Thracia is a beautiful video game and a bit of a standout in the Fire Emblem series. In FE you often play as a prince or princess with the support of the crown, yours or another, at your back. Knights, resources, loyal retainers, and the like. You go forth and fight for your kingdom, your friends, and what have you.

Thracia is a bit different. Leif is a minor prince in exile, and your brigade is the local militia. So much of the game is spent struggling against overwhelming odds; running away from a superior force. You have very little gold, so you need to capture enemies and steal their equipment. Every victory feels desperate and well-earned.

The game is full of bullshit. It is a bullshit game. Don't have enough keys at this very late chapter in the game? Sorry, buddy, you're softlocked. Oh, you're in the bandit gaiden? Get ready for the girl with the Thief staff to steal your equipment from across the map. Deal with it. Got a powerful unit in the middle of your army? Sorry, she got hit by the berserk staff and just killed your best healer. Walk out into the dark forest? That's a shame, this random bandit just hit you with a sleep staff, captured you, and stole all your equipment. Oh, and the boss hit you with a long range sleep staff, too. Don't even get me started on the long range siege tomes through fog of war.

The game hates you. The game spits on your face. You think you're having a continent-spanning adventure as the Hero-Prince Marth? Who the fuck do you think you are? You think you're having a geopolitical Shakespearean drama, an ancient epic with larger-than-life heroes blessed by the blood of ancient warriors, of the very gods themselves like in FE4? Get real, twerp. You're a two-bit prince with a bunch of militia troops, freedom fighters, and mountain noble knights (later), and you've got to run the fuck away before you can reclaim your kingdom. Every battle is desperate. Every victory is hard-won.

The beauty of the bullshit is that you also have bullshit. Staffs are busted. Warp across the map, who cares. Make the enemy berserk, whatever. Thief staff the boss's weapon away, what's he gonna do about it? When you're this desperate, who the fuck cares about 'fighting fair'? This game was meant to be cheesed, because it's cheesing you. It feels like the director Kaga is challenging you, personally, to a battle of wits - a contest you're going to rise to the challenge of.

One part that stands out to me is a mission later in the game, a tense defense mission where you have to hold out for reinforcements. When it is finally done, the protagonist of FE4 appears with a host of troops to bail you out and give you the thumbs up before going back to doing incredibly significant, world-saving epic shit. You, as Leif, and all of your struggles, have just been a footnote in the greater narrative of FE4. Your 16+ chapters of blood, sweat, tears and loss are just a single map to the other guy.

It's beautiful.

Most significant to me is the penultimate map, right before the finale. I won't give details of the reward, but it is the height of the game's bullshit, of its player-hostile design. Seemingly-random tiles teleport your units to a room in the bottom where they are beaten to death by enemy reinforcements coming out of stairways from which there is no escape. Fog of war concealing Berserkers with extremely high crit and damage, all but guaranteeing a one hit kill on any of your unfortunate allies. Constantly dark mages warping towards you from across the map. It is perverse. It is disgusting. It feels like something out of like a cruel romhack, like a particularly rough Kaizou Mario.

Yet it has great purpose. If you go through it, even though your best units will likely be fatigued and thus unusable in the final map, where you will need them most to actually beat the game - even though you will gain no new items, no new weapons, not even a powerful party member - you are instead rewarded with the best cutscene in the game and incredible emotional catharsis.

It is completely optional. It is in your best tactical interest to not do it. The requirements to unlock it are slightly difficult in the previous map. Yet, the game looks you in the eye, narrows its own, and asks you how much you want your happy ending. Because if you do, you'd better come and get it, motherfucker.

I love Thracia 776. I don't think we'll ever get a game in the Fire Emblem series like it again, but I deeply cherish my time with it and hope anyone else interested in Fire Emblem gives it a try, ideally after getting a few femblems under their belt.

>play first level
>finally reach a checkpoint after god knows how many deaths to cheap-ass bees
>guy offers to take me back to base
>accept to see what it does
>he takes me back to the hub and I have to start the level over with no benefit except respawning the seemingly useless money pickups (there's like 150K worth)
>why does he even exist
>game over and lose my money anyway (no saving)

>reach checkpoint again
>ignore the guy this time
>two screens later, a giant statue tells me I need to pay it 300K to pass, twice as much as is in the level

dropped

Fire Emblem Engage. Got really, really into Fire Emblem right before its release, playing much of the series in a feverish pitch with this game's release being the climax. Was it worth it? Sure was. One of my favorite Femblems.

Gameplay? Fantastic. The difficulty of the Maddening mode has hands-down the best difficulty pacing in the series; they really got it with this one. It's enough of a toothy challenge right off the bat that always feels hard enough, and it keeps pace with you even as you gain more and more tools to deal with its challenges. It contrasts with Three Houses Maddening, which is comically difficult in the beginning with your do-nothing scrub kids until they grow into their own and it gets much easier. Pretty great last maps, though. It also contrasts with Conquest's Lunatic difficulty, which punches your face in from the start and every mission is a fight for your life. Yeah, Conquest is pretty great, too.

The systems of simple character customization with emblem ring skills and the emblems themselves were really fun. I was worried that the game would be a juggernaut-fest of steamrolling the enemy with superpowered transforming emblem units (this can still happen but only if you really know what you're doing), but was pleasantly surprised at just how fun the emblem engaging mechanics were. The series fanservice was pretty nice, too, having the player take on some of the hardest maps from the old games.

Other production value things - great soundtrack with its dynamic battle themes, excellent animation with throwbacks to GBA battle animations, the previous peak of the series, and some really nice optimization. The game actually runs well on the switch, which is a real shocker.

What I didn't like as much is pretty much what everyone else didn't like, the story and the character designs. The story is Fine, it's a campy Marvel story that I was checked out of and kind of enjoyed the villain's motivations metaphorically as a Femblem gamer who just like me fr. It had hype moments, so what more could I ask for. Oh, I know - less text. The game had so much text and said so little with it! Man!

The character designs. Many will kvetch that they are too "anime," too "weeby," because, well, Fire Emblem has never been animesque! Anyway, Mika Pikazo's art owns, and I like some of the really exaggerated designs. Seeing Celine flip around in a giant poofy onion dress and platform shoes is the funniest and best thing. The problem is, there's no cohesion. Like, none. No one looks like they live where they're from, no one looks like they inhabit the same world, and nothing looks real. They feel like a bunch of gacha game character designs slapped together, and that's pretty much how they were made - IS asked Pikazo to just go and design 50 characters and bada-bing-bada-boom here we go. Bring us back to Echoes... or at least, Thracia...

Anyway, great strategy RPG

I am a huge sucker for bro stories. Just the guys doing stuff. Everyone calls FF15 a road trip game up until the city with the little sister and its so true. The open world was pretty empty, mostly long roads and wide fields, but filled with memories. I never used the fast travel and manually drove wherever I went, excited every time Prompto grabbed our attention to get a nice photo op with the boys. It had zero mechanical reasons to be there, but for the reason of making me cry it was a 10/10 addition. Trudging thru dungeons, spamming sword teleports, chilling at camp with the gang, talking to the hot mechanic girl, its a perfect tale of summer vacation.

I followed this for the first year if you count retweeting art of girls as following. And then they came out with track mari and I decided I had to lock in for at least 6 months. I got my spark and my track mari but I also received peak fiction. I think hifumi "I love cliches" speech enjoyers should be giving out less 1 stars and more "hooooooly moly" ratings to games with soul but arent really good. I dont like the gameplay very much but its a gacha and you cant convince me they can be anything but reloads and micromanaging rng (and macromanaging rng by getting good rolls).