Nostalgia Video Gaming - 'Fire Emblem' Follow Up

You know, it's funny how many things you think you know, when you don't have the whole picture. When I made my review on the Fire Emblem series, I got a few things wrong, and I didn't realize it until I took a closer look at some of the older games. Since this has been bugging me a while, I thought I'd do a quick follow up to hopefully correct any mistakes I made. First off, Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones is a much more fun game than I first thought. It runs the same engine as Fire Emblem (Blazing Sword in Japan) and many of the character sprites are the same. There were several times where I mistook Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones characters for Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword characters. But this is one of two games that led me to realize how unoriginal Fire Emblem: Awakening was.

Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones features and overworld map from which you travel to the next chapter, or backtrack to face roving monsters, or to revisit shops from the previous chapters. Fire Emblem: Awakening kept the overworld map pretty much the same, adding only paralogue levels, and changing up the monsters. One mistake I know I made came when I said that Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance was the first to feature skills. That was very wrong and I knew it, but somehow I didn't realize that. Unreleased in the U.S. is Fire Emblem: Holy War (the fourth title in the series as a whole,) which actually was the first to feature skills. But not only that, it takes more originality points away from Fire Emblem: Awakening by being the first to include the second generation of characters, which can be raised by playing match-maker with your first generation. And, I wasn't clear when prefacing Fire Emblem: Awakening too: I had been following the release of Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem (which was a remake of the third Fire Emblem game, not released in the U.S.) but I never saw that reach our shores. And then Fire Emblem: Awakening blindsided me. I had also made a very controversial move in saying the various worlds of Fire Emblem don't match up. And I will stick by that until proven wrong... which could happen soon. I am still certain that some of the games (such as Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn) involve cataclysmic events that would really goof up an over-arching timeline across this series. But if there are multiple continents, universes, or some such way of limiting the influence of each story's gods to that story, then its possible that Fire Emblem has a single world. Or multiverse. Or whatever.   Photos via: Google