game, which is ideally what a strategy game should do. oh also dancers are so fun. the game felt so much more playable once i got feena, it's unreal.
the plot is pretty stupid, though. mystery starts off strong with marth being turned against on both sides by major players from the first game, and i do love the way this integrates with the story. the early to mid-game throws a lot of maps with absurd amounts of reinforcements at you, which really makes you feel like you're on the run and you're up against something way bigger than your little band of rebels. unfortunately this devolves into marth simply going from place to place to get told (not especially interesting) lore, and the reasoning behind the events of the game are really stupid.
speed also hasn't really improved from the nes games much. units move faster but combat animations are still really slow, a lot of maps are huge, and like i said earlier there's tons of reinforcements in this game, so enemy phase can drag quite a lot. i turned combat animations off pretty early and i didn't regret it. some of them are cool, but not really enough to where it's worth the wait, imo. clarity has greatly improved from the nes games, but it's still missing some information i'd really like to see, such as enemy attack ranges. for most of the game this isn't notable because the only long range units are ballistae, which have very low hit rates, but lategame there's a lot of long ranged mages with meteor, and there's no convenient way to tell when you're in range of them.
the character endings are hilarious man marth's friends must fucking hate him

Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

This isn't actually Fire Emblem 3, that's just the name rom kiddies gave to it once and it stuck. It's actually a remake of Fire Emblem 1 and 2, I think. I'm not sure which system Fire Emblem 2 is for, since Fire Emblem Gaiden is in fact NOT Fire Emblem 2 and is actually a separate story unto itself. So maybe this game is, like, Fire Emblem 1, with a new story at the end, that they just kinda CALLED Fire Emblem 2, but it was a totally new game! Yeah! Okay probably not. The Fire Emblem series is enigmatic at best, I'm afraid.

I previously said, perhaps foolishly, that this remake is shorter to play than the Famicom original. In fact, however, I lost so many hours playing this game, getting about twenty minutes or so into a chapter only to find I shouldn't have brought in one character, or another character is going to get killed no matter what, or I forgot to do something important during the mission. I put twenty hours on my journal, about two weeks altogether, but honestly who really knows. And this is WITH me heavily and unapologetically using save states and rewinds, going into arenas and artificially pumping characters full of EXP to bursting. I have the power of God in Retroarch, complete mastery of time, space, and reality, and it's still hard as balls. What if I played this vanilla? What if I played the ORIGINAL game vanilla?! I shudder to think. There but for the grace of etc.

The first SRPG I ever played was Final Fantasy Tactics. What I liked about that game was how open to experimentation it was: there were a slew of jobs available for you to try out and develop if you liked them or ignore if you didn’t, and if you made a team that didn’t really work out for you, well, don’t worry, it’s not inconceivable to make another one, and if not your main character is going to be superpowered and you will also get somes superpowered allies very soon. This was also very much a game where you restarted from your save point if anyone died permanently, but there was a mechanism in place to prevent permanent death. It was kind of fun, if a bit of an inconvenience, to rescue fallen party members in the time limit before their souls disappeared forever. Years later I tried the Shining Force games for the Genny, and my experience with FFT was what warmed me to those. I remember quite a bit of looking at walkthroughs to see which characters were good and which to ignore, but aside from that I don’t remember any major hurdles to beating either one. It helped that you could repeat battles to level up!

