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.

New Vegas’s DLC serves as a capstone to overarching plotlines that have its threads in the base game, but even more than that, it serves to mine out the behind-the-scenes stories and missed encounters. Van Buren characters return, canned plot threads are unsealed, and Ulysses, originally a base-game companion, gets top billing. It’s hard to look at the DLC without considering its context. This is, almost certainly, the last West Coast Fallout game made by anybody who worked at Black Isle in any meaningful capacity. The add-on storyline is, then, something of a swan song - the series’ central themes are given a variety of tonal and thematic viewpoints, the serialized nature of it all allowing for extreme variety.

How badly are people trapped by their past? Are they in control of their future? How much can one great man truly accomplish, and will it last? These meat-and-potatoes Fallout-ass questions are stressed across genre, tone, visual style, and character perspective, to varying results. Lonesome Road represents the ultimate culmination of these themes and delivers it as the ultimate test to the player. It’s cool to see these gameplay systems be used for a grueling mega-dungeon lined with the most fearsome enemies in the game, and it takes the base game’s yellow-washed concrete and turns it into a thin orange haze amidst a skyline on fire. It’s paced better than any other of Avellone’s DLC, and it can be beaten in an evening (if you’re willing to stay up an hour past bedtime.)

It frustrates that it struggles to live up to its potential. After three expansions of hype, the much-vaunted confrontation between couriers is mostly conveyed through rambling phone calls. Ulysses rants about the obvious and doesn’t dig into the interesting, the Courier is given a backstory that they’re about as baffled by as the player, and incredibly bizarre questions about their past are raised and dismissed as quickly as they came (logistically, how would they even be a Legion spy at level zero, having lived their entire life west of the Hoover Dam and taking jobs for the NCR? If the Courier is a woman, they literally can’t have been in the Legion while still having the freedom to do... anything they do at all because of the patriarchal systems in place!!!)

Ulysses trembles in fear at the Big Empty’s scientists, claiming that somebody would need to be “a hundred Elijahs” to take them down - but the explicit mechanical and narrative point in Old World Blues is that they’re complete pushovers when they don’t hold all the cards - cards they did not hold at the time of Ulysses’ internment. He tells the Courier that they built a city they don’t remember, on roads they never walked. He systematically genocides a model society because they proved his ideology wrong by virtue of not collapsing like Ashton did, then high-roads the player because they delivered a package several years ago . He talks at length about the threat the Tunnelers pose to the Mojave, the unpreparedness and menace they bring, despite many, many slides in the base game ending contradicting this event’s occurrence and the DLC’s level design ensuring the Courier will have killed about eleventy bazillion singlehandedly. He castigates the player’s lack of beliefs even if they’re at the point of no return for the NCR. He tells the protagonist “remember... you could have turned away at any time... none of this had to happen...” in intonation that makes even a Spec Ops: The Line defender make dismissive jerk-off motions.

Constraining the protagonist’s backstory is not a bad thing. Knights of the Republic 2 and Planescape: Torment both do this extremely well; they indisputably did things that affected the world for better and for worse before the player took control, and it’s said player’s job to figure out how much responsibility they want to take and how much they can grow and change. This is baked into the core of both games, and the player is given a range of responses and reactions, through which they develop their character’s personality in meaningful ways. Lonesome Road is terrified of committing to this, and the Courier isn’t even concerned with taking responsibility inasmuch as they’re baffled at even having a backstory. There’s “the MC pathologically cannot take responsibility for their part in Peragus’ destruction in a healthy way and is incentivized to avoid taking any,” and there’s “in-universe, in-character, the MC asks what the fuck is going on and points out that this retcon breaks the lore, and the GMPC just kind of goes ‘nuh-uh’ and continues their screed anyways.”

This half-baked intrusion further suffers from its placement: there is a time to deny the player agency, and there is a time to establish constraints on their past and behavior, and that time is not in the victory lap dungeon crawl forty-four hours into a forty-five hour game. The Tunnelers obliterate the meaningfulness of literally any decisions the player makes in Lonesome Road, in the other DLC, and in the base game, because 80% of the Mojave will die overnight in the near future. Doing quests and character interactions with an assumed backstory becomes frustrating when the Courier suddenly grows a decade-plus of experience for just delivering mail (frustrating that the player has to spend their entire life doing this one thing to make the plot work, but Ulysses gets to do it as a side gig inbetween being a frumentarii and community-builder and still proclaims that he’s a full-fledged Capital C Courier) and has precious little space for anything not built around that single backstory and character concept.

