Marik2 said:
Someone guide me where to start with the series. I somewhat played the DS ones, but people say they're not that good and the animations suck.
The DS one, shadow dragon? That was probably one of the worse if not the worse in the franchise, it was a remake of the first one, except they kept all the terrible design of it (which doesn't bode too well for this remake).
The fire emblem, as far as the american market is concern, is essentially split into two half with awakening which significantly changed a lot. If you're hearing about FE nowadays it's because awakening made a lot of change that the market liked and as such it revive the franchise away from it's niche route toward more open market, so that's probably where you want to begin then.
Essentially fire emblem used to be pretty ruthless, you had a set number of missions, this meant limited resource: character (permadeath), experience to level unit, weapon (weapon had a limit use after which they break) and money to buy new equipment and consumable. For the US market that was fire emblem (GBA), path of radiance and radiant dawn, most older game also work on that model, but those were never released here (although full translation are available online and playable by emulator, thracia 776 is particularly notable and considered one of the best if not the best of the older FE). If you want to start there, the GBA one is excellent and path of radiance is pretty good, radiant dawn I though was fairly mediocre.
Sacred stone which was release between GBA FE and path of radiance is somewhat in between the two style, as it feature multiple difficulty (although extremely unbalanced) and the ability to play generic mission for more experience (although at the cost of resource). Then you have the second "era" with awakening and fates, which saw significant relaxation of the rules, permadeath is now something you can disable, you can easily grind additional experience and fates even remove the limitation on weapon usage. Another significant change is the ability to pair up unit so that weaker character can be protected by stronger one. Most future FE are guaranteed to feature most if not all of those changes, so like I said it make most sense to play these since they're the future.
You could see old fire emblem a bit like the dark soul of tactical, it didn't hold the player hand much and it expected you to perform well, but in exchange there was little that felt unfair about it. Because the game usually only had one difficulty setting, they were extremely well balanced (although the balance was made with player who would get the best results in mind, it's very possible to fall behind and end up in a situation where it's impossible to finish the game if you lose too many character or you don't spread the exp all around your character). With the changes came a lot of problem in balance, imo. With three/four difficulties setting and the possibility that the player is playing with or without permadeath, it's quiet simply impossible to properly balance the missions, and so you have huge difficulty spikes and some deeply unfair situation (a large number of enemy appearing out of nowhere and moving/attacking on the turn they show up, i.e. trial and error difficulty). The other changes also significantly strengthen the players, making proper balance far harder, so you end up with normal mode that are far too easy and harder mode being unfairly hard (enemy can kill character in one shoot and so on).
