Quote Originally Posted by Skyblade View Post
You also might simply not have gotten far enough to really experience that due to the difficulty and permadeath, though.
Yeah, Awakening is the first one I've actually owned. And I did a LOT of research to justify that beforehand. The others I've only played through emulation or from borrowing from a friend. So without having any real financial investment or obligation, I didn't feel compelled to play them very deeply to taste test them. And nothing really against the ones that I tried, but nothing really grabbed me strong enough to play for more than a few battles for whatever reason

But thank you for the very informative post. It's nice to know the series has always had a lot of depth and Awakening wasn't just a fluke. Also nice to know they haven't just been churning out copy/paste sequels with no heart or soul like you tend to see in a lot of mobile environments and whatnot. So there's a bit of pedigree going on. I may have to re-look at one or two of them. But even barring that, it just solidifies my support for future Fire Emblem endeavors

Though I will say permadeath did bother me, and I'm not entirely sure why, because I loved it in XCOM. Made the stakes feel higher and made me want to honor the dead and try harder and whatnot. In Fire Emblem, I would just feel like a failure and feel compelled to restart a battle because of it. Which is weird, because I got the feeling that a lot of characters were just not that important. A lot of them seemed too similar. And now that I think about it, they're probably that way so that it wouldn't hurt as bad to lose one and you can choose to move on without them. So it's a catch 22 and I get bothered that either they don't have personality or that they die forever. And I'm really not sure why. But I will say difficulty alone is definitely not a problem. I'm not a sadist, but I do enjoy a good challenge. Something I never got out of either earlier Shining Force games. Though the third one could throw a few good curve balls here and there

And I'm just now getting into the Persona games for the first time, and enjoying them so much I plan on going back and enjoying other SMT games I've missed. So eventually SMT X FE will probably be on my list as well