The best Fire Emblem game launched 30 years ago, saving the series

If you’ve kept up with Fire Emblem over the past decade, you’re probably familiar with the tale of its downfall and rebirth, or at least one version of it. Intelligent Systems and Nintendo decided North American consumers were finally capable of purchasing strategy games and published the seventh Fire Emblem game, The Blazing Blade, called simply Fire Emblem for international audiences in 2003. Thus began a roller coaster of successes and failures.

In 2012, as the series was on the brink of collapse, Fire Emblem Awakening launched with a cast of marriage candidates and countless permutations of their playable, genetically modified children as a last-ditch attempt to save the series. It worked! It was a miracle! Or a shameful concession to the popularity of games like Persona, depending on who’s talking. It was neither, though. Intelligent Systems and Nintendo already paved the road to salvation 30 years previously with Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War.

The whole thing spans generations — hence the “Genealogy” part of the name — because everything is bigger in Genealogy. Everything. A single battlefield map contains what would be three chapters or so in any other Fire Emblem. You might start one mission by galloping off to save a castle besieged by bandits, only to end up dealing with reinforcements threatening the base you just left behind and a kidnapping victim to rescue in another castle further away. All these objectives are relevant to the story, as Genealogy spins its tale out among dozens of important personalities across multiple countries and even — a unique thing for the series — ally armies.

Genealogy of the Holy War, released in 1996 for Nintendo’s Super Famicom and never officially localized outside Japan, features a lot of plot beats that will seem familiar if you’ve played any Fire Emblem game, including Awakening, but dials them up to 11. The gist of it is that a powerful country takes advantage of a smaller one during a time of weakness in a bid to expand their rule over the continent. You’re (mainly, for the first half) Sigurd, a prince whose initial “defeat the bad guy” motivations get swallowed up in a complex tangle of politics and dark magic. Do-gooders get involved, there’s backstabbing and surprise twists to do with deities and the descendants thereof, along with a very Awakening-coded bit about using humans as the vessels of gods. (Let’s also not forget some really weird bits where half-siblings kind of sort of get married. They didn’t know they were related. Yes, you could say this is the Game of Thrones of Fire Emblem.)

For a long time, Fire Emblem did a thing with allies, the green characters who never know how to fight, where a bunch of them would appear and get murdered unless you saved them. You’d sometimes get a reward if you succeeded in preventing all of them from dying, but saving them for the purpose of getting nice things was really their only significance. Genealogy of the Holy War ropes them into the story. Allies may show up as they’re fleeing another army or scouting the field wondering whether to help you, and the reinforcements they bring are usually essential to turning the tide — or a massive liability as you suddenly have to shift resources to protect them.

One of the game’s most memorable moments happens at the end of the first act. Two important characters you previously played as are on the run from one of the game’s many villains, and they turn up as “neutral” allies right as you’re dealing with one of the other main villains. They appear at the far end of the map. With their children in tow, plus a bunch of knights and the hope that you’ll rescue them from the massive amount of wyvern riders in pursuit. The whole thing is very dramatic and one of the best cases for cramming each map full of events and stories.

Image: Intelligent Systems/Nintendo

It’s also where Nintendo and Intelligent Systems safeguarded Fire Emblem’s future, even if they weren’t aware of it at the time. Genealogy of the Holy War‘s second act picks up with the children of the first act’s heroes in a shift that Awakening owes much to. Like in Awakening, the children you get depend on which relationships you fostered during the first half, though (also like Awakening) the game also gives you a roster of standard kids if you ignored support pairings, so you can still enjoy and finish the game. Their parents failed miserably and died in the knowledge that they left behind a broken world, and now it’s up to them to put things right, which they do in spectacular fashion.

Games that put you through the wringer and still let all the bad things happen, before giving you a chance to fix them, are hardly rare anymore. Just look at Dragon Quest 11. But it was a big deal when Genealogy of the Holy War first launched (reviews at the time praised its story above all else), and it’s why people still hold the game in such high regard today. So it’s no surprise — or cynical concession to the masses — that Nintendo trotted that concept out again in its last desperate effort to save the series. Of course it did, and, of course, it worked. This was Fire Emblem at its finest.