Gimmick! 2

 I played Gimmick! 2

Gimmick! 2 was released in 2024. It is a sequel to Gimmick! from 1992

Okay, so I've always said the original Gimmick! for Famicom was my favourite 8-bit game. It's cute, difficult, it has a lot of attention to detail and the main gameplay mechanic of throwing the star to bounce around has a lot of depth, for traversing the levels, attacking enemies, skipping sections of levels, it's just so good. 

The main thing that makes Gimmick unique is the star throw - you create a star above Yumetaro's head, and then throw it. It bounces around the environment with relatively realsitic bouncing physics, and if you land on top of your own star, you can let it take you around the level, which lets you reach high places if you're skilled at bouncing it in just the right spot. It's really cool. 

So I played Gimmick! 2, and.... hmm.

So the game gives a good first impression. The physics of the star bounce are spot on. They added a bit more momentum to your jumps if you jump off a moving star, which is a nice change. It feels perfect for returning fans, and it is just such a clever emergent physics kind of movement option for a platformer. I love it.

the game is definitely more of a puzzle-platformer compared to Gimmick 1. It feels a bit Celeste-like in that the focus is on completing a series of rooms using your star-bounce mechanic, with frequent checkpointing and infinite immediate retries. It's not like Gimmick 1's 8-bit style of difficult platforming with lives and game overs and all that.

The levels in Gimmick 2 are pretty long, but there are only six level in total. So the game has a bit of a lopsided balance, where it feels like things are dragging on a bit too much, yet it also feels like you're over and done with it a bit too quickly. I dunno. I don't think it's an actual problem because the checkpoints let you travel between them, Shadow the Hedgehog style, and the game permanently saves the fact that you have access to a new checkpoint the moment you unlock it. So the game does give you plenty of natural stopping points if you do start feeling fatigued. ...It's fine tbh. But maybe it could have been better paced anyway.

The game has a ton of secret items hidden everywhere that unlock customisation for the main character Yumetaro. You can change his colour palatte, star colour, or give him a hat. I never really felt like using any of these, but these items are really just a way for them to put hidden little secrets in the game, the actual prize isn't what's important.

I do enjoy how the secret areas are subtly conveyed by way of slightly off-looking level design. You see a ledge that goes nowhere, and it feels enticing to try and reach it anyway. And then you get rewarded for managing it. it's good stuff. But there were a few hidden areas that were a bit too obscure. I did not feel bad about looking up a guide for the few things I didn't find myself.

The main difference in level design philosophy between Gimmick 1 and Gimmick 2 is the fact that Gimmick 2 is designed primarily around doing trickshots with the star bounce. In Gimmick 1, you really didn't need to know how to bounce the star in order to complete the game for the most part. It was a hard game due to the enemy behaviour and platforming jumps primarily. The star bounce system was mostly there for repeat playthroughs, for more experienced players to play the game over and over, getting more efficient and practiced at bouncing the star, and being able to skip once-tricky sections with a well-placed bounce. It was super cool and it really rewarded becoming familiar with the game over repeated playthroughs.

Gimmick 2 on the other hand, demands that you master the star bounce just to get through the game. Very often there are platforming challenges that expect you to figure out exactly where to bounce the star in order to get past them.

This is what makes the game feel more like a puzzle-platformer than a pure platformer. And this extends to the enemy design as well - the enemies are placed in order to support each screen's challenge. Like a Deku Scrub-like enemy that shoots seeds at you from afar, but hides when you're close. The puzzle is figuring out how to bounce the star so it can defeat the enemy from afar. Things like this make the game feel much more puzzle focused than before. 

There is also one other, kind of esoteric aspect of Gimmick 1 that absolutely did not carry on over to Gimmick 2.

And that is the "Realistic Another World" aspect.

So basically, Gimmick 1 says on the title screen "Authentic Entertainment Realistic Another World" which is kinda a poorly-translated Japanese English tagline to make the game sound cool... but what it was trying to convey was the fact that Gimmick 1's world feels alive and "lived in".

 Enemies have distinct behaviours that don't really serve a gameplay purpose, but instead are just fun little details. The ferret looking enemy that appears at the start of the castle level chases your star like a dog playing catch. The hardhat guy who shoots homing missiles in the factory level runs away defeated once he runs out of missiles. The tooth-looking guys are normally peaceful, but get angry if you hurt one of the little birdies. The ship captain boss starts the level asleep, which you can only see if you reach the boss fast enough. The bees in the cave level actually fly into a hole in the wall, rather than just flying offscreen like a normal videogame enemy.

These are the little touches that make Gimmick 1 feel like "Realistic Another World". The world doesn't revolve around Yumetaro. It feels like it's its own little world with its own logic and procedures, and the player just gets a little taste of it during their playthrough of Gimmick. This concept would be taken to the extreme in Trip World for the GB, which I would say even goes as far to forgo having actual gameplay entirely, and just focuses on this weird naturalistic aspect. (Trip World is a super weird game btw).

Gimmick 2 doesn't seem to care about any of this that made the original Gimmick so unique. Gimmick 2's level design and enemy design exists purely for the gameplay. They took the most interesting aspect of the original Gimmick, which was the star physics system, and designed a new game entirely around making as much use as possible out of it.

And with this design goal in mind, they did a great job. Some of those bounces they expect you to do are pretty challenging, and feel great to pull off. ...But it feels like they completely ignored the other aspects of Gimmick 1 that made it feel so unique just to zero-in on this one part. Which is a bit sad to see.

Overall.. good game, good puzzle-platformer game, but I felt fatigued after playing it, and I'm nowhere near as enamored with it as I was am the original Gimmick, sad to say.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven

 

I played Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven.

This game was released in 2024 for modern platforms. I played the Nintendo Switch version.

Revenge of the Seven is a remake of Romancing SaGa 2, which was originally released for the Super Famicom in 1993, and later got an enhanced port to Switch in 2017. 

I never played either of these versions though - I've only played the 2024 version!

This is a turn-based RPG with a rather unconventional non-linear structure.

The game follows the story of the Kingdom of Avalon, and its thousand-year-long quest to rid the world of the evil fiends known as the Seven Heroes. 

The prologue of the game follows the Emperor Leon and his son Gerard in the Imperial Year 1000. After some events involving Kzinssie of the Seven Heroes ravaging the kingdom, the Emperor seeks revenge - however the Emperor is killed during the battle by Kzinssie's "Soulsteal" magic. But Leon didn't sacrifice himself without a plan - using the power of Inheritance bestowed upon him by the seeress Orieve, Leon is able to pass down his knowledge of Kzinssie's Soulsteal spell to whomever sits upon the throne next - and with Gerard as the new emperor, he now understands how to fully avoid its effects. With this knowledge, Gerard is able to take down Kzinssie to avenge his father.

However, there are six more Heroes out there: Subier, the king of the oceans. Dantarg, the beast who strives to be the strongest. Noel, the stoic knight. Rocbouquet, the beautiful temptress. Bokhohn, the scheming puppetmaster. And Wagnas, the ruler in the sky.

The Seven Heroes rule over regions all across the lands, infesting the world with their monsters. In order for this world to know peace, all of the Seven Heroes need to be eliminated.

During the prologue, we learn how combat works in this game. For the most part it is a simple turn-based JRPG style combat system, though it has some unique elements that make it interesting.

You travel with a party of five characters, and you position them into a "formation" that affects their stats. The default formation you have at the start of the game is the Imperial Cross, which allows you to select one party member to get attacked more often, and two to get attacked less often. Thankfully the prologue provides you with a Heavy Infantry character named Bear who is great at tanking damage.

Characters can equip two weapons at once, which allows access to two types of Techs at a time for each character.

This game doesn't have a standard EXP system, but rather, characters' individual weapon proficiencies are leveled-up instead, gaining weapon exp whenever you attack with them. Any character can equip any weapon, but they start with higher proficiencies with their preferred weapons. So if you want to give an archer a sword, you can definitely do it, but it will take some grinding before they can actually deal any damage with it.

Each weapon's Techs are special moves that cost BP to use. (BP is this game's MP).

However, it's not so simple to acquire these techs. Techs have to be obtained by "Glimmering". What this means is, whenever you do an attack, there is a chance that your character will suddenly have a spark of inspiration, a lightbulb will appear over their head as they come up with a new idea for an attack. And thus they have now learned a new tech they can use from now on.

The ability to glimmer a new tech is based on a number of things, including the user's weapon proficiency levels, and also which character is attacking in the first place. So an archer is inherently much more likely to glimmer new bow techs than sword techs, even if you train them well in swords.

Thankfully the game does have an in-game "Glimmer Chart" that lets you know if there are any new moves available, and whether your character is able to glimmer it or not. Takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.

Additionally, some special weapons have specific glimmers that are tied to the weapon, which require you to keep the weapon equipped if you want to use it. These are usually the stronger or more interesting techs. I do like when RPGs have a reason to keep older weapons around.

Additionally, characters have a chance of glimmering Evasions to specific moves. If a monster uses a move, there is a small chance that a lightbulb appears over the head of your character, and they will figure out how to perfectly dodge it. And from now on, this character cannot be hit with that specific move at all. It seems to happen completely randomly, but I'm sure there's some behind-the-scenes systems that determines which characters are more likely to figure out how to avoid which enemy moves.

The Evasions system is in fact the gameplay mechanic that allows Gerard to avoid Kzinssie's Soulsteal during the prologue boss fight - it appears as an Evasion in his skills menu.

Characters can also glimmer new magic spells if they are proficient in specific magic elements. This happens after combat rather than during it. 

There is a limit to how many techs and spells and evasions characters can have at once - you can only know 8 techs, 8 spells, and 4 evasions at a time. And much like in Pokémon, if you learn a new one you don't have room for, you'll be prompted to select a previous one to forget.

Having a spread of different weapon types available to use across your party is very useful, as all enemies have weaknesses to specific weapon types. Additionally, attacking a foe with their weakness will fill up an Overdrive gauge, which will let you perform a super attack when it's full. So sometimes, even attacking with a weapon you're no good with can be helpful if it gives you the extra Overdrive juice you need. 

I like this kind of system where a simple set of combat options can have multiple layers of usefulness. It comes together really cleverly.