There’s none of that sissy shit here. We all know what's coming when we boot up a FE: Strategery, permadeath, limited experience points, limited weapons. There's not only that here, there are also missable items! Like a lot of them! A good maybe twenty or so altogether if you count both books! If you follow me on this websight then you know how I feel about using walkthroughs, but for Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, I would dare to say a walkthrough is necessary. How the shit are you going to play it without one? You’re going to look up which characters are good and which ones to ignore for sure, because there’s limited battles and limited opportunities to raise their levels, so if you create a worthless team and get no-scoped by dark dragons in the end so you have to play it all over again, that’s your time! You’re going to read up on which treasure chests to scavenge, which villages to rescue, and who needs to talk to who to recruit them, and who needs to not die no matter what, because if you get all the way to chapter 20 just to be told you forgot crystal shard number five and so sorry, but you have to play the whole thing all over again, that’s your time! If I had a major criticism for this game, not to mention the series as a whole, it is that there seems to be a Right Way To Play This Game, and your choices are either read up on it to find out, or let the game tell you that you picked the wrong way and give you the finger for free (even on a narrative level, the game hints that Jeigen, Arran, and Matthis suck!). If you tell me you can play this without a walkthrough you’re either lying, or you’re the user on here who decided to play the Famicom original blind, going through each chapter taking every permanent death as it came, hanging by a thread at the end of every battle, only to get softlocked around like chapter 17 or so. Good for them for having that experience, but it’s not an experience for everyone, and it’s also obviously not how the developers intended anyone to play it! And if that's the whole point, if there's an awareness of how unlikely it is that someone will intuitively know how to play the first time to get the ideal ending, then why make it a game? If you need the official book to play the game, why not just write the book?

It’s unintuitive, yes, but not outright bad. I enjoyed what I was playing while my eyes were glued to a gameFAQ. Someone at work who wasn’t into games asked me what I was playing lately and I told them it was “like Japanese Game of Thrones, with medieval factions warring for power and control, but there’s also dragons and magic and shit, only way more anime, way less tiddy, and way better prose compared to GRRM,” and when I said that I was surprised to realize it didn’t make me hate the game. As a regular connoisseur of JRPGs I’m always prepared for the story to turn into some damn bullshit and Not What I’m Really Playing This Game For, but I have to say I liked the story more than I thought I would! I was worried the second story was going to lapse into my final fantasy-ass pet peeve of the bad guy not really being bad but just possessed by a dark cloud, not to mention “remember the bad guy last time? We gotta fight him again!” But to give this game enough credit, it heavily implies that Hardin needed to be enough of a shithead to make that possession happen in the first place, and it bothers to go into some deep lore in the second book, including how Gharnef and Medeus got to be bad. I liked getting just little glimpses of character development out of the mere seconds of time all fifty characters had when they get recruited, learning who they loved or who they hated based on their recruitment messages, their death messages, and so on. The ending for both books is an array of John Hughes-ass captions of what they decided to do after the story, and I went through all of them going awwwww 🥹, or awwww 😢, or what what what dude why the fuck would you do that dude. Not bad storytelling for a children’s toy made thirty years ago.

And now, please enjoy this little bit from my playthrough of what we in the industry like to call, ahem…

taps on a mic, which feedbacks

LUDO-NARRATIVE DISSONANCE

Went into this bad boy after Thracia, wanting more Snes Fire Emblems. I was pensive about it. Like, I'd seen the screenshots, I'd seen some videos - it looked old, crusty, slow. Besides, if it didn't have the story of 4 or the balls-flattening gameplay of 5, what was the point? Still, I wanted to see what Marth was all about.

Absolutely loved it. Book 1, the remake of the first Fire Emblem game, was the baseline story of Marth and pretty fun. Didn't have me singing from the mountaintops, but it was really fun to get acquainted with the original Fire Emblem crew. I started to like all of the characters - Marth, Ogma, Caeda, Linde, Cain and Abel, Hardin... through the gameplay, they really grew on me.

Then I got to Book 2 and found myself stunned. It's a bonafide chronological sequel with all of your favorites returning, and some painful twists. The beginning conceit really impressed me with how it turned the ending on its head. The level design was also consistently pretty good, with the huge exception of Chapter 3. Nothing hamstrings my replays more than that accursed mountain island.

Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem (or FE3) was a natural evolution of the first two games. Gameplay was a lot more polished in terms of stats, item management, and the flow of battle. Battle animations are a lot more lively as they look like paintings in action. Music (in terms of Book 2) is great all around and the core experience was still fun to experience. Despite those important evolutions, FE3 still felt slow to play in some aspects. The enemy turns took long and some animation of specific units does drag on. Another problem I had was the difference of polish between Books I and II. While Book I is a straight up remake of FE1, Book II is the actual FE3 experience. Due to it being FE1, Book I felt sluggish to play despite the upgraded hardware. It doesn't help that it only had one map theme for most of the scenario and it got really repetitive overtime. Book II on the other hand felt a lot more quicker and fun, though the sluggishness still occurred on some specific maps. It also doesn't help that Book II had a lot more map themes and thus the usual slow gameplay is elevated by a really great OST. If FE3 was just only Book II with a bit more polish, then I'll give it a higher rating. However, because development had to focus on remaking FE1, Book II doesn't reaches its full evolution of the gameplay until the next game succeeds that aspect. For that, the game is just average as Book I simply drags down Book II and thus the experience of the whole game. Despite my gripes, it still is an important game in the series due to its quality of life features and I'll still recommended to any Fire Emblem fan who is trying out the Famicom games (though just play Book II).

first we start with the original, then we move on to the sequel, and now, we get the prequel....

wait that’s Castlevania

I thought Neptunia was impatient when it came to remakes, but only three games in and they’re already remaking FE1. well at least with Fire Emblem the remake’s on more powerful hardware, plus there’s an entire other game in it as well!

FE3 is divided into two sections: Book 1 (a remake of FE1), and Book 2 (a continuation of the events of Book 1). most of this review will be about Book 2 but before I move on to that I’d like to briefly talk about Book 1 and its changes. Book 1 has 20 Chapters compared to FE1’s 25 Chapters which means a shorter campaign as well as character recruits being moved a Chapter or two earlier or later. normally this would be a bad thing because “REMOVAL OF CONTENT” but for this case I’m actually okay with it and that’s because all of the five Chapters that were cut weren’t that fun to begin with so it’s more or less trimming the fat away. The Wooden Cavalry is a funny meme and I wouldn’t mind that one staying though considering that Ballisticians were reworked into stationary units it probably wouldn’t have worked. a few characters were cut as well but like with the Chapters most of the cut characters were pretty filler so it’s no big deal. the Vulnerary you get in place of Wrys in Chapter 1 is unironically more useful than Wrys himself, imagine. the items you get in armories and vendors have changed a bit as well. the Bowgun which offered high crit chances and Hammers which destroyed Knights can no longer be bought or are even in the game at all so bow units and Fighters have been nerfed a bit. Rapiers have also been moved to a single Secret Shop so Marth needs to work on conserving the Rapier he begins with. while we’re talking about weapons, Javelins got a nerf as well as their weight have been increased dramatically, making follow up attacks with them impossible, though at least you can still buy them by Chapter 13 this time around. storywise, the narrations that occurred every so often in the beginning of some Chapters now all occur before every Chapter of the game, with a map showcasing the world of Akaneia to boot. some Chapters also get new added dialogue as well, my favorite example being Chapter 11 (Land of Sorrow) where the boss of the Chapter has an argument with his lackey when he calls the rebels “the allied army” and then throws a hissy fit when he finds out the reinforcements he requested are only a bunch of pegasus knights, good stuff. there’s also animations for some of these cutscenes too like in Chapter 6 (Lefcandith Gauntlet) where Minerva flies over to the boss, dismounts off her wyvern and has a conversation with them before she hops back on and returns to her original spot, you even see the wyvern sprite next to her while she’s dismounted, very nice attention to detail that I appreciate. lastly the indoor maps have their own tilesets now and they look way cooler than the originals, mmm just look at that purple. that said I can NOT forgive this game for redesigning my favorite map into this much more generic layout, I don’t care if the tileset is cooler the smaller size removes most of the tension and you finish it in a lot less turns than the original, what a downgrade. that said Book 1 is a more polished experience of FE1 and is a great way to experience Marth’s first adventure (or rather first war), however if you can put up with the slow pace and admittedly horrible inventory management of FE1 then I’d still recommend to check the OG NES version, now then time for me to move on to Book 2.

