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.

Went into this bad boy after Thracia, wanting more Snes Fire Emblems. I was pensive about it. Like, I'd seen the screenshots, I'd seen some videos - it looked old, crusty, slow. Besides, if it didn't have the story of 4 or the balls-flattening gameplay of 5, what was the point? Still, I wanted to see what Marth was all about.

Absolutely loved it. Book 1, the remake of the first Fire Emblem game, was the baseline story of Marth and pretty fun. Didn't have me singing from the mountaintops, but it was really fun to get acquainted with the original Fire Emblem crew. I started to like all of the characters - Marth, Ogma, Caeda, Linde, Cain and Abel, Hardin... through the gameplay, they really grew on me.

Then I got to Book 2 and found myself stunned. It's a bonafide chronological sequel with all of your favorites returning, and some painful twists. The beginning conceit really impressed me with how it turned the ending on its head. The level design was also consistently pretty good, with the huge exception of Chapter 3. Nothing hamstrings my replays more than that accursed mountain island.

Best presentation Fire Emblem has had, sad we'll never get it again. Beautiful character designs, wildly good music(that I was shocked to find was all just remixes of the dang NES tracks!), peak vibes. Just a joy to go through and see the story through to the end. The Fire Emblem I'd recommend most to people who simply want a nice JRPG/SRPG experience without particularly wanting to get into Fire Emblem, because it's both poorly representative of Fire Emblem gameplay as a whole, and not a very good Fire Emblem to play. On its on, though, as something on the outside - indeed, as a gaiden, it's great.

There's so much I could say about this game, and it did, indeed, teach me a lot. Perhaps I could talk about how drummed-up controversies affect our perception of games, perhaps I could talk about how expectations of "uh it's Oscarbait AAA stuf it's going to be 'good' standard good great even" can make things seem less appealing - after all if you know something is just boilerplate good, then you know, why bother?

I could talk about the modern 2 hour video essay, how they serve often to give a person a wikipedia summary of a game and prepackaged opinions so they can take part in Discourse. I can talk about people complaining about emotional manipulation, about The Gamer Struggles, about all that.

None of it matters in the face of the primacy of experience. Of going through a massive work of art like this yourself. How did this get made. How did this get made with a AAA budget. How is it twice the length of The Last of Us One. How is it all killer no filler. How does it manage to tell a story of such violence, emotional vulnerability, and depth. I don't know. People and the discourse around it could not tell me.

A masterpiece. Play it if you liked the first game. Play the first game to play this game. This will be an enduring, all-time classic.