After every combat, HP is restored, but BP is not restored. Your regular attacks are normally quite weak, so constantly using Techs and burning through your BP is pretty much mandatory in order to get through the dungeons. So it is often wise to buy some BP-restoration items.

The player has an unlimited inventory, however medicine items can only be used mid-battle if you equip them to your character beforehand, and each character only has two slots for medicine. Interestingly, BP restoration cannot be equipped and is only usable outside of combat, which means that a character's max BP is actually a limiting factor for the strategy versus some of the harder bosses.

Thankfully, before each boss battle is a save point and a BP restoration point, so it's not too harsh. 

Overall, the difficulty of this game was pretty good. I played on "Normal" difficulty, and it wasn't a walk in the park by any means - I had to think about my options and which techs to use, and when to use my Overdrive, and all of that good JRPG combat stuff. 

During the prologue, the game feels like a fairly standard JRPG - You've got a main character, a main questline, a linear narrative with story cutscenes, and all that regular JRPG stuff. But right after the prologue has finished introducing the game, things take a turn in a rather unusual direction. The game becomes completely nonlinear, to the point where it doesn't even have a "main quest" any more.

The game structure goes like this: 

Explorable areas appear as icons on your world map, and you can fast-travel to any one of them at (mostly) any time.

At first, you have the Avalon castle town, as well as the port town of Somon, where Kzinssie was battled in the prologue.

After the prologue, there is a scene where the emperor's advisors tell you that there may be something interesting to investigate in some other nearby towns and caves. It unlocks these areas for fast-travel, and also adds quest markers to them on the map to remind you to take a look.

From Somon's port, you can sail to a few other port towns, which will add them to your fast travel map. From these, you can explore even further out, adding more towns and dungeons and even some wide-open field areas to your map. Reaching the other side the fields unlocks the towns on the other side.

From the towns you have access to, you can find new sidequests, which will unlock new dungeon locations, and quite often they will lead into more sidequests that unlock more new towns and dungeons, and... it just keeps going and going like this. The more sidequests you complete, the more and more area icons get added to your fast-travel map, giving you more and more access to the world as you continue playing. 

So essentially, the whole game is spent completing sidequests in order to collect more fast-travel points on your map, so you can find even more sidequests.

The entire game is pretty much comprised entirely of sidequests.

The sidequests in this game usually involve travelling through a dungeon area full of monsters, and fighting a boss at the end.

The Kingdom of Avalon will also gain favour with the region whose quest you completed, leading to that region being annexed into Avalon. The more regions that become part of Avalon, the more "Imperial Revenue" your kingdom will have, which is essentially just how much gold you earn after defeating monsters.

Clearing sidequests can also grant access to new party members. They will join your kingdom, and can be swapped out at any tavern in the towns. There's a good amount of party members to collect - there's over 30 of them! So you'll definitely want to be changing up your party often to use them all.

Each party member has a unique character class, with their own weapon preferences and a unique skill.

It is useful to keep new party members in your team when you first get them - every new character you recruit has a unique skill that is unlocked after 30 victories in combat. These skills can be things like "heals a bit of BP every turn", "more likely to inflict status effects on enemies", "gets healed for more HP than normal", "has complete immunity to water-based damage", among other things. 

Later on in the game, you can unlock the ability to "master" learned skills, which takes 30 more victories. Mastered skills can then be equipped by other party members, but only when the skill-master is not in the team themselves. 

So for example the Blacksmith character has "increase weapon and armor effectiveness by 10%" skill, which is a pretty good skill for anyone to have. So in order to make it available, you first need to take the Blacksmith into at least 60 battles.

After that, you can equip this skill to any other party member, but only if the Blacksmith isn't in the team. Because it is not possible to have two members with the same skill at once, and a character cannot not have their own skill.

I like this system, it adds a ton of individuality and customisability to your choice of party, and it can make party members useful even when you're not using them. In fact it makes certain characters more useful to not use. This is a really cool way to make a game with lots of party members feel like every one of them is contributing in their own way.

...

So anyway. That's the gist of the game progression. In order to reach the remaining members of the Seven Heroes, you have to find their sidequests. They are not marked any differently to any of the other sidequests in the game - you have to discover them naturally. The quests that lead to one of the Seven tend to involve travelling through longer dungeons, multiple dungeons, or completing some other prerequisite quests before gaining access. So it's not likely you'll stumble into most of them. ...Though it seems Dantarg and Subier in particular don't have all that many prerequisites, so these two might be easier to stumble into than the other ones I guess. I dunno. It's possible there are special conditions I met without realising or something.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit here. I haven't mentioned one very important and interesting aspect about this game.

After the prologue, after Gerard has killed Kzinssie and begins exploring and investigating and discovering new towns, and maybe even completing a few quests here and there, suddenly the game will do something highly unusual.

One moment you're playing as Gerard, solving a monster problem in the next town over, but as soon as you complete the quest, the game fades to a black screen, and text appears that simply says... "136 years later...".

... Wow. I mean. What??? Really?

Okay. So... what exactly happens?

Well Gerard isn't around any more, that's for sure. In fact, he's never heard from again after this happens. Because this isn't actually Gerard's story, it's the story of the Kingdom of Avalon as a whole.

You get to choose a successor. You're given five options, from a selection of character classes you've unlocked so far.

So what kind of emperor would you like to appoint to the throne next? A Heavy Infantry? A Ranger? A Mercenary? A Thief?

Whoever you choose becomes the new main character.

Due to Leon's Inheritance magic, whoever you choose will inherit all weapon proficiency levels from both the previous emperor, and the previous member of that character class. So for example, if you choose Heavy Infantry, both Gerard (the previous emperor) and Bear (the previous Heavy Infantry)'s weapon proficiency levels will be inherited to the new Heavy Infantry Emperor.

Additionally, whichever character class you choose will unlock a unique new Formation for you to use in battles.

All the other characters in your party are replaced by their direct descendants, which in practical terms doesn't actually change much - They all wear the exact same style of outfit as their predecessors, and they all have the same weapons and skills you've been training them in. They just have different names and faces.

 So if you were giving Therese the Ranger some sword practice on the side, then after the timeskip, her identical descendant Mary the Ranger will start with a similar amount of sword proficiency, even though that skill isn't natural to archers.

You never really lose your character building progress, even though your characters are getting replaced.

But it's not as simple as a copy and paste job. Every weapon level has an overall "Imperial Standing" that can be checked in the pause menu, which is basically an average of how much weapon experience levels all of your party members have accumulated amongst everyone. The higher the overall standing, the higher all the next descendants' weapon levels will be at the beginning of a new era. 

This system allows for classes that you don't use on your team much to not get outclassed later - as long as you've been using archery attacks at all, then the archers you haven't been using will be all caught up when the next generation starts.

The timeskip is also how party members can pass down their glimmered techs to become teachable to others.

After glimmering a new tech, only the one who glimmered it has access to it - however, after a timeskip, the knowledge of the tech will be passed down through the Knights' Training Hall, and now anyone with sufficient weapon proficiency will be able to learn it, for free. This also allows you to safely forget learned techs and evasions to make room for new ones, without permanently losing them. Once it's recorded in the Training Hall, it's always available to relearn.

This system is also how magic is primarily given to party members. 

At first, only mage characters know how to do spells. But after a timeskip, all of their spells will be recorded in the Incantations Lab, and after that, they can be taught to anyone. If any new spells are glimmered afterwards, then you'll have to wait for the next timeskip before these ones can be equipped on anyone too.

There are six different spell elements - Pyrology, Hydrology, Terrology, Aerology, Cosmology, and Umbrology. 

Characters cannot equip spells of opposing elements - if you equip a Pyrology spell, then all Hydrology spells will become unequipped. And the same applies for Terrology vs Aerology, and Cosmology vs Umbrology. You'll need to be a bit careful, because you might lose access to a spell entirely if you unequip it before it gets recorded for the next generation via a timeskip.

Umbrology is an interesting case, because I never actually had the opportunity to use a single Umbrology spell during my entire playthrough. It turns out that the ability to use Umbrology is locked behind a mutually-exclusive choice during one sidequest. And I just so happened to choose the other way.

Hmm. Not so sure about that game design choice to be honest.

So the sidequests in this game actually do have some choices to make, and they also interact with the generations system too.

...other than locking me out of using dark magic for the whole game, there are some other mutually-exclusive events that may or may not occur depending on your choices.

For example, there is a quest where the emperor receives a request for aid by the neighbouring region of Cumberland, as they are in the midst of a civil war. If the emperor does not deal with this situation before the next timeskip occurs, then in the next generation, Cumberland will have turned into a hostile territory, and the questline changes from aiding Cumberland to liberating Cumberland. 

This is kind of interesting. But this unfortunately isn't actually a common thing throughout the game. The vast majority of the sidequests in the game will happily wait patiently for you to get around to them, now matter how many hundreds of years pass by.

...

In fact, this leads me to the part of this writeup where I start complaining about the game. 

So. This whole generations system. All these timeskips, new emperors, inheritance...

I'm not sure I exactly like the way it's presented.

First of all. The game doesn't really explain why there needs to be such large timeskips. Did the emperor just decide to stop doing anything for the entire rest of his natural life? Even when there was much more to accomplish? Why?  Why would he willingly let Cumberland fall if it was in his ability to aid them? Presumably, he was on the throne for years and years after the screen goes blank, but literally nothing gets accomplished in between then and now? ...I suppose we just have to come up with our own storytelling to explain it? Is this a game that expects you to do your own GMing??

The timeskips seem to occur when the game decides that "enough things" have been accomplished in the current era. There really isn't more to it than that, it seems. After three or four quests are completed in a single era, the game decides that that's enough, now it's time for the next emperor to have their go. 

The game honestly does a really really poor job making it feel like any time has actually passed. A hundred years is an extremely long time, you would've thought, but absolutely nothing about the world changes at all. Every town remains literally exactly the same. No towns develop, no new towns are established, no towns are abandoned, and worst of all, all town NPCs are still standing in the exact same spots as before, saying the exact same dialogue as before.

After rescuing Somon from Kzinssie's fiends, the NPCs around town will have dialogue... Children say "Yay, the monsters are gone, now we can play outside!", or another NPC says  "We can start to rebuild now that the monsters are gone"... Skip 150 years into the future, and visit Somon again and..... the exact same kid is still saying the exact same dialogue. "Yay, now we can play outside!" .... hey kid, this town has been monster-free for over 150 years, what the heck are you still celebrating for????

