Honestly? I find myself in unmitigated preference for FE7. I cannot give preference or creedence to anything previous to 7 but I found Sacred Stones a walkover and thus that fails to actually entertain me as a videogame. Even ignoring that, other Fire Emblems display stories I find superior.
Now, as to FE9 and FE10, yes - they were good but I still found them easier than Rekka no Ken. The challenge and difficulty in trying a different tactic or entering the game on a harder difficulty is a rather mitigating factor.
As to story, meh - Path of Radiance did not hit me as particularly special for the FE games. A cool story, graphics are shinier but the other games have cool stories and graphics can go hang themselves. If the game doesn't lack textures and/or the style suits the gameplay, I'm not concerned with how many pixels it employs.
I could cite FE10 as a good, if not amazing game but something that makes for a huge sticking point, one I just cannot take out of account - Battle Saves. They provide a safety net that whilst it's my choice to use, left the game feeling somewhat unsatisfying for having them there at all. It took out a lot of my investment in playing through a chapter or following a tactic. By knowing I could, half way through - just cut out the first half of a level, I lacked as strong an investment.thought in what I was doing and thus lacked an investment in my units that I had in other Fire Emblems.
The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. - Milton Friedman.
