Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia Standard Edition - Nintendo 3DS

I only recently experience playing Fire Emblem in the GBA and fell in love. I got this on sale last month and have fallen in love with it. As this was my starting point, I would most likely hold this higher above others because it has a full well voice acted cast, beautiful music, and gorgeous visuals. I have not finished the game because it is a thinking game, for me at least. One part had me play for 2 hours (from trial and error, in fear of losing anyone in battle). If you're looking for something that'll keep you busy, and don't mind thinking strategies to win, I highly recommend this. I wish someone did but I guess it leaves lots of more hours to look forward to for the next games. I'm excited to play the old games and the latest one on the Switch. But first, to finish this one!

Great game! Art style, gameplay, story, and fully voice acted too! If you're into Strategy RPG than I totally recommend this. Veteran FE fans will love this. It might take a little bit to get used to for casual fans, especially without the pair-up/marriage system, but I would still recommend this.

I loved and put too many hours to count into Awakening when it came out. All of the extras with focus on relationships and making strong child units was fun to keep up with in addition to having the solid strategy gameplay and story inherent in the fire emblem formula. When Fates released however, I grew a bit tired of all the extra content and it felt like it got in the way of trying to solely focus on the story and progression. Echoes has been a relief to me for its return to focusing once again on combat and story while stripping out the extras that came with the last two games. It has one main new addition in the dungeon crawling segments. I've found running around the dungeons to be a fun way to level grind in between story segments. The story segments are great in this game and the battles offer a decent challenge to make each fight feel really rewarding when you complete them. If you are a long time FE fan looking for a return to form, this is a great entry to pick up.

My first Fire Emblem game. I greatly enjoyed the game. Uses 2D graphics for the map scene and switching to 3D graphics for the battle scenes. Uses 2D animation for the cut scenes. There is a large cast of characters. Besides the maps to play there are dungeons to explore that give you standard RPG element to play. There are enemies that you encounter in the dungeons. The story is very good. I played on classical/hard mode. In classic mode, characters who die in battle do not return after the stage is complete. I had to restart many times as I didn't like losing my characters but I liked the challenge of not losing any characters. There is a mode where characters will return on the next stage for players who want that. The tried the amiibo support for Lucina which gave me a ghost like character of her. I wasn't interested in that and did not use it again. The Alm and Celica amiibos give you an extra map/dungeon to play (I have yet to use it myself so I can't say much on it).

There's a lot to like about the previous two Fire Emblem games on the 3DS (Awakening and Fates) but the stories are pretty melodramatic and some of the characters are pretty one note. That's not the case in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. The story is heartfelt and engaging, and every teammate matters. They all have their own personality which makes them more real. The game being fully voiced goes a long way to enforce that. As for mechanics, this is typical Fire Emblem fare and it's exciting and challenging (playing on normal seems about right, with some difficulty spikes) without being a slog. If you like Fire Emblem at all, you owe it to yourself pick this up.