after the events of FE1 now known as the “War of Shadows”, with the collapse of the Dolhr/Durhua Empire, Akaneia/Archanea is now able to thrive as its own empire thanks to the efforts of Hardin, now referred to as Emperor Hardin. of course since this is a fantasy work: empire = bad. a rebellion occurs over at Grunia/Grust led by General Lorenz, you know that General from the first game that you get in Chapter 20. when Marth is sent to put an end to the situation by force, he finds out Lorenz was protecting the Grunia heirs from Lang, a corrupt general hired by Hardin who has brought a bunch of suffering among the residents of Grunia and plans to execute the two young heirs, basically he’s evil irredeemable bad guy. after being sent to “resolve” another situation at Macedon, General Lang returns to order Marth to recapture and hand over the Grunia heirs who managed to get freed. knowing how much of an ass this guy is, Marth refuses. as Lang informs Emperor Hardin of Marth’s betrayal, he ends up invading Marth’s home turf Aritia/Altea in retaliation, leading to the beginning of the “War of Heroes”. all it takes is one Chapter to realize that the stakes in this game are much higher and darker than probably anything in FE1. not all of Marth’s previous allies are around, some end up being captured, some now side against him, and Chapter 1 even ends with a former ally killing himself after receiving fatal wounds, Mystery of the Emblem means business. so that’s the basic summary, I’ll actually talk a little more about what’s going on later but for now it’s back to the gameplay as well as the overall changes that were made.

wow, there’s a lot of QoL added. moving a unit shows you their movement range which is highlighted in green, the same applies when you view your enemy which means it’s a lot easier to plan your movements and lure your enemies. Priests can actually gain EXP now by using their staves so they no longer die in one hit anymore, they now die in two hits! playable Manaketes have also been reworked as while dragonstones now have durability like traditional weapons, using a dragonstone lets them transform into a dragon during the map for a total of five turns, Tiki’s Divinestone also gives her increased movement range while she’s transformed and on top of that, if you can find and have access to a secret shop in her Chapter recruitment, you can buy Magestones which make her immune to magic and Flyingstones which gives her the best movement range in the entire game, TL;DR, Tiki is OP in this game. what’s not OP though is that mounted units like the Cavaliers and Pegasus Knights are now restricted to only lances and can no longer be mounted indoors and they’re now forced to dismount which forces them to use swords (Awesome!) and have their stats temporarily lowered (Not awesome!). this isn’t too much of a problem in Book 1 but with Book 2’s abundance of rough terrain and indoor Chapters in the latter half this means Cavaliers and Paladins aren’t as amazing as they were in FE1, Pegasus Knight and Wyvern Riders are still great though since their movement is not affected by rough terrain, just make sure they get close to bow units. Item wise, the Hammerne staff no longer fixes staves so Warp cheesing will be less useful, not that it matters though since your only Warp staff isn’t until Chapter 14. continuing with the nerfs, Xane no longer copies the HP of who he’s transforming into, and his default HP isn’t that great so he becomes a glass cannon clone of who he transforms to if you don’t give him stat items that boost his HP. now this is something I learned after finishing FE1 but in that game, the AI has a tendency to attack Marth if they are in his range, while normally this would result in more game overs, you can use this to your advantage by having Marth shield some nearby units who are low on health so he can soak up the damage in their steed, from my experience this no longer works in FE3 or at least they don’t always target Marth anymore so you can’t really pull off that strat.

for buffs though, items and weapons get separate weapon slots now so units can hold four weapons and four items, Xane really benefits from this as now he can carry four different types of weapons or tomes as well as having staffs in his item slots, giving him a versatile amount of classes he can transform to right on the spot, this in turn also buffs anyone that is or can become a Bishop. the supply convoy has also been reworked as instead of going to a tile in the map and slowly store and retrieve items, Marth instead carries everything now so he’s basically a walking inventory, combine that with a proper trading system between units that doesn’t use up your unit’s turn and now Marth is OP in a different kind of way. as for class changing it works the same way it did in FE1 (get your unit to Lv. 10 then use a promotion item), however this time Knight’s Crest has been updated to also let Knights promote to Generals making them slightly less lame and Orion’s Bolt also being able to promote Hunters to Horsemen so now Kashim/Castor is suddenly the best bow unit of the game, maybe now he finally get that gold for his mother. for some reason Marich/Merric has his own unique Bishop sprite during maps and battle and I’m not sure why, I’m not complaining though because it is a nice looking sprite. lastly, the popular Support system Fire Emblem is well known for makes its debut, though it functions a lot differently here than it does later on. all it is in this game is a hidden system where if a character has connections to another and they’re within three spaces of each other then they get a +10 to their hit rate, critical chance, evasion, and critical evasion. for example, Marth and Sheeda/Caeda get Support boosts from each other since they’re in love, Minerva gives a boost to the Pegasus Sisters since they all look up to her, Tiki gives a boost to Banutu/Bantu since he’s Tiki parental guardian and he could really use all the help he can get, and Cool Dude “Tuxedo Mask” Sirius who’s definitely not a previous FE character in disguise gets a boost from Nyna because he had a really nice thirty second conversation with her. other than the boosts that’s really all that Support does in this game so unfortunately no face rubbing or giving your favorite girl a child, I’m sure a lot of you FE enthusiasts are very disappointed.

