Fire Emblem - Chapter 26x: Night of Farewells

The Fire Emblem series (along with the Wars series) originally started on the Famicom (NES) in Japan. Like Advance Wars, it didn't make its first appearance in North America until the Game Boy Advance. After playing both the games, I can say without a doubt that we in North America were screwed. This game is awesome.

The game is more similar to Shining Force than Final Fantasy Tactics. Each character is highly specialized and has only a few things that they can do. The real trick in this game is putting your characters' strengths against the other enemies' weakness. Oh, and the biggest feature of the series is permanent death. Yes, if one of your characters dies, they are gone and there is no way to revive them. Gone for the rest of the game. Of course, if one of the three main characters dies, it is game over, so you have to redo the level. Otherwise, you just lose the use of the character which is cool because it changes aspects of the story.

I have a problem in that I can be a bit of an anal retentive perfectionist sometimes. In Fire Emblem, this means that I want to finish the game with every character that I recruited still alive. So if one dies during a mission, I have to restart that mission (there is no way to go back to an earlier point in a mission). Chapter 26x was long. I mean, really long. There were tons of enemies and they were strong. So, it took me a long time to complete this mission. Really long. I would get halfway through and then mistakenly leave a character out on his own. He would get swarmed by enemies and die. And I would have to restart. This must have happened over a dozen times. And it was very frustrating. I almost considered bending my rule and just letting a character die.

But no, I persevered and finally last night I completed the mission. I'm actually not sure if this rewarding of my obsessive behavior is a good thing.