Ranking Fire Emblem games - my memories of the series

From Ylisse to Fódland and beyond.

Back in the 3DS days, if you’d ask me what my favourite game series were, I would’ve answered: Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda and Fire Emblem. I already had a long(ish) history with the first two, but Fire Emblem? That’s a series I discovered on the 3DS.

It was a video from a YouTuber I watched back then that introduced me to the series with Awakening. His praise for the game, and my interest in playing a strategy game, made it the first game that came to mind when my father said he wanted to treat me to something. It was the start of hundreds of hours playing through countless battlefields. From fighting masked villains to helping a mysterious songstress escape a theatre. I did fall out of the series for a while, and we’ll get to that, but you can say I found my way back to the series last year.

With the latest entry in the series, Fortune’s Weave, just around the corner this is as good a time as any to take a trip down memory lane and rank each entry I’ve played based on how much I enjoyed them while I’m at it.

Without further ado, let’s talk about all the Fire Emblem games I’ve played! Oh, and as always I will remind everyone that this is a list of my own personal opinions based on my own experiences and not an objective list of quality. I think the closer we get to the top, the clearer that will become. 

8. Fire Emblem Fates: Revelations

Kicking off the list is the third and final version in the Fire Emblem Fates package: Revelations. Why does this supposed ‘true path’ of Fates rank so low? Because, unlike its sibling versions, it doesn’t really give you anything you haven’t done before.

Birthright and Conquest are made of the same building blocks but offer a rather different experience thanks to the units you get to control, the type of missions you undertake and some other minor differences that nonetheless have a noticeable impact.

Just like how the narrative hook is that it brings both sides of the war together, so does Revelations bring all those other elements together. Sometimes, however, the sum isn’t greater than the parts it’s made of. Units and the overall challenge are unbalanced, gimmicks and win conditions don’t mesh well and the entire experience feels unnecessarily drawn out.

My time with this version was messy. I pushed through to a certain point, hoping it would kick into higher gear and give me something new, but that never came. After playing a map that wasn’t all that difficult but very annoying with how long it was, how many new waves of enemies came in, I called it quits.

It just wasn’t enjoyable enough to continue. This is an experience held up by the promise of its narrative and mixing characters from both sides of the conflict, and not much else. A slow moving ‘true ending’ path that can easily be skipped. 

7. Fire Emblem: Warriors

The second game on the list is the first title for the Nintendo Switch, the first Fire Emblem game I reviewed for this blog, and the only spin-off.

After the success of Hyrule Warriors, Nintendo and Koei Tecmo tried to repeat that success. Fire Emblem was a logical choice, it’s a gaming series about war after all just like Dynasty Warriors itself, but Fire Emblem: Warriors is far from the strong, celebratory, experience that I understand made Hyrule Warriors popular.

My primary motivation for buying this game was very simple: while perusing Marktplaats, the Ebay of the Netherlands, I found this game’s collector’s edition, for no money at all. I never owned a collector’s edition before and wanted to experience one for myself and so bought it. I learned two things from that purchase: that both collector’s editions and hack-and-slash games aren’t my cup of tea.

The latter is because the game is rather basic and bland. There is fun in button mashing your way through hundreds of mooks but it’s a fleeting kind of enjoyment. Now, I would later play Age of Calamity, drawn in by the allure of it being a ‘canon’ prequel to Breath of the Wild, and that game was more of what I was hoping to find with this title. Unlike with this game, there were a lot more fighting styles to choose from and it had, surprisingly, a more tactical angle to it all.

The story here is also not much of anything. It tries to do the same ‘bring years of history together as in one big celebration’ as Hyrule Warriors but is seemingly afraid to commit. 80% of this game are the casts of Awakening and Fates, the then most recent games in the series, mashed together with only a handful of characters from Fire Emblem’s long history popping. That’s not really a celebration, now is it?

This is a well put together game, but it’s very much a ‘turn your brain off and just blast through it’ type of experience. A game that is enjoyable in the moment, but not memorable. 

6. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia

Ah, Shadows of Valentia. The game I started up repeatedly and still never finished. My first attempt was at release. This remake came out in April 2017, only a month after the Nintendo Switch released. I, like many others, was rather distracted at that time by the new console and its killer-app: Breath of the Wild. I got Echoes day one and played it for a fair bit until that new Zelda pulled me back in.

When I finally picked the game back up again well over a year later, this time the distraction came from ‘within’, so to speak. Three Houses was about to release and while I intended to finish this game before that, because I chose to play the game on hard mode, I just wasn’t done with it by the time that new game released. After Three Houses, ‘Fire Emblem Burnout’ struck and I just never went back to this game because of this.

My desire to still finish it one day is a testament to how much I did enjoy playing this title. I do find the dual army narrative a bit clunky but experiencing how these two lovers want the same thing, but walk a different path due to their circumstances, is compelling.

As a remake, Shadows of Valentia is built on some very old bones, and you do feel that in some areas, but by and large it felt like a modern game to me. The moment-to-moment gameplay feels very good even without something like the weapon triangle. The lack of any big romance system makes it so that a lot less time is spent on ‘managing’ your squad and more time is spent on actual battles.

This remake brings in new things too that I enjoy. The dungeon crawling made for a very fun distraction that gave me a reason to explore the map beyond just battles. The extra story content was nice to see too, especially as a guy who always loves a good narrative, and the art style is probably my favourite in the entire series. The 2D art tries to invoke the idea that everything is a painting which I find to be a much prettier style than what has become the ‘regular’ Fire Emblem art style.

So yeah, Echoes of Valentia might be a game that I didn’t finish, but it’s still a good and enjoyable title. 

5. Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Cindered Shadows

I’ll get into the ‘nitty-gritty’ of why I dropped the series for years later in this ranking but this entry finds itself as the end of that saga. Triangle Strategy, another tactical RPG, opened the door again to the genre itself but it wasn’t until this expansion to Three Houses, Cindered Shadows, that my ‘Fire Emblem Burnout’ was truly over.

That has everything to do with the fact that it is a much shorter experience. Coming in at around 9 hours, it is a far cry from the 60+ hours it takes to just beat just one path of the main game. Cindered Shadows is a compact and combat-focused little tale that captured the core gameplay of Fire Emblem rather well. It has a hub world but it’s purposefully much smaller and filled with less activities meaning you spent more time in the actual battles whereas in the main game, that ratio could easily be flipped. Since the amount of busy work that game had contributed to that burnout, this was all oh-so appreciated.

That this was a more difficult experience, made for those who had done and seen everything the main game had to offer, did make it a bit daunting at first. Was I setting myself up for failure since it had been years since I played Three Houses? The opposite turned out to be true as the high challenge was actually quite exhilarating.

I can still remember sitting on the edge of my couch, passing the time before a shopping trip, wracking my brain for how to beat a specific level. During the quiet moments of the trip, when others were in stores I didn’t care for, I came up with a plan. One I put into action that evening which, albeit by the skin of my teeth, got me the win. And it felt great.

I might’ve been disappointed in its story but this was the Fire Emblem experience I needed for me to find my love for the series again. Short and focused on the core of what I enjoy about the series: the battles and the challenge. For that, I am grateful.

Beyond that, this is just a good piece of extra content. A bit pricey perhaps but that price does include new content for the base game too, so do keep that in mind.  

4. Fire Emblem Awakening

The time has come to tackle the first Fire Emblem game I ever played: Awakening. Once I had gotten my fill of Pokémon Y and A Link Between Worlds, I started to look at what other games were out there for the 3DS and discovered this series as a result.

The opening cinematic was the first thing that piqued my interest, followed closely by its fantasy setting and the discovery that it was a tactical game. I was looking for something to test my brain at the time and Awakening looked like it could do just that while giving me handholds to support me should I get backed into a corner. This was the first game of the genre I would play after all.

I bought this game for the gameplay but what actually gripped me the most was the story. Witnessing Emmeryn throw herself off a cliff to her death was a narrative turn that I had never experienced before. Never had I witnessed such a ‘mature’ twist in any of the games I had played, except for the ending to Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, and I wanted to see what would come next.

