Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War Impressions

 

The Fire Emblem series has been around for over three decades with well over a dozen titles. Western gamers wouldn't get a taste of the series until 2003 when the seventh installment, Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken (The Blazing Blade) was localized overseas. The franchise would continue to release game after game while also localizing every title to the west (minus Fire Emblem 12). Games like Fire Emblem Awakening continued to capture a larger audience when it was released in 2012 in Japan and in 2013 worldwide. While entries like Echoes: Shadow of Valentia and Three Houses would go on to offer a higher production value in terms of voice acting that seem to be adored by fans of the series, whether they prefer English or Japanese voice dubs. It’s hard to believe something so niche could grow into one of Nintendo's most precious properties.

When Fire Emblem Engage was announced, I wanted to marathon a few games in the series to get myself pumped up for the newest release. I finished the remaining routes in Three Houses along with the Cindered Shadows DLC, played a bit of Warriors spin-off Three Hopes, and finished The Sacred Stones on Game Boy Advance. But there was one game in particular that I’d been avoiding for a while but has always been in the back of my mind. That game was Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu, or more commonly known to Western fans as Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the fourth installment in the series.

Genealogy of the Holy War was released on May 14th, 1996 on the Super Famicom. You control Sigurd and his army as they travel across the continent of Jugdral and watch how certain events unfold. You’ll witness the world's political climate, conspiracy theories, and relationships among characters play out as you progress through the game. Pretty standard for most Fire Emblem games. The latter half of the game puts you in control of Sigurd’s son Seliph, who has his own army and fights to win their freedom from a certain enemy. As to who the enemy is, well that’s for you to find out to not spoil the events that lead to Seliph’s uprising. The story and theming of the game are also surprisingly very mature for the series. Touchy subjects like questionable relationships, religion, and child sacrifices make it apparent why it may be difficult to officially localize the game without changing too much of what drives the narrative of this entry.

The core gameplay of the series is well intact with Genealogy of the Holy War. You’ve got the traditional weapon triangle such as swords beat axes, axes beat lances, and lances beat swords; familiar classes like cavaliers, mages, and myrmidons; and even class and personal skills like Astra or Vantage which first made their debut in this game. Of course like with any other Fire Emblem game comes a cast of colorful characters, each brimming with their own personality. Although there aren't as many support conversations as there are in the newer games, when these characters have something to talk about, it isn't just some throwaway line put into the game with little significance. Many of the conversations these characters have with each other add to the amount of world-building present in the game. As you play, you’ll learn about complicated relationships between characters like Sigurd and Eldigan or why a character like Lewyn hid his identity from Sigurd when they first met up. It’s moments like these that made me want to continue the game and learn more about this world Intelligent Systems crafted. I wanted to see where Sigurd's story led, I wanted to see where the game's political climate settled on, and I wanted to see how well this game compared to other Fire Emblem games. 

Genealogy of the Holy was also the first game to introduce an iteration of the inheritance mechanic found in games like Awakening and Fates. It is a bit different than what was present in those games, but it works fairly similarly. The first generation of units you command can pair up with any other unit of the opposite sex. For these characters to form a relationship, they need to gain 500 love points. These points are acquired in several ways such as support conversations or if a pair of characters are adjacent to each other on the map. Some characters have an easier time getting into relationships with others because that’s just how the game works. A character like Lewyn will have an easier time forming a relationship with Erinys because of the set love points each character starts with for each other. If you manage to ship your female units with a male character and you kept your female units alive before the time skip, you’ll be greeted by their children in the second half of the game. These units will typically be suped up so long as your match-making skills were on point. Children inherit their parents' personal skills, weapons, a fraction of their gold, and a slew of other bonuses that affect things like their stats and growth rates. If you happen to fail at shipping your female characters or keep them alive up to a certain point in the game, substitute characters will take the place of children units. These characters will have inferior stats and skills compared to most child units but are still manageable to use if they are all you have to work with. I was really happy to see a form of the inheritance mechanic of this game present within Genealogy of the Holy War. It felt very familiar to what was in the 3DS games. And without getting into spoiler territory, it makes a lot more sense as to why children show up here than in a game like Fates, where child units only showed up to cater towards players who liked the child mechanic without it having any plot significance to the main story.

What also makes this title stand out is the map design.  Genealogy of the Holy War features big maps. These maps are typically three or even five times the size of traditional Fire Emblem maps. There are multiple objectives on a map that mostly have you seizing enemy castles. You’ll also have run-ins with multiple boss characters on a map. Sometimes you may need to even split your army up to take on different forces on the map. The layout of the maps are also interconnected with each other. For example, the final castle you conquer in one chapter will typically show up in the following chapter as the starting base. I love how big and interconnected the levels are because it made me get a feel for controlling an army and taking them across Jugdral. You get a real sense of how huge the continent is and I wish more Fire Emblem games would bring map designs like this in future titles. Since the maps are so big, it can take a while to finish them, roughly a couple of hours for each chapter. But with each chapter comes a different map theme. This was great as it made each chapter feel special as it felt like the game was trying to show me that I was in a different historical event of this holy war. 

