I previously said, perhaps foolishly, that this remake is shorter to play than the Famicom original. In fact, however, I lost so many hours playing this game, getting about twenty minutes or so into a chapter only to find I shouldn't have brought in one character, or another character is going to get killed no matter what, or I forgot to do something important during the mission. I put twenty hours on my journal, about two weeks altogether, but honestly who really knows. And this is WITH me heavily and unapologetically using save states and rewinds, going into arenas and artificially pumping characters full of EXP to bursting. I have the power of God in Retroarch, complete mastery of time, space, and reality, and it's still hard as balls. What if I played this vanilla? What if I played the ORIGINAL game vanilla?! I shudder to think. There but for the grace of etc.
The first SRPG I ever played was Final Fantasy Tactics. What I liked about that game was how open to experimentation it was: there were a slew of jobs available for you to try out and develop if you liked them or ignore if you didn’t, and if you made a team that didn’t really work out for you, well, don’t worry, it’s not inconceivable to make another one, and if not your main character is going to be superpowered and you will also get somes superpowered allies very soon. This was also very much a game where you restarted from your save point if anyone died permanently, but there was a mechanism in place to prevent permanent death. It was kind of fun, if a bit of an inconvenience, to rescue fallen party members in the time limit before their souls disappeared forever. Years later I tried the Shining Force games for the Genny, and my experience with FFT was what warmed me to those. I remember quite a bit of looking at walkthroughs to see which characters were good and which to ignore, but aside from that I don’t remember any major hurdles to beating either one. It helped that you could repeat battles to level up!
There’s none of that sissy shit here. We all know what's coming when we boot up a FE: Strategery, permadeath, limited experience points, limited weapons. There's not only that here, there are also missable items! Like a lot of them! A good maybe twenty or so altogether if you count both books! If you follow me on this websight then you know how I feel about using walkthroughs, but for Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, I would dare to say a walkthrough is necessary. How the shit are you going to play it without one? You’re going to look up which characters are good and which ones to ignore for sure, because there’s limited battles and limited opportunities to raise their levels, so if you create a worthless team and get no-scoped by dark dragons in the end so you have to play it all over again, that’s your time! You’re going to read up on which treasure chests to scavenge, which villages to rescue, and who needs to talk to who to recruit them, and who needs to not die no matter what, because if you get all the way to chapter 20 just to be told you forgot crystal shard number five and so sorry, but you have to play the whole thing all over again, that’s your time! If I had a major criticism for this game, not to mention the series as a whole, it is that there seems to be a Right Way To Play This Game, and your choices are either read up on it to find out, or let the game tell you that you picked the wrong way and give you the finger for free (even on a narrative level, the game hints that Jeigen, Arran, and Matthis suck!). If you tell me you can play this without a walkthrough you’re either lying, or you’re the user on here who decided to play the Famicom original blind, going through each chapter taking every permanent death as it came, hanging by a thread at the end of every battle, only to get softlocked around like chapter 17 or so. Good for them for having that experience, but it’s not an experience for everyone, and it’s also obviously not how the developers intended anyone to play it! And if that's the whole point, if there's an awareness of how unlikely it is that someone will intuitively know how to play the first time to get the ideal ending, then why make it a game? If you need the official book to play the game, why not just write the book?
It’s unintuitive, yes, but not outright bad. I enjoyed what I was playing while my eyes were glued to a gameFAQ. Someone at work who wasn’t into games asked me what I was playing lately and I told them it was “like Japanese Game of Thrones, with medieval factions warring for power and control, but there’s also dragons and magic and shit, only way more anime, way less tiddy, and way better prose compared to GRRM,” and when I said that I was surprised to realize it didn’t make me hate the game. As a regular connoisseur of JRPGs I’m always prepared for the story to turn into some damn bullshit and Not What I’m Really Playing This Game For, but I have to say I liked the story more than I thought I would! I was worried the second story was going to lapse into my final fantasy-ass pet peeve of the bad guy not really being bad but just possessed by a dark cloud, not to mention “remember the bad guy last time? We gotta fight him again!” But to give this game enough credit, it heavily implies that Hardin needed to be enough of a shithead to make that possession happen in the first place, and it bothers to go into some deep lore in the second book, including how Gharnef and Medeus got to be bad. I liked getting just little glimpses of character development out of the mere seconds of time all fifty characters had when they get recruited, learning who they loved or who they hated based on their recruitment messages, their death messages, and so on. The ending for both books is an array of John Hughes-ass captions of what they decided to do after the story, and I went through all of them going awwwww 🥹, or awwww 😢, or what what what dude why the fuck would you do that dude. Not bad storytelling for a children’s toy made thirty years ago.
