Best Western Fire Emblem

[Super_Boom]

1.) Path of Radiance - Not only my favorite game in the franchise, but one of my favorite games ever. Best characters, best story, best OST, and the added gameplay mechanics only improved the old formula. My only real complaint was how the post-game characters were so tedious to unlock...but eh...they're just bonus characters.

2/3.) Radiant Dawn/Blazing Sword (Fire Emblem GBA) - Can't pick between these two. Radiant Dawn is a direct sequel to Path of Radiance, and while it improves in some areas (animation, content, classes) and wraps up a lot of loose ends from the previous game, it also takes a step back in some areas (supports, character balance). The difficulty is a bit sporadic, with the chapters in Part I being much harder than Part II, and Part III starting off even easier than that, before the difficulty jumps up here and there. The story is still great, but it also falls into the old RPG sequel pattern of forcing new characters into the spotlight at first (though fortunately the original characters eventually take it back). 

Blazing Sword was a lot of fun as well. It doesn't have all the features of the games above, but the difficulty is consistent, and the support conversations are far better than Radiant Dawn.

Both Radiant Dawn and Blazing Sword had a bad habit of hiding important story elements in gaidens or side conversations, some of which are pretty hard to unlock. If you plan to try either of these games, I'd recommend checking out a guide to make sure you don't miss any of the prerequisites.

4.) Awakening - Awesome game with awesome story and awesome characters. It combines elements of nearly every previous game, which creates some balancing issues. The issues only affect the player team, so they're non-essential to complete the game, but the option is always there. The support system was brought a step further, in that characters at max relationship levels actually will have kids that join the story. Essentially every character can get with any other character, which opens up a lot of possibilities, but it's also done at the expense of support depth, so most of the conversations are just cute little jokes rather than intimate conversations used to flesh out characters past the usual trope they fall under (with exceptions of course). There is also a world map, which means the game allows you to grind rather than progress linearly through the story. 

5.) Sacred Stones - It uses the same game engine as Blazing Sword, so the game is pretty similar, with the big differences being branching promotions (so  one class can choose to promote into one of two classes instead of a locked one), and a world map like Awakening.

6.) Shadow Dragon - This is my least favorite of the localized games, just because of how dated it feels, and how the reclass option makes characters feel less unique (though they weren't very unique in the first place in this one). Not a bad game by any means, but I enjoyed the other five a lot more.

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And I would love to see Sword of Seals and FE12 (DS) make it over here. Especially the former. If that game was released was on the eShop I'd buy it twice!