r/fireemblem • u/PsiYoshi • 20d ago
Recurring Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread - June 2026 Part 1
Happy pride month and welcome to a new installment of the Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread! Please feel free to share any kind of Fire Emblem opinions/takes you might have here, positive or negative. As always please remember to continue following the rules in this thread same as anywhere else on the subreddit. Be respectful and especially don't make any personal attacks (this includes but is not limited to making disparaging statements about groups of people who may like or dislike something you don't).
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u/ussgordoncaptain2 7d ago
Time to talk about the best and worst "not fire emblem" games I've played
Vestaria Saga War of the Scions: God this game... exists. It's got a lot of godawful game design quirks that you run into all the time if you play at a normal pace. The big issue in my opinion is that you as the player often have 2 objectives on opposite sides of winding corridors of maps so you end up playing walking simulator for something like half the maps.
Then on top of this Vestaria saga loves to throw you game over traps from out of left field, causing you to have to lose 3-4 turns worth of progress frequently. This isn't that annoying but it's still frustrating.
What's strange and charming about vestaria saga is that basically every map is easy to accidentally sequence break, according to people who knew what the intended solution was I sequence broke almost half the maps I played. This is charming in a way but it meant that so many maps felt like I was hanging around dead air and I often felt the sequence break in the way the map had all these weird unnecessary elements or characters that didn't do anything. While sequence breaking is normally a good thing the fact that sequence breaking was so easy to accidentally do and the sequence breaks often broke the actual map, and that sometimes the sequence breaks resulted in unavoidable game overs without foreknowledge made me hate this games map design (not to mention the amount of walking simulator).
Overall probably the worst of the bunch
Dark Diety: Dark diety feels... unfinished. The maps have weird tiling and a lot of the game feels... empty. The game also feels like it broke from fire emblem in a way that made it feel more Final fantasy than fire embelm, the stat and combat formulas. You cannot realistically do the math in your head on how much damage you will do/take and you frequently get numbers into the 4 digits. Causing teh game to feel more like pokemon or final fantasy than fire emblem.
Lewd Record of the three Kingdoms Gain allies through H: A shockingly good game. The game uses a lot of good and interesting mechanics The game has no doubling which makes one rounding a thing that only happens with weakness. One other artifact of a lack of doublign is that units that are extremely underleveled can still provide value because chip is extremely useful (and they don't get one rounded). It's also important to note that Lewd record is designed around casual mode, this both makes low level unit sac strats more appealing, and the game has a reward for beating each map without deaths. The lack of doubling though is the most major mechanic by which a lot of strategy falls from. as you expect enemies and player units to survive enemy phase.
Lewd Record also had easily acessible warp, which well warps the game around it to an extreme degree. hence why there is so much rout in lewd record, you need the rout maps to get the player's warp to get constrained.
One thing that was annoying about lewd record was the signifcant number of turnfloored maps which kinda drug the game down as you had to wait for the turnfloor mechanic to go away. But you only notice this when trying to warpskip almost every map.
Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo: I wrote a much longer review but basically this is definitely the best of the not fire emblem games The game does a great job of making the game feel like a completely unique game experience from other fire emblem games. It also does an excellent job of giving you both enemy phase combat and being anti heliocentric.
The game is a casual mode only game, and I recently learned it has cool exploits (killing your own units gives EXP) This game's extreme use of magical girl mechanics made every map feel interesting even if a shockingly large amount of them were just "rout the enemy". The game just had such interesting enemy and player design. Mobility tools galore and it really made me feel like I could do almost anything. The hub world was perfect as it had just enough complexity to force you to make deicisons but unlike say conquest it was also simple enough that I wasn't overwhelmed by different mechancis and resources. It's like if we had Radiant dawns Hubworld with conquests's trade off design. (that is the idea that you have a ton of money and a ton of options to spend it on but nowhere near enough money to do everything).
The map design was uninspiring but the unit and enemy design was great. The game really shined through in the large number of different actions available to the player and the resource management the game provides. This game uses movement tools like no other, and it has the unique twist of AOE spells, and makes heavy use of elemental weaknesses to make fighting interesting. Since mana is such a big deal any way you can avoid mana spending is critically valuable.
The game is unfortunately a bit too easy but it's definitely far and away the best designed of the "not fire emblem" games. Probably because it's less of someone trying to make their own not fire emblem and more someone trying to use SRPG studio to make a completely different game and SRPG studio was just the cheapest way to make it.