One of the strangest entries in the Fire Emblem series, yet contributes so much to the series DNA for titles to come. Gaiden eschews the straightforward story of the original for an attempt (the best they could manage for a console like the Famicom) at a more nuanced plot with more moving parts, and to accomplish this they tried to revamp the entire Fire Emblem paradigm to mixed results. The way items works are ok, opting for a more RPG approach with even rare items that have rare drops from certain monsters, and even light dungeon crawling but the real crime here are the maps. Something I realised playing this back to back with the original Shadow Dragon and the Sword of Light is that the prior game was actually fairly competent at making maps that have a bit more strategy to them, despite being a dinosaur of strategy RPGs. Gaiden on the other hand, has absolutely dogshit maps and a fair share of frustration that stems from this, the saving grace is that with all the new systems (namely the changes to magic) the maps can fairly easily be abused around. This game is a strange one, but it's another worthy entry in the catalogue of this series, and from revisiting both Famicom titles I can still say that these two accomplish much more than most, if not all, SRPGs/TRPGs of their era.