Chapter 1 Map

So while I can say my impressions of the game story, world design, and inheritance mechanic are high up there, many other gameplay mechanics feel outdated and some newer fans may not be so forgiving with them. For one, while I did say skills made their debut here, it also meant certain skills were locked behind certain characters or classes. One of the most important skills introduced was Pursuit. Pursuit allows units to strike twice so long as that unit's speed stat was higher than the enemy. In most FE games, follow-up attacks were not tied to skills and were something characters would be able to do so long as they had a higher speed stat. Even critical hits were tied to a skill in this game unless two characters who were lovers were adjacent to each other before initiating an attack. I was not too fond of the skill system in this game as it led to some characters being useless compared to a character that was able to double attack. Because of this, it made wiping out hordes of enemies difficult and I needed to carefully plan how I wanted to proceed with each encounter. I needed to find a way to make sure some of my units didn't kill specific enemies so that my remaining party members were able to get the kill because they were not able to double-attack or land a critical hit when it mattered. When I play these games, I don’t like to have a few selected characters hoarding all the exp. while my lower leveled units are left to bite the dust. I want each unit to be on a fairly equal playing field with each other, but that’s just not the case here because of how good some skills can be.

Pursuit skill as part of the Sniper class

My second complaint would be the item management system. In this game, every character has their own set of funds. There is no shared pool of gold for your army. This made grabbing specific weapons/staves difficult for some characters. Money is also not very easy to come by. The few ways you can earn coins are by visiting villages, selling existing items, winning rounds in the arena, using your one and only thief to attack enemy units to steal gold, or by trading gold amongst characters that are in a relationship with each other. For some characters, it can be easy to obtain gold if they have the high stats to wipe the floor in the arena, and in turn, can provide their partner with the funds they need. But if there’s a character that just doesn't have the best skills/weaponry in the game, or doesn't have a partner to trade gold with, it can be tough for them to be a viable asset for your army. And also good luck with getting your thief to steal gold because the thieves you receive are very squishy and can be a pain to level up to improve their stats. You also cannot trade weapons and instead have to sell and repurchase items at a pawnbroker to transfer items between your army. When you repurchase said items, the broker will charge you double the price it was sold for. Great.

The Pawnbroker charging double the price for what items are sold for

Other complaints I found myself running into were just the amount of quality of life improvements many of the newer games have compared to FE 4. Things like speeding up battle animations, being able to see support levels before committing to the relationships you want for your units, or checking danger zones at the press of a button. It made me appreciate how accessible many of the games that came out after this were. But despite my gripes, I still wanted to keep playing. It's mostly the same old Fire Emblem that many fans know and love. If anything, this game taught me to be patient. I needed to be patient with its mechanics and map design. After all, it is only the 4th game in a long-running series. If you stick with it, you’re in for probably one of the best stories told in a Fire Emblem game. I can’t speak for every game in the series such as the Tellius games or even Shadow Dragon, but for the ones I have played, this could very well be one of the best story-driven Fire Emblem games I’ve played. 

I say it could be one of the best because well, I actually haven’t completed the game as of the time I’m writing this up. I ran into an issue with the emulation device I was using and my save data got corrupted. I managed to make it to the eighth chapter of the game. I tried many solutions to recover my save data but to no avail. So where does that leave me now? I could have just watched a Let’s Play and experienced the story that way, but I didn’t want to because I’m too stubborn to have things end that way. So I restarted the game from scratch. This time I planned out how units should prioritize their funds, which characters to ship with whom, and formed strategies based on my knowledge from the prior playthrough. By the time I’m writing this up, Fire Emblem Engaged has already been released and most of my attention has been given to that game, so I’ll go ahead and slowly take my time with FE 4 as the year goes by so that I can hopefully finish it in the near future. I am glad I got to experience this game and understand Sigurd’s backstory before the release of Engage. It was not totally necessary, but as I said at the beginning of this post, it was something I wanted to do to enrich myself with this series.

If you plan on playing Genealogy of the Holy War, the Project Naga fan translation is readily available, which you can find here. It is a bit outdated at this point, about six years old. Character names are slightly different than what some fans may be accustomed to like from Fire Emblem Heroes, but the translation is fantastic as it lets those curious about FE 4 be able to play the game in English. If you’re more familiar with the newer titles like Awakening and up or even the GBA games, you’ll still find many themes and mechanics familiar but I would recommend using guides from sites like the Fire Emblem Wiki page or information regarding the game’s mechanics from Serenes Forest. If you wanted to go in blind, I think the game is still fairly accessible mainly due to being able to save before each turn. Just be patient with the game and you’ll have a good time.

I hope more people get the chance to play this wonderful title, it may be a bit dated for some people's taste but I believe it holds up remarkably well compared to the titles before its release. If you’re a fan of the FE 4 characters that showed up in Fire Emblem Heroes, you owe it to yourself to get to know their backstories in this game. And if you still don’t want to jump into FE 4 right now, you can always hope for a remake of the game in the same way that Fire Emblem Gaiden was given treatment in the form of Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Intelligent Systems please make it happen.