So, I think around 2010, I found a Visual Boy Advance lying around at my computer, probably it was from my brother. Said VBA is also packed with severals ROM, one of which is FE8. So I decided to give it a try, and never got past Chapter 6. Several years later I was in Highschool and got my own smartphone. I decided to download a GBA Emulator on my phone and give FE8 another try, this time I managed to complete the Eirika Route, although I lost Arthur at the final chapter, got killed by Formotiis.
Several month after that I found out about the FE Hacking and Randomizer runs and tried those, but I think that’s for another story I guess?
niccee
And who were they?
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First Smash Bros, then watching Awakening playthroughs… (Damn, that Lucina tears scene gets me 
)
And that’s how I became real and a FE fan! 
Now, I hope for a Elibean version of Self-Randomizer… Wake me up, when it happens kekw
I think that was a lot of people’s first exposure to FE lol
there’s just so much of the stuff
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I think in middle school I found a youtube channel which played through FE7, and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I played chess, and it was like chess with anime characters (I’m still quite partial to the anime aesthetic lol). So I gave it a try, and followed all the very outdated advice like waiting until level 20 to promote, ditching Marcus immediately, etc. Back then I thought Lyn was so cool haha.
Then I dropped out of playing for a while, and I came back to it in college. I decided to try out FE6 because it was the only gba one I hadn’t played at all, and I fell in love with it. I think part of it was that the game was hard enough to force me to start using Marcus and promoting earlier (this corresponded to me watching some Mekkah videos unsurprisingly), and I haven’t stopped playing since 
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Fire Emblem was one of those series l knew was popular, but never saw much info about it. I saw Marth and Roy in Melee, Ike in Brawl, etc. but l never thought to look into the games until one day l said, “I’m gonna check what all the buzz is about.” I chose FE7 to try because it was the first western release and l felt like that’d mean a good first impression. I have hard time recollecting the overall journey through the game now, though, because l started it in 2015 and didn’t finish until 2020. My memory of it might be foggy, but the screenshots l took of it still have their timestamps, so l can see l played on and off for half a year, then dropped it for some reason. l do remember around the middle-early parts of Eliwood’s route, l was taking a full hour to get out of the prep screen, then two hours on average to play the chapter. I’m guessing that immense time sink plus some other unknown frustrations got me fed up enough to take a break right before completing Pale Flower of Darkness.
Then, l just kept putting it off for years until late 2020 where it got on my mind again and l figured it was worth me seeing it through to the end. l sure did see it through, but boy, what a spot to jump back into. Effectively the final stretch of the game, right there, with all the story threads coming together. It felt overwhelming at times and l was wigging out at the high stats, but l managed to put an official end to my five-year long playthrough. And with that, l decided that was enough Fire Emblem for me; it’s all GBA hacking, wiki synopses, and Let’s Plays from then on!
I suppose that does put me into a bit of an odd boat. I’m certainly “into” Fire Emblem, l just don’t wanna spend another hour in prep screen. XP ((seriously dunno why l got fed up, though. Prolly some dumb reason of younger-me))
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an hour in the prep screen?! ma dude what was you doing in there, preparing for the apocalypse?
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There was a blue hair dude wearing a tiara in the newest smash bros game (Melee). Apparently he was from a Japanese only series called “Fire Emblem”
Years later when I had discovered a passion for FFTA and Tales Of Symphonia, my brother told me there was this epic GameCube game his friend had that I’d love, never told me the name, just borrowed it.
And then there it was in my hands, Fire Emblem Path of Radiance.
The rest is history.
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I’m a very, very careful planner! …and overthinker.
I was like 5 at a family reunion on my Dad’s side, saw my third cousin playing shadow dragon.
Got interested in it, forgot for long time.
Watched this:
Video when it released, remembered fire emblem existed.
seeing your third cousin playing shadow dragon reminds me of the time I was on a tour bus in Cancun and the guy sitting in front of me was playing FE12 on his phone with DraStic LMFAO
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A friend of mine was invested in Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates. He talked with me about some stuff but I never thought it was my cup of tea because I generally dislike Strategy Games. Though Total War is a whole other world than FE… I would soon discover that.