Its finale has a bugged reputation check, a boring wave defense, and a genuinely great conversation that can be ignored with a 90 Speech check. The player is given a binary choice that’s never very hard to make at all given that they have to pick between NCR or Legion to beat the game, then are offered a get-out-of-jail-free sacrifice that textually loses absolutely nothing because all the relevant data was transmitted elsewhere and the Courier can just fill in the gaps later on if they want to. The ending slide has Chris Avellone finally remember that he forgot to make female characters feel weird and shitty, so the mic drop gets a gendered line that reads “War never changes. But women do!”

From the start, Fallout excelled at captivating the imagination and letting the player fill in the gaps, and going from a base game with eighteen months of development time to four DLCs that cost five bucks a pop means a lot is gonna get lost in the shuffle, shoved aside, or get served undercooked. Lonesome Road tries, and it threads together locations, characters, and concepts from every Fallout game up to that point - including Tactics and Van Buren - to create one final confrontation, begging the past to stay dead, the mistakes to be remembered, and the future to be written anew. Memories of the past were already falling apart or warped to fit new ends, and ghosts are put to rest or brought back incomplete and screaming. The end of the West Coast was never really going to be dignified, after all.

Genealogy of the Holy War is almost less of a game and more like a story that you interact with. If it wasn’t for the near unrivaled mix of worldbuilding with gameplay I would not like FE4 as much as I did. Despite birthing some elements that would be integral to Fire Emblem as a franchise going forward, it’s also the most unique entry in the series by far. Even with all of its influence and acclaim, not ONE game past this has ever tried replicating everything this game did. Some of that could be attributed to the new systems being seen more as flaws rather than benefits, or the sheer complexity maybe too scary for newer players. I’m not sure.
I finished this game over a week ago, and I’ve been banging my head on the wall trying to figure out what to say. I feel like I need to get the word out of what this game is, but it’s just not fully coming to me. I’d love to write a review as long as a single enemy phase in this game but I really can’t do that as much as I try. So I’ll suffice by writing something shorter while explaining why YOU should at least experience this game once.
War. Legacy. Succession. Betrayal. Tragedy. These are all themes that Genealogy of the Holy War focuses on. Fire Emblem has.. well obviously always been about war. However Genealogy, out of all the games I’ve experienced, delves the most into the pure tragedy and unfairness of what war is. There are so many moments where you just.. can’t save everyone. The other games have similar moments, but this one melds it into the gameplay so perfectly and precisely. Every map is vast with history, communities, and density. They genuinely do feel like actual locales rather than “a video game level”. That goes both to its benefit and detriment from a gameplay perspective, but from a story perspective, it’s pure bliss. We follow our heroes through lush forests, sprawling plains, harsh mountains, scorching deserts etc. You slowly proceed through this seemingly endless war, each map becoming more and more hopeless.
I should also preface that you need to experience this story blind. I know it’s very hard to do as such with how much the middle plot twist is spoiled to everyone, but I encourage you to stay as blind as possible. Genealogy’s narrative is fantastic, not only for a Fire Emblem game but for a piece of media in general. Seliph is one of my favorite video game characters of all time because of how we follow his journey from suffering a harsh young life, but growing to become a fine young man himself capable of what his mission is. Once again, I’m not going to elaborate so the reader can find out what happens themselves, but the story is, no exaggeration, simply masterful.
Generational storytelling is one of my favorite tropes of all time. Seeing how descendants of a generation will remedy the mistakes, regrets, or failures of their predecessors has always been so engaging to me. While Genealogy's latter half isn't nearly as narratively complex as the former half, it's story about the next generation of heroes is among one of my favorites for this trope. Ily Seliph.
Presentation also goes a long way, of course. Every music track in the game adds to the atmosphere so heavily, it’s easily one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard on the Super Famicom. Some tracks were so masterfully composed I nearly shed tears, I couldn’t believe how well it played me especially when I can rarely cry at soundtracks anymore. The graphics can be hit or miss, especially with the character portraits, but the maps and environments are top notch. I could really look at them for so long.
I think that’s pretty much all I could think of to say about Genealogy of the Holy War. As a game… it’s a mess. Possibly even objectively bad. But as a story, a piece of artistry… it’s an undeniable masterpiece. It’s certainly not for everyone, I’m aware, but it is worth experiencing in full at LEAST once. Not my favorite Fire Emblem because of the gameplay, but definitely the best narrative and cast of characters in my eyes.
Also ever notice how so many of the people who say this game sucks (or other classic FE games for that matter) are Three Houses fans or have Three Houses pfps? curious ….