Of the two.

I'd go Fire Emblem. VC is good. But it has a number of flaws. Some of which are being corrected by the PSP game but still.

The biggest flaw is AI. The Enemy pretty much never makes full use of their medals... ever... and couldn't because if they did the battle system would be completely broken and unfun.

Which means the player has a pretty unique "exploit" vs the AI opponent which really... is kinda bothersome.

Ogre Series is better then both though....

Outside of Fire Emblem it's what EVERY SRPG is based off of. 

Valkyria Chronicles: Better music graphics story and game play=win for me.

War of the Lions is basically just an Ogre Battle game with the Final Fantasy class system over it.  It should be nowhere near a "best SRPG" discussion.

It's just doing almost exactly what the previous seires did with little to no innovation.

My god... did they fix the difficulty in the remix on the DS game?

The PS1 game was freaking brutal.  Hardest SRPG game every.  You were constantly outnumbered, against higher leveled enemies in areas where you often couldn't bait a few without getting the majority of them on top of you.

I found Knights incredibly dull. I played around 16 missions before calling it quits. I read there are 40 or so missions, so take it as you will.

Each round is time based. When your 60 seconds are up, the round is over. You control this soul/wisp thing using the stylus. You control it to capture crystals or w/e to keep your power up, but you also need to avoid enemy attacks. If you get hit, your time decreases. The problem here is the game gives you more than enough rounds to finish the battle. Out of the 20 rounds they give you, you'll probably use 9 at most. The stylus-dodging novelty wears off fairly fast.

Battles are all the same. You select and attach the right weapon to a knight, and then wait for the enemy to get into the weapon's attack range while avoiding the enemy's attack. You select the weapon using the stylus, and then you release the stylus when the enemy gets into the range. If you choose the element the enemy is weak against, the enemy will die in two - three hits. It's been the same for the 16 missions I've played. Nothing changed other than the maps. There's no challenge in this game. The knights never got attacked or died. Keep in mind that your knights don't move and you can't move them while battling, so make sure you wisely place your knights.

You can also recruit knights, but the game hasn't forced me to recruit them. In each battle, there were always 2 - 5 guest knights, and those were the ones I needed. The only thing I liked about the game was the artstyle.

I suggest you rent it if you can. I personally didn't like the gameplay.

Yeah, Radiant Stones is a good one.  Decent story, and there is an overland map and random encounters so those who are intimidated by difficulty can level grind.

It's still brutal. Sorry. I haven't encountered the problem of not being able to bait some stragglers though. I do it all the time in the game. Maybe they did change that.

I enjoyed Valkyria Chronicles more than Fire Emblem.

I also think Jeanne d'arc deserves a mention!

Jeane D'Arc feels off... I don't know how to put it.  It's like they played nearly every SRPG ever, took most of what worked and threw it in a game with a good story...

yet something still feels off... I can't put my finger on it.  Maybe it's that its too easy... or that it's juggling too many things.  I'm not sure.

I'm not sure either, but I do know I really enjoyed it. It's my top 3 all time handheld games probably.