A subtly addictive strategy game mildly hindered by a few flaws.
User Rating: 9.2 | Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones GBA
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is a great strategy game. Perhaps the best thing about it is exactly how easy it is to get into it - extra layers of depth are quickly piled on through each oncoming battle as you go forward, but they're easily grasped and quickly understood, and result in an easily understood but extremely deep and fun battle system. Characters armed with swords, lances, and axes as well as various types of spells move around the map. Generally you have to defeat everybody on the map, or at least the leader. But it's nowhere near that straightforward. You'll sometimes be given a chance to convince other characters - neutral or even enemy sometimes - from the other side, but to do so, you have to do it with the right character. However, this is sometimes irritating. It's sometimes difficult to get the character that you know you have to talk with the enemy character to said character, as this person is often surrounded by other enemy units. This means that to do so you either have to do a stealth charge and get the person next to said character - which is probably the best option - but even in that case you'll need some backup to take out the enemy characters once you talk to one. However, before the enemy character is friendly, he or she will act just as any other enemy, and it's a difficult balance - if you attack him head on, he'll die, but if you put him within range, one of your characters may die. Which brings us to the death system. When a character dies in Fire Emblem, they die and don't come back - and every character on the map is capable of dying, save the one protagonist character. This is a double-edged sword - you do form a connection with your character, and your actions are given considerably more "weight" than in pretty much any other strategy game, because each unit is crucial. It also forces you to use all your assets in order to protect them, because absolutely no unit is really "expendable" - of course you can keep playing if one dies, which there's a good chance you may have to do, but each character is useful and important in their own way, so it's wise to make sure they're sufficiently protected. However, there's a problem. Your enemies are pretty much just as strong as you, so you have to rely on various status advantages - like the rock-paper-scissors systems of each weapon, etc - to be able to defeat enemies, as well as using healers. But enemies aren't really going to travel solo all the time, and will mostly stick in groups. This means that if you don't mostly decimate an enemy force once you meet them the first time, then they'll often focus on killing a single unit - even if they're as good as dead, they're not stupid enough to waste their remaining lives. Since characters can potentially die in one or two hits, often you'll see a character who is not even at half-health go away in one turn. This is especially irritating because if you don't want to sscrifice that particular character - which most of the time, you won't - you have to restart the battle, and may end up doing battles over and over and over again. Thankfully, this game pretty much gets everything else right. It's phenomenally deep, and luckily it's fun enough so that you'll keep coming back even after you keep having to restart battles. Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is not only one of the best GBA games, but is one of the best and deepest games you can play, just like the similarly addictive Advance Wars. 