Fast forward a year or so later and I’ve read about an article of Fire Emblem Fates, tips how to get started, which game you should play first… Before potentially wasting 40€ for a game I don’t like I decided to buy a cheaper game, FE7 on the WiiU shop first. (Hm… Could it be that… that the existence of the E-Shop Virtual Console… made me spent more money for Nintendo who decided to ditch that forever? Nah. Prolly just coincidence…)
The rest of the day I no-lived almost the entire Lyn Story and later on spent even more time on Elliwoods path. I never completed FE7 until much later though because I simply wanted to know if I would enjoy a Fire Emblem Game. Nowadays, I don’t know if it would’ve made click since Three Houses is much different than the earlier entries. But since I was pretty new and liked investing much time to grind characters etc. I prolly wouldn’t have bothered. But to sum it up: I heard about it, read about it, got FE7 on the WiiU and FE Fates later on. Prolly one of the best descisions in my life, it quickly became a new favorite game series of mine.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I liked playing as Lucina and Ike in Smash Bros 4.
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When I was an early teenager a friend gave me the NDS emulator for PC ( Desmume) with a lot of games including Pokemon and Final Fantasy. Then I found Fire Emblem that was similar to FF Tactics and you know what ? The experience of permanent death , the cool main character ( Marth ) , the magic medieval theme attracts me a lot and I finished playing more that Fire Emblem than FF Tactics. But I never completed and i stop playing. Some years later my father brought a 3DS to me and I looked for new FE games like Awakening and Fates … I fell in love.
Since that day i have been compiling all the originals FE games ( digital versions ) also in japanese and it becomes one of my favorites videogames series
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I really wish I had a more interesting story to share, but it’s really just, “I saw Marth and Roy in Smash, read on their trophies that they were from a game called ‘Fire Emblem’, and decided to check out the game when FE7 came out in the US”. Fire Emblem was, at the time, totally unlike any other game I had ever played. Initially, I sucked at it, due to a combination of that unfamiliarity and being, like, 9 when I first played it, but it really stuck with me and got me hooked from the first game I played. I still remember poring over Nintendo Power magazines, eagerly awaiting Fire Emblems Sacred Stones and Path of Radiance in the leadup to their respective releases.
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Oh that’s an easy one.
A little phrase called “Your Journey is Just Beginning”
For those who don’t know, there was a little booklet that came with certain GBA games. I believe it came with my copy of Link to the Past GBA. It was how I discovered several franchises, really. Mario and Luigi, Advance Wars, and plenty more. Heck, it was how I found out about Golden Sun: TLA’s release date.
I guess you could say Smash Bros. started it, but we all knew it was Japan-only at the time. That little brochure made me hyped like nothing else when I found out we were getting a Fire Emblem game Stateside.
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While I would like to say LetalBladeNinja’s LP of Path of Radiance is the one that hooked me to the franchise (seriously, if ANYONE who either knows Italian or would like to learn it would like to have some nice exposure to the Italian language, I highly reccomend it!), what ultimely hooked me into this series was a ROM called Fire Emlem.
I had just gotten a taste of Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga through VisualBoy Advance, and after randomly deciding to dive into other RPGs, I wound up trying out FE7 and Mother 3, both games that have changed my life because of their story/characters.
I remember deleting my file at Chapter 3 'cause Florina kept dying, and I didn’t know that I didn’t need to play from the beginning in order to reset XD
I remember thinking that Lyn mode was the entire game, and that everything with Eliwood after that was post-game content. I was treating it so much like post-game content, except that by the time Chapter 21 hit, and especially Night of Farewells, it seemed like a never-ending adventure of wonder.
After that I saw Sacred Stone’s story, and became utterly enamored with its second half’s villain, and ESPECIALLY the ways in which Alfred Kamon’s Midnight Sun built upon it, and ran to hell and back with it.
Some LPs of both FE9 and FE10, courtesy by Agent Elrond on Youtube (again, highly recommended), of Fates by BigKlingy, and Echoes by Kuuribro later, I guess that by that time I had already diven way too deep into the rabbit hole.
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When I was 13 years old, I accidentally downloaded a FE8 ROM in a random website while trying to download any game of Breath of Fire.
The fun part is that I’ve never played a Breath of Fire in my life.
I think it was destiny… or some reverse-karma-like thing because I was one of those “Who the heck is this redhead guy? It’s he an actual Nintendo character? Why is he in Smash?”.
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I saw an article in a videogame magazine about the then-upcoming FE: The Sacred Stones. When it came out I decided to try it out of curiosity, and ended up falling in love with it, so I tried the other two titles for GBA. The rest is history.
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I was 12 and I saw a college student playing an rom fe7 on the library computer. This was a big deal since library computers with internet access were timed, however he was using the catalogue computer which had no time limit since it had no internet. I being a clever 12 yo did some googling, learned what emulators are, and started using the catalogue computer for emulators of fe7 and fe8.
I eventually got use of the catalogue computer banned because I would stay on it for 3-5 hours playing fe Roms.
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