Fire Emblem - A Gaming Diary

I'm surprised how long it's taken me to write about Fire Emblem on this blog.  Not actually, of course, I obviously have an idea of what I want to write about and have absolutely cancelled Fire Emblem drafts before.  Maybe some day I'll get that Three Houses draft together.  Probably not though now that Nintendo has promised us five more years of Three Houses discourse.  Anyways, I used to adore FE.  It was probably, for a like 7 year stretch between Awakening and Three Houses, my favorite Nintendo franchise.  I, like most people in the West, found out about FE from Smash originally but I also had the benefit of a content creator I watched being an FE fan.  

Former content creator and anime journalist Jacob Chapman, then going by JesuOtaku online, used to do streams on Twitch where he would play dating sims and watch Detective Conan.  They were super fun and also super late night, which was perfect for me at the time as I was a homeschool kid who had never slept well in his life.  But Jacob would also play Fire Emblem, specifically the Ike duology.  And I remember falling in love with just the core ideal of Fire Emblem.  An RPG where failure had a very steep consequence was novel to me, and I was enthralled by the implications therein.  I remember excitedly telling high school friends about Fire Emblem, trying to convert them over since they had played Advance Wars and so were familiar with the core gameplay.  Unfortunately this was still a time when I was, a, not buying games for myself so had to be picky, and 2, not in a place where I could easily access Fire Emblem games.  My GameStop's PS2 section was full of cheap copies of every RPG you could ever think of but a single FE game?  Nah fam.

So I'm excited to get into this. Excited to finally play FE for the blog, hopefully not for the last time.  By the way, I know people can probably infer which Fire Emblem I'm talking about because there's only one that has ever been released in any country I'm pretty sure that just carries the title "Fire Emblem".  But I am talking about the seventh game in the series, first to be released outside of Japan, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade.  It's been on my to-play list forever and I'm excited to finally get into it.

Review:

I did not finish Fire Emblem.  Not in the sense that I'm DNF-ing it and calling it quits, it's just playing Fire Emblem on its WiiU VC release proved to be more annoying than I had thought it was going to be.  Fire Emblem for GBA is a game best equipped for like playing curled up in bed or playing on the go and the WiiU made both of these things either inconvenient or impossible!  Having to completely reset maps each time a Lord died proved to be very frustrating and the WiiU just made that worse by both limiting where I could play, ensuring I couldn't easily pick up and play, and also how long I could play as the WiiU gamepad has a worse battery life than the Sega Game Gear.  So in the interest of not playing Fire Emblem for the rest of the year and wanting to have the best experience possible with Fire Emblem, I'm putting it on ice until I can afford to get the NSO version where I can at least rewind when a Lord dies.  So I'll only state, for now, that I really liked Fire Emblem and look forward to someday playing it for real.  8.1/10

Diary:

3/27/26

Okay, so two things real quick.  The first is that I have, in the past, played a chunk of Fire Emblem.  I bought the game on the WiiU Virtual Console years ago and had, at that time, played through to chapter 10 I believe before getting walled by the big boss of that chapter and going "oh I'll get back to this later."  I never got back to it.  So everything I played tonight is something that I had experienced before.  But also I'm glad that I didn't pick up from where I previously played because I forgot so much of the first part, let me tell you.  The second thing is that, for this Fire Emblem game and any Fire Emblem game I play for the blog with permadeath on, I'm going to just take my losses.  I know I'm going to regret that later on, trust me, but here's the thing.  I used to be the type of FE player who would turn permadeath on and then play a map over and over again until I did it deathless.  What is the point?  Legitimately, what is the purpose of that.  The whole purpose of permadeath as a mechanic is that you have to live with your consequences, just resetting an infinite amount of times renders the whole thing worthless.  No, I'm choosing to just play through, take my losses as they come, and if it puts me in a no-win situation later on because I've lost so many units that I can't progress, then I'll gladly take the L.

I was immediately reminded how much I love Lyn as a character.  I don't want to pretend like Fire Emblem has the best writing in the world, mind, especially when it comes to its characters.  Three Houses is notable among the fandom for being a game with an actual story that has something interesting to say about the nuance of war, that's kind of where we are.  But Lyn is so atypical for a "Lord" archetype.  Fire Emblem lords are people who are usually defined by their sense of honor and duty.  They're usually princes and fit the same rough vibe as characters.  See: the Smash Fire Emblem roster where we have 8 Fire Emblem characters and it's difficult to tell them apart.  Lyn, meanwhile, is just totally unique among the cast of Lords.

She isn't a super refined classically trained fencer, her swordsmanship was learned surviving as a nomad on the plains.  She attacks swiftly and, usually, tries to cut as many times as possible, a stark contrast to the typical FE lord who is more classically trained.  And this fighting style reflects in how her character moves through the world.  She is disinterested in becoming a noble, in ruling.  She's a nomad first and foremost and an heir second, a woman hyper aware that the nobles she would be playing politics with look down on her for being, essentially, half-Romani and only play nice when there is favor to gain.  She just simply wants to meet her grandfather before he passes on, and finds her granduncle's attempts to assassinate her to be a waste of time as she does not crave the throne.  I know Lyn isn't the character we follow long term, that FE7 is built around the three protagonists.  But she's a nice introduction to the world of Fire Emblem and it's not surprising how popular she remains, especially among Western Fire Emblem fans.

The rest of the cast is pretty whatever though so far.  Like, Fire Emblem characters have a habit of being pretty one note and fitting into existing archetypes.  You have two knights, one who is a boring stick in the mud and the other who is a flirtatious cad.  An awkward and shy pegasus knight who finds combat easier than talking to men.  The healer who is an absolute gremlin, sewing chaos in the group.  The cynical and sarcastic mage.  The thief who is a bit too forward about his profession.  You get the idea.  They aren't bad but they also aren't like.  Noteworthy.  I understand that FE7 does have support conversations but support conversations seem like a nightmare to try and get in this game and don't seem super worth it in the end so if they reveal more nuance about these characters, then ignore me about them being one note.  But also, don't lock the depth behind optional supports, y'know.

I completely forgot that basically the entire first part of FE7 was just tutorial chapters.  Now, on the one hand, I appreciate this.  Every game in a series is likely to be a player's first game in that series, and I feel like playing it safe and overtutorializing is, more often than not, the better play.  Onboarding new players is better than shutting them out in most cases.  And I do like how FE7 presents its tutorials, starting with just Lyn battling a couple grunts to learn the combat and strategy basics, then introducing knights to communicate increased mobility and weapon switching, then introducing a different kind of objective, and so on.  And also I've been out of FE for long enough that reminders on the basics are kind of welcome.  On the other hand, I do think it goes on for a bit too long?  You could've probably condensed down some of these tutorials, like why do we need two separate entire maps to tell us how "knights" and "knights that fly" work.

I forgot that you get Dorcas this early.  Dorcas is not a super notable character in the actual game, he's an ax-wielding warrior who is introduced in the game's chapter about recruiting enemy NPCs.  He's a man who is in desperate need of money to afford a healer for a disease that makes his wife have great difficulty walking and in that desperation, he finds himself allied with a group of bandits.  Dorcas is, however, infamous to me because he makes me think of the original US Fire Emblem commercial which bizarrely tells the player to "trust nobody", which is not the point of Fire Emblem at all, but also features a moment where Dorcas falls over dead because one of his allies poisoned his ale.  My guy catching strays.

I haven't lost anyone yet!  I mean, I'm still in the tutorial so it's not expected that I'll lose anyone, hopefully I'm not that bad of a strategist.  But still, I have yet to get a disastrous 1% crit that just murders someone out of nowhere.  I have to say, having gotten so used to the modern games, I'm finding it a little difficult to adapt to classic FE where there's like.  Limited experience due to not having random mercenary fights to grind with, having units that cannot deal any actual damage and thus serve hyper-specialized roles and rarely, if ever, level up, just in general not having my units be even levels.  In particular the fact that like, the Healer is only meant for healing and the bard/dancer class is only meant for giving extra turns is something I need to get used to, I'm used to those classes being able to do SOMETHING in battle.  Also, just as a random aside, the way this game uses Together We Ride is hilarious.  The classic FE theme is used literally any time a new recruit joins the party so sometimes Lyn will literally walk into a home and it'll start playing because there's an NPC there that can join up.  Anyways, here's hoping that my entire army has a long and prosperous life and I don't lose anyone throughout the game.