It's just so bad. It completely ruins the effect they're trying to pull off here. It's honestly bafflingly bad. There is no way I'm going to truly get into the idea that literally over 100 years has passed when I'm seeing things like this, I'm sorry Square Enix.

Important quest-giving NPCs are another poor showing of this. They introduce themselves when you first meet them, and generally they join your party after completing their quest. However, if you don't manage to fully complete the quest before a timeskip happens to you, then...they'll still be there waiting for you, over 150 years later. And the quest will continue as if nothing happened. I mean, What??? 

They actually do occasionally try to explain this. In Cumberland, the quest-important character is Sophie the Crusader, and one of Sophie's aides says "It is tradition that all Crusaders leading the rebellion will be named Sophie"..................... yeah okay. That's the best they got, huh? 

Except, after completing the quest and recruiting Sophie to our party, now the regular game mechanics regarding inheritance will apply to her, so the next Crusader descendant will have a new face and a new name. In this case, the new name is Agatha. So we've already broken that rule.

..........And if you go back to Cumberland after this, all NPC dialogue mentioning Sophie is still the exact same as it was 150 years ago, except now all the dialogue has been find+replaced to change "Sophie" into "Agatha". So apparently now Agatha is the saviour of the town and always has been, even though the town was actually saved 150 years ago by Sophie. They literally just have NPC dialogue that is "<Insert Current Crusader Name Here> is the saviour of our town!!!", not at all paying attention to how things actually played out.

There are other things that don't make any sense to be able to carry over a timeskip. If you visit the Amazon village, you rescue one of the Amazonians from monsters, but she runs away from you. If you chase after her, she does not let you in to the village if you are playing as a male emperor. The quest objective says "Follow after the woman", but it's a dead end until you change emperor.

So okay. We'll go do some other quests then. Now, another 150 or so years have passed. So we can choose a lady to inherit the throne, and now we can finally fulfil the quest objective of "follow after the woman". ...which is a quest objective that doesn't even make sense to still exist after 100 years but whatever. ... And so we get there, and she greets our new empress with "Thanks for saving me back there". ................yeah. I mean. .....are you seeing the problem here? If we entertain what the game is trying to say here, then I suppose we are to believe that she is thanking our ancestors for saving her ancestor, despite neither of us having met before. And that's the first thing she says to us. It's just. I'm sorry game. I just can't with this.

God this is so obnoxiously implemented. I'm not trying to pick it apart so cynically like this, I'm really trying to engage with the story as it's presented, but it's just. ...it just immediately falls apart. I don't even have to do anything, it's shoving plot holes in my face without me even going to look for them. it's just not well done. :( It really doesn't feel like a story that spans over many years. It really, really, really doesn't feel like that at all.

Instead, it just feels like a regular JRPG with tons of sidequests, where occasionally you have to change main character.

The quests in this game are designed as if this was a normal RPG where timeframes aren't relevant. But this is very much a game where timeframes are relevant, yet the sidequests were not designed with that in mind at all. It's just so.... baffling to see it.

The fact that there is no actual main character of the game means that, after the prologue is done and Gerard is gone, your party members don't have any lines of dialogue for the rest of the game. It's pure silent protagonist mode for the whole game. That's fine and all I suppose. I've played old RPGs before, they don't all need fleshed-out party members. We can use this as an opportunity to make up our own interpersonal storylines, right? JRPGs are all descended from D&D after all, right??

So while there's no such thing as character development for your team members, there actually still is at least one plot thread the game shows you. And this is in the form of the Memories of the Seven.

Occasionally as you explore the dungeons you'll come across a terminal that has a recording of a scene from the past, back from before the Seven Heroes became monsters. These scenes show snippets of the Seven Heroes' past lives, how they became friends, and how they dealt with a monster threat that was terrorising the kingdom. And importantly, it also shows the events that eventually led to them becoming the immortal monsters we see today.

This kind of reminds me of how the Memories work in The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. It's a look into the past, and just like in Zelda, this is the only time the game's narrative gets to shine through. These memory scenes are definitely an important addition to the game, as the game is extremely light on story without them.

...Interestingly, the memories can be found out of order, depending on which order you do the various dungeons. It's not too big of a deal, but it can make them a bit more confusing to follow. It wouldn't have been so hard to force the memories to be viewed in a set order, would it? Oh well.

...

So alrighty. The majority of the gameplay is doing fun JRPG sidequests, and occasionally being forced into changing main characters. Overall it's pretty fun as a game. I enjoy the combat, I enjoy the dungeon exploration, and I enjoy the sidequests, as long as I don't think about how many hundreds of years are supposedly passing as I play. 

But once you reach a certain point, something interesting happens.

Once you reach 5/7 Heroes killed, the game forces a timeskip, and now we are presented with only one choice for the throne. The "Final Emperor".

In my playthrough, the Final Emperor was given to me once I had reached around Imperial Year 2200. That's 1200 years after Gerard's reign. I don't know how variable the years are, since the numbers of years in each timeskip seem to fluctuate based on how many quests you've done or something, but I have a feeling that the final emperor will always be in the 2000+ range.

Apparently, it takes 1000 or so years for Kzinssie's spirit to revive itself, and the initial Inheritance Spell wears off the moment Kzinssie starts existing again. So it's up to the Final Emperor to put a stop to the Seven Heroes once and for all, by defeating Kzinssie again, along with the other remaining two Heroes.

After you become the Final Emperor, your Knight's Training Hall gains the ability to record newly-glimmered techs immediately, rather than only after a timeskip. ...And the fact that this happens kinda makes me wonder whether the whole timeskip and inheritance system actually has any purpose to it at all...?  

I'm imagining a hypothetical version of this game where the entire game is just Gerard going around and killing all the Seven Heroes by himself, with no time skips at all. Sure, some of the more interesting mutually-exclusive choices would not be possible any more, and maybe some of the sidequest storylines would have to be rewritten, but... that's a tradeoff I'd be willing to make in exchange for a game that presents itself in a way that actually makes any sense. I dunno. ...1000 years is an extremely long time, and the fact that every single town remains completely unchanged for the entire duration of over 1000 years is just too impossible for me to accept. Let alone all the other problems this system causes.

I feel like... the concept of the game was more ambitious than they had the ability to properly implement, and instead of scaling back and doing something that works, they went ahead and implemented what they could of the system gameplaywise, but had absolutely no way to make it fit narratively, so they just... decided it didn't matter how nonsensical it comes across. 

And you know what? I actually think that's really really interesting. This is clearly a game for fans of RPG gameplay more than fans of RPG storytelling. The mechanics and systems are all extremely solid and fun. And the inheritance system adds just a touch of unique flavouring to this game, and the way it affects certain sidequests does give it value. It serves to really stand out as something no other game has really done. So for achieveing something like that... I have to commend them, honestly.

So yeah, overall...

I like Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven.

I really do like it.

I spent over 80 hours on this game, I played every single dungeon, I did every single sidequest, I watched every single memory scene, I beat the bonus dungeon. I did it all. This is a really fun RPG. I enjoy levelling up my weapons and glimmering new moves and passing down my learned skills and all that stuff. It's a very well-built RPG system that focuses heavily on the gameplay side of things, while for the most part completely ignoring the story side of things... to the point where it doesn't even care that it makes no sense.

I know I spent the latter half of this writeup mostly complaining, but.... once you realise that the game is supposed to be more representational than literal, then you can overlook its blatant inconsistencies more easily. 

I actually think this game's biggest failing is the fact that it's a fully modern-looking remake of a 1993 game. It's much easier to consider pixel sprites as abstractions than it is to consider highly detailed HD characters as such. So I'd imagine that any problems where the game isn't internally consistent are easier to brush aside when playing a pixel game, but much harder to overlook when things are presented to you much more realistically. Even if the actual game design hasn't changed.

Maybe this has something to do with why I spent so much time complaining about it. I dunno.

Anyway. It's a very good game. Just don't play this game expecting a storyline. because it only kinda has one. For the most part it's just a game about doing sidequests and dungeons. ...And sometimes that's all you need!

...Oh and one last thing, unfortunately the Switch version has really long loading times. cest la vie. I just put up with it. the end.

Fantasian: Neo Dimension

 I played Fantasian Neo Dimension.

Fantasian is an RPG developed by Mistwalker, released in 2021 on mobile devices. The "Neo Dimension" enhanced version was released in 2024 on modern platforms.

I played the Nintendo Switch version. 

Fantasian is a classic-style JRPG. It uses pre-rendered backgrounds with fixed camera angles, in a similar style to Squaresoft's PlayStation 1 RPGs (Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, Chrono Cross, etc). It also uses invisible random enemy encounters and turn-based, menu-based combat. This is a fully classic style JRPG through and through!

In fact, this game was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy. So the similarities are no coincidence. Also worth mentioning is that the music in Fantasian was done by Nobuo Uematsu, another well-known name among Final Fantasy and other RPGs.

The story of Fantasian follows Leo, a boy who wakes up in a strange factory without his memories. Leo is greeted by two seemingly friendly robots. Leo doesn't have much time to figure out what's going on, because it just so happens that the three of them are in the middle of being chased by a giant killer robot. Leo doesn't remember anything about why he would find himself in this situation, but eventually he manages to escape by use of a Warp Device he finds. Leo teleports to safety, using his vague memory of a girl, and the memory of a small town. ...because, apparently, the Warp Device relies on its user's memories in order to function.

With nothing more to go on but his memory of this girl, Leo begins his adventure. Along the way, Leo discovers his lost memories, meets new allies, and learns about the nature of the "mechteria", a dangerous infestation that has been spreading across the land.

The storytelling in this game is really nice. For the most part, it's a normal kind of JRPG story - the characters are all fun and likeable, and there's lots of great interactions between them. The story isn't too overly complex, though it does occasionally go into some confusing detail about the nature of human emotions and how they relate to interdimensional physics... you gotta take it at face value, you know?

