Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light

This aged pretty well, surprisingly. Decent game.

Still pretty solid, but Mystery of the Emblem includes a remake of this game that's basically a carbon copy except with better graphics and QoL improvements so there's not really any reason to play the original here.

This is where all the various Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, and the subsequent Strategy/Combat/Craft RPGs carbon-copies come from. This game is of an epic length: I did not manage to beat the game in 20 years (language barriers aside). For a NES game (8bit) from 1990 with such lenght, crafting, and grinding it is nearly mind-boggling (not as much as Zelda 3, yet it is quite a feat for a 8bit game which memory is not supposed to contain that much stuff). And yes, your Minecraft indifrectly descends from this game.

Playing this on Switch as my first-ever Fire Emblem. Dated 90's gameplay aside, I'm enjoying it a lot more than I expected, but I've also been abusing the save states everytime I initiate battle with another enemy. It seems so random if your attacks hit or completely miss, and the inevitable counter-attack makes each encounter such a gamble. This ordinarily wouldn't bug me too much, but the permadeath aspect makes each little battle so high stakes that I'm too cowardly to play this without save states ha.

The convoy/weapon+item storage system is definitely the worst thing in this game though. Such a chore to go through like ten turns just moving characters, withdrawing/depositing items, and then cycling others onto the convoy to do the same.

This is one of those games you need your weird older cousin to teach you how to play