Hey, you didn't see this coming did you? Well, my tenth completed game of 2025 is this one!
I wasn’t expecting my second post for #Blaugust2025 to be a game review, but here we are!
Fire Emblem is a franchise that I haven’t played very much, I wrote about the series in the past, and this will be the first one I actually complete.
Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade was the first game of the series to come out overseas, after being released exclusively on Japan for years. It is a tactics RPG series that has remained popular since the apparition of its characters in Super Smash Bros Melee for the Game Cube.
On this game, you control a variety of characters who can move inside a grid-based map, and attack enemies. These attacks are done with melee weapons, of which there are three of them: swords, axes and lances, that best each other, like in rock, paper, scissors. There’s also cavalry, archery, mages, and other classes with different uses in the game.
One of the defining factors of this series is perma-death. If a character dies during a battle, they cannot be used during the rest of the playthrough. In-story, they may just be incapacitated sometimes, but it’s practically the same thing.
In the game, you become the strategist for a group of characters, helping them achieve victory battle after battle. You join forces with three main characters, Lyn, Eliwood and Hector, all of them have multiple goals throughout the game, from finding lost family members, to uncovering a conspiracy against the kingdom, to saving the whole world from calamity itself.
Cover art of Fire Emblem The Blazing Blade
I think the story is pretty great, but not the highlight of the game, at first it seemed like filler to me, but as it kept progressing, I grew interested in these characters and I wanted to know what was next, the last third of the game really elevates the stakes quit a lot, and I really enjoyed the dialogues and the character developments more than I expected.
The game is divided into chapters. Unlike other traditional games, you don’t traverse a map from town to town or get into random enemy encounters. Every chapter will show some story bits, with character dialogue and scenes explaining the story. After that, you will have a preparation phase, where you can select which characters to use, equip them with weapons and items, and position them in certain tiles of the map. Once ready, you will start the battle and do your best.
Each battle consists of multiple turns, a player phase and an enemy phase. You can move and interact with as many characters as you have, and after your turn ends, the enemy will do the same. As the amount of enemies grows, this can be a bit tedious, but it’s no big deal. It’s actually a way for the player to realize the consequences of each move. Positioning, attacking, healing. Everything you did during your previous turn will affect the outcome of the enemy phase.
The Blazing Blade came out for the Game Boy Advance, which influences its design in a couple ways, given it’s a portable device with a focus on pick-up and play, the maps aren’t too large and it’s very easy to suspend and resume a session if needed. I think this makes the game a perfect point of entry to the series.
This game looks absolutely gorgeous in 2025. It is one of the best looking games in the platform, and it is hard to find pixelart as good as this one even in modern games. Just look at this sweet critical hit:
Lyn gets a critical hit and performs a super cool sword attack on some dude
I do have some caveats though, which are not really a big deal.
I am sorry to the fans of the franchise, but I couldn’t really stand the permadeath for the most part, I must confess I absolutely abused emulator save states to avoid losing characters, multiple times. I replayed the same bits over and over trying to get the outcome I wanted.
This however didn’t make me hate the game or anything, it actually turned it into a bit of a puzzle game. It was almost like playing minesweeper or something, I would do multiple variations of a turn, trying to attack enemies in the right order to avoid a character dying during the enemy phase.
Also, during a battle, enemy reinforcements will show up sometimes, and if I left a mage in relative safety, a knight could spawn right beside it from off-screen and kill them, so I’d end up restoring to a previous state and moving that mage away from danger pre-emptively, or leaving other characters to intersect the new enemies.
I much prefer how other games do it, where death only affects during the battle itself, but in the end you get all your characters back for the next battle. This is the case on Jeanne D’Arc, Triangle Strategy and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. But again, to each their own.
Besides, it was only annoying when a character dies for a really, really dumb reason. There will be times, when everything seems lost, when I made so many bad choices for a long while and it is not worth it to go back, that I will come to terms with letting someone die, by making them fight and deal enough damage so that one of my other characters can do the final hit.
It’s in moments like that when the game actually succeeded in making me care about them, the noble sacrifice for the greater good and moving forward when everything seems lost.
Again, it really is kind of neat and helps create your own story sometimes, but many times, a random enemy would just one-hit kill a character I had been leveling up for a while with full health and all, which was really, really annoying.
In 2025, this game is very easy to emulate, it can be done on the Nintendo Switch via an Online + Expansion Pack subscription, or you can use a GBA emulator on your phone or laptop. I played part of this game ages ago on my PSP, but played most of it on my Anbernic RG35XX SP, which was a faithful recreation of the experience I would’ve had on real hardware, but with better screen brightness!
The music was great, the art was awesome, the animations are absolutely a feast to the eyes, the gameplay loop is solid, I don’t know if I need any more words, pretty much everything in this game holds up today, even more so if you don’t mind the challenge of permadeath.
All in all, this is a really cool game and it’s worth playing it today.
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