But more uniquely, there are these occasional moments where the game uses a storybook narration style. This happens whenever characters talk about the past - especially when Leo regains one of his old memories. The storybook scenes have a slow pace with illustrations, accompanied by a soft, gentle narration reading the words on screen, and it even uses a sort of kinetic style of text where important words or phrases appear larger, and text can appear at different speeds for emphasis. 

I find these storybook scenes to be really sweet and relaxing. They invite you to just take a moment to just slow down and listen.  I really like it. :)  And every time you watch a storybook scene, it gets added to your quest log so you can re-watch it again whenever you like.

As you explore the towns, you can talk to NPCs and visit shops, buy new equipment, and find sidequests and all that good JRPG stuff. Outside of the towns are the more dangerous areas - usually pathways between locations, or dungeony areas, which have monster encounters in them.

The dungeon areas are fairly short and simple in this game - they normally take the form of a simple maze of paths, with dead-ends and treasure chests and hidden collectable items. There are a few areas with some interesting navigational challenges, but for the most part, the challenge of the areas comes from the enemy encounters. Again, very reminiscent of the classic Final Fantasy style of RPGs.

So, the battle system is simple, but it has some unique twists.

You have a party of up to three characters versus an assortment of enemies.

You can either select a regular attack, a skill, or an item. Skills take MP to use, and items can be bought or found around.

Turn order is determined by everyone's Speed stats, and is shown as a timeline in the bottom of the screen.

The combat works with a line of sight system. All your attacks, including regular attacks, take the form of a projectile slash or beam of some kind. You select a target by positioning the trajectory line so that it connects with an enemy. Enemies can block other enemies from being targeted if they're positioned in front of them, however this also allows you to target multiple enemies at once by using a piercing skill that can cut through them.

Characters with magic attacks can also curve their trajectories along the edges of the battle screen, which can allow for some cool trickshots where you can target many enemies with a single attack, depending on their positions. There are also a few area-of-effect attacks, where you place a circle on the field to try and include as many enemies as you can within it.

This targeting system is only applicable for the enemies - your characters don't have any formation system to worry about, and the enemies target your characters freely.

An important aspect of the combat system is buffs and debuffs - Some characters have skills that can buff your attack and defense, and I enjoy the fact that there is no separate stat for magic vs physical or anything like that - all damage-dealing moves are improved with attack boosts, and all damage taken is reduced with defense boosts. Because the buffs are so important against the harder enemies, it would be too fiddly if there were so many different types of buffs to worry about, so the game keeps it simple. 

I actually found myself using items quite a lot on this game, which is surprising considering how many RPGs seem to encourage you to hoard them.  For example, if you use an Energy Drink on one of your characters, they get an attack up buff, which can actually make quite a difference, especially if you're paying attention to the timeline and use it on a character whose turn will be next. 

These buff items are not difficult to come across, and as you get further into the game, you'll be swimming in them, so it never feels wasteful to use a buffing item or a healing item in battle. In fact, once you have a ton of them that you're unlikely to run out, you start to think about usable items as just another available option for your character on their turn, rather than as a special resource that must be used wisely. 

That being said, that doesn't mean consumable items are so abundant as to be completely free to use: One of the party members you meet is Ez, an enthusiast of engineering and crafting, whose attacks use up consumable items rather than MP. I think having a player character like this is a clever way to make sure that the player's large stockpile of items has any danger of actually being used up, since Ez's skills often use many items at once. And I always enjoy it when games find unique ways for party members to differentiate themselves in their gameplay.

The combat system really gets to shine during the boss battles. Each boss battle is a uniquely designed encounter with its own individual patterns and gimmicks. And there are a LOT of bosses in this game.

An example of some of the boss variety...

Some bosses have multiple pieces to target - a big robot with two arms who charges a super laser, which can be stopped if you break the arms. Or a big salamander whose tail can perform a healing move, so you can cut off its tail to prevent it from healing. (but you can only reach the tail with curved shots, as straight-on hits will target the main body).

There's a boss who summons minions who charge the boss's ultra attack, so you gotta make sure to prioritise hitting the minions to avoid that (and using a piercing skill to hit the minion and the boss at the same time is even better).

There's a boss who poisons you and then feeds off your poison to absorb power - so equipping anti-poison items will prevent the boss from doing its strong moves. Or if you don't have enough anti-poison gear for everyone, curing poison with an Antidote just before the boss's turn can be useful too.

There's a boss whose mega-meteor attack causes debris to float around it to form a protective barrier, so you need to make sure to kill it before it does this move too many times (or remember to use one of Ez's skills to move the debris out of the way).

There's a boss who revives itself if you don't kill it and its two knights at the same time (so using the area-of-effect attacks to hit all three at once is a good idea)

There's a boss who summons several spirit swords while charging their super move, but the move can be weakened depending on how many swords you kill before the attack comes out (which may be easier or harder depending on how many swords you can get in your line of sight at once).... 

...I think you get the idea. There's a LOT of boss variety in this game, each one making full use of the battle system's mechanics in interesting and unique ways. 

The bosses are the standout stars of the game for sure.

I should mention that, the original 2021 mobile release version of the game was considered a very difficult game The difficulty was in fact the most common criticism of the game by reviewers and fans. When the Neo Dimension version came around, they turned the existing difficulty into "Hard Mode", and created a brand new "Normal Mode" so players can progress without getting too overwhelmed. Because I read about this before I started playing, I decided to play the game on Hard Mode so I could see it as it was originally designed, and... wow, these bosses can be super tough! I frequently died against the bosses in this game. I had to really rethink, re-equip, and reconsider how to approach them. But interestingly enough, I never really had to grind.

But that's because this game actually has some anti-grinding measures built in, which I'll talk about in a sec.

But yeah. I agree that the bosses were definitely too difficult for the original release - I felt undeterred because I knew I was willingly doing it to myself by selecting Hard Mode. But players of the original 2021 version must have been feeling pretty desperate to go up against such difficult encounters with no choice but to keep trying.

But anyway. 

The enemy encounter system is interesting.

On the surface, it feels like it's a classic random encounter system, but as you play, you'll realise that it seems to work based on fixed number of steps travelled. Encounters seem to happen at regular intervals as you walk, rather than purely randomly. Reminds me a bit of Legend of Dragoon in that regard. 

Encounters in this game are definitely on the maybe-a-bit-too-frequent side, but it was done this way in order to work with the added "Dimengeon" system.

Early in the game, Leo finds a machine called the Dimengeon Machine, which allows you to store enemy encounters away in an alternate dimension. You can turn the machine on and off at any time, and if you're walking around fields and dungeons with it on, instead of an encounter starting, you'll just see a notification saying "enemies sent to the DIMENGEON", and you'll see a little capacity gauge fill up. And you can keep walking with no interruption.

So if an encounter would have been against four enemies, you'll see your Dimengeon gauge is now at 4/30. next encounter would have been against seven enemies? Now it says 11/30. A third encounter that would have been against 5 enemies? Now it's at 16/30. At any time you can decide to enter a battle within the Dimengeon, which means that you'll have to fight every enemy inside, all in a row, without the ability to run away.

This is interesting and unique, and I rather quite enjoy it. It allows you to reduce the amount of interruptions that combat encounters make, while consolidating them all into one big encounter to take on when you're good and ready. I personally like to explore a dungeon without interruptions, and then whenever I reach a save point, I like to empty out the Dimengeon Machine there in relative safety. It reduces annoying interruptions when I'm remembering which paths I've already taken etc as I explore the environments, and getting the fighting done at the save points also allows me to save right after having the big encounter.

You need to be careful, because if you let the Dimengeon Machine fill up to maximum capacity, it forces you to fight them all 30 of them right there and then.

While fighting an encounter of 30 enemies, you generally fight them 10 or so at a time, and as you kill them, more and more will spawn in until all thirty have been killed. Thankfully it's not literally 30 enemies all at once, that would be too much.

Since you have to fight so many enemies at once, Dimengeon battles are a great way to make full use of all those area-of-effect and line-of-sight attacks in order to kill lots of enemies as quickly as possible. This is another example of the game's various gameplay systems working well with each other - a Dimengeon Machine system would be difficult to make work well in a different RPG that didn't let you target multiple foes at once for example, because it would be extremely arduous to clear it.

One annoying aspect is that, there are occasions during the story where the Dimengeon Machine is not available. This mostly occurs when playing as characters other than Leo - at certain points in the story, the perspective shifts to other characters, but Leo is the one with the machine... so without him, you have to put up with the regular overly-frequent encounter rate. This is a bit annoying, but not having Leo around only happens a few times, so largely it's not too much of a problem. 

Since encounters are not random but happen at predictable step intervals, you can strategically use the Dimengeon Machine to reduce the overall number of enemies you come across as you explore. If you choose to fight inside your Dimengeon just before a new batch of enemies would have appeared on the next step, it will reset the step counter with the dimengeon fight, which means the encounter you stopped short of won't appear afterwards. I like how the system allows for neat little minor optimisations like this if you're paying attention.

The game is structured in two distinct parts. During part 1, the story is quite linear. Leo goes from location to location, and you have no choice but to follow the story as it's presented. Once Leo gets the Warp Device functioning again (the one from the prologue), you unlock fast-travel and are free to return to previous towns to do sidequests and stuff, but even so, there isn't much freedom of exploration during the first part of the game.

After about 20 hours of playtime, part 2 begins, and suddenly the whole game is extremely open-ended. Now you have six or seven areas available to you all at once, and every previous town has a slew of new sidequests available too. 

The way to progress the main quest is not conveyed to the player at the start of part 2 - you're just dropped into the world and have to figure it out yourself. I do enjoy this way of doing it, it feels fun to discover everything. 

Part 2 also introduces several new gameplay mechanics. Now there exists a Tension Gauge - a meter that gradually fills up during combat, granting access to a powerful super move that targets all enemies when it's full. And you also get Character Growth skill trees - leveling up now earns SP, which can be spent in the skill tree to unlock new moves and passive buffs. For example, Leo can learn an auto-counter passive, which gives him a chance to automatically respond to taking damage by hitting the enemy back for free. There are new skills such as Taunt, which forces enemies to target Leo instead of his friends. And all sorts of other cool stuff can be unlocked too. Additionally, Part 2 allows you to swap your party members as you wish. Previously they would join or leave as the story dictated, but now you can to choose who's in your active party or not. All this means that, starting from part 2, the combat gets a lot more intricate and customisable. But part 2 is also where the more difficult boss encounters start appearing too.