I’m combining the character discussion with some story discussion as well so there’s going to be spoilers of a 30 year old game from here on out; beware ye who tread any further

Book 2 of FE3 feels like a sneak peek of what this franchise will become later down the road as there’s more cutscene dialogue in Chapter 1 than there is in a majority of FE1. while FE1 only has one lengthly lore dump during the end of Chapter 7, in FE3 you’re getting lore dumps much more often, though a majority of them are when Marth has to make a detour to Anri’s Way during the middle of the game. this affects a lot of the characters too, as a good portion of the returning characters get more dialogue and/or backstory here. Kain/Cain and Abel actually get to speak and Abel in particular has a relationship with Est now. Jeigan/Jagen has become too old to fight so he’s now Marth’s personal tactician and advisor. Astria/Astram remains loyal to Emperor Hardin and is thus an antagonist during most and potentially all of the game. Boah DIES, Arran is on the verge of DYING due to an illness, and Lorenz JOBS. you remember Xane the funny dude who can transform into other people? turns out he’s a Divine Dragon! White Sage Gotoh/Gato? he’s a Divine Dragon too! Tiki being a Divine Dragon isn’t much of a surprise, but she’s also the daughter of Naga who’s basically the ruler of all the Divine Dragons, plus she will degenerate and become capable of destroying the world if the Binding Shield is not put back together, the Binding Shield is also the complete Fire Emblem, I think we might have let Kaga cook a little too much. now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I do enjoy the extra characterizations and backstories quite a bit it helps give them some more depth and that’s A-OK, though a small part of me misses how I was able to characterize them however I wanted in the first game, some of the imagination is….disappearing I guess? I know the later games are going to continue with this route and I’m well prepared for that and even welcome to the idea if the story continues to be fascinating like it was here, it’s just an interesting observation I’ve noticed while going through Book 2. fun fact: magazine surveys were taken during FE1’s heyday to determine which characters were fan favorites and the top two were Hardin and Lena, which is made all the more interesting considering their fates in this game. what’s that, you like Hardin? too bad, he’s an evil emperor now! what you like Lena? she’s abducted now, and you won’t see her until the end of the game! it’s a great subversion considering that it’s very likely that Lena would have been your main healer as well as Hardin being one of your main Cavaliers in the first game, that’s a really cool nod to the early days of the fanbase.