And now, please enjoy this little bit from my playthrough of what we in the industry like to call, ahem…
taps on a mic, which feedbacks
LUDO-NARRATIVE DISSONANCE
The first SRPG I ever played was Final Fantasy Tactics. What I liked about that game was how open to experimentation it was: there were a slew of jobs available for you to try out and develop if you liked them or ignore if you didn’t, and if you made a team that didn’t really work out for you, well, don’t worry, it’s not inconceivable to make another one, and if not your main character is going to be superpowered and you will also get somes superpowered allies very soon. This was also very much a game where you restarted from your save point if anyone died permanently, but there was a mechanism in place to prevent permanent death. It was kind of fun, if a bit of an inconvenience, to rescue fallen party members in the time limit before their souls disappeared forever. Years later I tried the Shining Force games for the Genny, and my experience with FFT was what warmed me to those. I remember quite a bit of looking at walkthroughs to see which characters were good and which to ignore, but aside from that I don’t remember any major hurdles to beating either one. It helped that you could repeat battles to level up!
There’s none of that sissy shit here. We all know what's coming when we boot up a FE: Strategery, permadeath, limited experience points, limited weapons. There's not only that here, there are also missable items! Like a lot of them! A good maybe twenty or so altogether if you count both books! If you follow me on this websight then you know how I feel about using walkthroughs, but for Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, I would dare to say a walkthrough is necessary. How the shit are you going to play it without one? You’re going to look up which characters are good and which ones to ignore for sure, because there’s limited battles and limited opportunities to raise their levels, so if you create a worthless team and get no-scoped by dark dragons in the end so you have to play it all over again, that’s your time! You’re going to read up on which treasure chests to scavenge, which villages to rescue, and who needs to talk to who to recruit them, and who needs to not die no matter what, because if you get all the way to chapter 20 just to be told you forgot crystal shard number five and so sorry, but you have to play the whole thing all over again, that’s your time! If I had a major criticism for this game, not to mention the series as a whole, it is that there seems to be a Right Way To Play This Game, and your choices are either read up on it to find out, or let the game tell you that you picked the wrong way and give you the finger for free (even on a narrative level, the game hints that Jeigen, Arran, and Matthis suck!). If you tell me you can play this without a walkthrough you’re either lying, or you’re the user on here who decided to play the Famicom original blind, going through each chapter taking every permanent death as it came, hanging by a thread at the end of every battle, only to get softlocked around like chapter 17 or so. Good for them for having that experience, but it’s not an experience for everyone, and it’s also obviously not how the developers intended anyone to play it! And if that's the whole point, if there's an awareness of how unlikely it is that someone will intuitively know how to play the first time to get the ideal ending, then why make it a game? If you need the official book to play the game, why not just write the book?
It’s unintuitive, yes, but not outright bad. I enjoyed what I was playing while my eyes were glued to a gameFAQ. Someone at work who wasn’t into games asked me what I was playing lately and I told them it was “like Japanese Game of Thrones, with medieval factions warring for power and control, but there’s also dragons and magic and shit, only way more anime, way less tiddy, and way better prose compared to GRRM,” and when I said that I was surprised to realize it didn’t make me hate the game. As a regular connoisseur of JRPGs I’m always prepared for the story to turn into some damn bullshit and Not What I’m Really Playing This Game For, but I have to say I liked the story more than I thought I would! I was worried the second story was going to lapse into my final fantasy-ass pet peeve of the bad guy not really being bad but just possessed by a dark cloud, not to mention “remember the bad guy last time? We gotta fight him again!” But to give this game enough credit, it heavily implies that Hardin needed to be enough of a shithead to make that possession happen in the first place, and it bothers to go into some deep lore in the second book, including how Gharnef and Medeus got to be bad. I liked getting just little glimpses of character development out of the mere seconds of time all fifty characters had when they get recruited, learning who they loved or who they hated based on their recruitment messages, their death messages, and so on. The ending for both books is an array of John Hughes-ass captions of what they decided to do after the story, and I went through all of them going awwwww 🥹, or awwww 😢, or what what what dude why the fuck would you do that dude. Not bad storytelling for a children’s toy made thirty years ago.
And now, please enjoy this little bit from my playthrough of what we in the industry like to call, ahem…
taps on a mic, which feedbacks
LUDO-NARRATIVE DISSONANCE