Fire Emblem is the seventh game in one of the best series nobody has ever heard of. Dating back to the NES, the Fire Emblem series has been one of Nintendo's most consistent series in Japan. Unfortunately, the series hasn't left the far east until now. Those who give Fire Emblem a spin, despite its relative obscurity, are in for a fun time...as long as they didn't play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance first.

Fire Emblem (known as Fire Emblem 7: Rekka No Ken in Japan) is, at its heart, a textbook tactical RPG, like Final Fantasy Tactics or Shining Force. Rather than favoring the former, with a couple of important characters and the rest faceless cannon-fodder, it favors the latter. In Fire Emblem, every single character has a personality and an unchangable career track. Every character starts with a base class, and can be promoted to an advanced version with a one-shot item; class changes with a Final Fantasy I spin, instead of a Final Fantasy V style. All in all, managing the characters is surprisingly simple; there is no customization outside of choosing when to change class or choosing with which weapons to arm each character, and weapons have advantages over each other in a rock-paper-scissors manner (swords beat axes beat lances beat swords, and light magic beats dark magic beats elemental magic beats light magic.)

The most unique aspect of Fire Emblem is the sense of danger and risk. Any character that goes to zero HP is dead. Permanently. That character is removed from the story (in a sometimes-wrenching epilogue after the battle), and will never be available again. What's more, there's no off-time to build up characters, leaving no opportunity to "power-level" as in other games. This means that every single casualty counts, because there's no cannon-fodder to recruit, and no filler levels to build up the second-stringers.

The combat scenarioes, curiously, are the weakest point of Fire Emblem. For the first two-thirds of the game, FE gets it right, matching force against force in pitched battles. Obviously someone at Intelligent Systems forgot that this was a tactical RPG by the end, though, as Fire Emblem eventually degenerates into the kind of gimmick battles that plagued recent titles like Gladius and Onimusha Tactics. By the end, it's clear the game has gone on too long, after several battles with cavalry charging from behind out of a Fog of War, and an absolutely ridiculous (but thankfully optional) stage with a series of platforms connected by disappearing and reappearing platforms. This kind of thing is tolerable when an error can be corrected with skill or preparation, but even a little mistake can mean the loss of one or more characters at a time.

Tactical RPGs tend to have complex stories with nuanced politics, and Fire Emblem is no exception. Everything starts simple, with a lost princess seeking her true family, but gets much more complicated in the second chapter, about Eliwood seeking his father, the marquess of Pherae. (The translation is perfect except on this point; "marquis" has been mistranslated into its female form, "marquess.") From there, the story is a fairly complex conspiracy, and layers of the onion are peeled back in turn.

Graphically, Fire Emblem looks like Fire Emblem 4. Exactly like Fire Emblem 4. While comparing a new game to a ten-year-old game is usually a slur, FE4 is a good place to start, graphically. The main screens are flat and boring by any measure (little here couldn't have been done on the NES) and the cut-scenes are the same moving cardboard-cutout heads tactical RPGs have had since...well, Fire Emblem on the NES, the battle animations surprise by being nice-looking. Instead of using lame transparency effects, every class has individually hand-drawn animations, more evocative of Capcom's flashy 2-D style than anything else.

The music doesn't stand up to any standard. There are marches and hymns and all sorts of appropriate martial themes, but few of them qualify as even slightly memorable, and some are genuinely annoying. Other than the music, there's nothing else to hear; the sound effects are never more than functional, as with many GBA games.

Fire Emblem is the kind of fare that sustained tactical RPG fans for a long time; competent titles remarkable only in that they tend to be widely spaced over the years. Unfortunately, for anyone who isn't a genre fan, Fire Emblem simply can't compete with higher-quality titles like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, while still clinging to too many of the genre's frustrating tics to really make it generally accessible. Anyone who is still ravenous after devouring FFTA should give Fire Emblem a look, as it isn't nearly as user-hostile as the other choices.