3/29/26

I'm just going to complain about the WiiU controller battery here for a sec, hope you don't mind.  So, I've been playing this on the WiiU, as previously stated, because that's just where I own FE7.  I bought it off the VC many years ago and played through most of the first 10 chapters before I stopped at literally the boss of Chapter 10, as I got in a situation that, to me, seemed unwinnable.  So what I would like to be doing with this playthrough is to curl up in bed using the WiiU gamepad as a handheld device to play the game on while I throw up like, a movie or a YouTube video essay on the TV.  After all, the gamepad has a screen for this very reason, to play on it so the TV can still be usable.  And maybe it's because my WiiU is now 12 years old so it's getting a bit long in the tooth, but I swear it's like.  I'm playing for maybe 90 minutes before the red light comes on.  It's ridiculous.  The WiiU, man.  Decisions were certainly made.

It's so funny getting to the end of Lyn's story and getting a series of descriptors on what happened to the cast after you beat it.  Like this is an actual ending to the game only 4 hours in.  I wonder how many kids turned their game off at this juncture thinking they had beaten the game, not knowing that the game had barely even started.  I knew FE7 was split between three protagonists, it's difficult not to know actually because the box art of the game is the three protagonists standing side by side in battle.  So I figured Lyn's story was going to reach its conclusion partway through the game.  I did not expect it to both be so early on in the game, nor did I expect it to be such a definitive changeover.  I assumed there would be a more natural transition, like you follow Lyn until chapter 14 and then she fights with Eliwood by her side and then that would be the end of Lyn's story but because you already have Eliwood, you just follow him from there instead.  Wild that it's as abrupt as it is.

Something I forgot about Lyn's character, which also serves to make her feel very distinctive from other Lords in the series, is that she is just willing to throw hands with anyone.  Like, she's not violent by any means, but it's clear that her different perspective, being a woman who has had to fight in the plains to survive with no concrete home, has led her to be quick to throw down.  If there is someone who needs to be taken care of, there is very little hesitation on Lyn's behalf, very little hand wringing about whether it's "right" to kill someone just because they're a bad person.  She sees a problem, and she wants to solve it.  Other lords will get super philosophical about whether or not wanton violence is truly the only way but Lyn is like "I will make sure you never know Mother Earth's embrace".  She's so much fun, I wish we got more time with her as the main character.

Unfortunately though, we have to spend time with Eliwood.  Eliwood is fine, I think of the Fire Emblems I've played, he's by far the most boring lord.  For a long time I thought he was Roy from Super Smash Bros. Melee, his actual game of origin, because they look a lot alike.  He's actually Roy's father, go figure.  Eliwood is the way more traditional FE lord at the center of this game, a young, heroic prince to lead the army behind a truly noble cause.  He's so refined that his default weapon is literally a rapier, like THE sport fencing weapon.  Eliwood detests the concept of going to war as he cannot stomach the hardship that war will cause the innocent citizens of the various kingdoms scattered about the continent.  He believes that individual conflicts are easy but a largescale war would be too much.  Also, he can be very trusting, and is loyal to a fault, something the villains try to exploit at one point in the part of his story I played.

But forget about Eliwood, because we also meet our third lord for this adventure, Hector.  Hector is introduced in Chapter 12, the chapter after we take control of Eliwood, and he's also the lord from FE7 I've heard the most about over the years.  Like obviously there's a lot of love for Lyn out there, she's usually the one who gets brought back for other projects.  But people who have played FE7 tend to really like Hector, in my experience.  And it's not difficult to see why, dude's a blast.  Hector is the second son of the Marquess of Ostia, a large and powerful nation on the continent.  He's sarcastic and unpretentious, he lets his feelings be known directly and usually in a smarmy way.  He feels the least like a Lord of the three lords we have in FE7, having more in common with Fire Emblem's history of thief and barbarian characters.  Which is, itself, pretty on point as Hector favors a large axe over the typical swords the other Lords tend to use.  He's a lot of fun, and the dynamic between himself and Eliwood is very entertaining as, despite being close friends, they are so definitively opposites.  The enemies in Chapter 14, the chapter I left off on, seemed surprised they were traveling together for this very reason.

So we've stumbled into the plot of the game, though arguably we stumbled into it in the last section it's just like.  At that time, the main villains were just a bunch of grunts trying to kidnap a girl.  We'd be here forever if I described the story to each individual map.  Anyways, the Black Fang are our big bads (for now), an assassin's guild on the continent who is the backbone of a conspiracy that is brewing under the noses of Eliwood, Hector, and Lyn.  Eliwood's part of the story starts with Eliwood leaving his kingdom to go search for his lost father, who rode off one day to investigate rumors of unrest across the continent and never returned home.  Upon reaching a neighboring kingdom, with whom Eliwood's kingdom has always had close relations, Eliwood seeks their aid.  Only to then be attacked by Black Fang assassins who cut him off in the mountains, using the auspicious terrain to put Eliwood at a disadvantage.  The Black Fang are attempting to stop Eliwood from moving forward by any means necessary, as they do not wish for him to uncover their conspiracy, a conspiracy which unifies multiple kingdoms across the continent for a goal we know not yet.

I believe FE7 is the first game in the series where the Tactician is a real character in the plot and not just a representative of the player on the map, and you can tell.  Like, the tactician is still meant to be representative of the player, but now it's more of a player self insert than it is just "there's a little green guy on the map sometimes and that's the strategist making the plans".  Characters will now talk to you directly and have conversations with you.  The way they choose to handle this, however, is very funny.  You don't get like dialog options or anything, instead the characters stare directly at the screen and talk at the player, and then when they ask them for questions or advice they pause for a second before saying a response to some advice the player allegedly said.  It's such an odd vibe to include.

As well, in Eliwood's story they will slowly trickle in characters that were part of Lyn's party in the first part of the game, and all of these characters will react excitedly to seeing the player again.  But again, it's like.  We're not enough of a character to be able to appear on screen and respond but we're too much of a character to be allowed to fully be a self-insert, it's kind of a clumsy incorporation.  It's very charming, mind, and there are some scenes where it works.  Like Lyn saying goodbye to the player at the end of her story does feel more impactful because she's talking directly at us.  But it's very clumsy and it needs a lot of refinement.

So far I've only lost two units and both of them were in Lyn's part of the game, meaning they weren't actually lost.  It is weird that the game has training wheels for the first 10 chapters before being like "okay, NOW if anyone dies they're dead".  I have to wonder if this game was always made with the intention of it being the first game to release overseas, as they seemed to really focus in on this being a tutorial game.  Anyways, Lucius, the Monk, was lost to me in Chapter 8 of the story, the ballista tutorial level.  I had Lucius as part of a squad that was taking a sneaky path around the mountains to try and pincer attack the enemy while my other squad tried to blitz attack the Ballista, but I miscalculated how effectively I would be able to descend on the ballista and it took me considerably more time to get there than I would've liked.  Lucius got overwhelmed on his trek around the mountains, the ballista found an easy target, and so he was picked off.  RIP.

The other unit I lost was Erk, the mage.  Erk I lost in Chapter 9, the fog of war tutorial level.  If you know this game, that does mean that both of my offensive magic users were out of commission before the boss of Lyn's section, so you can imagine how tedious that was.  Erk was just the result of me not being cautious enough when going into the fog.  I again split the party up into two, this time not trying to pincer the enemy but rather to access the northern part of the map, where there were houses to access.  I left Erk a bit too open as we entered some of the foggier parts of the map, thinking foolishly "how many enemies could there really be anyways, it's so far from the objective".  Blissfully unaware that there was a fort up north which was spawning new units every couple turns for the first so many turns of this map.  Erk got swarmed and I lost my only other mage.  But hey, at least both of the deaths so far were my fault, right!?  I can accept it when it's my fault, it's way more upsetting when it's like "you played correctly and the opponent just landed a 1% crit on you".  I actually haven't had a 1% crit situation yet, if you can believe it.  I did, however, miss two 93% hits in a row.  Fire Emblem's calcs are wild, y'all.

4/4/26

I know, that's a pretty wide gap between entries.  I got in kind of a writing mood, I was writing "who was the first playable woman of color in Super Smash Bros." and then I used that momentum to start writing a review/essay on Pyre which hopefully will be out by the time this gaming diary is out so I can link it.  Then I did a big dumb, like just a massive dumb.  I got curious what my save state was on my WiiU and reloaded it, setting me back three chapters, so I had to replay three chapters.  Actually kind of four because I did do the sidequest on chapter 13.  So understandably I kind of didn't want to play Fire Emblem for a few days.  Reloading the wrong state and losing a ton of progress is the worst feeling, I swear.  Thankfully I still didn't lose anyone on my replays of those chapters but man, did the game want me too.  The enemy landed a 20%!  They miss every 80 they have but they sure can land a 20, huh?

