Not as good as Awakening but still a great game. You can move around freely for the first time, which was quite cool but also kind of pointless because the dungeon design was rather mediocre in places and very linear. The story was more in the background but the division into 2 stories with 2 different protagonists and their own party members was a really cool idea. The characters are the big highlight, great voice acting and really likeable people :D Unfortunately you can't choose jobs freely and you can't really date either, but hey, that's what Awakening is for^^

fire emblem can be sick as hell when it's not wholly focused on making characters Fuck

story is great, some of the best voice acting i've seen, beautiful presentation and artstyle, but it gets bogged down by being a remake of a famicom game from the 90s. poison swamps, shit-ass desert levels that take up a good chunk of celica's route (which is the only reason to use pegagus knights at all)... plus they kept in stupid gimmicks like whatever the hell is going on with jedah.

yet somehow none of that ruins the game for me! i still think this is hands-down my favorite fire emblem, it just hits so differently than other FE games. nothing compares to getting a 60% crit rate on deen and just sweeping the whole damn game

Despite the weird designed maps which are often called bad I think the game is fast enough and charming that most of the time I didn't care, until act 3 where the game becomes really sicko on hard mode. In general the hard mode isn't good in this game the maps and pacing don't hold up for the extra challenge to be engaging. Hard mode is just tedious the dungeons are fun addition to the formula without consuming the game although I would like future games to explore them in way thats more than just a hub area. However the dungeons become annoying in hard because the amount of times you have to run through them sometimes and the box maps with fast as fuck flying enemies which force boxing clerics and the forced deployed bad units with your own units. Meanwhile Normal mode feels really fast and allows the momentum of the early game carry through the late game. You could also use whoever you want and not just Palla, Catria, Alm, Dread fighter and cleric. The characters are well written (which in FE means not annoying and for the most part aren't a single quirky trait/ bit). The instigating force behind the story doesn't make sense and it is a dragon turns evil plot but the story is so character driven it doesn't matter when I play the game the main story that sticks is Alm and Celica, their bonds with their main group, and the deliverance revolt against annoying nobles.

This is a pretty decent entry for what seemed to be a series dedicated to Fire Emblem remakes.

My favorite part about this game is the art style. The game looks very beautiful and has my favorite character portraits of any Fire Emblem game. The character designs look amazing, especially considering how newer Fire Emblem games have been lacking in this department in my opinion.

I also find the writing pretty solid. The kingdoms of Rigel and Zofia are very fascinating, and having you switch between Alm and Celica throughout the game truly compares and contrasts not only their characters, but the nations they personify.

I find the characters' writing themselves to be a mixed bag. Without spoiling anything, some major plot details made me much more disappointed in how some characters were developed. The female characters in particular struggle from a damsel-in-distress syndrome that the original game had. I wish that the writers had polished a lot of the character endings. Being a remake of an older game, this would've given the developers an opportunity to improve upon some of the original game's weaker writing. We already see it with Leon now being written as a gay character to improve portrayal of LGBT+ characters in the series, so I don't understand why the remake retains the original game's poor portrayal of female characters.

I found the maps in this game to be so-so, and none of them were truly memorable for me. I did enjoy traversing through dungeons however.

And so there's Shadows of Valentia, the first and only entry in the Echoes series so far. Unfortunately, some people theorize that due to poor sales, we've never had another Echoes game since. It's a shame, as it's a solid game in spite of its flaws and can be enjoyed by newer and older fans alike.

First and foremost, the presentation on this game is fantastic. The artstyle, voice acting and UI is an absolute treat to feast your eyes on and is almost worth playing the game by itself. Unfortunately, as a pretty faithful remake to an NES game, the gameplay defenitely is a black sheep of the franchise. The maps are wide open fields and enemies line up in big squares to swarm you instead of being thoughtfully placed, and there's a lot of weird mechanics like witches teleporting wherever they please and that damn Jedah fight. If you can look past the flaws though there are a lot of interesting things to play around with like the unique magic lists for every character, the art system, dungeon crawling and the dual storylines. Kind of funny how in the remake they added 3 original characters with completely different levels of writing quality with Faye being awful, Conrad being mediocre and Berkut/Reina being fantastic.