Pros: gameplay
Cons: graphics, sound, can't train your units anywhere
The bottom line: I am warning you if you have already played Fire Emblem Sacred Stones you may be disappointed with this game.
This actually wasn't the first Fire Emblem game I played. The first Fire Emblem game I played was Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones. I even played Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for GameCube before playing Fire Emblem. I actually found out that it was actually the seventh in the series because the first six didn't make it to the U.S. Its not as good as the Fire Emblem games that came after them but its still a fun game. You may be a little disappointed if you played Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones before this one but its still an enjoyable game to play

Story:

There are actually two stories in this game and the first story starts at the prologue and ends at Chapter 10. The second story starts off at Chapter 11 and goes to the final level and there are two choices in the second story depending on which you choose determines how Chapters there are. The first story follows a young girl named Lyn who lost her family and her whole village to a group of bandits. It starts when Lyn finds you who is a apprentice tactician and you decide to join Lyn on her journey to find her grandfather that she just found out she had. It turns out to be a quest to save her grandfather from his evil brother Lundgren who is trying to poison him so he can be come the king. As you and Lyn journey to save her grandfather they are joined by a bunch friends who want to help her. Now the second story has two choices to choose from you can follow Eliwood on his quest or you can follow Hector on his quest. Either one you choose its basically the same story because after a couple of chapters Eliwood and Hector come together along with some of their friends they bring along. It all starts when Eliwood who is the prince of Pherae notices that his father Lord Elbert was missing. Eliwood decides to go and find his father but he doesn't go alone he brings his friends with him and a little later he meets up with his best friend Hector who wants to help him find his father. They end up finding out that Eliwoods father was kidnapped by Lord Nergal with the help of his precious morphs and his other followers. Lord Nergal wanted to bring the dragons back into the world because he thought he would be able to control them himself. There is more to the story but this is all I am going to say.

Gameplay:

Fire Emblem has a large cast of characters and there are three main characters. Eliwood, Hector and Lyn are the main characters. Here are al the rest of the charcters I can remember: Oswin, Matthew, Serra, Isadora, Ninian, Sain, Lowen, Bartre, Legault, Will, Erk, Guy, Rebecca, Dorcas, Florina, Hawkeye, Marcus, Heath, Rath, Fiora, Dart, Canas, Kent, Raven, Priscilla, Nils, Nino, Jaffar, Pent, Louise, and Renault.

The main part of the game is the strategic battling. The battle system is turn-based and the battles are fought on maps and each map is set up on a grid. Each character is considered a unit and the enemies are units too. Each Chapter there is a different map your units fight on and at the beginning all your units are put in a certain square. Each character has movement and depending on what the movement number is that's how many spaces your unit can move. When shown on the map all your units are blue, the enemy units are red and the friend units are green. Once all your units have moved that is a turn and it counts as a second turn once all your enemy units have moved and the same goes for friend units.

In order for your units to attack a enemy unit they must have weapons or magic. There are 5 types of weapons and 3 types of magic, the 5 types of weapons are: sword. lance, axe, staff and bow. The 3 types of magic are: anima, dark and light. Each weapon has a certain amount of uses and once they are all used up they will break and you will have to buy more weapons so its good to always have extra weapons with you. Next I will talk about the weapons triangle which gives units advantages over others and disadvantages too. Here is how the weapon triangle works swords beat axes and axes beat lances and lances beat swords.

Now when two units go into a fight they take turns striking each other with their weapons usually your units will get to hit once or twice that goes for the enemy too. Your unit will do a set amount of damage with the weapon its using but your strength or magic comes into play too as well as the enemies defense or resistance if its a magic attack. Luck also comes into play in fights as well as skill and speed. The luck helps determine if they will hit the opponent and the speed of the enemy comes into play too. The units skill is what gives it the small chance or big chance if the stat is high enough of landing a critical hit. Once one of your units is killed in a fight they will be gone for the rest of the game. Near the end of the game the chapters get harder and sometimes your units will be too weak to survive in the chapters.

When a unit kills another unit they will earn some experience points. Of course like all RPG games when you earn enough experience they will level up and the good thing with the Fire Emblem games is that it always takes 100 experience to level up to the next level, but the higher the level the less experience they get when killing an enemy. Unfortunately the highest level they can reach is level 20. Every time your character levels up some of their stats will increase and these stats are: HP, strength, skill, speed, luck, defense and resistance. One draw back is that you can't train in between chapters. After Lv 10 if they have the correct up grade item they can upgrade to a new class, oh yeah each unit has a class and here are a couple of classes: Mage, Archer, Thief and Wyvern Rider. Once they upgrade to a new class they start over at level one and here are a couple of upgraded classes: Sage, Mage Knight, Sniper, Ranger, Wyvern Knight and Wyvern Lord. Here a couple of the upgrade items you will find in the game: Elysian Whip, Guiding Ring, Orion's Bolt and Ocean Seal.

Controls:

The A button is used to choose a command, select options and other things. The B button exits out of menus and goes back to previous menus. L and R buttons let you check your units status and how much weapon uses they have left and it lets you check all that for the enemies too. The start button will start a fight once you have access to the Preparations menu before a fight. The d-pad is used to scroll through the different menus and it is used to move the cursor on a map.

Graphics:

The graphics are not that good for this game. The maps are not all that detailed and don't look that great. At least you can't actually see the grid lines on the maps. The characters don't look that great on the maps either and there is very little detail on the characters. In the maps your units are almost completely blue except for a little bit of other colors for some of them. The enemy units are all in red and the friend units are all in green.

Sound:

One thing I don't like is the lack of voice overs for the characters. Some of the music is good but most of is not worth listening to that's why I usually play with the sound off. The sound in Fire Emblem is just not good at all.

The actual game is very fun and enjoyable as long as you can focus on the gameplay and keep the sound off. If would be so much better if the graphics and the music were a lot better. Other than that it is a great game for anyone who likes Fire Emblem games or just strategy games in general. For all I know you may like the music or graphics and enjoy it more than I did.