GBA games

Recently I’ve been replaying some GBA games that I never won on a GBA emulator I got from Jacob. The two games in question are Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, both of which are very highly recommended Japanese RPGs.

Final Fantasy is fun, though its gotten somewhat boring now. The battles are all very similar and after a time training your characters gets a bit boring. Still, I’ve played the game so many times… and its quite fun so I did enjoy it for the week or so I played it.

Now I’m playing Fire Emblem, which just so happens to be one of my favorite Japanese RPGs of all time. I’ve played three games in the series and all of them are amazing. These games all work as turn-based RPGs where you lead a small band of warriors through various maps fighting lots of other games. The amazing thing about these games is a very simple, very logical game feature: if a unit dies he is DEAD. As in, no resueraction, no KOs; dead is dead. If that sounds harsh, then you’re right: it is a harsh rule that makes you actually care for your units.

On top of this you’ll often find yourself with rather weak units, but units that you NEED to use to make them strong so you can have strong units later on. This means you’ll have to put them on the front line, but in such a way that they don’t die.

Add to the fact that you have weapon triangles, magic triangles, special weapons that destroy other weapons, and most of the games don’t allow you to save in the middle of battles (well… they do, but once you access the save it deletes itself), it all makes for a very challenging tactical experience.

Anyways… so I’m gonna probably play a level now… see if I can finish it this time without losing my thief.

NOTAE BENE: I say Japanese RPG several times. What I mean by this is that I find most Japanese RPGs are rather different from their western counterparts, such as that they should be in a different subgenre of RPGs. If you want more information on RPGs you should wiki it or something.