The skill tree in this game has the ability to actually undo decisions. You can unspend your SP and reclose the skill tree nodes and try other ones, any time you like. And sometimes this can be important versus specific bosses - for example, Leo's automatic counterattack skill might actually be a detriment versus a boss who responds to direct damage by exploding... ...So because there exist bosses like this, it is really really good that they also let you unlearn skills whenever you want at no extra cost. We would have some major problems otherwise.

This structure where the first part is linear and the second part is open is very reminiscent of Final Fantasy VI. And in fact, I read somewhere that Sakaguchi did say he re-played Final Fantasy VI for inspiration before working on Fantasian, so I have no doubt that the similarities are fully intentional.

Part 2 is also where the anti-grinding measures comes into play. Since you can do everything in part 2 in any order you choose, they needed to solve a game design problem of how a player might be overleveled for an area just because they decided to do it later. They didn't want their cool boss fights to be trivialised due to players choosing to do other quests first.

So the solution they ended up using is...

After you reach level 35, the game starts significantly reducing the amount of EXP you earn from normal encounters.

And that's it. There's just a flat level 35 cap on EXP gains. Of course you can level up beyond 35, but only from bosses and endgame enemies. So during the majority of Part 2, you'll be hovering around the 35-40 area for a large potion of the game. Only once you reach endgame areas will you resume levelling up normally as this EXP limit seems to selectively apply based on the enemies' levels compared to yours. 

To be honest, it feels a little artificial to limit it like this. Suddenly you just stop earning EXP in the name of game balance. I do appreciate that it means that bosses never become pushovers, but it also means that the order you decide to tackle them in is less important than it could have been. And if there are any RPG fans who prefer to grind levels in order to take down tough bosses, their preferred playstyle is no longer viable at this point.

And also, this level-up situation actually does lead into one side area becoming impossible to complete on a regular playthrough.

Late in the game, you unlock a bonus area called the Void Realm, where you can rechallenge difficult versions of previously-fought bosses. There are three levels to the Void Realm: Outer, Middle, and Inner. However it's only really possible to beat the Outer level. The Middle level has a "recommended level" of 80, which is just ridiculous. You can't hope to touch any of the bosses in the Middle Void Realm at all, and grinding to that level is also made impossible due to the level cap system. So what gives?

Well, this game has New Game Plus mode.

In order to activate New Game Plus, you must reach the room before the final boss, find a treasure chest with a token in it, and take the token to a shrine in an optional area that becomes active if you've been following a semi-optional sidequest chain. If you offer the token to the shrine, it will offer for Leo to go back in time, which is essentially starting a New Game Plus run.

...I find it interesting how defeating the final boss has no bearing on New Game Plus - when you beat the boss, the ending plays and it doesn't save anything to your file. 

In New Game Plus, you get to play again with all your items, weapons, skills, and everything you have already. The main difference is that enemies are higher level. Which means that, now the level cap system now allows you to very easily level up to 80+ ...because whatever calculation it's doing is now taking higher-level enemies into account. I don't get how it works, but for whatever reason I'm now getting a lot more exp just because I'm on New Game Plus.

I...kinda don't like this approach to be honest.

On my New Game Plus playthrough, it took me 6+ hours of speeding through the game, breezing through the bosses with my endgame build, skipping all the cutscenes etc, just to get to the point where I was back in the endgame with all my party members, finally ready challenge the Middle Void Realm.

I didn't exactly want to add an extra 6 hours to my playtime just to finish the last side area before I stopped playing the game. I kind of wish that... they just let me level grind in the end game properly without having to be in New Game Plus?

There's a bit more going on in New Game Plus than JUST the higher level enemies, though - they added an extra explorable cave in the first town for some reason, but it's an annoying maze with no encounters, just lots of dead ends and no map..., and the prize at the end is a unique equipment item that raises maximum HP. I guess that's cool? Dunno why this needed to be New Game Plus exclusive tbh. Game design is funny sometimes. They also give you a brand a new skill tree exclusive to New Game Plus, but it's mostly just stat boosts and endgame style bonus perks such as "increase overworld movement speed" - no tangible new combat abilities or anything.

But anyway.

Overall... I'd say that Fantasian is a really cool classic JRPG! Its battle system is simple and inventive, and its systems mesh very well with both the unique random encounter system, as well as the extremely well-designed boss fights. The characters are fun and lovable, and the storybook narration style cutscenes are very pleasant to watch.

I really like Fantasian! This is a good game!

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I played Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light.

This was a game released on the Famicom in 1990 in Japan only. It's the very first game in the Fire Emblem series!

In 2020, Nintendo did a special promotion for Fire Emblem's 30th anniversary where they temporarily released an English edition of the game on the Nintendo Switch eShop for four months. After this promotion ended, the game was removed entirely from the digital storefront and has become completely unavailable ever since.

I'm not a big fan of this practice at all. They finally translate one of their legacy Japan-only games, and they don't even keep it available for people to buy? Why, Nintendo, why?

As a Fire Emblem fan, I've been waiting for so long for Nintendo to release the Japan-only Fire Emblems 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12 in English! When they finally decide to actually do one of them, why would they then decide to revoke its existence so shortly afterwards? This is cruelty towards your biggest fans, Nintendo, you know that?

But anyway. Obviously I did buy this limited edition release when it was available in 2020, and this game has been sitting in my Nintendo Switch's library for four years now.

I'm a big fan of the Fire Emblem series, but I never actually played very much of the first entry before! What kind of Fire Emblem fan am I, who hasn't even played Fire Emblem 1? I owed it to myself to make use of this rare English version I have access to, and decided to actually play through the dang game!

And... I'd say I had a great time!

...

Okay, so before I get into the actual game itself, I want to talk a bit about this weird Switch version. Nintendo did it in a way that is very unusual from the way that retro translations are typically done.

It seems that this Switch app is running the original Fire Emblem 1 Japanese Famicom ROM, in a bespoke emulator that is specifically set up to replace the Japanese text with the equivalent English text in real-time. The actual underlying ROM it's running is the same old Japanese FE1 ROM as ever.

This means that Nintendo didn't have to actually make the English text work within the memory constraints of a Famicom ROM.

NES games from the olden days did have rather limited English text. Games like Zelda and Simon's Quest could only display awkward limited sentences with only capital letters in big chunky square tiles. Even games like Dragon Warrior, which had remarkably well-written full sentences with proper capitalisation, still had to use a chunky tile-based font.

But the English text here in Fire Emblem is quite thin, and it uses a variable-width font, in a way that I don't think could actually work on NES? I'm no technical expert by any means, but it seems to me like this English text, as seen in this version, would not be capable of displaying on a real NES the way it does here. They managed to fit way too many letters in the small text windows, and they don't use nearly enough abbreviations compared to actual NES games. 

Okay so for example, English versions of 90s games would often struggle with item names - anyone remember "Mrbl3" from Breath of Fire? Here on the Switch FE1, they can fully write out names such as "Silver Sword", whereas the unofficial fan translation romhack for FE1 can only fit "Silver", and then it uses a custom little sword icon instead of the word "sword". The fans had to come up with a solution that worked within the confines of the NES ROM, but Nintendo wasn't under any such constraints for this Switch version.

It looks to me like Nintendo just wanted English text, without the need to actually figure out NES romhacking to do it "properly". It's a completely different philosophy from fan translations - the fans who make them need the game to work in their favourite emulators and on their flash cartridges to play on original hardware, so it has to be done as a modded ROM. Whereas Nintendo knows that this version they're making is only ever intended to run on Nintendo Switch, so there is no need to actually limit it to the constraints of NES hardware.

Nintendo doesn't have much interest in making their solution behave "authentically" like a NES game - they only cared about making one of their older games run in English on Switch, using whatever means they had access to.

But this philosophy comes with some drawbacks. Their method of displaying English text that's reliant on a proprietary hackjob of an emulator makes it so that this version of Fire Emblem 1 is not actually possible for them to release on the Nintendo Switch Online selection, which uses its own NES emulators that wouldn't have these specific hacks in place. It's a bit upsetting because the Japanese version of the NSO selection has the regular Japanese Fire Emblem 1 in there no problem. So if Nintendo ever wants to release their official English version of Fire Emblem 1 again in the future, it'll have to be a special thing separate from their other NES games, and separate from the Japanese side of things too. 

...if it's gonna be such a pain for them to rerelease this thing, why on earth would they remove it from the eShop in the first place? It still bothers me so much.

But anyway....

This version also has a few extra emulator options - you have the ability to save and load a single savestate, and you have the ability to rewind turns mid-battle. They achieve this by quietly saving a savestate in the background at the start of every round, up to 19 of them in a row, and you can pick one of these to revert to at any time. ...and then they call that a "rewind". I suppose they added this for modern fans who are used to how games like Three Houses let you undo a bad turn.

I decided to not make use of these features as I wanted to play the authentic Fire Emblem 1 experience.

Additionally there is a 2x speed option, and you can even set it so that it only comes into effect during the enemy phase (which is a good inclusion, since the computer is fairly slow-thinking in this old game) However it is literally just a 2x speed-up, so it also speeds up the music and makes it all squeaky high-pitched, ...so I don't tend use this feature either. I don't mind watching the slow computer play its turns out to be honest. It's kind of a vibe just watching the game play its turn.

...

But aaaaaanywayyyyy! Let's talk about Fire Emblem 1 itself! I'm gonna go into a bit too much detail, so I hope you're prepared!

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is a turn-based tactical RPG by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, released in 1990 for the Famicom.

Not only is this the first Fire Emblem game, it's one of the very first tactics-based JRPGs in general! Fire Emblem was responsible for inventing and popularising many aspects of Japanese tactics-RPG design and gameplay. 

The story is about Marth, the prince of Altea, a nation in the Archanea region. Marth travels the lands gathering an army, battling various foes from different factions as he rescues neighbouring kingdoms, liberates his homeland from occupation, searches for the legendary sword Falchion, pursues the evil wizard Gharnef, rescues his sister Elice, and eventually faces off against the Shadow Dragon himself, Medeus. 

