Review: Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Fire Emblem’s Darkest and Strangest Entry
Originally Published in the December 3rd 2019 edition of The Load Screen
A lot of Nintendo’s older Fire Emblem games never made it out of Japan for a pretty simple reason: they were *weird*. The concept of a tactical RPG, where the classic Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest gameplay of an over world broken up with occasional battles is replaced with multiple missions taking place on, essentially, a Warhammer-esque tabletop game, was a bit of a hard sell, and wouldn’t catch on in the states until Final Fantasy Tactics leveraged the familiar Square brand name to get people to buy a strategy game. Eventually, after Marth and Roy’s breakout roles in Smash Bros, Nintendo slowly started bringing the series over to the west, culminating in the massive multi-million selling blockbuster Awakening in 2012, as well as remakes of almost all the NES/SNES entries. Save, of course, for two-the Holy Blood duology on the SNES; Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776. Odd, seeing as those entries are considered by the Japanese fandom to be among the best in the series, and many of the gameplay elements that western fans love about the series, such as marriages, child units, and castle seizing originate from the first game in this saga. Well, there’s probably a real good reason for that-NoA is probably still scared shitless of the extremely dark storyline that involves child murder, sexual assault, brainwashing, and genocide. So let’s get to it!
Most Fire Emblem games (especially up until the DS era) open on a pretty familiar story of a nobleman facing exile from their kingdom by invading forces, and the plot revolves around raising an army to retake your birthright. Genealogy, meanwhile, opens with your army having to secure a castle from an invading army that has, according to the game, already slaughtered about a third of the population of your country and is planning to force the prince’s betrothed to marry a bandit king, who promises his men that “they’ll get their own girls eventually.” Ah. Bit darker than usual.
The story only gets darker from there-taking heavy cues from King Lear, most of the plot revolves around realizing there’s a vast and insidious conspiracy to dethrone the aging king of a neighboring country, who is slowly going mad, and the resurrection of a demon lord via eugenic breeding, which takes its influence from Rosemary’s Baby (JRPGs are wild, y’all.). Friendships are tested, your wife gets amnesia and is tricked into marrying her half-brother to facilitate the awakening of said demon king (!!!), and finally, at the end of part one, your entire army is burned alive by hellfire, and the game jumps ahead 17 years to pick up with the children of your units.
To put that into context-imagine if, when Aerith dies in Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth turns around and stabs every other member of the party you’d spent the past 15 hours playing as, then getting a hard “18 YEARS LATER” cut to Rain, Cloud’s child, picking up the sword and trying this whole hero’s quest thing again. Yeah, it’s pretty fuckin’ wild.
Gameplay wise, each chapter of the game takes place not over the small maps of other FE games, but across entire countries, with changing map objectives as you make your way across. This has a few big changes-one, the game has far less “maps”-there’s only 12 missions in the game, but each one takes about 2 hours to complete. Some units can’t naturally “double”-that is, attack twice in one turn if their speed is above that of an enemy-instead, they either have it as a skill or they never get it at all. Likewise, most units cannot crit normally-they need to either have the critical skill, or kill 50 units with one weapon and “learn” it. But that’s not nearly as cool as the storytelling capabilities having such a large map allows-it’s one thing to be told the villages of the kingdom are under siege, but it’s another to see a bunch of barbarians slowly tear down villages one turn at a time, and you can only slowly, agonizingly, make your way over from across the country. It imparts a bigger sense of import to the proceedings, but also tends to drrrrrrraaaag out the gameplay (which is honestly probably the real reason they never tried this concept again, as cool as I think it is.)
I don’t really have much to say about this game otherwise-I do have critiques, like how the second half of the game feels kind of bland compared to the first, or how a big drawback of the giant map design is that tank units are effectively worthless, but it’s still probably my favorite pre-3DS Fire Emblem. While it has no official translation, it does have a serviceable fan translation that’s pretty easy to find and play (even if it occasionally slips into the bad habit of fan translators to make it as literal as possible unless they can somehow make a character cuss.). If you have no qualms about sailing the high seas, it’s certainly worth your time to play the game that directly influenced the likes of Awakening with its marriage system, or Three Houses with its deeper focus on political intrigue.