So, the good news is that I still haven't lost anyone.  I've come close, god knows, especially in chapter 15, the second of the two maps I've gotten done tonight.  Chapter 15 is a siege map, your goal is to cut enemies down until you can successfully route a path to the central goal.  At which point, after capturing it, the map ends.  And it's common in siege maps for enemies to respawn endlessly so that the player doesn't just stall for a million turns and is incentivized to win the map.  So in Chapter 15, they just keep spawning enemies to descend from behind you, sort of entrapping you if you can't push forward and putting a clock on how long you can hold your central position.  But outside of losing my tent for that map, I haven't permanently lost anyone yet.

The bad news is that the reason why I haven't lost anyone yet is not because I haven't been losing.  Instead, it's because I keep losing my lords.  This isn't uncommon, your lords are often the strongest units you have so it's not difficult to end up in situations where you send them out to deal with a problem, only for them to get overwhelmed and die.  And especially in this game, it's an outcome that you'll run into from time to time just because you have three Lords, so there's a lot more opportunity for each of them to get overwhelmed individually.  The thing is, lords aren't allowed to die.  It's the one exception to the permanent death rule, if your lord dies, you have to either restart from the start of the turn that killed them or just restart the map over.  Except it's not really a real option, because FE7 calculates the enemy's hits at the start of their turn, so you can't keep reloading a turn to try and manipulate the RNG.  If your lord dies on an enemy turn, you have to restart the map.  Which is also probably why I only got two maps done tonight.

Lyn is back, by the way.  Hence why I now have three lords.  After the events of Chapter 14, which reveals the conspiracy to Eliwood and Hector, and also implicates Eliwood's missing father in said conspiracy, we move to Lyn's nation of Caelin.  Caelin has been taken over by the big bad of this section of the game, the Lord who would be king if the conspiracy succeeds, overthrowing the current ruling house and redistributing their power among the Lords involved with the conspiracy.  Who are now mostly dead.  They're mostly dead.  Anyways, Eliwood and crew move into Caelin to aid Lyn in reclaiming her home, meaning Lyn reunites with the player insert AND Eliwood.  And also meets Hector.  There is drama immediately.  Lyn, who is very measured and precise in how she handles her weapon, having been taught to preserve the blade and strike only when needed, finds Hector to be a brutish oaf who swings his weapon without a care in the world.  She chides him immediately, before apologizing for speaking out of turn.  I hope there's more drama to come between these two absolutely.

I feel like progress is going to slow down considerably.  Not because I don't like the game, mind, I do.  Playing Fire Emblem has been a lot of fun.  It's such a junk food RPG, just good mindless fun.  It's the kind of thing I need sometimes.  I'm just sick of fighting the WiiU.  I really don't like how quickly the WiiU gamepad battery drains while I'm playing FE, with it losing its charge after only a map and a half usually.  And I don't really want to play with it on the charger the entire time because I like being able to curl up in bed with it.  It feels like, out of necessity, I'm probably going to have to adapt to only playing one map at a time.  Disappointing but like, I'll do it.  I want to finish this game.  Don't be surprised though if other games get done/other gaming diaries have come out while I'm making my way through Fire Emblem, only being able to play for like 90-120 minutes before the WiiU throws a fit does open up as lot of possibility.

4/10/26

It was a week, y'all.  Yeah so I didn't play like any Fire Emblem this week.  I was dealing with an eye infection and just not feeling like doing anything, really.  Probably a bit of gaming burnout too.  Also time blindness has been hitting REAL HARD lately, I don't know what that's about, but there were a couple nights where I was like "I'm going to do at least a chapter of Fire Emblem, I'm just going to watch this YouTube video first" and then I watch like five and suddenly it's midnight and I missed my window to play.  I'm mad at myself because it's like.  It's not that I don't want to play more Fire Emblem, I really like this game, it's just that I haven't found the drive to do so.  It's been a week of "I don't want to play right now so maybe I'll just work on some drafts" too but that's also been slow going.  It's been making me big depresso.

On top of that I will admit that my fighting with the WiiU Gamepad has made me not want to return to Fire Emblem.  It's been genuinely deflating getting like a chapter done and being excited to jump into the next one only for that red light to come on.  I know this is such a minor thing, but like, I like being able to really commit to a play session, y'know?  Spend 3 or 4 hours on something, especially if my goal is to write about it.  So the WiiU being this way just got me like "I don't know if I want to do this".  I think I have a solution though, and I'm mad I didn't think of it before as it's the solution I usually come to: the Super Nintendo controller.  I own the SNES Classic, lovely little device, and something fun about the SNES Classic is that the controllers have the same input as the Wii Remote port.  So what you can do is plug a SNES Classic controller into the bottom of the Wii Remote and use it as a Classic controller for Wii/WiiU games.  It's not a very good Classic controller in most situations, mind, since it lacks sticks and therefore couldn't really play the more "hardcore" Wii games you'd want to play with it.  But for VC stuff, it should work well.  If I had a nickel for every time the Super Nintendo controller came in clutch, I swear.  A friend's FireRed playthrough improved tremendously once she switched to SNES controller.  Truly the GOAT, I should always be thinking about it.

So I finished Chapters 16 and 17 in this play session.  The plot to this game like so doesn't matter, y'all.  Like, again, Fire Emblem plots are famously just nothing, this isn't surprising.  It's just like, man, this plot is hard to latch onto.  But basically what happened in this section is that we met a spy who, allegedly, has been working as a double agent for Hector's kingdom by posing as a Black Fang.  Or I guess a triple agent?  She's working for Hector's father by pretending she's working for the Black Fang by pretending she's working for Hector's father.  I don't know, I don't really trust her but like, this is early Fire Emblem.  There are rarely characters with super complex allegiances.  Anyways, she informs us that the Black Fang were once a vigilante group operating on the continent, killing corrupt nobles who abused their power to make life better for the citizens.  But that just over a year ago, their leader remarried, and their new wife has ties to a mysterious figure known as "Nergal".  Nergal seeks to use the Black Fang to ally a group of kingdoms and stage a coup, and that Eliwood's father is very likely alive and with the other leaders of the other kingdoms.  Although the spy cannot say if his father is truly part of the coup or is just being held hostage by them.  Oh also, the girl the Black Fang tried to kidnap earlier is back.  Her name is Ninian.  She's obviously very important to whatever plan they're scheming but right now she's just a girl with no memory.

With that, we sail South.  Which means we get a boat stage!!!  Love a good old Fire Emblem boat stage.  Hilariously, despite there literally being a class of character in Blazing Blade called "pirates", the pirates that attack the boat aren't actual pirates.  Annoyingly, they are mostly dark mages, meaning that my army has an uphill battle with them.  I do appreciate that dark magic in FE7 has a pretty low chance of hitting, rarely over 50%, which means it's not immediately decimating a party.  Unfortunately my luck is terrible and enemies have hit basically every hit below 50.  And, for reasons I'll get into in a minute, I don't actually have a party member who is equipped to counterplaying dark mages specifically.  So my strategy ended up being "throw out my Pegasus Knight, have her tank every hit, retreat her when her health got to low, deal with the fallout".  It worked surprisingly well, but I did have to rely on lucky rolls because when Florina retreated for heals, she did leave my party pretty vulnerable.  That being said, Florina is the GOAT, she held down that map basically all on her own, Pegasus Knight supremacy.

Speaking of being unlucky, man, my level up rolls y'all.  So, bad level up rolls are a universal experience to Fire Emblem players.  It is very common that you will finally get a character to a level up, which is much harder for some characters than others, only for your level up reward to just be "+1 HP".  Or, the worst feeling, you get a cracked level up where everything goes up +1 or you roll a very rare +2 on a beneficial stat, then you lose the lord and have to replay the map and your next go through you get a much worse level.  But in particular, I've been getting horrible roles.  Florina is like the only unit that has gotten strength upgrades in like 3 hours of play, despite many of my units being almost in a position to reach their higher class many of their attack stats are really low.  It's very difficult not to rely on the singular pre-upgraded unit I have unlocked, Marcus, because I know the pre-upgraded units are usually worse long term.  But like, he's the only one with a decent damage output right now.  And that's just strength buffs!  I don't even want to talk about how fragile all my units are!  So many level ups are just "HP and Luck".

