Fire Emblem

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

Fire Emblem is a video game series for the Nintendo consoles and handhelds. It's the younger, more popular, brother of Advance Wars. Among the tRPG genre, of which it was a fairly early member of, it's unusual for its lack of player controlled generic characters: Every character the player controls is unique, has a personality and if they die, they're dead forever. In most games there is a finite number of battles and obtainable money while weapons are finite in use, which renders efficiency in combat quite important (though only a handful are particularly stingy about this).

Officially we're not here to talk about any of that. Instead we're going to talk about a pair of trading card games based on it!

Games

Until the 7th game, none of these were officially translated. English titles for these are the ones used by Nintendo in crossover games. Most of the games are in separate unrelated universes, with only two or three games being connected in plot. Fans refer to these subseries by the name of the world they take place in while Cipher, the second TCG, assigns each a color and a symbol.

Archanea/Falchion/Red

In Cipher characters originating from these games focus on swarming cheap units, fitting how many of these characters lacked solid personalities or dialog past their original chapter.

• Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (ファイアーエムブレム　暗黒竜と光の剣) on the Famicom (NES), often known by early fans by the slightly different and unofficial translation Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light or just FE1. The pantless prince Marth is forced to flea from his country of Altea after Dolhr, who has obtained supernatural aid from some old artifacts and some evil dragons, invaded it. After his cover is blown in exile, he and his retainers decide to join forces with the other countries of Archanea, including the Holy Kingdom of Archanea, who are trying to fight Dolhr. Along the way he acquires the legendary sword Falchion (which isn't actually a falchion) and the Fire Emblem shield. It is regarded as exceptionally primitive and lacks many basic features of later games. The most obvious three being that healers can't level up by healing and instead can only get XP by being attacked by an enemy and not dying (quite a task given their frailty), not being able to see the enemy's movement range when selecting them, and the inability to rearrange units in the deployment phase (this can be worked around by removing all units from deployment and readding them in a particular order). Don't play it and play one of the remakes instead.
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (ファイアーエムブレム　新・暗黒竜と光の剣, lit New Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light) on the DS was the 11th game and is a remake of the first game. While it fixes the basic issues and gives Marth some much needed pants, it still lacks much of the polish found in later games and for some bizarre reason makes the new content impossible to access by a rational player by requiring things like killing off the majority of player units at a rate even a horrifically bad player couldn't manage. This is corrected by a fanmade Full Content Patch.
• Fire Emblem Gaiden (ファイアーエムブレム外伝) on the Famicom was the second game and set on Valentia, a continent far to the west of Archanea. It stars Alm, a youth that eventually acquires another, separate, Falchion (that's still not a falchion!) and Celica, a sword wielding priestess. The mechanics actually got weirder here instead of more polished and introduced concepts that would never or almost never be seen in the series again like magic that requires spending HP to use, equipable shields, explorable towns and abandoning the limited resources. The maps in this game are really terrible, open with limited terrain.
  • Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia (ファイアーエムブレム Echoes もうひとりの英雄王, lit Echoes Another Hero King) on the 3DS is a remake of that. It's officially released in English, though the translation is quite lacking and has a bizarre love of adding character breaking jokes. The maps were barely improved.
• Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem (ファイアーエムブレム　紋章の謎) on the Super Famicom (SNES) was the 3rd game in the series and where it started to hit its stride. Two years after the original game Marth has found pants and become king of Altea and awaits his marriage. A two year peace ends when the Kingdom of Archanea forces Marth to assemble his men and crush a rebellion in Grust. It included a remake of the original game which uses the new mechanics and contains many differences, including removal of several filler levels. It is regarded as an excellent game.
  • New Mystery of the Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadow (ファイアーエムブレム新・紋章の謎〜光と影の英雄〜) on the DS was the 12th game and a remake of the third. It generally tightens up the original, expands the personality of the previously bland characters, and remains quite good. It was for some reason not translated to English, but a fan translation exists. It introduced two mechanics which were well executed here but directly contributed to the downfall of the series: My Unit/The Avatar, a player created original character, and Casual Mode, where dead units only stay dead for one chapter. Since Shadow Dragon existed the remake of the original was not included.

Elibe and Magvel/Legendary Weapons/Purple

In Cipher characters from these games focus on support skills, which is appropriate since the game's beloved support system began here. Characters from Magvel often have anti-monster effects or (in one case) monster tribal. As of this writing only two Yellow monsters were printed and only 4 monsters were printed overall, so this isn't utilized all that much.

Tellius/Lehran's Medallion/Green

In Cipher characters from these games focus on leveling up and promoting to achieve high power, with abilities that only work if a character has sufficient cards on its stack.

Ylisse/Naga's Brand/Blue

In Cipher characters from this game focus on class change (but not to the extent of Tellius), orb manipulation and have easily swarmed monsters with their own tribal support. Ylisse is actually the same continent as Archanea but in the distant future where technology is exactly the same or worse.

Fódlan/???/Grey

TBA.

First TCG

An unusual, poorly supported game. It's best remembered for being the only source of official art for many characters from the first five games. No effort was made to translate it and nobody plays it.

Cipher

Cipher is the second attempt at a TCG. It is unusual among TCGs for two reasons. Firstly, all cards represent characters, with no land, mana, spell, energy, instant or trap cards to be found. Secondly decking out does not lose the game, it only causes the discard pile to be shuffled into a new deck (and this happens instantly so you don't even miss drawing a card).

While it has not been translated officially, there is a notably sized English community for simulator play and all cards have been translated for such.