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What do you guys call "old" for Fire Emblem standards?


Lord Ice
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     Honestly, I believe the old/new divide is New Mystery of the Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadow (a game I've never played bc it's hard to emulate).

     Anything before is rooted in the old formula (the one I prefer). There's a Kaga/Anime subdivide in there, but I won't get into that. It has weapon durability, deep stories filled with war, politics, evil gods, etc., no waifus (Genealogy does have marriage, but there's no self-insert of yourself, so no waifus), and no phoenix mode (I know casual mode exists. I'm fine with it). Sorry to sound elitist, but it's all the really good stuff.

     The new stuff is anything after, and its differences pander to the casuals. That's not a bad thing. I honestly like how there's a huge aspect on reclassing and customization. I (though I don't use it) think casual mode is a good crutch if you're scared of losing units and don't want to reset every time a unit dies. It's stories are meh (Awakening's is rushed, Fates' is bad, and Echoes is a remake, but Berkut and Fernand are new, so they make the original parts of the story great). Weapon durability was dropped in this era, and was handled well. The avatar gained priority over time (much to my dismay), and waifus (or husbandos) and children units went from a good idea to a unnecessary one. This era was more... experimental.

     New Mystery splices these two eras. It has a story and gameplay rooted in the old formula, and an avatar and casual mode from the new. That is what I say is the old/new divide.

 

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For me I pretty neatly sort everything from the first Fire Emblem all the way to New Mystery as ''old Fire Emblem'' while the 3ds era is where ''Neo Fire Emblem'' begins. 

The first 12 Fire Emblems had their differences but ultimately they have much more similarities. Only the Jugdral games and Gaiden really feel like the odd ducks among these games. The Elibe games, Magvel, Path of Radiance, Shadow dragon and new mystery all follow the same general formula in both gameplay and story, and RD is more of an evolution of that formula rather than a departure. 

But Awakening is different. New aspects were introduced or certain aspects received a much larger focus than they did in the older games. As a Fire Emblem era that brought in a lot more people Awakening and its successor also resulted in a large number of fans having different expectations of what should be important in a Fire Emblem game. 

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49 minutes ago, Lord Ice said:

Weapon durability was dropped in this era

this is inaccurate; fe13 has durability and fe15 is a remake of fe2, which didn't have durability to begin with. Fe14 is the only one that really decided to drop it on it's own (and it was certainly not done well, much like almost everything in fe14).

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I'd say theres 3 divides. 

the Kaga Era, that being 1-5, which is full of experiementation and concepts that would continue in Kaga's own games outside of FE such as Tear Ring Saga and Berwick.

The Formula Era, That being 6 through 10, these being the most "standardized" FE's with not too much variance until Tellius mechanically besides a few things.

The Neo Era, That being Shadow Dragon introducing new mechanics into older concepts which people were kind of unfairly adverse to, and then hitting the bullseye with Awakening marketing wise. Going into their new popularity continuing on with their own new ideas.

These are the 3 common threads I see people stick by, if they are strongly opinionated against the other two, they will typically hold a strong stance with one of these 3 particular eras, not that everyones the same mind you. It's just some trends i've noticed with some fans. 

Like me, I find merit in every FE, for differing reasons. But that's not a very common stance because of how much the series has radically changed, even from each other in the earlier years.

As a friend of mine put it, you can think of 6 and 11 as soft reboots, Awakening to an extent as well, all 3 draw from Marth's original 2 games in their own ways.

Edited by Jedi
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I'd rather not divide the games by the archaic and biased "Fateswakening and then everything else", so I'm going with multiple labels.

1-3 is ancient, almost outdated.  I say "almost" because 1 and 2 are outdated and archaic, while 3 still can hold up.  Still, all of these games show their age.

4-5 is fairly old.  Still in the era of home consoles, but clearly more advanced than the first few.  Again, quite aged, but this era advanced the series beyond mere strategy and simplistic story-telling.

6-8 is old handheld era.  I'd say this era could be considered "adult" age while the older stuff would be "elder" aged.  This is where FE was starting to really form a lot of its more staple features like the support system and prep screen.

9-10 is the newer console era.  At this point, the GBA mechanics had been solidified and IS was now trying to take advantage of the power of consoles.  The first era that saw actual 3D for the series.  I'd call it "teenage" FE.