Still haven't lost anyone... kind of.  I did lose Guy on the boat level but then had to reset when Lyn died (as she is want to do, apparently).  And then upon reload I was like "I'm not going to force Guy to die just because he technically already has".  Though maybe I should've, given how I intentionally didn't let him die when I replayed through chapters earlier when I reloaded my save incorrectly so he'd still be where he would end up "canonically".  Hmmmm.  Regardless, the problem is actually that I failed to gain a couple new recruits.  In Chapter 16, there is a prisoner of war who joins up with the enemy party, as he seeks to take revenge on Hector for what the kingdom of Ostia did to his family.  He does this despite swearing loyalty to Lyn's royal family.  This guy, Raven, is apparently the brother of my Troubadour party member Priscilla and if I had brought her all the way to him to talk to, I could've recruited him.  I don't know if that's something Priscilla said and I just missed it or it's something I would've found out through like context clues?  Regardless, I played cautiously, as I often do, and the non-playable green army got to him.  More pressing though is that he was imprisoned with his friend Lucius, a person that we had met in Lyn's part of the story.  Lucius is a monk, meaning he is capable of using Light Magic.  Not recruiting him is the exact reason why the boat mission was so hard, as he would've had advantage on all those dark mages.  Oh well, though, we eat our losses.  Two units officially lost so far.

4/13/26

Welp, I finally lost someone for real.  If you're counting, this is technically my fifth unit lost but it's also the first one that is actually "lost" per se.  In Chapter 18, I recruited the sister of my GOAT Florina, Fiora, and thought I had safely cornered the boss, surrounding them with lance users.  He got a tricky hit on Fiora and she died on her very first mission with the party.  RIP Fiora, I was excited to have a second Pegasus knight if only for a moment.  By the way, I don't know when the Pegasus Knight is able to get a class up, I would really like that about now.  Florina has been putting in the work and I really want her to get the credit.

I got a singular chapter done in this session, though not for lack of trying.  I was really wanting to sit down and go "I'm going to play like A LOT of Fire Emblem tonight".  At least get through 3 or 4 chapters.  And it seemed like it was going well, I made it through Chapter 18 with losses but not too many all told and I was almost to the end of Chapter 19.  It seemed like getting through a few more chapters of Fire Emblem was more than in the cards.  But as I reached the boss of Chapter 19, the kind of main villain of this act of FE7, I started to rally my units and get a good position to try and storm the boss.  What happened, however, was that enemies started flooding in from my backline and I set up Eliwood, who is the main lord, to defend.  He had full HP and had just received a pretty crucial level up, so he was a good candidate in my mind.  Eliwood then proceeds to be hit by 5 40% hits in a row and dies in one turn, meaning I have to reset.  I got Fire Emblem'd hard.  And because of how FE7 works, I just have to reset the map.  As much as I enjoy Fire Emblem, I'm not going to pretend like having to reset so often isn't a very deflating experience.  It feels like there are just a lot of reasons working against me, Fire Emblem 7 is probably going to be a very long term project.

I don't enjoy having three Lords.  This is more a criticism on Fire Emblem as a whole, especially in the modern era, but the number of Lords available to us in this game is more a detriment than a boon.  Especially on a map like Chapter 19, wherein the three lords must all be deployed.  I know that this is one of the reasons why FE7 is so beloved, the triple Lords who all have their individual storylines coexisting.  Although Lyn basically exists as a side character in the Eliwood section.  But from a gameplay perspective, having this many units that are instant game overs if they die is just a headache more than anything.  I've probably actually had like 9 or 10 unit deaths at this point but they're always the Lords so they just don't count for anything.  It's especially annoying as you reach the bosses, who are just always a massive difficulty spike.  Like, the reason I lost Fiora is that I could not outpace the boss in damage before he could start attacking my units.  I'm having to swarm bosses and hope that I get good hit and dodge rolls as I deal 3 damage knowing that every boss in this game can just swing for an entire character's HP.

So the spy from the last section is dead.  The Black Fang effectively crucified her, stringing her up as a warning to Eliwood's party to turn back.  I guess she was actually on our side in the end.  The Black Fang revealed in this part what their plan actually is: their boss, Nergal, wants to bring dragons back into the world, intending to use them as a powerful force with which to conquer the continent.  It's a good thing I had watched the intro for the first time last play session, otherwise I wouldn't have even known there were dragons in this Fire Emblem.  I could've assumed, mind, it is a Fire Emblem.  There are very few Fire Emblems without dragons.  But I wouldn't have known that the dragons had a war with humanity that ended with them losing and being sealed away.  And now Nergal seemingly wants to bring back dragons to get their revenge on humanity.  This is also why Eliwood's father was "involved" in the coup, he was trying to see what the Black Fang's goals were so he could put a stop to them.

While Chapter 19 did make me feel pretty deflated after losing it right at the end, it's probably my favorite map so far?  It takes place in this abandoned fortress with a bunch of locked doors and breakable walls.  It's very nonlinear with how to progress, you have multiple pathways through which to attack the goal, it's super cool.  I actually really like maps that are in enclosed like this, it feels like I'm properly flanking the enemy, using my best strategy possible to enclose them.  Which ultimately doesn't matter when you get to the boss and he's just sitting there, menacingly, and your party struggles to take him down for like 8 turns while he can just one shot everyone but it's really fun map design regardless.  Also, unrelated, I've finally figured out the deal with Merlinus and his tent and I really love it actually.  I think it's fun to have to work with limited resources on a map, leaving units behind to defend the castle as I push forward.

I hope progress starts picking up because like.  I do like Blazing Blade.  I think it is fun, I think it is a solid Fire Emblem.  But there is no worse feeling than having to redo an entire map over and over because of unlucky rolls.  Just instantly deflates my want to play.  I want to beat this, mind, I am committed to beating this.  It's just progress is slow going and every time I have to reset a map I just no longer want to play.  I've been thinking of alternating games since Fire Emblem is being like this and I might just start doing that, especially since we're now in mid-April and I have yet to beat a game this month.  Start doing some of my smaller projects that don't need gaming diaries.  Or maybe some that do, I don't know.  A problem I'm having is that a lot of the games I want to play ARE games that I want to do gaming diaries on.  Like currently on my queue, I have 3 games I want to write about for sure (including another TRPG, ahhh) and then a few more that I'm sure once I start feeling them out, I might want to write about them (Hi Sonic Adventure).  We'll see.

4/21/26

Y'all, I don't know if I can do this.  I don't think I'm strong enough.  Which is disappointing to me, because I like Fire Emblem and I want to play it.  I think this game is very good, when I am making progress it's really fun.  I redid a map 5 times because an opponent kept hitting a 30% on me.  And I still haven't beaten it.  It's to the point where I feel like, before I end my turn, I have to make a save state and save scum, hoping my opponent rolls poorly to make genuine progress.  It's not a thing I'm above, lord knows I've always save stated and rewound on NSO games before when needed, but the WiiU just makes this so much more frustrating than it needs to be.  A massive part of me is just like "scrap this, put it on the backburner until I can play it on Switch" because the entire experience of playing Fire Emblem on the WiiU has made me not want to play the game in any capacity.

As you may have noticed, the updates are very staggered for this one and there are a number of reasons why that is, but I legitimately have just has a lot of nights where I go "this whole process seems miserable, I don't want to do this".  I think I would just simply have a better time playing it on Switch where I can at least have some recompense when the game just has my Lord catch a stray.  So do not expect this to be my only Gaming Diary about Fire Emblem the Blazing Blade, because like, I think it's kind of over at least in this form.  I'm not having fun, even if I like the game a whole lot, and I have the potential for another version which would allow me to have more fun.  The decision seems simple.

It sucks though because I was finally gaining access to upgraded units!!!  I upgraded the knight Oswin to a General, which maybe wasn't the play.  Dorcas, my boy whose mutton was poisoned, he got upgraded into a Warrior.  My girl Rebecca became a sniper, with their comically large bow.  And, of course, my girl Florina, the GOAT, my best unit, she became a Falcoknight and started tearing up things before I had to redo the same chapter 5 times.  Which was also the chapter I got the item to upgrade her, so I had to upgrade her five times.  I really like how they introduce the upgrades.  You start to gain them at about the halfway point but they give you time to sort of settle into who you want to gain said boons.  Let you think on it for a bit.  But also not too long, they do just go "hey, you have to make these choices or else".  Powercreep comes for the units quickly, especially with regards to bosses.  Chapter 19 in particular is very much an "upgrade your units now or die", as the boss can very easily decimate an entire party without a few upgraded units.  It gives you the room to make choices but doesn't let you go forever without making them.

