LogFAQs > #937849741

Alright, here we go. The biggest individual moment(s) are going to be spoiler tagged, but the general flow of the story, including some big details, won't be. So read at your own risk if you fear having the overall plot spoiled for you.

1. Genealogy

At this point, you could argue Genealogy is the single most distinct game in the series. Three Houses and Radiant Dawn share some overlap in how they handle multiple factions, though the resolutions are very different. Gaiden had a lot of its ideas brought back in Sacred Stones, and since it's been remade you could say it has another game just like it. Genealogy though remains its own special thing, utterly unlike any other entry.

The first and foremost thing to come to mind when discussing this game will always be, of course, the sheer size of its maps. While other Fire Emblem games generally have somewhere in the realm of 20-30 individual chapters, Genealogy has a mere 12, but they're all huge. The prologue is a whopping 62 tiles wide and 30 tall, while every other map is 62 by 62! Of course the amount of the map you actually cover varies by chapters with a lot of spaces existing just for show, but there's no denying that these chapters are gigantic. Your objective is always to seize enemy castles, which kind of serve as the chapter breaks for this game. And you can save every turn if you want, which is pretty much necessary when you're dealing with maps that go on this long.

The map size is a pretty divisive topic, with many saying it results in the game dragging itself on too long and citing the places where you spend a lot of time just moving people around with nothing happening. And it is true that there are some boring parts here, like the long unguarded stretches of road in chapter 9, though I would argue that the amount of "dead" turns is not nearly as bad as people say once you know what you're doing and are making sure to send your units to the places they'll be needed instead of trying to get people to places they'll never reach in time. It's a game that plays better when you learn to play it quickly. Still, nothing
can make moments like the spirit forest not be tedious.

On the other hand, these huge maps really serve to drive home the sense of scale that Genealogy operates on. Fire Emblem games can sometimes have worlds that feel pretty disjointed, with things like Marth just kind of getting warped across the continent or Bern in Binding Blade apparently having its entire army wiped out in one battle so you can walk into the royal palace unopposed. This is definitely not the case with Jugdral, where you get a great sense of how the world is laid out because you ultimately play your way across the entire thing. With the exception of an awkward transition between chapter 9 and 10 (and a well justified skip between 3 and 4), every map ends with you seizing the castle you'll start the next chapter in, and you can clearly see places where elements from one map appear on the next one. This is most notable with the final chapter, whose starting and final areas mirror the beginning of the prologue and the end of chapter 5, respectively. This continuity across the world makes the whole story feel so much more real than it otherwise would, and its always a highlight of chapter 10 to finally return to Chalphy where it all began because you know exactly how long a journey it's been.

This brings us to the story. Even people who haven't played it yet probably all know Genealogy's basic plot structure, especially after things like second generation characters and timeskips have come up in recent Fire Emblem games and drawn comparisons to it, though they might not know the exact context. The first half of Genealogy is a bit of a departure from typical Fire Emblem stories, as instead of taking control of a young lord you play as the somewhat older (by which I mean like, maybe mid 20s. It's a Japanese game, "old" means weird things here) and already established Sigurd as he gets drawn into a series of conflicts that lead to him going to war with opposing nations before eventually having to fight his own homeland to defeat the corrupt nobles who have declared him a traitor. The second half of the story picks up 17 years later and is more typical ground for the series, with Sigurd's son Seliph raising an army to overthrow the evil empire and defeat an evil cult and dragon etc.

Genealogy is not the deepest story ever written by any means, but what it does is be very efficient with its writing and present itself well. Major characters are (mostly) well characterized even with only brief dialogue, we're given enough information about the history of the world and its nations to make everything feel that same sense of continuity I praised Three Houses for having, and there's a lot of little nuances that make it all come to life as more than the sum of its parts. Things as basic as the pre-chapter narration showing the map and where all the major players are located and the plethora of mini-bosses with dialogue and portraits (that often get recycled, to the point of creating a meme around a certain guy and the six others who look just like him) all help enforce the idea that this story is taking place in a fleshed out world where every group of enemies you encounter has some sort of rudimentary character to them, a feeling added to by the way many enemy groups have some oddities unique to them, such as mini-boss Riddel in chapter 10 having a squad of diverse units who all carry speed rings, or Brian's great knights who have luck stats, higher speed than their level/class would suggest and a personal skill (Pursuit, no less!), all things no other generic in the game possess.

One of the game's strong suits is its strong collection of antagonists. While the central villains of the Loptyr church are sadly just generic evil guys, the rest of the villainous cast covers a ton of ground. The thoroughly unlikable petty tyrant Chagall serves as a good short term villain before the real first generation heavy hitters Langbalt and the amusingly named Reptor show up in person for the first time after being merely referenced up until then. And even they have a bit more depth than your typical evil noble, with Langbalt seeming genuinely disgusted by Andrei killing his own father to take power and wishing peace on the dead Lord Ring despite him having apparently been a good dude, and Reptor being a manipulative schemer who ironically gets himself played like a fiddle. In the second generation your enemies run the gamut from serving the empire mainly because they were born into it to utter scumbags and everywhere in between, with particular mention going to Hilda, arguably the most detestable person in Jugdral, no small feat in a story that features a literal cult dedicated to an evil god that believes in having children put throug