In 2021, I wrote about Fire Emblem for our GBA 20th anniversary story. Over the past five years, I’ve played it from start to finish twice, and I can once again confirm that it’s my favorite Game Boy Advance game.
I hadn’t even heard of Fire Emblem as a series before jumping into it. Advanced Warsanother Intelligent Systems game. From there, I discovered that there was a whole series of fantasy-inspired games with similar gameplay, but which had never been translated into English. Thirsty to know more, but with a distinct lack of Japanese skills, I spent a year delving deeper Final Fantasy Tacticsold Shining Force games, Vandal hearts and basically anything that vaguely resembled Fire Emblem and was available in English. Then, at the back of Advanced Wars‘ success, Nintendo decided to release a Fire Emblem game in the West, and simply called it Fire Emblem.
Published as Fire Emblem: The Flaming Blade in Japan, Fire Emblem was technically the second GBA FE title and the seventh overall. The battles were challenging and its RPG elements appealed to me much more than Advanced Wars never done. With a vast, twisty story and a cast of characters I really care about, I was instantly hooked. Which made it even more difficult when I encountered perhaps FE’s most famous mechanic: permadeath. The loss of a character who saw you die a pathetic, meaningless death, all because you left him one square away from safety, is memorable.
Despite a few missteps, Fire Emblem has become my favorite series over the years, and I’m deeply excited about it. The weaving of fortune we finally get a release date. But I still come back to the GBA game to relive this moment of love at first sight.
In 2026, I know the game so much that it’s very rare that I lose a member of my party by accident. These once difficult battles now turn into a warm embrace. Unfortunately, playing it has become more difficult in recent years. Even though I still have my original basket, my Game Boy Advance and my old DS Lite are really worse to wear. I recently tried playing on the Switch 2’s online library, but I think the screen size just isn’t suitable for GBA games.
In this regard, modern retro handhelds have been a godsend. I spent way too much money on the Aya Neo Pocket Micro Classic, a machine with the same aspect ratio as the original GBA, and I loved playing Fire Emblem on that. However, it feels strange playing on anything other than a Game Boy Advance. I’ve been saying this for almost a decade, but I wish Nintendo would take advantage of this deep thirst for its old games and produce a bespoke console similar to the classic editions of the SNES and NES.
— Aaron Souppouris, editor-in-chief