The story, for how kind of "yep that's a story", was also just starting to pick up.  We get to the end of Chapter 19 and have this dramatic confrontation with the main villain, Nergal.  We had, unknowingly, brought him exactly what he wanted as Ninian was needed to open the Dragon Gate and unleash all the dragons into the world.  So by rescuing Ninian out at sea and taking her with us onto the island, we had ensured Nergal could complete his ritual.  This is also why Eliwood's father, Marquess Elbert, was led here.  Nergal requires the willpower of humans to complete his goals, their "essence" in a sense.  It's why he wanted to start a war that would span the continent, a war is a good way to harvest human willpower.  People die en masse, and Nergal can absorb all that through his proxies, amassing more and more power.  But Elbert walking right into his hands was very beneficial to Nergal.  Elbert has enough willpower for a hundred people, his single sacrifice could be enough to open the Dragon Gate on his own.  With everything in place, Nergal manages to open the gate, bringing forth a dragon.  But he is stopped by the combined efforts of Elbert, who spends his last moments trying to stop the dark mage, and Ninian's twin brother Nils, who manages to break Ninian from the trance Nergal put her under.  The dragon gate closes, for the moment, but Nergal escapes.  Eliwood cradles his father's dying body, before returning to the mainland to regroup.

I will return to Fire Emblem some day.  I promise.  I really want to play this title, as well as the other GBA English release, the Sacred Stones.  It's just the WiiU was not the vibe.  I don't mind losing units, I think that's part of what is great about Fire Emblem.  That there's this large cast of characters you grow to care about, and that your decisions might result in their deaths.  But having to restart entire chapters over and over again because the Lords keep dying on a console where I have no option to just rewind and try again is frustrating in a way that kills my want to play this game.  This isn't the end for Fire Emblem, but for now I feel like I have to shelve it.  That being said, I did really enjoy this game.  This isn't the best Fire Emblem title by any stretch.  Its plot is pretty basic, its characters don't really do a lot, it having three Lords is really cool until you realize how often it causes problems.  It's also very difficult, as I'm sure you can tell from how I've spoken of it.  But it is, in my mind, the platonic ideal of Fire Emblem.  It has fun maps, good strategy gameplay, a nice risk vs. reward balance, Lyn.  It's just a very solid game and I look forward to returning to it later on and going through it for real.  Until then.  8.1/10

 Hi, this is going to be a dumb one, but it's a question I find interesting.  So, I've been playing Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade for my game clearing, Gaming Diary will be out whenever I finish it.  And I've been thinking a lot about the character of Lyn.  Lyn is a lord I'm very fond of, I don't think she's the most intricate character ever put to Fire Emblem, but she's a very unique lord nonetheless.  She's way more rugged and practical in comparison to the usually refined, well trained lords who adopt classical fencing techniques.  It's very fitting of her upbringing as a nomadic tribeswoman who would learn fighting for hunting and petty squabbles.

But it also made me think about Lyn in Smash Bros.  Lyn has always been a fairly popular request, being the first Fire Emblem lord the American audience was familiar with and with her style being very atypical for the often very samey potential Fire Emblem roster.  But this thought led me to another thought.  See, Lyn is a nomad and in the context of FE7, this is not so much a way of life as it is a distinctive racial or ethnic group.  Lyn is treated poorly, especially by other royals, due to her heritage, her father being a chieftan of a nomadic tribe rather than a highborn royal.  Even her own friends are kind of racist to her, noting how her "nomadic features" give her a "distinctive, unusual beauty" that they find striking.  Given the rough time period and state of European culture most Fire Emblem games are built off of, we can kind of infer that Lyn is half-Romani.  Or at least an equivalent race/ethnicity to the Romani.

Which brings me to my actual curiosity here: if Lyn were added to Smash Bros, would she be the first woman of color in the roster.  No.  The answer is no.  Of course not.  However, the actual answer is a bit more complicated than you'd expect, and has a number of possible answers.  It's a surprisingly complicated question, one whose answer is really up for interpretation.  And so I ask, dear reader...

Who was the first playable woman of color in Super Smash Bros?

Some Ground Rules

I want to first start by establishing some basic ground rules so that my intentions and understandings of the question I'm detailing are pretty clear.  They are, as follows:

1. This is not meant to be a criticism of Super Smash Bros.  I am not here to state that Super Smash Bros. has some sort of moral failing because there is a small potential roster of women of color or that this question is ambiguous in the first place.  This is genuine curiosity, and if there is any criticism present, it is moreso towards the gaming industry for both not featuring women enough and, moreover, not featuring women of color enough.  My only goal here is to go over the potential candidates and explain why they're each interesting as an answer to this question.
2. A potential candidate, in my mind, is not just a character who looks like they are a person of color.  This is an important thing to note as Smash, famously, has a number of characters who adopt an anime aesthetic in it and thus all could be considered Japanese.  However, most of the time these characters, despite their appearances, are meant to be analogous to European peoples.  Three Houses takes place in an analog of the Holy Roman Empire and thus all the characters can be considered to be German, Palutena is a Greek goddess, Samus Aran is the daughter of people named "Rodney" and "Virginia".  I'm only going to be focusing on characters who are either definitively people of color, or their place and/or people of origin are analogous to places and cultures that people of color come from.
3. Every candidate will be either human or humanoid.  The reasoning for this should be obvious but just to clear it up, this is a rule, if it's not a rule, the answer is Jigglypuff, who is a pink puffball from literal Japan.
4. If the candidate in question is related to an existing character rather than being a unique character, I will note that their technical origin date is when the character as a whole debuted but I will take into consideration whether the character debuted AFTER another character on this list as consideration on whether or not they were actually first.

With that out of the way, let's meet our candidates in order from least ambiguous to most.

Addendum 1: In the following text, I discuss the character of Corrin from Fire Emblem Fates.  It was my belief, having played Birthright and part of Conquest, that Corrin's character was a PoC, being from the Japan-inspired Hoshido by birth and only being raised in the Russian-esque Nohr.  I have come to understand that Revelations reveals that Corrin's heritage is far more complicated and that it can be brought into question whether she is a woman of color as a result, as her birth mother comes from a land that is just generally based on cultures with rich, mainstream mythologies (Greece, Norway, India, etc.)  As such, Corrin probably doesn't count and should be disregarded.

Addendum 2: Some people have asked the question of, if there could've been an earlier WoC rep in Smash, who would it be.  This is a question that actually has an answer.  Masahiro Sakurai has stated in the past that he did, at one point, wish to include Ayumi Tachibana from the Famicom Detective Club series in Melee, as he was a massive fan of the games.  If Ayumi had made it into the game, she would've been unambiguously the first woman of color in the series, being a Japanese woman from what is intended to be real Japan.

Min Min

Btw, Min Min was my ARMs main, so I'm glad she got into Smash.

This is the easiest answer, this is the safest answer, this is the least ambiguous answer, but that does not mean it's correct.  Min Min comes to us from Smash Ultimate's 6th DLC, a DLC that fulfills an empty slot on the roster that Sakurai had always intended.  Sakurai had wanted to include characters from the Switch's first year on the market, but Ultimate was already pretty far into development before said games could come out and, as such, Breath of the Wild kind of had to be the cutoff.  Three Houses only really came into the first DLC pack, which was decided around Ultimate's release date because Intelligent Systems gave Sakurai a sneak peak copy years before the game hit market.

Min Min comes from the video game "ARMS", an early Switch 1 title designed to utilize the Joy-Con's motion controls.  It was essentially attempt to take the general idea that made Splatoon work, i.e. "what if we made a competitive game with the sensibilities of a more traditional singleplayer one" and try and create a more dedicated, competitive fighter with it.  In ARMS case, rather than being a shooter that played like a platformer, it was a fighting game that played like a third person shooter.  It unfortunately did not become successful to the degree that Splatoon did, but it certainly has its audience and Min Min in particular is the game's most popular character, having won their big character tournament at the end of their support window.

So why is Min Min the easy answer?  What makes her the safe option for the first woman of color in Smash.  Well uh.  She's Chinese.  Like, Min Min is from the ARMs' universe's version of China, she speaks actual Chinese, her name is a pun on the Chinese word for noodle, her theme is heavily inspired by music meant to depict China.  Min Min is the easy answer because she is the only character on this list who is definitively from a place in the real world and is the easiest to confirm as a woman of color.  She's also a handy line to draw for what we're doing, because she's so unambiguous, any character who is in contention for this title has to be before her.

Villager

The second "easy" option is the Villager.  The first new character to be confirmed for Smash 4 and, in fact, the first character to be shown for Smash 4 at all, Villager is one of Sakurai's truly most insane characters concepts that he actually got working.  Nowadays Villager almost feels quaint, as their moveset doesn't really do anything super crazy.  Compared to people like Min Min, who have had the mechanics from their own games fully adapted into Smash, to where you really feel like you are playing an ARMs character in this game.  But Villager is truly a highlight of Sakurai's creativity, a character from a life simulation game brought into a fighting game and made to work entirely within the context of them being from a life sim.  It's superb.

