I liked Advance Wars as a kid, then spotted Path of Radiance in a game store one time. Noticed it was also made by IS and decided to see if it’s also good.
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Obviously I knew about this franchise thanks to the Smash Bros games, but it wasn’t till like in 2021 when I really got into it. Unlike with some other franchises tho (like Persona, Guitar Hero, Marvel) I actually don’t really remember how I got into it. I think it was in late 2021, just as I entered college, when I was browsing through the TV tropes entry of FE Echoes (that was also when TV Tropes really became one of my most viewed sites) and then I checked a playthrough of the game made by Hawlo (goated youtuber btw), and since then I’ve known to know FE pretty well.
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I actually found out about it through Advance Wars.
I was recommended it in a small poketuber’s discord server. I was advised to start with fe8 and to use Saleh, which is what my clean fe8 rom is still named today. I think I had also watched some Mekkah videos?
A bored, much younger me found an gba emulator site on his school chromebook. All downhill from there tbh.
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I would say Super Smash Bros Brawl (was a big fan of Ike and Marth, desptie leaning towards Yoshi and Kirby at the time), but I only learned what FE was from Smash 4 (somehow), and that got me into Awakening.
*/Was bored during the pandemic
*/Scrolling through instagram reels
”Ooohh an online emulator eh?”
*/scrolling through various games
“Fire Emblem 7: Blazing blade?- Meh sure why not-”
(Spongebob narrator voice) 5 years later.
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In the early days of the 3DS, there was a series on the eShop called Nintendo Show 3D. Since this was before I had consistent internet access, those videos were my main source of news about Nintendo games coming out. When Awakening got a spotlight, the game really caught my eye. I had heard of Fire Emblem from Marth and Ike in Brawl, but I had no concept for what the games were like. Eventually, the Awakening demo dropped, and I replayed it probably 20 times. I was hooked.
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Not to be a hipster about it or anything, but I was one of the OGs 
I was really big into Golden Sun as a kid, like, autistically hyperfixated on it. And my parents saw something that said players of Golden Sun might enjoy this game, and it was the then newly-released FE7. I dove in and was HOOKED. Been a huge fan of the franchise ever since.
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Fire emblem awakening demo on the 3ds.
Legit blew my mind.
After that I met the youtube channel “Big Kingly” (he did a Awakening and then a fe8 full playthrough with awesome bios) that got me hooked leading me to get into fe7 and fe8 once I got my first phone able to run the “totally real game boy advance”. 3 or so years ago I played awakening and yeah it was peak indeed.
SMASH BROS!!!
The only reason why I got seriously interested was because I was writing a Smash Bros fanfiction and while writing the FE characters, I started to become very interested in the series.
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incredible. absolutely incredible.
-Receive a copy of FE Awakening for your birthday.
-Didn’t like it that much at first.
-The copy sat in a drawer until a friend asked if I could lend it to him.
-I lent him the game and he returned it with 3 completely wiped saves on lunatic mode.
-“Is it really that good?” I wondered. Then I decided to give it another chance.
-8 years later and here I am.
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My friend had FE9 and a GameCube. I had neither of these things, but when I was over at his place I’d often say we should play 9. I don’t even think he liked it that much lol. We got all the way to the last map but couldn’t find a way to beat it, our (ironmanned) team and our (badly screwed, probably underlevelled) Ike was too weak. Second time was the charm, though.
Then my father got a pirate flashcart and asked me what games to put on it, so I said FE8 and 7, soon playing them in that order. Then I had access to a computer, and emulated 4… and so on.
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I got bored of pokemon and dragon quest and I was searching for a new ds game and I found fe 11.
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Like most people, I was vaguely aware of Fire Emblem via Smash Bros. The strange part is that coming across MarkyJoe’s wacky Ragefest videos on Youtube was what made me curious about the series AND romhacking at the same time. Played through Blazing Blade + Sacred Stones on the Wii U Virtual Console, then started to try hacking myself.
Heard about Fire Emblem through Smash Bros, as most probably have. As for how I got into it? Game Informer magazine had this really cool multi-page ad for Awakening that convinced me to try the demo out. A few plays of that demo later, and I asked my mom for the game, and from there, the rest was history. My middle school classmates can attest to how annoying I was about my love of Awakening.
My mother felt the need to ask if it was the kind of game where you kill cops, btw? That always confused me. What about the title Fire Emblem: Awakening suggests that it might be in any way like Grand Theft Auto?
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When I was only about 10 or so I found a Pokémon fan site which had things like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon mission and rescue mail generators. It also had a section labelled “Fire Emblem” which I couldn’t make sense of at all but it had what I later discovered was a FE7 Link Arena simulator. Some of the class names were familiar to me (Archer, Cavalier/Paladin etc. - I was also into Age of Empires at the time) and it seemed interesting.
Later on I found FE11 in a game store or something, recognised the series name, tried it and enjoyed it even if I didn’t have the patience to reset for dead units nor the skill to ironman even in a game with so many recruitable characters and kept getting stuck. After I eventually cleared it, I was annoyed at Marth x Caeda being a thing (I have never liked romance).
I only really got into the series when Awakening came out though. I did go back to FE11 and lowman it with my favourites a couple of times though.
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When I was eleven I got bored of the games I normally played on an emulator, so I started looking around for something new. After finding and trying a few boring games I found three fire emblem games, FE6, FE7 AND FE8. I wanted to try one of them so I looked at the box art a bit before deciding not to pick FE6 since I saw Japanese on there and was not sure if it was translated or not. I then looked at FE7 and FE8 a bit more before deciding I liked how Eliwood, Lyn and Hector looked more than Erika (Her brother looked better tbh). I liked them a lot and eventually played the other games.
By accident, back in 2000 or so.
I was like 11 at the time, and most of the games I had played were strategy games (Starcraft, Warcraft 1-2, Age of Empires 1-2, Age of Wonders 1, you get it) of various sorts.
I had heard of emulators and roms, and where to get them. Got myself a SNES emulator. I was looking for a SNES rom of Final Fantasy 6, and on the particular site that I was on (I never found this site, each game had a screenshot showing what it was. I saw FF4, FF5, and FF6. Snagged them all.
Now, what’s going to be sorted next to Final Fantasy? And what looks suspiciously like a simplified version of a lot of the games I had been playing?
Fire Emblem 3, 4, and 5. None of the translations were complete, used a guide for them because I kinda had to!
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