#15 - Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - Nintendo Gamecube
The Gamecube is awesome, the system that pretty much shaped my love for videogames, and one of those games was Path of Radiance, still what I hold as something as perfect as it can get from the series.
A great story filled with proper good characters, that are both instantly likable for the most part, and have proper depth if taken the time to do support conversations. The level design is consistently fantastic, the first 7 chapters are a really great, gradual tutorial, chapter 8 puts that knowledge to the test, and then everything else is a really good challenge, with the only point of contention for me being the final boss, is another of those, only a select number of characters can realistically damage it without getting killed, and that sucks the fun out of it, not as bad as Blazing Sword, but still. My favorite part is definitely the gauntlet of chapters in the Serenes Forest, that pretty much cemented my love for the game. The music starts out kinda bland, but it gets better over the course of the adventure, the showdown against the Black Knight, ending the final mission and getting to listen to Bittersweet Victory, and the incredible credits theme Life Returns, what a way to end the adventure.
As a whole this remains the peak of the series for me on most fronts, Fates Conquest is the closest I ever got to something being equally as good if not better at times than PoR in the level design, but that game has a pretty uh, questionable story, so it loses some points there.