There are a lot of different story threads going on at the same time here. I did find it a little bit difficult to follow what the actual sequence of events was, because the story is only really told through very brief dialogue scenes that are shown at the start of each chapter. I am fine with this though, because each story scene is mostly there just to give context to its corresponding battle scenario anyway. 

It feels like there's a lot of underlying lore and history that they created for the game's setting, but it feels like it's struggling to fully present itself within the confines of the game's limited dialogue system. It's interesting because it definitely comes across that there is a lot of story detail in this world, yet we as the player only get a small glimpse of it during the game. And of course later Fire Emblem games would flesh out Marth's story and the land of Archanea more thoroughly. 

The story is not so much the focus of the game, though, so let's talk about the gameplay.

The game is structured into chapters, each one being a different battle scenario. There are 25 chapters in total, and you play through each chapter one by one, in order. You cannot go back to previous chapters, and there are no optional battles - this is a strictly linear game where the story only moves forwards.

 You can save your game only after winning a chapter, though you can also create a temporary suspend point if you need to turn the game off mid-battle.

Each chapter takes place on a tile-based map, usually either across various grassy plains, or inside castles (with one desert chapter thrown in for good measure). The player has a number of blue units under their command, and the enemy side has a number of red units. 

You control a cursor on the screen, and with it you can select a unit to see its stats: Level, HP, Strength, Skill, Weapon Level, Speed, Luck, Defense, Movement, Resistance, and EXP. You will also see what items they hold - enemy units all have one item each, usually their equipped weapon, while player units can hold up to four items. Each unit belongs to a certain character class which affects its base stats, what weapons it can use, and other unique attributes such as the Pegasus Knight who can fly.

The game alternates between player phase and enemy phase.

During the player phase, you can select any of your blue units to move, and they can move as many tiles as their Move stat allows. Some kinds of terrain will take more movement to cross - a forest tile takes 2 move to cross for example. In general, mounted classes have more Move than on-foot classes do. Additionally, some terrain may be passable or impassable depending on your unit's class. A flying unit is not impeded by forest, mountain or water tiles at all.

So, when you're moving your little guys around the map, if you position someone within attack range to a red enemy unit, then you can select the Attack option and pick a held weapon to initiate an attack on the enemy. Most units need to be right next to an enemy to attack them, while archers need to be one space away. Mages are flexible and can attack from both nearby and one space away.

During your turn, you can move any of your blue units once each, and when you've ran out of unmoved units, you can press the "end turn" option to begin enemy phase. 

In enemy phase, the computer does the same thing - it moves all of its red units, and once it's done, player phase begins again.

Each enemy unit can have one of three behaviours during enemy phase:

1: They will always try to move closer to your units, and will attack whoever they can reach.

2: They will stand in place until a player unit enters their movement range, at which point they will then start pursuing them.

3: They will never move from the spot they stand, but will still attack anyone who enters their attack range. This type is normally reserved for the boss of each chapter, as the boss guards the goal.

If an enemy unit has multiple player units in their range, they will prioritise targeting units they can deal more damage to. Lower defense units are more likely to be targeted than higher defense units. However, if Marth is in their range, the enemy will ALWAYS prioritise attacking Marth, no matter what. The only time they ignore Marth is when Marth's defense is too high for them to do any damage to, which can start happening lategame.

When an attack occurs, in either player phase or enemy phase, the game shifts to the fight screen where the interaction will play out automatically. During the fight, a few things take place in a certain order:

First the initiator will attack the defender with their equipped weapon. 

Next, the defender will counterattack using their equipped weapon. If the defender cannot reach the attacker with their weapon (for example, if you are attacking an enemy swordfighter with your archer), then no counterattack occurs.

After both units have done their attack, then the two units' speed stats are compared. If one of them is sufficiently faster, then they will do another attack. If both fighters have similar speed, then the extra attack does not occur.

If at any point one of the two fighters' HP reaches zero, they are dead and the fight ends immediately.

The player unit will receive EXP equal to the amount of damage they dealt to the opponent, and if the enemy was killed, then they gain a large amount of additional EXP too. Enemies do not gain EXP at all, though bizarrely, enemy units do inexplicably show a non-zero EXP value in their stat window.

All attacks will either hit or miss, with the likelihood being determined by a calculation based on the attacker's Skill stat, the defender's Speed and Luck stats, terrain bonuses, and the modifications that their held weapon has.

The amount of damage an attack deals is based on calculations involving the attacker's Strength and Weapon Level stats, the defender's Defense stat, as well as additional modifiers from the equipped weapon. 

Magic attacks work differently - every type of spell deals a set amount of damage. Fire always deals 5 damage, Thunder always deals 7 damage, and so on. The Resistance stat reduces damage from magic, however every unit has 0 Res by default, and it can only be raised by artificial means - either using a Talisman (a rare stat-boost item), or by using a consumable Pure Water item, which boosts Res temporarily for a few turns.

Additionally, there is a small chance the attacker will land a critical hit, which deals thrice the damage. The critical hit chance is calculated based on Skill, Luck, and weapon modifiers. Spells can also crit, despite normally having set damage.

This system of critical hits can make battles a quite a lot more exciting - it feels good to occasionally get a lucky break like this, and it happens juuust infrequently enough where you can't ever really rely on it happening, but can still quietly hope for it in the back of your mind. It's a great balance.

(It might be interesting to note that every single enemy unit in the game is forced to have a Luck stat of 0, likely for game balancing purposes - to reduce the game frustrating the player with too many enemy crits.).

Every weapon has a durability value that will decrease by one with every successful hit. Missing does not decrease durability. When the durability reaches zero, the weapon breaks and disappears from the unit's inventory completely. If a weapon breaks, the next weapon in their inventory will automatically be equipped, or without one, they will become unable to attack. It is necessary to frequently resupply your units with new weapons as you play through the game.

Enemies do not have weapon durability.

So yeah, this is basically how the attacks play out. You pick an enemy to attack, who then attacks you back straight away. And sometimes you get two attacks if you're using a speedy unit.

I think this is a very cool way of doing it. The fact that enemies get a chance to strike back is one of the most interesting parts of the strategy in my opinion. If you have an enemy you can't kill in one shot (which is most of them), then you need to think about how to approach them. You need to think about which of your units are capable of taking hits, which of your units can do the most damage to secure a kill, and which of your units should be speedy enough to double-hit the opponent.

There's all sorts of different ways to go about it depending on the circumstances. For example, it is often a good idea to approach an enemy but intentionally not attack them on the player phase. Because if, for example, an enemy takes two turns to kill, then attacking them first means you'll be taking a counterattack, PLUS their next attack when enemy phase starts. But if you just position your unit next to them and end your turn without attacking, then on enemy phase, they'll attack you, you get your counterattack hit in, and now you can finish them off with an attack when player phase starts. It's the difference between getting hit once or getting hit twice.

Also, it might be worth noting that, sometimes NOT killing an opponent on enemy phase is beneficial as well. For example, if you put a strong unit of yours in range of three enemy units, then on the enemy phase, all three will try to attack them. If your unit's counterattack kills the first enemy, then that means there's a free space available for the second enemy to do another attack. And if your counterattack kills the second enemy too, then the third one will also have an opportunity to strike. ...and taking three hits from the enemy all in a row with no chance to back off is a dangerous thing. So sometimes giving your strong unit a weaker weapon that doesn't kill the enemy is a good idea, so that their counterattack leaves the enemy alive, blocking the other two from attacking during the same enemy phase. 

...yeah, okay some of these things may be a bit too complex to describe in a way that makes sense unless you have some Fire Emblem experience. But you see what I mean, right? The attack-counterattack system has a TON of strategic depth to it!

There's a lot to keep in mind, yet somehow it all feels very simple in the moment, since all you're doing as a player is telling a unit where to move and who to attack. The game handles all the calculations and complicated things, and if you as a player don't quite yet know how everything works, you can learn it intuitively, piece by piece, through practical experience.

Knowing how the game works is where the majority of the strategy in this game comes from, so it is important to get a sense for it if you want to do well, but it's not mandatory to be an expert in order to progress either. I think it's a really nice balance.

I actually think this is an example of some really elegantly-designed game systems. It's all simple enough to be able to control with two buttons and a d-pad, meaning a player who doesn't know the game is still able to make progress fairly intuitively... yet the game is still complex enough to have a lot of tactical depth, which allows the gameplay to be highly dynamic and interesting. It's really good stuff. 

...okay so. I'm gonna go a bit on a tangent here, but...

For the most part, I want to speak only of what exists in Fire Emblem 1 without referring so much to things that were introduced in later entries in the series. (after all, it's not fair to judge the first game by what later entries improve on) However, there is one aspect right here that is the most significant difference in my view, that I really can't avoid bringing up.

In later entries of Fire Emblem, there is a "battle preview" window that shows you the exact numbers before you commit to an attack. Starting from Fire Emblem 4, before you confirm your attack, a preview window pops up with the exact attack value, defense value, and chance to hit after all modifiers, on both sides. And from Fire Emblem 6 onwards, the preview window even does the work of calculating the difference between attack and defense to give you a "Might" value, showing the exact number of HP a successful attack will do, as well as now showing the percentage chance of critical-hitting, and whether or not you are fast enough to double-attack.

I've always appreciated how Fire Emblem is such a precise game with its numbers, and how it always gives you all the information you need to make good tactical choices. And this preview window is a big part of that.

Fire Emblem 1 is still a precise game under the hood - there is never any wiggle room in the numbers like in some other RPGs that make use of fuzzy damage rolls... but the precise information is not conveyed to the player very plainly. The lack of a battle preview window can be seriously jarring to a fan of the later games who has come to rely on them for their strategy. Occasionally in Fire Emblem 1, I have initiated a fight where I deal 0 or 1 damage, as I may have underestimated my opponent's Defense stat compared to my Strength + Weapon Level + equipped sword type. This is something that would never occur in later games that would have told me how bad the numbers were beforehand. I would have been given a chance to cancel my move and try something else.

Now, it is possible to gain an idea of how tough an enemy is without the preview window - you can just look at their stats and figure out the numbers yourself (and doing this is useful even in the later games whenever enemies are too far away to initiate battles with, meaning you can't bring up a preview window anyway), but Fire Emblem 1 has a problem that makes even this method of figuring out the damage more difficult... 

