I wasn't expecting much from this game, and it's certainly A First Person Dungeon Crawler From 1994 with all that that entails, but I have not stopped thinking about this game since I beat it. I am enamored. The atmosphere is perfect and the combat, while clunky, has a certain rhythm that you pick up on by the time you leave the first floor. If you put in a little time to get used to the way the game is I feel like it's a pretty rewarding experience. The game is also pretty short so it's the perfect game to stay up all night and finish.

I went into this not expecting much, maybe even to dislike it but I actually had a really good time! A relic of the time before the bullet hell arms race its successors would inherit, its comparatively sparse levels give it a fairly smooth difficulty curve unironically making it not such a bad entry point for newcomers. People don't seem to regard the music too highly but I think it's got some bangers in it. There's a fair amount of jank though and some cheap shots here and there so it does kinda noticeably lack the polish of DDP. It's not so bad, DDP and DOJ are just tough acts to precede. Humble beginnings, I guess.

It's hard to succinctly summarize my thoughts on this game because it's bad but also good. Improvements to movement and things like dual-wielding are a huge improvement over the original but things like deceitful hitboxes and the level design are staggeringly atrocious. Like, go look up early-development DS1 maps and you can see the meticulous care put into designing a cohesive world. Look at the mishmash levels in DS2 and tell me that same level of care was put in. Not to mention how SOTFS took abysmal level design and floored the gas pedal. Such a transparent cashgrab from the publisher that it legitimately turned me off from playing DS3. This is one of those games that its more fun to think about playing than it actually is to do so.

This game is, if nothing else, a masterclass in how to do a remake. Certainly, I think there's some aspects that could have (maybe should have) been improved, like early Celica maps being repetitive and overall the game being a no-deploy-limit rout-fest. But you know what? So was gaiden, and there's a part of me that appreciates getting to experience it in all its quirkiness with modern quality of life improvements and an excellent soundtrack. Easily the best 3DS fire emblem game and the irony of the fact that its a remake of a Kaga-era game is not lost on me.

This might be my personal favorite Fire Emblem game and I feel like it stands equal to FE4. In fact I feel like part of its greatness comes from its context within the broader FE4 story. The atmosphere of this game is immaculate; seldom have I played a game that so perfectly captures the feeling of a rag-tag group of revolutionaries, from its music, to gameplay mechanics and dialogue. It makes some improvements on some of Genealogy's aspects while returning to a more "traditional" Fire Emblem experience. It's reputation as difficult isn't unearned but I feel like its severity is vastly overblown.

This game elicits some complicated feelings from me, because I think it could have been something amazing, and it clearly had enough going on to spawn a whole sub-franchise. The main problem with the game is that it doesn't really respect the player's time, to absurd degrees. World of Sloth obviously comes to mind with that, but I feel like it's such an audacious decision to create something like that it wraps back around to being funny, maybe even clever. The real time-wasting comes with a lot of the clunky mechanics that seem to primarily be there to pad out the play time since the story is rather light. It's incredibly frustrating to recruit demons, dying demoting your guardian is frustrating, ranking up into a guardian that nerfs your build is frustrating, level design is frustrating. The whole experience seems tailor-made to taunt you the whole time you're playing. A masochist's game if I've ever played one.