FE3 has an interesting enemy progression. it starts off what you’d expect in Chapter 1 with the Thieves, Archers, and Brigands (basically mountain Pirates), then all of a sudden Chapter 2 introduces the Wyvern Riders before Pegasus Knights even show up, granted there’s only three of them you should have 2-3 bow units at that point but still. Chapter 3 already has fort reinforcements though they’re not as annoying to deal with as in FE1, plus some more Wyvern Riders, hopefully you’re training your bow units. for a while it starts to calm down a little bit until Chapter 7 when Astria and his Hero army shows up, and never before have I been more frightened of a former ally, well I’ve probably have but not in recent memory. if one of your units ends up getting too close to the Heroes standing by the forts, all of them will start going after your army and someone will die so you’re better off going through the forest so they don’t go after you. in Chapter 8 not only do you start fighting promoted classes as regular enemies now but in a couple of turns, Astria and his Hero army emerge from the previous Chapter and starts chasing after you with a thrist of blood, on top of that Emperor Hardin is waiting for you at the top and will begin to go after you with the Gradivus, the endgame weapon once in possession of Camus during FE1, though thankfully you should make it to the seize point before he gets too close. now at Chapter 9 Marth and the gang sail to Khadein at by then you think you’re safe but UH OH Khadein views you as an enemy too but that’s fine Mages and Bishops are no big deal, but then a couple of turns later ASTRIA AND THE HEROES SOMEHOW MAKE IT TO KHADEIN AND CONTINUE THEIR ASSAULT THEY LITERALLY SWAM ALL THE WAY TO KHADEIN JUST SO THEY CAN KILL YOU. there’s not much things in video games more terrifying than seeing the message “Akaneia arrived!” during the beginning of an enemy phase, I didn’t realize I was playing through a horror game. back to enemy progression, once you arrive Anri’s Way in Chapter 11 not only are you away from civilization which means no shops of the secretless variety but you’re now up against Barbarians which are basically Brigands on steroids as well as a variety of dragons showing up as regular enemies; Fire, Ice, Flying, all here in Anri’s Way. except they’re not all here because in Chapter 20, there’s a lone Earth Dragon in the southwest corner of the map. once again heading to spoiler territory here; it all comes together in the true final Chapter in the true final map (it’s divided by into three separate maps) as you once again face off against Mediuth/Medeus, and they must have saw what I typed in my FE1 review because Mediuth has been resurrected as a proper Shadow Dragon this time around and he’s HUGE not even the small sprite ratio on the map can contain his size, that said it would have been a lot cooler if the box art and title screen didn’t already spoil his new transformation. what’s even cooler (and probably frightening) is that Mediuth’s allies during this final battle are more Earth Dragons. you thought you were hot stuff killing an Earth Dragon as a final boss in FE1? well now they’re regular enemies during the final map! the downgraded final boss trope is so kino

soundtrack appreciation time; Book 1 still uses the same couple of tracks that FE1 did but they’re not restricted to an 8-bit sound chip so they’re more pleasant to listen to this time around. Trouble! is a nice remix of the original version though it’s missing the second half from the original, wish they kept that. Under the Flag is a more mature and militaristic remix of what it originally sounded like and probably won’t drive you insane after almost 20 Chapters. Battle is a fine remix of this nothing too special, however the remixed version of the original enemy battle theme which I have not listened to more than the first twenty seconds of before typing this is an excellent track what an improvement, but the remix is also missing its second half which kinda sucks, I wonder if there was some soundtrack limitations for this game. unfortunately the remix of Gato’s theme isn’t as cool as the original IMO, it’s still good but a lot of the mystique went away in the transition to the new sound chip. I don’t even know what happened here, lol. okay I’m listening to the last part of this theme for the first time and wow that’s some Mother type beat right there, anyway the remix, don’t know which one I prefer but both have their merits. onto the Book 2 tracks, Off to War is a big contrast to the original’s traditional cutscene theme as this one sounds a lot more serious, that coupled along with the new intense map and battle theme that plays now. this was the original village theme in Book 1 but here in Book 2 they added a new one to go along with it specifically called “Sad Villager” because now the villagers are even more sad than in Book 1, war never changes. oh yeah here’s the Fire Emblem theme I forgot to show earlier, apparently the track’s name is “Together We Ride!”, don’t know if that’s official. Book 2 has a more subdued version though the Book 1 version still gets used on occasion, I prefer the Book 1 version more but this one suits the overall tone of Book 2 more. Conspiracy is the second cutscene theme and just know stuff is going to go down here, nothing good every comes out of this whenever this track comes on. this is just a Super Metroid track, it’s also the map preparation theme you hear around the second third of the game, you know when Astria and the Heroes are trying to hunt you down, are you sure this isn’t a horror game? OH MY GOD A SECOND MAP THEME THAT DOESN’T PLAY AT THE VERY LAST CHAPTER. epic and based. this is a downgrade from the first two map themes lol. and here’s the new Mediuth theme and yeah it’s kinda catchy, I think I still prefer his first theme but this is nice too, especially the beginning that’s a good buildup.