Villager hails from the Animal Crossing series, designed to represent the player character of Animal Crossing which is a player insert character.  An Animal Crossing character was actually in demand as early as Brawl, I remember a lot of speculation around Tom Nook being a character, or KK Slider mayhaps.  Instead, Sakurai decided that the customizable player character is instead the best way to represent the Animal Crossing series, having them utilize their various tools and items to fight.  In a way, Villager, and by extension the very similar but not quite a clone character Isabelle, kind of fight by just doing things randomly and the opponent sort of runs into them.  Being a player character though, the Smash team decided to include various alternate skins that represent the level of player customization present in the Animal Crossing series.

Which brings us to the question at hand.  As of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the Villager's 8th skin is a dark-skinned woman, meant to represent skin tone customization, a feature I don't think was in Animal Crossing when Ultimate came out but was very likely planned for the then upcoming next entry, Animal Crossing New Horizons, which was famously in development for a long time.  And, with this character being before Min Min, both Villager as a whole and this particular skin, Villager has a strong case for being the first woman of color in Smash.  Especially when you consider that Villager is, like Min Min, meant to be human, not some sort of hybrid, not a fantasy race with dark skin, just an actual human that is a woman of color that was on the roster before Min Min.

However, I feel of the candidates we'll be talking about today, Villager actually has the worst claim to the title.  For starters, Villager 8 is not the earliest character we're going to be talking about on this list, though she's the earliest revealed character I think that is decidedly "human" we will be talking about technically.  There are at least two characters that debuted before original villager, and many more that debuted before this Smash Ultimate skin of Villager.  But also, this feels a bit weird, doesn't it?  Like Villager 8 is really who we're going with, a singular alternate skin of a character, and not even one that appeared in every game the character in question has been in?  I don't feel comfortable saying "the first woman of color in the Super Smash Bros. roster is the last skin of a character whose entire visual ideology is being customizable".  It'd be like if Dovakhiin were on the roster and we called them the first woman of color who was playable because Dovakhiin 6 is the Arabic-inspired Khajit skin, it just feels weird!

Leaf (Pokemon Trainer)

So how about, instead, a character who occupies half the skin slots of a character.  Pokemon Trainer appeared originally in Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the form of Red, the original Generation 1 Pokemon protagonist, albeit in his FireRed and LeafGreen incarnation.  Pokemon was always a prominent part of the Smash Bros. roster, Pikachu is literally one of the original 8, Jigglypuff is one of the only secret characters in Smash 64, Melee's new character roster included multiple new Pokemon, and several Pokemon were planned and/or shopped at various stages of development.  But Pokemon Trainer is the character that represents the series the best, a character that sends out his Pokemon, represented by the Gen 1 starters at various stages of evolution, into battle and has them fight for him.  It's also a very clever way of doing a stance change character.  Unfortunately, Pokemon Trainer would have to be cut in Smash 4 as the 3DS couldn't handle him.  But when he returned in Ultimate, he brought a friend.

Leaf, or the female Pokemon trainer, hails from Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen.  She is not the first playable female Pokemon trainer in the series, that distinction goes to Krys from Pokemon Crystal, but Leaf is the first female Pokemon trainer that was likely designed to market the game to girls.  As was found in a recently translated old interview, FRLG made numerous design decisions to market to girls.  Leaf, and by extension, the concept of a female Pokemon Trainer, would make their way into the series with Ultimate, which marked the triumphant return of the Pokemon Trainer, with Leaf occupying the even numbered slots of Pokemon Trainer's alternate costumes, although she would end up representing the odd numbered Generations.  After the first two skins, which are default Red and default Leaf, they have costumes representing each Generation, up to VII, the most recent one out at the time, but because Leaf offsets it by one, Red gets the even numbers and Leaf gets the odd.

Leaf is a pretty strong contender for this crown.  Pokemon Trainer, as a character, was introduced to Smash much earlier than either Min Min or Villager, and is one of the earliest characters I will be talking about in general.  And while Leaf is locked to alternate skins, much like Villager 8, she occupies a more prominent role within those skins, making up 4 out of the 8 available.  Leaf is clearly a feature of the character, rather than just a one-off skin.  Most importantly though is that Leaf is Japanese.  The Pokemon world is not 1:1 with the real world, there are various geographical inconsistencies (like the UK being upside down) and the world is much more untamed than ours, but Leaf's region is probably THE Pokemon region that is the most analogous to a real world location, being basically a deurbanized Tokyo.  It's literally called "the Kanto region", which is literally a place in Japan.

However, Leaf runs into the problem that Villager 8 ultimately runs into.  While she definitely occupies more of a presence on the roster, Leaf is still just an alternate skin at the end of the day.  She's an other to her male counterpart, a set of slightly different character models to add some variety to the Pokemon Trainer.  As well, while Pokemon Trainer is an older character in the grand scheme of Smash, Leaf is new, being added into the character's DNA as of Smash Ultimate.  It still puts her in front of Min Min, but she's unlikely to be the first.  Still, I don't think she's a bad option by any means and if you want to consider her, then go for it.  There's not exactly a right answer here.

Corrin

This will be the only time I talk about Corrin as being interesting, so you better enjoy this.  Corrin is the oddball of the Fire Emblem lords in Smash.  Corrin was the penultimate character in Smash 4's DLC, coming between Cloud and Bayonetta.  A lot of people criticize Corrin's inclusion within Smash as a cynical business move, because it probably is, but I do think Sakurai kind of cooked with Corrin.  She's like the easiest cut from the roster if they make another game but Corrin has a super unique and very fun moveset, utilizing their bizarre half-dragon form to do a lot of wild stuff in combat.  Corrin is also the only Fire Emblem lord that I feel truly belongs in this conversation.  Whereas other lords are just intended to be European with a distinctly anime aesthetic, Corrin's race/ethnicity is much more complicated than that.  Why?  Well, let's get into it.

Hailing from the trilogy of Fire Emblem Fates, Corrin is the fully customizable main character of those games.  Corrin was raised as a prince/princess of the Kingdom of Nohr, a cold, harsh, very Eastern European style kingdom that encompasses the vast majority of the land on the continent that Nohr is located on.  Shortly after the game starts, however, it is quickly discovered the Corrin is actually the lost member of the royal family of Nohr's neighboring kingdom and long-time enemy, Hoshido.  The two kingdoms have been at war for a very long time, and any time there is a treaty between the two, it is only a matter of time before said treaty is broken.  As such, war ignites in the midst of Corrin's reunion with their birth family and they are forced to choose a side: either side with the family who raised them, knowing they stole them, or side with the family they were born to, even though they do not know them.  Or maybe they can forge their own path.  Or join Smash!

So why is Corrin in discussion for the first woman of color in the roster.  After all, as previously stated, most Fire Emblem lords look Japanese, but their Kingdoms are analogs for the numerous European kingdoms.  Well, Corrin is a bit unique because her heritage is distinctly inspired by East Asian culture.  Hoshido is a country that, as you could imagine from the name, carries a distinctive Japanese lean.  Their lord and heir apparent to the throne is designed after a samurai, the names all have that lean (Ryoma, Takumi, Hinoka, Sakura), and geographically it is a smaller country on the east coast of a continent that is on a peninsula with an island chain.  With all of this evidence, it can be easily surmised that Corrin is either Japanese or, given the geography, Korean, and that Nohr is actually Russia.  This would definitely put her in the running as the first woman of color on the roster, appearing an entire game before the others listed.

However, once again, there are issues.  Like with Villager and with Leaf, female Corrin is not the default, she is a series of alternate skins on a character who is, in Smash, traditionally depicted as male.  Which is actually kind of a rarity for Corrin, mind, as a lot of other sources tend to depict Corrin as canon female, but I digress.  There is, also, the issue with Corrin being an FE lord.  Fire Emblem takes place in a high fantasy world and while there are analogs to the real world given in its history and geography, it's also not uncommon for Fire Emblem to blur those lines.  There are a lot of ninjas in Europe in the FE world, I'm just saying.  There is also just the fact that Corrin isn't quite human.  Corrin is a dragon, a half-dragon mind you, but a dragon nonetheless.  The half-blood daughter of a truly ancient race of dragons that is now all but extinct.  So while I don't think a convincing argument could be made that she shouldn't count because she is "not actually human", I could understand why some people would go that way.  That being said, I think Corrin has the strongest claim to the title we've seen thus far, at least of the ones that are a little ambiguous.  

