Replayed this for the sake of a video I'm making ranking every Fire Emblem, half-expecting to discover that my love for it was wrong the whole time but no, it's as great as I remembered it being. I could go on about how much I love DSFE's distinct feel of being player phase focused with extremely limited options in comparison to say Conquest or Engage, the interesting way having a meta based around forging affects resource management, and how the game it's a remake of is purposeful in a way that the overwhelming majority of subsequent FEs aren't but I think what makes this game hit different to me is my unique relationship with it. Maybe it's just because it was my first experience with the series when I was 12 but FE11 represents the weird mystique surrounding Fire Emblem prior to Awakening where it was spoken in hushed tones as this frictional experience where a character losing all their HP means they're gone for good. I'd liken it to Earthbound/Mother where being in the best selling party game of all time means you're inherently going to have a mythical specter built around the games from people who haven't played them, although in FE's case, that specter revolves moreso around its difficulty as opposed to weirdness in Earthbound's case. This reputation is of course exaggerated, as out off the five FEs with a stateside release (Blazing Sword, Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance if we're not counting the Japanese exclusive Maniac Mode) are easy to get the hang of regardless of which difficulty you're playing on and the remaining two only become uniquely hard if you play them on higher difficulties.
But as a 12 year old playing FE11 on normal as my first experience with Fire Emblem, this might have been the hardest game in existence. I could never get past Chapter 8 then. Still, something about the game was compelling to me. Shortly after the point where I threw in the towel though, Awakening would come out with this nifty little feature called "casual mode" and I would become fully obsessed with it, constantly starting new files in a foolish attempt to unlock every support conversation. At some point in this obsession, I tried to give the game another go and got as far as Chapter 20 before once again throwing in the towel. However, my Awakening obsession would eventually wear off. Fates and Echoes: Shadows of Valentia just didn't compel me in the way that Awakening did (to the point where I didn't even play past Act 2 of the latter) and getting into anime helped me realize just how tropey the game's writing is. I wrote off my love of the series as a juvenile one that only existed because casual mode Awakening was one of the few-non Pokémon games I was able to beat for the longest time.
However, in the summer of 2019, something would change. I watched the two episode Fire Emblem OVA on a whim and while I found it as cheesy as its reputation made it out to be, there was a charm to it that made me want to play a Fire Emblem game for the first time in two years. I remembered that I had all three of the Fire Emblem games available on the Wii U virtual console and started with Sacred Stones, the only one of the three that I hadn't touched beforehand and became enamored with it. Upon finishing it, I wanted more and booted up Shadow Dragon, aiming to conquer my childhood fears once and for all. While finally beating the game on normal mode really isn't that much of an accomplishment, finally emerging victorious against the demon that tormented me as a child felt like a transition to adulthood for my 19 year old self.
As corny as this story is, Shadow Dragon may very well have had a profound impact on the way I see games. For a long period of my life, a game's value was dictated by how much it stimulated me on a superficial level. Games I loved were ones I beat and if I couldn't beat a game, it probably didn't have that much value. But Shadow Dragon opened me up to the idea of more frictional experiences being worthwhile. It's probably not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of games that I'd list among my favorites are ones that I played after the floodgates that this one opened. I don't think it's an understatement to say that my current tastes in games would not have existed without the one that most FE fans write off as "bad and ugly."

This is a game I've had a lot of conflicted feelings on, ever since my playthrough of it over two years ago. Not helping matters is how its become basically inseparable from the heated debate over how it handled LGBT issues, which has resulted in the speaking over and harassment of trans people. But you know, I get it. Not the speaking over and harassing trans people part, please go fuck yourself if you do that, but I get Persona 4's appeal. It's a game about coming terms with truths about yourself that you don't feel like accepting and if you play it as the teenage demographic it's aimed towards, that's a powerful message. So I'm going to be extremely charitable and separate Persona 4 from its politics to see it for what it is: a mechanically dull/pathetically easy RPG with boring procedurally generated dungeon design and a poorly paced story that's as repetitive as those dungeons

In an ideal world, the term "remake" wouldn't be used to refer to games that are just a pre-existing one without a lot of the eccentricities that made it what it is but rather unique reinterpretations in a completely different genre with the gall to make choices as unhinged as making the new protagonist say "Bullshit" and blast a song on his phone that people were tricked into thinking was Limp Bizkit and turning the boss fight you probably forgot about into a fleshed out doomed yaoi storyline. Stranger of Paradise's journey from another nail in an already disappointing E3 to a source of ironic humor to a game sincerely enjoyed by most of those who played it was truly something special and I'm glad I was along for the ride. Every issue I had with the game (the awful loot system, how often it feels like repeating the same lines of dialogue in gameplay sections, etc.) was already outweighed by the sincere charm it has as this weird reinterpretation of one of the most formative works in the RPG genre but man did it stick the landing in that final act. I'm just sitting here trying to process the sheer amount of peak fiction I was hit with in quick succession.