Book 2’s maps bring me pain. they’re not even bad maps they can just be a bit frustrating to go through at times. Chapter 2 looks alright but there’s a bit of an annoying Thief placement where he’ll run off to the north where all the dangerous enemies are while carrying a Lady sword and that Lady sword is pretty good at this point of the game so you’ll have to risk sending a unit with great movement to go after the guy (Arran and Katua/Catria are your only options here) and hope the enemies don’t gang up on them. Chapter 3 lets you let you two paths. do you lower the bridge and get your ass handed to you by the enemies up close, or do you go around and slowly lure the enemies in your path one-by-one, how you suffer is up to you! Chapter 5 is a cool one since it gives you a great opportunity to put Doga/Draug on the bridge in the southeast and let him go loose, though the Thief at the beginning can be annoying if you haven’t learned about unit placing since that Thief is Rickard and you need Julian to go after him before he runs off the map, damn you Rickard the item you carry is more useful than you are, I know he shows up in the next Chapter if you don’t get him here but I’m still going to call him out. Chapter 7 is a genius map design because there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here. you have the Thieves going after Nabarl/Navarre in the forest as well as Feena/Phina who’s able to give him a turn refresh with her Dance ability, then there’s a cave in the southwest where you can lure a fire dragon out to get EXP as well as find a hidden Physic staff in front of the cave, then there’s the easy boss in the northeast who calls you a murderer when you kill him, and of course to the west you have the more fearsome Astria and his army who won’t hesitate to chase after you if you get too close to all of them, very cool. Chapter 8 is another great one because not only is it a map from the original, but instead of starting at the top and making your way down, you start in the middle and have to make it to the top left while making sure you don’t go down because Akaneia will arrive. Chapter 10 is neat because all of the enemies are going after you while a potential anime battle between Marich and an edge lord can go on in the center of the map, but if you can get Wendell to knock some sense into the guy trying to kill Marich, he apologizes and all the enemies will stop attacking you, at the same time Chapter 10 sucks because I didn’t realize there would be a Thief with a Silver Card in here and I then proceeded to miss out on halved shop prices for the rest of the game, missable content let’s gooooooo. speaking of missable content, you have to collect twelve Astral Shards throughout the game so you can repair the Starsphere which helps you get the Binding Shield which in turn lets you enter the endgame Chapters and if you miss a single Shard then no true ending for you, LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! skipping ahead to the last one I want to talk about, Chapter 17 has an interesting mechanic where the tough Akaneia soldiers are here to carry the inexperienced Gra soldiers. if you can make it to the boss of this Chapter without killing any of the Gra soldiers she’ll actually join your army, but if you decide to kill a single one then she’ll get pissed and try to kill you. thankfully the Gra soldiers refuse to fight you back out of fear so it’s really easy to keep them alive unless you’re intentionally going after them and by that point the bloodshed’s on you. anyway, new hardware means all new battle animations, but the really cool part is there’s proper battle backgrounds now, epic! there’s some really smooth battle animations here like the Pegasus Knight’s attacks as well as Knights slowly inching their way toward their opponents to then stab a lance through them, the Starlight tome even gets its own spacelike battle background when it gets used which makes sense since it’s the plot important spell that helps you get the Falchion. although there’s quite a visual improvement here, there are a few battle animations that I preferred in the NES game, Thieves don’t hit the same when they aren’t floating towards you with their capes covering them. I forgot to bring this up in the FE1 review and while this isn’t a battle animation, I also miss how the Generals in that game looked like they were in mech armor and had giant scimitars as weapons, at least they have shields this time around. lastly, the Falchion animation is a full on downgrade here because Marth no longer performs his cool backflip after he attacks with it why would you take away the backflip you just doN’T TAKE AWAY THE BACKFLIP BACKFLIPS ARE COOL WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME KAGA, 0/10 BAD GAME WOULD PLAY AGAIN