You see, the most problematic element in Fire Emblem 1 is how weapon stats are completely hidden. You can see in your inventory you've got items such as "Iron Sword", Steel Sword", "Lance", "Steel Lance", "Killing Edge", "Levin Sword" etc etc etc... and in this game, the difference in names is all you can see. There are no item descriptions in this game at all, and no way of seeing the differences between them aside from trying them out firsthand and paying attention. ...Because I have knowledge from future games, I already know that a Lance is heavier than an Iron Sword (and therefore reduces more Speed when equipped), but the first game makes no effort to inform the player about any of this.

It makes it so that, moreso than in any of the future games, you really do have to learn to acquire a vague "sense" for the fights. You have to observe how much damage an enemy does to one of your units, and with that in mind, extrapolate what that means. If you just saw one of your guys with 10 defense take 12 damage from an attack, you then know that your other guy with 8 defense will take 14 damage if attacked by the same enemy. If you just got doubled by an enemy you attacked with a heavier weapon, you know you should probably switch to a lighter weapon if you go for them again. ...This much is easy enough to figure out as you make your way through a chapter, but the problem is that you don't get access to much of this information before you're already taking the damage, which can put you in a bad spot without having had much chance to avoid it... unless you REALLY know how to calculate the stats perfectly and have encyclopedic knowledge of all weapon modifiers...and can be bothered to do the calculations for every single enemy you come across.

But you know what? It's... mostly fine, actually. After I got used to not having as much information as I was used to, I kinda just... didn't mind? It was sorta freeing actually, to just send my guys out there and hope for the best. Of course it wouldn't always work out, but that's part of the learning experience. It's a bit of a different vibe, but after all's said and done, it didn't actually affect the game as negatively as I was fearing it would. It still felt perfectly like playing Fire Emblem to me. And that is an interesting conclusion to come to, considering how Fire Emblem's precise stat and damage system is something I consider a key part of its identity. This game still absolutely embodies what it means to be a Fire Emblem game, even when the stats aren't front-and-center.

I think the lack of a battle preview window was the main reason I felt put off by Fire Emblem 1 for so long as a series fan. But after giving it a proper chance now, I don't have a problem with it at all. I mean, yeah, I do appreciate that the later Fire Emblem games played to the series' strengths by improving player information, but now that I've properly gotten "into" Fire Emblem 1, I can truly say that it doesn't make the game impossible or unreasonable to have to play without it, and the lack of a preview window isn't some huge "oversight" that makes the game bad. The game is perfectly well-designed the way it is. In fact, Fire Emblem 1 is way easier to complete overall compared to the insane difficulty of Fire Emblem 5, or the less-difficult-than-5-but-still-really-hard difficulty of Fire Emblem 6. And they had preview windows and everything. ... So there really isn't anything to worry about with FE1 in my opinion. 

Besides, besides........ why am I so worked up about knowing the damage numbers anyway? I mean... what happens if one of your units dies, huh? It's not big deal, right? ...right?

Well... it kiiiiinda is. It really depends on your perspective. I'll get to unit death in a moment.

Let's talk about the player units more broadly first, shall we?

In Fire Emblem, the enemy red units are mostly generic nameless footsoldiers, however the player's blue units are ALL unique individual characters with a name and a face. Every single one of them.

You start the game with a handful of units - Marth the Lord, Caeda the Pegasus Knight, Jagen the Paladin, Abel and Cain the Cavaliers, Draug the Knight, and Gordin the Archer. On the first chapter, there is a village, and if you bring Marth to this village, Wrys the Curate is added to the team. If you don't bring Marth to the village before winning the chapter, then Wrys can never be added to the team for the entire rest of the game. Recruitable characters do not appear later on if you miss them.

On Chapter 2, four characters automatically join Marth's team - Ogma the Mercenary, and a trio of Axe Fighters: Bord, Cord, and Barst. Additionally, if you pay attention to the red enemy units, you will notice that two of them are not generic bad guy units, but are in fact named and faced individuals: Darros the Pirate, and Castor the Hunter. These two will attack the player and can be killed by the player as normal, however if you approach them with the right character, a "Talk" option appears alongside the regular attack option. If you talk to them, you can convince them to join your side, turning them from red to blue. Marth needs to talk to Darros, and Caeda needs to talk to Castor.

When recruiting enemy units like this, it isn't always obvious which of your units needs to go talk to them. Throughout most of the game, it's usually Marth or Caeda, and you can usually figure it out by paying attention to their dialogue as they attack your units. Though some may take trial and error.

Chapter 3 again has two characters who join automatically - Julian the Thief and Lena the Curate, as well as an additional enemy character that can be recruited by talking: Navarre the Mercenary.

Now, from chapter 4 onwards, the game puts a limit on which characters you're allowed to bring. If you've recruited everybody available thus far, you'll have 17 characters, but there are only 15 slots available on your team for this chapter. And Marth always needs to be one of them.

Throughout the entire game, new characters are constantly available, either automatically obtained at the start, or through recruiting during the chapter. In fact, there only exist five chapters in the whole game that don't have any new characters to obtain.

In total, there are 52 playable characters in the game. (though you can only have 51 of them at a time, because Samson and Arran from Chapter 16 are mutually exclusive)

However, the available team size is always going to be around 12-17ish depending on the chapter. So you will never have an opportunity to use everybody if your goal is to train a strong team... since there's only 25 chapters in the game, with a set number of enemies to fight against, there's only so much EXP to go around, you know? You have to make decisions about which units to take into all your fights, and which units to bench. And if you gain a new unit you want to use, you might have to decide who in your main lineup is gonna get benched.

Now... this is where we can talk about death.

In Fire Emblem, when one of your units loses all of their HP from an enemy attack, they die. And when they die, they are DEAD. They do not come back. When this happens, you have to make a choice. Do you reset the game to start the chapter over and be more careful this time? Or do you continue on regardless?

In terms of gameplay, a unit death is not usually too big of a deal, because you will generally have enough benched units to replace them. However, if you lose one of your more well-trained and capable units, or if you lose a unit that has a unique ability, that might be a much bigger blow to your team - you may not have a suitable replacement, so restarting might be the correct play even if you don't mind a few deaths here and there. It's all up to the player and their playstyle.

There's one important aspect at play here that changes the whole dynamic up. And that's the emotional or personal aspect.

In Fire Emblem, all 52 playable characters have a unique name, a unique face, a backstory, some dialogue scenes, and other traits that make them unique as individuals. If you're someone who grows attached to your little army as you play through the game, you might not want to let any of them die at all. I certainly don't like seeing any of my guys die, that's for sure, haha. So for someone who prefers to keep everyone alive, they might play with the mindset that any death is unacceptable and requires a restart, no matter what. And for some players, it's not just about developing an attachment to them, it can also be about wanting to play a "perfect" completionist playthrough with no deaths, too.

But on the other hand, another perfectly valid mindset to have is the roleplay aspect. When you think about it, everyone's journey through Fire Emblem is uniquely their own story - which characters they trained, who became the strongest unit, who tried their best but couldn't keep up, who was benched, who was given the best weapons, who was given which roles in each chapter... there's so many different ways a playthrough of FE1 can play out, and an imaginative player might think of these scenarios from the perspective of a storyteller. If you think of Fire Emblem in this way, then a character's untimely death can be considered part of the unique "story" of that particular playthrough, and it might make things feel more meaningful to leave it that way. Maybe they valiantly sacrificed themselves for the sake of a friend? Or maybe they just got a bit overconfident? Were they always destined to die on the battlefield? There's a lot to work with if this is how you like to think about your RPGs, and Fire Emblem is quite accommodating toward this mindset.

I think Nintendo were very deliberate when creating this aspect of Fire Emblem. They could have made the player units just as generic as the enemy units, with only a handful of important guys like Marth being unique.... but they didn't. They went to the trouble to design and name over fifty unique characters for the player to use - and they did all this for the very first entry in the series! This means that the fact that everyone is unique and can potentially permanently die was considered by Nintendo to be an important part of the game design from the very start.

It really does affect the way you feel about using them and training them. It makes things more personal.

And the fact that there are so many spare units available does mean that the designers do expect a few of them to die here and there through the course of a regular playthrough. It's part of the game design as well. Having 50 characters in the game gives the lesser-skilled players some much needed leeway to work with.

...Oh and by the way, if Marth dies, it's an immediate Game Over, and you are forced to restart the chapter. He's the main character after all. 

Anyway. ... I haven't yet talked about how you actually go about winning a chapter, have I?

The goal of every chapter in Fire Emblem 1 is to bring Marth over to the enemy castle. Or if you are in an indoors chapter, then the enemy's throne. Either way, the goal is to make Marth stand on the specific goal tile, and then select the "seize" action on the menu to win. This is easier said than done, however, as there is always a strong enemy unit standing on that tile that must be dealt with first, not to mention all of the regular enemy units scattered around each map that will pursue you.

Each map starts with your units on one end of the map, the boss enemy sitting on their castle on the other end of the map, and lots of enemy units placed all over the map. You can select which of your units to use before the chapter begins, but you cannot choose their starting location. ...You can't even swap their starting points between each other, which is a bit annoying - the game can just decide your frontline units are gonna start in the back, and it'll take a turn or two to sort it out once the battle begins.

The maps also have some other important features and landmarks to pay attention to aside from the goal. These are: 

- Villages - they can be visited only by Marth. A village will give Marth a reward of money, an item, or a new character. However, enemy Thief units can destroy villages if Marth does not reach them in time.

- Houses - they can be visited by anyone. Visiting a house will give a few lines of text from the NPC living there - usually a hint, or a small snippet of lore. 

- Shops - There are two types: Armory for weapons, and Item Shop for other things. A unit must stand on the shop tile and have free space in their inventory in order to buy from a shop. That's right, all shopping has to be done mid-battle in this game. There are no between-battle towns where you can shop at your own pace or anything like that.

- Treasure chests - Can be opened by a Thief or by Marth (except for the chapter 6 chests, which Marth can't open). Chests have an item or money inside. Enemy Thief units will also pursue chests, and if an enemy opens one, the treasure inside is lost and cannot be obtained.

- Locked door - A door that blocks your way in certain areas. Can be opened by any character with a door key in their inventory, or a Thief with a lockpick. There are also a few locked drawbridges that require a specific "bridge key" to lower.

