Liner Notes: Fire Emblem - The Sacred Stones

Lean on your Seth, but don't.

This month we took a look at and talked about Fire Emblem - The Sacred Stones on the Gameboy Advance. I’m mostly picking Toben’s brain about the relation of this game to the rest of the series, the mechanics and lineage of them (including near the end a recommended order for new players to experience how the game has changed over time). We also reference some games that are clearly inspired by the series.

In terms of links, we’ve got the promotion chart as discussed (credit to GameFaqs and user Rick52 (Rick Dykes):

A fairly large chunk of our discussion is around the arcane mysteries of the promotion chart and how Sacred Stones handles character progression.

Toben also wanted to make sure that y’all got a look at the character animations, the bespoke ones for critical hits, which are lovingly crafted and beautiful in this game:

Modern iterations inspired by Fire Emblem if you’re a series fan:

Disclaimer:

I’m sorry for the fidgets and clicks that are audible, everyone. I’m always circling and moving around the screen as I listen and think, as well as moving in my seat. Typing to search up little tidbits happens too, but there’s no reason you should have to hear it. There was also an unknown buzz I tried to remove here, which means this version of our voices has more compression and a noise gate, where other months that hasn’t been necessary. I’ll be trying to use the Nvidia broadcast filter system and experimenting with other microphone solutions for next month to standardize the sound and quality.

Next month’s (this month’s game) is Psychonauts 2; we’re both very excited to be experiencing what by all critical accounts is an amazing return to the Psychonauts universe.

Twitch streaming will be on hiatus for the beginning of the month, but picking up later on, and previous streams are archived on YouTube.