In April we went through Fire Emblem: Awakening. As a 3DS game on an “officially” dead platform (one getting lots of headlines for preservation efforts made by the community to get it back online recently), as well as the game acknowledged widely to be the first in the “modern” Fire Emblem era and a last chance for Fire Emblem in the west (if not successful we may not have gotten more games here), this one is very interesting.

We talk about how to play this game given that the 3DS isn’t so easy to find on the secondhand market anymore (for a reasonable price), the game’s team-up mechanics as a one-off of sorts, but a very interesting way to expand the possibility space, as well as the multiplicity of abilities that each character can use, weapons, and the general expansion of this as a builder RPG (where you have a great deal of influence on how your party is specced and what they can do). Toben also contextualizes this game in the wider series in terms of accessibility and incfluence, a eugenics/tactics inheritance sim, as well as a kind of spaghetti-against-the-wall experiment to see where things might go (and it turns out have gone in some ways). Also we talk about its much more anime-influenced direction in storytelling.

Check out the liner notes here for links to some of what I’ve mentioned here, as well as our standard fare in music, speedrunning, and learning more about the games and contexts of play we talk about.

Catch you next month with our discussion of Resident Evil 2 (remake), which is a bit of a tonal and genre shift relative to Fire Emblem (to put it mildly).

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit supercombotech.substack.com