If you’ve kept up with Fire Emblem over the past decade, you’re probably familiar with the tale of its downfall and rebirth, or at least one version of it. Intelligent Systems and Nintendo decided North American consumers were finally capable of purchasing strategy games and published the seventh Fire Emblem game, The Blazing Blade, called simply Fire Emblem for international audiences in 2003. Thus began a roller coaster of successes and failures.
In 2012, as the series was on the brink of collapse, Fire Emblem Awakening launched with a cast of marriage candidates and countless permutations of their playable, genetically modified children as a last-ditch attempt to save the series. It worked! It was a miracle! Or a shameful concession to the popularity of games like Persona, depending on who’s talking. It was neither, though. Intelligent Systems and Nintendo already paved the road to salvation 30 years previously with Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War.
The whole thing spans generations — hence the “Genealogy” part of the name — because everything is bigger in Genealogy. Everything. A single battlefield map contains what would be three chapters or so in any other Fire Emblem. You might start one mission by galloping off to save a castle besieged by bandits, only to end up dealing with reinforcements threatening the base you just left behind and a kidnapping victim to rescue in another castle further away. All these objectives are relevant to the story, as Genealogy spins its tale out among dozens of important personalities across multiple countries and even — a unique thing for the series — ally armies.
Genealogy of the Holy War, released in 1996 for Nintendo’s Super Famicom and never officially localized outside Japan, features a lot of plot beats that will seem familiar if you’ve played any Fire Emblem game, including Awakening, but dials them up to 11. The gist of it is that a powerful country takes advantage of a smaller one during a time of weakness in a bid to expand their rule over the continent. You’re (mainly, for the first half) Sigurd, a prince whose initial “defeat the bad guy” motivations get swallowed up in a complex tangle of politics and dark magic. Do-gooders get involved, there’s backstabbing and surprise twists to do with deities and the descendants thereof, along with a very Awakening-coded bit about using humans as the vessels of gods. (Let’s also not forget some really weird bits where half-siblings kind of sort of get married. They didn’t know they were related. Yes, you could say this is the Game of Thrones of Fire Emblem.)
