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Capella

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Fire Emblem, where are you going?

I'm feeling pretty disappointed since I heard that the twelfth release in my favorite game franchise is...another remake in the style of the 11th one.  While I was excited when I first heard about Shadow Dragon (finally! Akaneia for the western world! Marth exists outside of SSB!) , after playing it, that was all I needed on terms of old Fire Emblem games. 
 
Of course, I'll still buy Mystery of the Emblem because it will be a Fire Emblem game and there is nothing I like to play more than Fire Emblem games, but I wish Intelligent Systems would go on to a new a setting. I firmly the believe that the story in the series has improved over time - I'm obsessively attached to the cast of Tellius games, fond of the world and characters of Sacred Stones, somewhat entertained by Elibe and Judgral, and as I found with Shadow Dragon, couldn't care less about what happens to anyone in Akaneia. It's the Fire Emblem story at its most basic "excuse to have a bunch of battles," and Marth, being the proto-Lord, has all the nobility-at-the-cost-of-anything-resembling-human-personality that has defined almost all of the Lord characters since then.  Not to mention how much the support system from games 6-9 enhanced the games' ability to characterize and make the player care about their units.
 
Sure, that's story and this series isn't really a story-focused one, but I feel that player investment in the characters is important to Fire Emblem's gameplay. Much of the challenge in the series comes from the fact that all the units are unique and that they're gone for good if they die. In Shadow Dragon, there were far too many characters, most of whom had nothing resembling characterization, and essentially no incentive for me to bother to keep them alive. So I didn't. And then there was the way the remake added bonus chapters if you had below a certain number of characters, which more or less incentivized letting people die. I suppose at least I can hope that Mystery of the Emblem will avoid that. 
 
Honestly, I think only an entirely new game has a chance of not being disappointing for me compared to the Tellius games. I really do hope this is the end of the remakes.

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