Editing Fire Emblem (section)

=== Archanea/Falchion/Red ===
In Cipher characters originating from these games focus on swarming with cheap units, fitting given how many of these characters lacked solid personalities or dialog after the chapters where they joined the team. One mechanic unique to Red (aside from Lianna and Rowan, the colorless heroes of ''Fire Emblem Warriors'') is the '''Hero Skill''', which changes the main character mid-play.
* ''Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light'' (''ファイアーエムブレム　暗黒竜と光の剣'') on the Famicom (NES), often known by early fans as ''Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light'' or just ''FE1''. The pantless prince Marth is forced to flee from his country of Altea after Dolhr, who has obtained supernatural aid from some old artifacts and some evil dragons, invaded it. After his cover is blown in exile, he and his retainers decide to join forces with the other countries of Archanea, including the Holy Kingdom of Archanea, who are trying to fight Dolhr. Along the way he acquires the legendary sword Falchion (which isn't actually a falchion) and the Fire Emblem shield, plus with a pegasus-riding lover, Caeda, who's put more points in Diplomacy than he has. If this sounds like pretty-standard JRPG fare, remember that this is 1990, when most console games rarely had a story more complicated than "save the princess" or "rescue your friends" and even the ''Final Fantasy'' titles of the era tended towards episodic and disconnected plots. Being the first entry, it's exceptionally primitive and lacks many basic features of later games, the most obvious three being that healers can't level up by healing and instead can only get XP by being attacked by an enemy and not dying (quite a task given their frailty), or as the joke goes, "level up with an axe to the face," not being able to see the enemy's movement range when selecting them, and the inability to rearrange units in the deployment phase (this can be worked around by removing all units from deployment and re-adding them in a particular order). It has important historical value, as one of the first console video games to try to tell an intricate story and for being a pioneer of many of the mechanics later games would tinker with and improve on. Extremely popular with the [[Old School Roleplaying| nostalgia-blinded Japanese grognard fanbase who keep voting it the best game in the series]], but just about everyone else agrees the remakes improved on it significantly and that the NES version, though vitally important and influential to not only the series as a whole but the evolution of video games as a medium, is probably best played by gaming historians rather than people who want a fun time.
** ''Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon'' (''ファイアーエムブレム　新・暗黒竜と光の剣'', lit ''New Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light'') on the DS was the 11th game and is a remake of the first game. It makes many basic quality-of-life improvements, fixes several of the original title's most glaring issues and archaic mechanics, and gives Marth some much needed pants.  It also introduced both mid-stage checkpoints, foreshadowing the eventual return of ''Geneology''-style mid-stage save points, and the reclassing mechanic, allowing the player to keep a decent pool of any unit type on-hand, though reclassing a physical unit into a magic unit or vice-versa was just asking for trouble, but avoided incorporating popular gameplay elements from later titles like the weapon triangle or Supports, which was and is [[skub]].  Story-wise, it's much more of a remake than a true reimagining an old-as-balls game, and few attempts were made to flesh out the often-bland characters or the world more-deeply. This was great for those who'd played the original and wanted to see it scaled-up into modern graphics and interface (see previous entry re: the nostalgia-blinded Japanese fanbase), but didn't impress many newer fans who checked in to see the origins of the series, and were met with dull characters who lacked charisma and a barely-updated script with a bland, charmless localization taken more-or-less as-is from the SNES remake.  It also, in a classic example of overcorrection, tried to be as un-''Radiant Dawn'' as possible by pandering to the Iron Man run crowd and made all of its new content and characters impossible to access without killing off the majority of your characters at a rate even the worst players couldn't manage without doing it on purpose. This was corrected by a fanmade ''Full Content Patch'', and is arguably canon given the next game has everyone survive and also refers to events from the new levels. It received decent-to-middling reviews in the same way ''Radiant Dawn'' did, and sold much better even in the West, recouping that title's historic losses, but it has had a very harsh afterlife, and negative word-of-mouth after the fact is considered an unfortunate factor in the Western fanbase never receiving the superior sequel. It didn't ''actually'' cause the financial decline of the franchise prior to the ''Awakening'' goldmine (''Radiant Dawn'' bears the brunt of that burden), that is just a diehard fan theory that has little basis in financial reality, but the mere fact that it was "common knowledge" among the Western fanbase that it had speaks volumes about the bad reputation it's gotten since release.