Going back to the gameplay, while it took me a bit to understand it (I died in the tutorial section twice), once I did, I got hooked. Coming up with a strategy, choosing and placing my units and seeing how far that strategy would bring me was very rewarding. Once I learned about the skill that allowed Pegasus Knights to move twice in one turn, I spent more than a little time getting that skill on all the characters you could get it on and build an entire strategy around that skill. Man, did I feel invincible once I got that core team of Sumia, Cordelia, Robin, Chrom, Sully, Frederick, Libra, Lissa and Kellam rolling.

That I didn’t have to worry about losing any of my soldiers, and that the game was pretty lenient when you failed a mission, gave me the confidence to do the above. Made failure a learning experience instead of a punishment like a perma-death feature often can be. I did, however, end up locking myself out of Gaius (who people consider one of the best units) because I didn’t understand he was a recruitable enemy, but that’s neither here nor there.

This game did to me what it did to many people: not only introducing me to Fire Emblem but also making me a fan.

3. Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

For me, Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright was everything Awakening was… and more. As a sequel to the game that revitalized the series, it is one of those games that simply goes bigger. There are more weapons added to the weapons triangle, more units to fill your army with, more side-activities such as the castle building, and stuff like that.  

I could go on and list everything but this isn’t the place for that. That would belong to a dedicated review, if I ever get around to replaying this game. What is important here are the highlights and the number one thing that made Birthright click with me much faster than Awakening did: the world.

This game does something that I have also done in my own creative writing: use a fantasy setting to make two cultures and time periods that never interacted in real-life, well, interact. In this case, medieval Europe and Feudal Japan.

Birthright is the 2^nd part of that equation. Its land of Hoshido, with all of its Japanese inspirations and allusions, wasn’t a type of land I had experienced before. Things like what the West sees as a Katana is just one version in a lineage of blades are all things I learned while playing this game. That made this game stand out to me and made me want to learn more about Japan through this fantasy lens.

What also helped is that Birthright is an even more approachable title than Awakening. Even with all of its new gameplay elements that make the game deeper, such as the more complicated way reclassing works, I find this game to be very easy to get into. Not only do we have even more modes to make the game easier (or harder) but the more straightforward mission objectives, the two layered difficulty and the ability to easily do mock battle and get exp. made it so that I played this game even more than Awakening.

That does make this version more ‘vanilla’ but when it comes to just understanding the width and breadth of the gameplay, to just engage in its side-activities like building out your castle and holding battles with classmates, that isn’t much of an issue.

And yes, this Fire Emblem game started the tradition of each title having a signature song. ‘Lost in Thoughts All Alone’ was the first and remains the best, with Birthright’s rendition the more emotional and iconic one of the pair.  

2. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Coming in second is the game with a ‘three’ in the title. The best-selling game in the series: Fire Emblem Three Houses. The game I spent the most time on (if you count all versions of Fates separately) and the game that is the cause of that ‘Fire Emblem Burnout’, but let’s get all the rest out of the way first.

We are back to the somewhat more simplified in how it, for example, went back to the original weapons triangle and it taking a backseat to a more flexible class system. With the game adding in the Academy phase, it builds out the ‘build your own castle’ mechanic from Fates from an optional side activity to a game in and of itself.

 Three Houses gave me something I wanted the series to do ever since playing Awakening: give me something meaty to do outside of battles. It’s all not just an enjoyable slice of life simulation, but everything you do circles back around to the core of Fire Emblem: battles. You, for example, have tea parties with students so they can eventually be added to your army.

The skirmishes themselves are also quite excellent here. Not only do we get a ton of quality-of-life improvements that help make it easier to strategize but also some new gameplay layers that I enjoyed tinkering with. I enjoyed experimenting with different classes for my students and matching my used units to one that fit the strategy I was building. It took some work, but Petra as an assassin? A beast of a unit, let me tell you that! 

