In 2021, I wrote about Fire Emblem for our 20th anniversary GBA story. Over the past five years, I’ve played it from start to finish two times, and can once again confirm that it is my favorite Game Boy Advance game.
I hadn’t even heard about Fire Emblem as a series until I got into Advance Wars, another Intelligent Systems game. From there, I discovered that a whole series of fantasy-inspired games with similar gameplay existed, but had never been translated into English. Thirsty for more, but with a distinct lack of Japanese language skills, I spent a year getting deep into Final Fantasy Tactics, old Shining Force games, Vandal Hearts and basically anything vaguely Fire Emblem-shaped that was available in English. Then, off the back of Advance Wars‘ success, Nintendo decided to release a Fire Emblem game in the west, and simply called it Fire Emblem.
Released as Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade in Japan, Fire Emblem was technically the second GBA FE title and the seventh overall. The battles were challenging, and its RPG elements drew me in much more than Advance Wars ever did. With a vast story full of twists and turns, and a cast of characters I truly cared about, I was instantly hooked. Which made it all the more tough when I encountered perhaps FE’s most famous mechanic: permadeath. The loss of a character who’s seen you through thick and thin dying a pathetic and meaningless death, all because you left them one square away from safety, is memorable.
Despite a few missteps, over the years Fire Emblem became my favorite series, and I am deeply excited by Fortune’s Weave finally getting a release date. But I still come back to the GBA game to relive that love-at-first-sight moment.
In 2026, I’m so familiar with the game that it’s very rare for me to lose a party member by accident. Those once-challenging battles are now more of a warm embrace. Unfortunately, playing it has become harder in recent years. Though I still have my original cart, both my Game Boy Advance and my old DS Lite are really worse for wear. I tried to play on the Switch 2’s online library recently, but I think the screen size just isn’t a great match for GBA games.
In that respect, modern retro handhelds have been a godsend. I spent way too much on the Aya Neo Pocket Micro Classic, a machine with the same aspect ratio of the original GBA, and loved my playthrough of Fire Emblem on that. It does feel weird playing it on anything but a Game Boy Advance, though. I’ve been saying this for the best part of a decade at this point, but I do 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