- Fort - a special type of terrain that, in addition to granting an evasion bonus, also heals a unit for each turn they spend standing on one. Can be very useful if you don't have any other way of regaining lost HP. (Maybe your Curate is on the other side of the map? Or you didn't bring one?) Additionally, forts are where enemy reinforcements come from. Reinforcements are not random - rather, each chapter has a set list of reinforcements that will appear on specific turns at specific forts. If you have a unit blocking the fort by standing on its tile on the turn that an enemy is supposed to appear, then it will prevent them from appearing entirely, which is a good strategy to reduce danger. (though if you're lacking in EXP, reducing the number of enemies that appear in the chapter might not always be beneficial?)

- Arena - These are fairly rare compared to other structures - only 6 chapters in the game have an arena available. The arena is a colosseum-like facility where you can fight to the death for a prize. It's the only way to gain additional EXP outside of the limited number of regular enemies, as well as the only source of additional money outside of the specific chests that have money in them... but it is risky. When you put a unit in an arena, you see a wager. If you feel confident, you can accept the wager to pit your unit against a random opponent. The higher the wager, the stronger the foe. In the arena, the same battle mechanics as normal apply, except it continues until one of the fighters dies, and there's no way to back out if it starts going poorly.

Because you cannot see the enemy stats before accepting the fight, I tend to find arenas way too risky to ever want to use. But they are an interesting option for players who need a bit of extra cash and don't mind the risk of death. Or for players who know the game way too well, and have encyclopedic knowledge of all kinds of possible arena foes and which ones appear at which wager ranges and... yeah. That's not most players.

- Convoy - Every chapter has this. When a unit of yours obtains an item but cannot hold it, it gets automatically stored in the convoy. You can retrieve items from the convoy by bringing a unit there and using their turn to store or take items. The convoy can hold 40 items total. ...The inventory-management in Fire Emblem 1 is very fiddly, because you have to do it all mid-battle like this, and it can take several turns just to accomplish the task of giving one item to one guy. Because once a unit has used the convoy and ended their turn there, they're blocking the tile, so no-one else can access the convoy until next turn. It's a bit annoying. There is no camp menu between chapters where you can manage items unfortunately, it's all gotta be done during a chapter, one move at a time.

So there's actually a pretty decent amount of stuff you may want to accomplish outside of just aiming for the boss directly. Buying new weapons, distributing the weapons to the right party members, going for the chests, killing Thieves before they ruin everything, figuring out how to safely recruit any new characters...and plain ol' just killing all the remaining enemies for the sake of getting as much EXP as you possibly can. The chapters can be pretty dynamic, with the player able to aim for multiple goals at once. I find it really interesting!

I haven't gone into detail about the different kinds of character classes yet. There are actually 22 different classes in Fire Emblem 1, which is quite a lot for an old game!

They are:

- Lord - a special class reserved for Marth, the main character. A swift and skilled swordsman who can use rapiers.

- Knight - has high defense, decent strength, but low mobility.

- Cavalier - a mounted fighter with high mobility and decent strength, can use swords and lances.

- Paladin - a Cavalier that has been promoted with a Paladin's Honor - stronger than the Cavalier in every way.

- Archer - has a ranged attack and decentish defense.

- Sniper - an Archer that has been promoted with an Orion's Bolt - has high skill.

- Hunter - has a strong ranged attack, but low defense.

- Horseman - a mounted archer, high mobility and has a strong ranged attack.

- Pegasus Knight - fragile and rather weak, but has high mobility and can fly over any terrain. Weak to bows.

- Wyvern Knight - a Pegasus Knight that has been promoted with a Skydrake Whip - much sturdier than the fragile Pegasus knight with higher mobility. Still weak to bows.

- Mercenary - a balanced swordfighter with high skill and speed.

- Hero - a Mercenary that has been promoted with a Hero's Crest - stronger with more skill and defense.

- Mage - fragile defense. Can use magic tomes, which inflict set damage.

- Curate - cannot attack and completely defenseless, can use staves for healing and bestowing other effects to allies.

- Bishop - a Curate or Mage that has been promoted with a Bishop's Ring - can use both magic tomes and staves.

- Fighter - uses axes, very strong, but low accuracy and low defense. 

- Pirate - uses axes, low defense, but can walk over ocean tiles.

- Thief - very weak, very fragile, useless in a battle, but can use lockpicks and open treasure chests. High mobility and speed too.

- General - extremely strong in both attack and defense, but has poor mobility.

- Ballistician - rides a wheeled ballista, has a ranged attack and very strong defense, but extremely poor mobility, and their ammunition is rare to come across.

- Manakete - a mystic dragonkin who has the ability to transform into a powerful dragon when equipped with a Dragonstone, useless without their stone. 

- Freelancer - a special class exclusive to one character named Xane, has the ability to temporarily mimic any ally. You can even have two Lords in play at once if you let Xane mimic Marth!

...That's quite a lot of variety in different types of unit! Honestly, for the first game in the series, I'm quite impressed with how they weren't willing to just stick to the basics - they needed to have some interesting variety in there, and I appreciate that. it's clear to me that they really wanted to push the gameplay systems as far as they could go, and all of these different classes are a result of trying to cram as much variety in the game as possible. I really like this.

While different classes have different stats, that doesn't mean that all characters of a class are the same as each other. In fact, two units of the same class can still be quite different to one another, and this comes about due to the level-up system.

When a unit levels up, each of their stats may or may not increase by 1, determined randomly. The chance of a stat increasing is based on the character's individual growth rates, which is unique for each character. For example, the first Paladin in the game, Jagen, is an old, seasoned veteran, and as such, his growth rates are very low. (as he has supposedly already reached the peak of his ability as a knight)

When Jagen levels up, his HP, Strength, Skill, and Speed stats only have a 10% chance each of increasing, and his Luck, Weapon Level, and Defense stats all have a 0% chance to increase. It's quite possible (and actually quite likely) that Jagen will get absolutely no stat gains at all when he levels up, making him more and more of a liability the further into the game you get. It can even feel like EXP given to Jagen is EXP wasted, as it could have been better going to someone that would actually benefit from levelling up.

A Paladin you get later in the game, Midia, is a young lady knight of noble upbringing, and her potential is significantly higher than Jagen's. Every time Midia levels up, her HP has an 80% chance to increase, Strength has 30%, Skill 50%, Speed 50%, Luck 10%, Weapon Level 50%, and Defense 20%. Even though Jagen and Midia are both Paladins who each start out with very similar stats to each other, it makes much more sense to bench Jagen in favour of Midia (or any other Paladin) as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, a unit's growth rates are completely hidden from the player. There is no way to actually get this information other than from external guides. In order to get an inkling for a unit's stat growths, you kind of just have to...pay attention whenever they level up. Which isn't great for long-term planning. Some players who aren't aware of the stat growth system might always decide to include Jagen in the team, since he's one of Marth's loyal retainers and is extremely strong at the start of the game. ...and the fact that it may be a bad idea to keep him around is not really communicated very well at all. 

This is a problem that unfortunately can only be avoided by savvy, experienced players. But even so, a newcomer shouldn't be too worse-off if they aren't aware of the growth rate system. There are enough units with high growths where this doesn't become a huge problem, even if you do keep Jagen around for every battle. it just means you're not playing at maximum potential, which isn't necessary to beat the game anyway.

A character can only reach level 20 before they stop gaining any experience. So once they reach 20, whatever stats they happened to roll throughout the game are the stats they're stuck with. (at least, without using the rare stat-boosting items)

When you want to promote a promotable class (Cavalier, Archer, Pegasus Knight, Mercenary, Curate, or Mage), you need to raise them to at least level 10, and then use a rare promotion item on them. When a unit promotes, they gain heavy stat boosts, and importantly, they revert back to level 1 - which means that their potential for gaining more stats is increased even further.

This also means that a pre-promoted character like Jagen or Midia has less potential than a promotable character like Cain or Abel. Because there's so much more opportunity to gain level-ups. A Cain who has been trained to level 10 and promoted into a level 1 Paladin has had 9 more opportunities to gain stat boosts compared to Midia who starts as a level 1 Paladin. And you could even wait until Cain reaches level 20 before promoting if you wanted to truly maximise his potential, though this isn't usually necessary, since a Paladin Cain is immediately more useful than a Cavalier Cain, even without the extra 10 level-ups.

...Also, by the way, the way Curates level up is kinda stupid. As healers, they cannot attack enemies, so the only way for them to earn experience is to successsfully avoid dying when an enemy attacks them. Every time this happens, they gain a chunk of EXP.

So to actually raise a Curate up to level 10 in order to promote them, you kind of have to artificially grind them on an enemy Thief or some other enemy that isn't going to kill them, while keeping them on a fort so they heal off the damage, and then keep passing turns over and over and... it's a mess.

Later Fire Emblem games would change it so that staff-users gain EXP every time they use a staff, which....kinda should have been how it worked to begin with??? ....Again, I don't want to talk too much about how the later games improved things, but this is such a stupid little thing, it was worth bringing up.

anyway...I think... I think that's about everything there is to this game.

In summary,

Fire Emblem 1 is a game where you play through 25 chapters, fighting your way through the maps by positioning your units with the cursor, to defeat each boss so you can get Marth to the goal, all while recruiting new characters of various different classes as you progress. Each map is a different unique challenge to overcome, with various different kinds of terrain and enemies to contend against.

Attacking an enemy means taking a counterattack from them immediately, but the same also applies to the opponent during their turn too, and you can use this to your advantage if you play your options right. All your recruitable units are unique individuals, and death is permanent.

That's about the gist of Fire Emblem.

Overall the game really impressed me with just how much it has going on for the first entry in the series. It feels like the essence of Fire Emblem came out already fully-formed with this first entry, which is not what I was expecting to be honest. I was expecting something a lot more prototypical, but it really is genuinely a proper Fire Emblem experience, which is really cool to see. 

So uh. .... Yeah. That's Fire Emblem 1! This game took me 40ish hours to complete, which is kind of insane for a 1990 Famicom game. Very cool.

I do want to play more tactics RPGs in the future. Fire Emblem is my favourite of course, but I am still very curious about playing various different kinds. Maybe I'll get to them soon, who knows?