Jesus, this game is.....something else man. The maps are huge, in a way I really don't like. In order to break up the gameplay and not irritate myself I played this game a few times a week for about 30 minutes a night over the course of a year. I ended up having some really memorable experiences with it that way. The skirmishes, when broken down into their pure gameplay, are a lot of fun. This game has a lot of mechanics I appreciate; I love the way the arena works. The fact that you can position units in such a way to have a dancer take care of four on a single turn. The fact that a lot of non-mounted units actually have a pretty big advantage if you're not playing for LTC in terms of their speed, which I quite liked with time.
But it's just....so monotonous sometimes. Some gameplay sessions were literally just moving units. Hell, some gameplay sessions were me RE-MOVING units wherein I load up from an earlier save after I realized I moved my units in a way that wasn't to my liking. It's just....boring.
The plot has interesting ideas but they mostly seemed executed in a way that was sorta basic compared to later games. At least to my understanding, my Japanese isn't great and I didn't play the fan translation.
I realize that some of my issues are because I played this game on original hardware untranslated. But I'm not critiquing Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the game these zoomer FE fans download from some dude on Discord and play on SNES9X with graphical filters or whatever. I'm critiquing Fire Emblem: Seisen No Keifu, the game that a version of myself two decades older might have bought from a local import shop in 1996 (or even maybe an alternate version of myself that got into retro gaming earlier in the mid-late 2000s but is otherwise the same). That game is brilliant in pieces but also pretty frustrating. But it sure looks nice on a CRT. Take that, zoomers.
But it's just....so monotonous sometimes. Some gameplay sessions were literally just moving units. Hell, some gameplay sessions were me RE-MOVING units wherein I load up from an earlier save after I realized I moved my units in a way that wasn't to my liking. It's just....boring.
The plot has interesting ideas but they mostly seemed executed in a way that was sorta basic compared to later games. At least to my understanding, my Japanese isn't great and I didn't play the fan translation.
I realize that some of my issues are because I played this game on original hardware untranslated. But I'm not critiquing Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the game these zoomer FE fans download from some dude on Discord and play on SNES9X with graphical filters or whatever. I'm critiquing Fire Emblem: Seisen No Keifu, the game that a version of myself two decades older might have bought from a local import shop in 1996 (or even maybe an alternate version of myself that got into retro gaming earlier in the mid-late 2000s but is otherwise the same). That game is brilliant in pieces but also pretty frustrating. But it sure looks nice on a CRT. Take that, zoomers.