Fire Emblem is evolving, I’m not sure if I’m ready for Fire Emblem’s evolution but I’ll still go through with it since I enjoyed my time with FE3 along with the new changes it brought to the table. from what I’ve heard a lot of people consider FE4 to be the best one, and while that’s cool since that’s the one I’m going through next, at the same time having your franchise apparently peak at 4/17 mainline games is a very concerning sign for me. but idk if it’s really all downhill from there then I suppose I’ll strap in and enjoy the potential train wreck I’m getting myself into. okay that’s a little harsh but that would be a bit funny. surely one of these future games has to be peak media, which one will it be? who knows? oh right there’s a remake of this game on the DS, one that also didn’t get an English release, lol. from what I know, the cut characters from the original are implemented back, there’s some new classes your units can turn into, some parts of the storyline are rewritten, and there’s a self-insert character that everyone kneels to like the Second Coming. I don’t know why there needs to be another main character to share Marth’s spotlight, but people must have enjoyed it since there’s been self-inserts in almost every game since. idk maybe it’s better but I just don’t really care at the moment, though if Marth can do a backflip with the Falchion then I might be interested.

take a shot every time I mention FE1 in this review

(strictly a book 2 review, book 1 has legit two other ways to play through it i ain't doing that again)

book 2 is hell of a lot better than book 1. you can tell after the first two they had a general idea of what they wanted fire emblem to really become. i'd say FE3 kind of left the bookmark in terms of rules that future installments would have to have as a baseline

the story is a bit more dark, with prior allies that you fought alongside with in book 1 turning traitor and hunting down marth. so you have that threat to worry about, alongside some other world ending dragon trying to run your fade

gameplay runs a lot more smooth as you'd expect, the jump from NES to SNES is a pretty big dealio

overall its ok. once again, recommending the DS port over this one

FE3 Mystery of the emblem
This game introduced me to my wife Minerva and Husband Michalis so it’s kino
But being real, you can tell the care went into book 2.
Book one is much more chill with a really good but relatively basic story, especially for FE
Book 2 starts off wonderfully with the immediate position it puts Marth in needing to betray the people he just fought with
Overall the game is really good, not above FE4 or 5 but an amazing entry none the less

The fucking ending cards for most of the characters are fucking ass

Ceci est décidément un jeu Fire Emblem.
Pour moi c'est vraiment le Template du FE classique, un bon jeu de stratégie sur un empereur fou qui envahit le pays du héros, pays qu'il va devoir récupérer en affrontant différentes armées et en recrutant des alliés.

Les graphismes sont très satisfaisants, ça rend franchement bien et les couleurs sont agréables.
La musique est très basique et ce n'est pas la meilleure chiptune de la série, ça fait le travail mais je n'ai pas eu de remords à la couper une bonne partie du temps.
Le jeu a fatalement vieilli, c'est assez lent et rouillé avec des petits temps de latence qui nuisent à la fluidité globale du jeu, mais au-delà de ça je trouve sincèrement qu'il se tient bien. C'est agréable à jouer et le Game Design est réussi.
Il y a toujours quelques pièges de salauds typiques de Fire Emblem (la fin qui te demande presque obligatoirement d'amener CES personnages précis à 2 cases du boss de fin c'est chaud, l'omniprésence de dragons beaucoup trop mobiles et puissants en midgame et de tomes longue portée en endgame sont de belles saloperies également). Ca fait partie de l'identité de la licence, si vous avez joué disons à The Binding Blade vous ne serez pas non plus si surpris que ça.

En bref c'est le Fire Emblem de base, histoire simpliste, Gameplay agréable, bonne ambiance, personnages sympathiques et durée de vie mine de rien assez costaude, en plus de la rejouabilité inhérente à la série, avoir deux livres de 20 chapitres chacun ça en fait un jeu bien long surtout pour l'époque, sans en devenir chiant pour autant (j'ai mis BEAUCOUP trop de temps à en venir à bout parce que j'y jouais disons 3 chapitres d'un coup puis rien pendant 2 mois, puis je m'en souviens et j'en fais plusieurs autres etc).
Je recommande aux fans et à ceux qui veulent découvrir les anciens jeux, c'est quand même plus permissif que les jeux Famicom ou les 2 autres monstres de Super Famicom que je vais entamer juste après.