Because of these additions, and its very engaging story and characters, I had a ton of fun playing Three Houses. Until the ending, that is. In a lot of ways, Three Houses is the improved Fates. It too has a story about an igniting war between neighbouring kingdoms and a protagonist with a birth shrouded in secrecy. Most importantly it has you, the player, make a decision who to side with. Will you be a tutor to the Blue Lions, the Golden Deer or the Black Eagles? That question alone gives way to a ton of replayability. The first half of the game, the Academy Phase, is rather similar but once you get past the time skip, the adventures you go on are quite different. Playing all paths to get the full picture of the story is the name of the game here and one of the reasons I burned out.

I chose the Edelgard and the Black Eagles as my first playthrough and that was perhaps not the best choice. The narrative and lore of Three Houses is one of its most praised aspects and I think a lot of that is due to how ‘dark and emotional’ it can get. With this particular route I followed the most complex, morally ambiguous character the game had to offer and learned a lot about what is ‘truly’ going on. Answers that would’ve been better suited for a second or third playthrough, if you ask me as that would’ve made it all feel more like a natural progression of the mystery.

This is also the first example of me getting a bit too invested in a story. A bit too attached to a character and so when it was all said and done, I decided to take a break. To come back to the game when I had put some distance between it and my emotions.

I never did though because the controller seemed to grow only heavier and heavier. Because of the Academy stuff, this game can be very long and tedious. There is so much you have to do to build out the army the way you want it to. To ‘get’ more units, to replenish your weapons and supplies and more. I just… didn’t want to do that again.  That, and this being my sixth Fire Emblem game in less than four years also didn’t help matters.

The series didn’t feel that exciting anymore and the long time these games tended to take to complete made them feel like a commitment. One I wasn’t in the mood for, which is why I didn’t even bother with Fire Emblem Engage when that came out in 2023.

Before moving on to the final game on this list, I would like to stress that the whole ‘burnout’ situation is just a me thing. If we are talking more objectively, judge Three Houses by its quality and level of content, it’s the best in the series that I’ve played. A game that comes with a strong recommendation should you like, or be interested in, Fire Emblem and/or tactical RPGs. Just be warned of how long and tedious it can be at times.

1. Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest

At number one is the remaining version of Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest. I can be pretty quick and to the point with this one: to me, this is the better Birthright. Sure, that version has that Japanese inspired Hoshido culture and is the more approachable, casual, version but Conquest is just a far more interesting experience.

Where Birthright’s objectives were mostly ‘rout the enemy’, here, your win conditions are a lot more varied. From escaping a battle, to simply surviving a certain number of turns. With the amount of gold and experience you can earn a lot more limited, Conquest is a more challenging game. A challenge I welcomed after playing two games that were both on the easier side of things.

The story was also the most engaging I had encountered so far. It doesn’t push its themes as far as Three Houses, plays it safer, but this is still a darker narrative. With you siding with Nohr, the arguable bad guys of the story, the narrative is less straight forward and open to shades of grey and moral complexity. There is a moment in the story in which, after a victory, Corrin loses control of the army and what follows is very realistic and has left a remaining impression on me. It’s also the version in which those crossover characters of Awakening are part of your army which I won’t lie about, was cool to see.

Lastly: Conquest has its own unique version of ‘Lost in Thoughts All Alone’. One that is a lot faster paced and more of an ‘action’ song than its standard counterpart. The only issue I have with it is that Nintendo has never released an official version of it. Why I don’t know since I think it deserves one. It might not be as good as the standard version, but it is still a great song in and of itself.

Fates as a whole gets more hate than it deserves with its ‘3 versions’ approach and all but I think 2/3 of that package, the ones that are still available, are great games with Conquest the best one in my opinion. With the 3DS era now two console generations behind us, and thus the console its games less and less approachable for new people, I can only hope that Nintendo will re-release Fates in some form or fashion one day.

If that day ever comes, perhaps you’ll remember this little post of mine and decide to give these games, with Conquest at the helm, a shot.

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And that’s a wrap on this ranking of enjoyment and memories! Well, until Fortune’s Weave comes out that is. I have the game pre-ordered and since I have my vacation planned around that time, my plan is to start playing it immediately and have a very good time doing so.

In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed this little list. Maybe I’ve convinced you to give Fire Emblem a shot or perhaps you want to share your own memories and experiences of the series with me?

Whatever the case may be, thank you for reading and that we may get many more Fire Emblem games in the future!