3.5/5 ★ – likevin96's review of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones.

Might just be fatigue from it being so samey v. the other two GBA games, but this one really didn't hit for me. On the surface there isn't that much wrong with it - the story is maybe the best of the trilogy (perhaps excluding my personal love for generation references from FE7), the gameplay mechanics are slightly refined from what came before them, and there's actually a pretty large array of different map objectives (although there's way too many fog of war maps for my liking). For some reason, I just didn't connect with the characters as much - I'm not really coming out of this one with any favorites (other than Seth, of course). I do want to shout out Lyon for being among the best villains this series has seen. His arc had the only character moments that at all resonated with me here. The two routes system annoyed me a bit since the final ~5 maps end up being the same, which, to me, is a silly way to implement something like this (I feel the same way about a lot of game with routes that only diverge for a small amount of time (SMTV) or don't give you great ways of getting to the point of substantial divergence (FE:TH), but that isn't really a huge deal. I played on hard mode for this one, which wasn't really too hard, but maybe made some parts more annoying than I would have liked. The challenge was probably too bumpy for my liking and the opportunities to grind felt a bit strange more than anything else. I don't know! I feel like I should like this game more than I actually did. Maybe another 20 chapters of GBA Fire Emblem just is uninteresting at this point - the aesthetics, sound, and gameplay style are perhaps just too much more of the same at this point.