Inkling

I know, I know, I literally made a rule about this.  And I literally just brought it up as a counterargument that could be leveled at Corrin.  Hear me out though.  The Inklings were the very first characters revealed for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, being revealed in the game's reveal trailer.  If you are keeping track, that means the majority of the potential answers to this question have technically debuted in Smash Ultimate.  That's certainly interesting, don't you think?  I promised I wasn't going to criticize, I know.  Anyways, Inkling is one of the only newcomers in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's base roster that doesn't come from a fairly old game, Splatoon being a game that came out during Smash 4's content cycle and very quickly became one of Nintendo's tentpoles.  And I think, given how Splatoon is, they become a very interesting answer to this question.

Splatoon is a franchise that takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, long after the extinction of humans.  Since the disappearance of the dominant race, squids have evolved into humanoids and have become obsessed with the pillars of human culture.  Things like fashion, music, sports, etc.  This new race of shapeshifting humanoid squids, called the Inklings, would inherit the Earth and recreate essentially the best of human culture, heavily influenced by Japanese idol culture.  In fact, the area that the Inklings occupy and from which they host their primary sport, Turf Wars, is heavily implied to have once been Japan and has now just been warped by whatever changes the Earth has gone through in the intermittent millions of years.  As such, the Inklings are themselves are something of a parrot of present day urban Japanese culture, and are noteworthy as such.

The Inklings have a bit of a leg up on the previous character's we've discussed in that, unlike with Villager 8, Leaf, and femme Corrin, the female Inklings ARE the default skin in Smash.  The Inkling's default skin is the platonic ideal of an Inkling, a young Japanese girl with orange hair and a white t-shirt with a brand logo on it.  I believe this is the design of the Inkling that we even first saw, appearing in the original Splatoon trailer which Smash Ultimate parrots for its reveal.  Not only that but Inkling, representing a game with loads of customization options, has skins of varying looks and, indeed, skin tones.  I feel like, outside of Min Min, the argument could be made that Inkling is the least ambiguous character in this lineup, not only is she a woman of color by default, but she is also represented by multiple women of color.

On the other hand, the Inkling is a squid.  That's a little reductive I realize, but the point is still valid.  Inklings are shapeshifters, they are not only able to switch between their squid and humanoid forms at will, but also change most things about their appearance on a whim.  This has been a very positive feature of the Splatoon series, as the games have been lauded for their inclusivity.  You can switch up your appearance and gender at basically any point.  But also, it makes this a little messy.  Can we consider Inklings PoC when they're actually humanoid squids shapeshifting into facsimiles of the culture that existed before them?  It also runs into the villager question, in that the reason why the Inkling is so varied in their alternate costumes is as a representation of player customization.  Splatoon is a series where you play as an Inkling you created, not any specific Inkling.  As such, the Inkling costumes are all designed to show the wide range of customization options present in the game.  The Inkling is very ambiguous despite in many ways being more concrete than any option previously listed despite Min Min.  They're probably the biggest question marks on this list.

Sheik

This is, to some people, the "correct" answer.  And this is, to other people, heresy.  I honestly just feel kind of gross even putting Sheik on here, to be honest.  Sheik is the earliest character on this list by far, being one of the first newcomers ever shown for Super Smash Bros. Melee.  Amusingly, because of how they're shown in the intro, Sheik is actually considered to be on the roster BEFORE Zelda, despite being the secondary transformation of her in Melee and Brawl.  Sheik is one of the very few Zelda characters on the roster and one of the only ones that has a unique moveset, as most Zelda characters are based on other characters in the roster as they were inserted as a means to buff the roster while not adding too much development time.  Sheik is very popular, despite the fact that they were included in a singular game from 1998, it's almost difficult to imagine the roster without them at this point.  Sheik is also complicated for this question for a couple very specific reasons.  We'll get into them.

Sheik originates from the iconic and critically acclaimed video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Entering the story after its game-defining time skip, Sheik appears as a helpful but mysterious figure in the darker and ravaged version of Hyrule that Link awakens in.  They are of the Sheikah tribe, a race of dark-skinned peoples who have loyally served the royal family for centuries and for whom Kakariko Village, a small farming town at the foot of Death Mountain, is home.  Sheik aids Link on his quest by nudging him in the right direction on his quest and teaching him the sacred songs which will allow him to more easily navigate Hyrule.  This all culminates in the plot twist that Smash likely spoiled for you if you weren't old enough to Zelda in 1998, the Sheik has actually been the missing Princess Zelda the entire time, having used the Triforce of Wisdom to transform themselves into a young Sheikah so they could hide from Ganondorf's eye.  Sheik was also planned to make an appearance in Twilight Princess, which is what their design from Brawl onward is based on, but this was ultimately scrapped.  Good thing too, Twilight Princess already has too many balls in the air.

There are two main problems with Sheik being the first woman of color on the roster.  One that's more based in canon and the other which is more based in fanon.  The former issue is that an argument could be made that Sheik is not truly a woman of color.  She is simply a magical disguise put on by Zelda, a means to hide herself as she awaits Link's return.  She is not necessarily a character to her own, just a costume put on by a woman whose appearance is more in line with European royalty.  But I could also easily see the argument that Sheik's popularity, her legend as it were, has made her a character in her own right.  And that Smash in particular is evidence of this fact, as the two characters have evolved in completely separate ways, with Sheik not even maintaining the very few elements that she shared with Zelda by the time Ultimate was released, i.e. losing the Light Arrow as a final smash.

The other problem is that Sheik is typically depicted as a man by the fandom.  Not only is Sheik a man to the fandom, but Sheik is a pretty important symbol of transmasc gamers, I distinctly remember the outcry that happened around Smash 4 when Sakurai confirmed Sheik in the game was female and people called for erasure.  Sheik being a guy is the first thing most people know about him, and the twist that Sheik is Zelda hits harder as a result.  It's why I feel uncomfortable with putting Sheik in this running, it feels a bit like stepping on the toes of a community I am not a part of.  Sheik's gender identity being masculine is very important to people, both in a narrative sense and in a representation sense.

So why is Sheik here at all?  Because, according to Nintendo, THIS is the correct answer to the question.  Or at least the closest thing to a correct answer that we'll be given without asking them directly, at which point I imagine they'll say like Min Min just to be safe.  Sheik has almost always been understood internally to be a woman.  The idea that Sheik is a man mostly arose about from the fandom, as previously stated, namely due to the fact that Sheik's gender is very ambiguous.  They don't lean too heavily into masculine or feminine character design and, to a lot of people, that immediately equates to masculine because most of our characters are male.  Especially in the context of video games in 1998.  I don't really like it either, to be clear.  Again, I feel like I'm stepping on people's toes by even suggesting this as an option.  I just want any trans readers to know I love them, I'm sorry Sheik is here, but I couldn't justify not putting them on here, especially since they're probably the "correct" answer.  It's an answer I really wish wasn't here and I don't blame anyone for disregarding Sheik as a possible contender, as this question is super ambiguous anyways.

Daisy

I bet when you clicked on this, you never thought it would end with Princess Daisy.  One of the very first characters to be shown off in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the first "newcomer" revealed in the first Smash Ultimate direct actually, Daisy was introduced as an "Echo Fighter".  Basically how Smash now contextualizes clone characters, rather than them having their own individual spots on the roster, they now share one with another character.  So Daisy isn't character 67, she's character 13E.  For the record you are only an Echo Fighter apparently if you debuted in Smash 4 or Ultimate, the Melee and Brawl clone characters got to keep their numberings.  Here's the thing, when I started thinking about this question, it was just something I was like "well here's the list of possible candidates but this one doesn't work for this reason or this one is ambiguous for that reason", stuff like that.  When I got to Daisy though, that's when I wanted to turn it into a blog post.  So let's do this.

Daisy hails from the original Game Boy launch title "Super Mario Land".  Created as a way to make the Game Boy game feel distinctive from the console Mario games, so as not to feel like just an inferior port, Daisy has become a fan favorite character over the years, in particular due to her portrayals in the Mario sports games, especially Mario Strikers.  Compared to her counterpart, Peach, she's tougher, more energetic, and just a bit psychotic.  It's honestly shocking how long it took Daisy to reappear in the mainline series with how beloved she is, she was literally in Smash Bros before she made another mainline Mario game reappearance.  However, it is from her origins of that our question comes into play.  And with Daisy in particular, it is exceptionally complicated.

