Obtaining the Fire Emblem

Before long, my brother discovered another game through Nintendo Power magazine: Fire Emblem. It was made by Intelligent Systems, the same company that made Advance Wars. Its gameplay is also very similar to that of Advance Wars, although there are some key differences. First of all, the plot is more serious and the character development is deeper. These are the primary reasons why I keep playing and replaying it and the other games in the Fire Emblem series to this day. Secondly, unlike Advance Wars, it doesn’t have a modern setting—Fire Emblem takes place in a fantasy world with knights, kings, nobles, magic, and dragons. One thing about the Fire Emblem games that makes each new one refreshing, though, is that they don’t stick with the same world or the same characters in game after game; they usually make two games for each world and its associated cast. Third, the commander of each army takes part in the battle as a unit in his or her own right in Fire Emblem. In fact, all allied units and a few enemy units are unique characters themselves. If you lose a unit, it dies and cannot be resurrected by any means, so keeping your units alive is much more important in Fire Emblem than in Advance Wars. Units have different classes—for example, Mages cast nature-related spells with ice, wind, fire, and lightning and tend to be fairly well-rounded while Knights wield lances and tend to be slow but heavily resistant to physical attacks. Units can change class once; the change gives stat bonuses and usually allows the character to wield a new type of weapon. Additionally, units grow stronger as they battle in the fashion of a typical role-playing game with experience points and level-ups. The maximum level for every character of every class is 20. It’s possible to change classes starting at level 10, but it’s usually beneficial to reach level 20 in a character’s original class before changing classes because if he changes classes early and reaches level 20 in a promoted class before the end of the game, he ceases to improve where he still would have been able to improve further if he’d waited and gained more levels in his original class.

Like Advance Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance before it, Fire Emblem was a game I could not share with my brother, so we each had our own copy. And like Advance Wars, I found a forum online centered around Fire Emblem. It was called Fire Emblem Fusion. Since there were no COs in Fire Emblem, I just called myself “Kyle” this time. Continuing the pattern I established on AWB, I typed my messages in orange all the time. On Fire Emblem Fusion’s welcome board, I introduced myself as “the orange man.” However, it turned out that Fire Emblem Fusion already had an orange man. His username was “SwordsAreShiney,” erroneously spelled with an “e” between the “n” and the “y” of “Shiney,” but strangely, that didn’t bother me. In real life he was a Canadian guy a year or two older than me. He and I developed an instantaneous but short-lived rivalry that suddenly reversed itself into a close friendship based on the color orange, and thus orange became my favorite color in general rather than just my favorite Advance Wars color. SwordsAreShiney, or SAS for short, led me to a different Fire Emblem forum, Fire Emblem Planet.

When I joined Fire Emblem Planet or FEP, much like when I joined AWB, it was just starting. SAS was a Global Moderator on FEP, so I had a friend in power from the beginning. Once for my birthday, he made the entire forum bright orange and kept it that way for most of the day despite heavy backlash from most users. In a reversal of the events of AWB, my brother joined after I did. Some of the people from AWB, mostly people I’d been friends with, joined FEP as well.

Through FEP, I learned that the Fire Emblem I’d played was actually the seventh game in the series although it’d been the first to be translated into languages other than Japanese. The sixth game in the series was a chronological sequel to the seventh, and it centered around Roy, who remains one of my favorite characters from Super Smash Brothers Melee. So I got myself a copy of the sixth game and started playing it. Some things about it were very difficult because I couldn’t read any Japanese at the time, and I still can’t read most of it because the Japanese use their own alphabets, called hiragana and katakana, more than they use Chinese characters which they call kanji. I can’t even read all of the kanji that they do use because although I do study Chinese, reading isn’t my strong point. Still, the game mechanics of Fire Emblem 6 were mostly the same as those of Fire Emblem 7, so I managed to get through it. At some point after I started playing Fire Emblem 6, I became aware of translation patches for the game that were being distributed on the Internet and got one of those, too, which immensely increased my enjoyment of the game because like Fire Emblem 7, it had a compelling plot and deep character development. Later, I played the eighth Fire Emblem game before it was officially translated, and I liked it quite a bit. However, when the translations were finished and the eighth game started to be sold in stores, I found that I’d liked it better in Japanese—it seemed like they didn’t even try to make the characters realistic and likeable, and I’m pretty sure the story and setting were thrown together in an afternoon by the laziest guy on staff at Intelligent Systems. Some members on FEP didn’t care about these things, though, because there were a few differences in game mechanics that people liked. However, the people at Intelligent Systems were apparently intelligent enough to realize that Fire Emblem 8 wasn’t as good as the other games in the series, so they never made another game with the world and characters of the eighth game. Fire Emblem 9, which featured an all-new world with its own characters, also came out while I was still active on FEP. I never got the ninth game in Japanese, but fortunately, it was a return to the previous level of quality in story and character development, so the English version was just fine. The star of Fire Emblem 9, Ike, replaced Roy as one of the playable characters in the next Super Smash Brothers game, Brawl, and I don’t mind that.