11-12 is the "regress-progress" era.  The series was starting to fail, and the remakes were their last ditch effort to try and build it back up.  However, the first remake stripped some features that the GBA era introduced, namely supports and the regression back to sprites, and then the sequel never saw release outside of Japan.  These are the reasons I use the term "regress" to describe these games; they may have a shiny new paint job and some refinements (including some new features such as changing class without promotion), at the end of the day they started regressing to the original stage they were at with the series with Japan-exclusivity and lacking features.  This era is but a child - judged, but still not quite old enough to be considered "classic".

13 and onwards is modern.  Even the one remake this era saw is of higher production quality than we've seen before.  You have supports affecting the game in new and innovative ways, refined and innovative gameplay and map design, and the 3D models (at least in Fates and beyond) are much less rigid than before.  This era is either a newborn or a toddler.  Gonna go with the latter, because it feels like we might be entering into another era of FE with 3H.

 

Also, while attempting to find some information to help someone who was hacking one of the DS games, I stumbled upon some threads on a forum from around the time Shadow Dragon was released.  It was incredibly interesting and enlightening seeing the opinions from back then, some actually thought the rest of the series for the following six-or-so years would've just been remakes.  Well, one of them was kind of right when they said "FE 2" would be next, because sure enough that was the next remake after the Archanea games.

Edited by Ertrick36
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11 minutes ago, Emperor Hardin said:

I don't think many people care about casual mode, only phoenix mode got any controversy.

Yeah I don't recall almost anyone complaining about it, it was PHOENIX MODE that got all the ire, just check my thread on it in the Fates section (have to dig a bit) for that.

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There's 3 stages for me. 

There's old-school FE which is 1-5, and then there's Classical FE which is from 6-12

13-16 are Neo FEs.

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1 hour ago, Chocolate Kitty said:

this is inaccurate; fe13 has durability and fe15 is a remake of fe2, which didn't have durability to begin with. Fe14 is the only one that really decided to drop it on it's own (and it was certainly not done well, much like almost everything in fe14).

 

By "during", I mean not at the beginning of the era. I was alluding to fates. I know that Awakening had durability

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I lump some games into eras for brevity. FE6-8 are all GBA Era, since they run on the same engine, but examining FE6 through 10 you see a pretty linear evolution of game mechanics. FE8 reintroduces skills into the series - though they're easy to miss or forget. While later entries place more emphasis on it. FE9 drops the polarizing Con system and makes attacks speed depend entirely on increasable stats. And then Shadow Dragon just kind of forgets everything that's happened since FE1 in a super safe remake. Whoops.

It's hard to say what feels "old" when you play it. 3DS era was heavily derivative of every entry before it. You can feel the developers actively hunting for mechanics and references they can put into Awakening and Fates, and Echoes is of course a remake. Marriage and children felt "new" to us in 2012, but it's just a weird Kaga-ism they wanted to recreate without thinking about why Kaga had the mechanics in FE4 in the first place. Similarly, having witch DLC or a Capture mechanic, what is the point? Where are the new ideas?

Edited by Glennstavos
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For me it's more of a 

FE 1-3 The pretty much replaced set. They all have re-makes so the only reason to play them is for their slight differences, but they can feel really clunky at times

FE 4-5 The real SNES games. They can feel a bit off at times, their age only shows with the console more than how the games play though.

FE 6-8 GBA, They can feel old at times but they have aged pretty decently. FE 6 can feel old and I'd say that's my limit. It's likely in a few games time anything before FE 9 I'll consider old FE, but for now it's still the Kaga Era

FE 9-10, They're clunky to watch, and SO GOD DAMN SLOW, but they still look decent and have aged okay.

FE 11-12 "First attempts at remakes" They've visually aged poorly but what ever I don't mind them. But the re-classing makes them pretty fun to play still. 

FE 13-14.....I mean...they're the "Just take what people liked from the past games and put them in here" games. They work, I enjoy them (Mostly Awakening over fates, fates gets boring fast)

FE 15 What every remake for now on should be like, Nearly directly what the game was, some new additions that don't take from the story without forcing a change, and some fun options to do things like re-class and mess around.

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  • 4 weeks later...

It depends really. As far as mechanics go Heroes of Light and Shadow is a mish-mash of old and new Fire Emblem chiefly because of the avatar. That said, FE12 lacks the polish newer FE games have, and its mechanics are pretty archaic.

One thing people don't usually note is that Katarina does in fact have a kiddie crush on MU which of course is part of the power fantasy thing, especially considering how OP MU (usually) is.

I would even argue that some of the music in the game for the new additions took a bit of an "anime" sound (See Tearing Shadows).

That said the game plays like an old fire emblem, for sure.

So FE11 and FE12 are the middle children that nobody pays attention to.

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