* ''Fire Emblem Gaiden'' (''ファイアーエムブレム外伝'') on the Famicom was the second game and set on Valentia, a continent far to the west of Archanea. It stars Alm, a youth that eventually acquires another, separate, Falchion (that's ''still'' not a falchion!) and Celica, a [[Gish|sword wielding priestess]]. The mechanics actually got ''weirder'' here instead of more polished and introduced concepts that would never or almost never be seen in the series again like magic that requires spending HP to use, shields as equipable items, towns that could be walked around and explored, no money mechanics, and infinite-use weapons and items. "Monster" enemy units rather than soldiers have their origin here. The maps in this game are really terrible, open with limited terrain, turning battles into tactics-free slugfests with Kaga himself later mentioning his dissatisfaction with his element of the game. Origin of the weaksauce-rookie with huge growth potential, in the form of the Villager class, who also indirectly introduced the concept of multiple choices after class changing. As its title implies, a weird sidestep more than anything else, but one that cemented the series' knack for innovation and exploration of new ideas rather than resting on laurels forever.
** ''Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia'' (''ファイアーエムブレム Echoes もうひとりの英雄王'', lit ''Echoes Another Hero King'')  on the 3DS is the fifteenth game and a remake of ''Gaiden''. It's been officially released in English, and whilst unlike ''Shadow Dragon'' the story and characters have been updated, expanded, and given a lot more focus, complete with a new Support mechanic to further flesh out the cast, it keeps many of the weird experimental mechanics that most fans and reviewers agree were better left in the past. The maps were barely improved, though it's the first game in the series to have full voice acting, and includes a few methods of reducing difficulty, like giving the player a limited number of chances to turn back the clock.  Financially, while not a real bomb, it sold markedly less well (hundreds of thousands vs. millions of copies) than its 3DS predecessors, possibly because ''Fates'' cooled player interest, possibly due to word-of-mouth about it being a remake of an old title, possibly just because it was on an increasingly-aging system whose replacement was coming out soon.
* ''Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem'' (''ファイアーエムブレム　紋章の謎'') on the Super Famicom (SNES) was the 3rd game in the series and where it started to hit its stride. Two years after the original game, Marth has found pants and became king of Altea where he awaits his marriage to Caeda, the princess he spent his exile with and who helped him reconquer his homeland. A two-year peace ends when the Kingdom of Archanea forces Marth to assemble his men and crush a rebellion in Grust. It actually featured a full remake of the original game which uses many new mechanics and contains many differences, including removal of several gimmicky filler levels, which was considered definitive until the remakes started up, and which some grognards still tout as a better way to experience the first title than an un-modded ''Shadow Dragon''. Arguably the first modern ''Fire Emblem'', and the template all later games would either use or break away from. Remains a fan favorite in Japan, and its sales record has yet to be topped in that country.
** ''BS Fire Emblem: Archanea War Chronicles'' (''BS ファイアーエムブレム アカネイア戦記編'') on the Super Famicom with the (Broadcast) Satellaview is a sidestory that was only briefly playable. Using the Mystery of the Emblem engine this set of four chapters with an objective to survive as long as possible while collecting as much loot as possible. Each chapter was a prequel or sidestory to ''Mystery of the Emblem''.
** ''New Mystery of the Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadow'' (''ファイアーエムブレム新・紋章の謎〜光と影の英雄〜'') on the DS was the 12th game and a remake of the third. It generally tightens up the original, expands the personality of the previously bland characters through introduction of the Support mechanic, and introduced the concept of "reclassing," granting each character a pool of additional classes that could be accessed to reset their level and in turn allow for stat-farming and skill-tweaking, the [[skub]] that was the self-insert My Unit playable character, who was both grossly overpowered and had little personality beyond utter devotion to Marth, and the equal skub of Casual Mode, where a player could switch off the series' permanent death and instead have defeated characters benched when beaten but not inaccessible for the rest of the campaign. It was, due to Nintendo's plans to wind down the series in advance of putting it to bed for a while, not translated to English, but a fan translation exists. Since ''Shadow Dragon'' existed the remake of the original was not included, but a remake of the ''BS'' episodes are.  Almost always considered quite good, and a significant improvement over ''Shadow Dragon''; the progenitor of the newbie boom that was the 3DS era of the series and therefore one of the most important titles in the series simply because of how goddamn lucrative those games were.