So, Daisy's place of origin is Sarasaland, an empire ruled by Daisy's royal family.  Daisy is an empress.  Sarasaland is comprised of four Kingdoms; the Birabuto Kingdom, a vast desert kingdom which contains ancient ruins, namely large pyramids, the Muda Kingdom, an kingdom set on a large island chain in the ocean where weird occurrences happen, the Easton Kingdom, a mountainous kingdom high in the sky where the people have built large statues of men, and the Chai Kingdom, a forested kingdom covered in primarily bamboo.  Sarasaland, in a departure from most other Mario games before or since, has its kingdoms representing real world locations, spanning Egypt, China, Rapa Nui and Bermuda, though the last one could be the mythical continent of Mu, which was believed to be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Aside from the fact that this empire would be comically massive if it were in the real world, stretching from North Africa all the way to the coast of the Americas, this also raises a very interesting question about Daisy: is Daisy a WoC?

Now, I don't think Nintendo has ever or will ever weigh in on this debate one way or another.  I think in their mind, Daisy is the princess of a fictionalized kingdom and while that kingdom has real world analogs, it's not a place.  Daisy isn't Egyptian just because her kingdom is Egyptian, it's a fantasy world.  Daisy is very likely a generic European royal that just so happens to have a kingdom made up of cool iconography that the team working on Super Mario Land thought would be cool.  Except I don't think that's actually true.

See, the answer of "is Daisy a WoC" seems to change based on the game.  Daisy is typically depicted next to Peach and, as a rule, always has darker skin than her.  Even the most pale Daisy appearances are slightly tanned.  But again, it's not enough to where you could look and go "yes, Daisy is a person of color".  But sometimes, Daisy has fairly dark skin.  Her first appearance in color, Mario Tennis, is one such case, having Daisy's official art have pretty dark skin.  And this is also true of Mario Party 3, Daisy again has dark skin in that game.  But then in Mario Party 4, she is much paler.  And it keeps going back and forth like that.  Daisy sometimes has pale skin, sometimes has tanned skin, sometimes has dark skin.  There are some Daisies where it seems like the art team was implying that Daisy was a woman of color and other Daisies where she just definitively isn't.  It's shockingly complicated and I think it is only fitting that the surprisingly ambiguous question of "who was the first playable woman of color in Super Smash Bros." ends with a character who, herself, is really ambiguous.

In recent years, though, there's been more of an acceptance among the community that Daisy is indeed a woman of color, or at least she should be.  It seems a bit obvious to many of them, Daisy's massive globe spanning empire she is the singular monarch of would cover North Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, the Pacific Islands, Central America, before finally landing in the Caribbean and coastal America.  It's comically large, as previously stated, but it is a diverse swath of people and it would imply Daisy is part of them.  Granted, the British Empire also was comically large, to the point where the sun never set on Britain, but I imagine Nintendo doesn't want to imply that one of the biggest characters from their cartoony mascot platformer is a ruthless colonialist who violently conquered this land.  If Daisy is not officially a woman of color currently, which again is complicated, she probably should be going forward.  It'd be nice for Nintendo's biggest franchise to prominently feature a woman of color.

So what is the answer?

Min Min probably.  Look, I don't know what the actual answer is, and I don't really think there is one singular answer.  There are many asterisks to basically any candidate that is not Min Min, and the other answers can be seen as unsatisfying.  Like I said, what is probably the "correct" answer is one that feels a little icky because of how much that character means to transmascs.  Everyone is going to interpret this question differently and, honestly, even if it were something Nintendo was interested in answering, I don't think we'd like their answer, because it'd probably be Min Min.  I will say though, it is infinitely disappointing to me that every eligible character besides one debuted within the last two Smash games.  Smash is a series that has been around for almost 30 years now and not only is this question ambiguous, it's a depressingly small sample pool.  I think even the characters after Min Min, there's like A Steve skin that is a black woman, and then that's every woman of color on the roster period.  And that's honestly the other reason why I don't like just saying Min Min, because it means that in the 30 years we've had Super Smash Bros, the 6th to last character introduced in the game about having EVERY Smash character is the first WoC.  Feels just a bit wrong, doesn't it?  Maybe the answer should be Jigglypuff.

Earthbound Beginnings - A Gaming Diary

Review:

I am going to begin by stating something that is very obvious but needs to be said: Earthbound Beginnings is not a good game.  It's slow, it's not well balanced, in many places it's not well designed.  Enemies are overly frequent, there are massive difficulty spikes that require you grind.  It's a very infamous video game and one that I completely understand if you find it to be unplayable.  I adored Earthbound Beginnings.  As a fan of this trilogy of games, Earthbound Beginnings is such an impactful work for me.  It's like seeing the origin of so many things you love in real time, from the art style to the general themes to the music, Beginnings is, if nothing else, historically important.  But for me it was also just a joy to play through.  To see this sort of alternate universe Earthbound, one where the games still satirize but are far more serious and dark.  Where they have more in common with Western RPGs, with an open world to explore and the only "roadblocks" in your way being not being able to fight certain enemies.  And playing Beginnings made me both appreciate the trilogy more and understand the trilogy on a very deep level, it contextualizes why these three games fit together in a very meaningful way.  I could never recommend this game to anyone who isn't an Earthbound fan and, even still, doesn't have a lot of patience.  But I really enjoyed it myself.  8.1/10

Diary:

1/21/26

I am updating this blog after an hour of play, I got about the first hour of this game done before I had to make dinner.  Already I'm super into this game, which like.  I'm aware doesn't always have the best track record, I've been immediately into a few games in the past that ended up letting me down.  But I think as an Earthbound fan, Earthbound Beginnings has a lot to offer.  Especially if you, like me, are playing it third.  I know this game is very archaic, don't get me wrong, but you can also instantly tell how much love is put into it, how unique it is as an RPG.  Itoi cooked, I don't know what else to say.

I think as an Earthbound fan, the thing that works to its strength is how instantly it feels like coming home.  Playing Beginnings third is, in my opinion, the absolute correct choice because it really feels like fulfilling the franchise this way.  The presentation, atmosphere, and especially music just instantly feel so warm, so nostalgic.  Beginnings defines Earthbound's sound, even as Earthbound is more iconic and Mother 3 has a more passionate fanbase, Beginnings is what Mother sounds like.  It's impossible to overstate how happy I was hearing Pollyanna.  Pollyanna is the best song in the entire series, it's not a contest.  The title music too, Mother Earth, is also just such an emotional track, it's difficult not to latch onto.  I'm pretty impressed by them being able to do these songs on an NES, they're pretty complex melodies and granted, this was 1989, they had a few years, but still.  They feel like fully realized compositions and that's not always apparent in NES soundtracks. 

But it's also such it's own thing immediately, it's very unlike the other Mother games.  Like, in many ways Earthbound is, at least one the surface, a remake of Mother 1.  So it can be easy to think Mother 1 doesn't have its own sauce, Earthbound just seems to be like "taking the core elements of Mother 1 and reworking them into an RPG that has a more solid structure and a more satisfying gameplay loop".  But when you sit down to play it, it's so unique.  It's way less jokey than its successors, it has some little gags here and there but it also has this way darker tone to it too.  It's trying to be a more serious, more grounded story than its contemporaries, which are often overly optimistic high fantasy RPGs.  This game instead takes place in, much like its successors, a satire of modern day America and has this real background of "the world is wrong now because we've messed with things we shouldn't have".  

The most famous departure, perhaps, from the general Mother tone is that it sets up a mystery at the beginning rather than having it build.  The game opens with a text scrawl discussing how the protagonists great-grandparents, scientists 80 years prior to the game's events, went mysteriously missing for two years back in the early 1900s and how only his great-grandfather ever returned.  It's a very cool hook, and it quickly establishes Earthbound Beginnings as a unique science fiction mystery in a genre dominated by fantasy.  It's super good, I'm excited to play more.  Sometimes I wish this game had a remake so modern audiences could experience its unique flavor of Mother vibes without having to invest in an NES RPG.  Not as many people have the same admiration for old RPGs as I do.

I've only had a couple encounters so far with the infamous encounter rates of Mother 1.  It is pretty ridiculous though that immediately entering a battle after you exit one is an option?  I do, however, think that, at least so far, people have overstated how brutal Mother 1 can be.  That's something I've always heard, Mother 1 not just has a brutal encounter rate but also a brutal difficulty in fights and I will say, fights aren't easy per se.  Enemies get way too many crits for my liking and leveling up can be pretty slow going.  But it's not as bad as people tend to make it seem.  The biggest problem so far is just that healing options are scarce and without scrolling HP like the later games, you have to be a bit proactive with healing instead of reactive?  So you can't play risky to optimize damage knowing you'll have a safety net because you will often just die.  Is it hard?  Sure.  Is it brutal?  I don't think so yet.  If anything I think people may have just accidentally wandered into areas they weren't prepared for and decided that the game was hard because they weren't used to its more freeform design when compared to later JRPGs?

1/22/26

Y'all, I think I might be too in love with the Mother series already to judge this game fairly.  I try not to let this happen to me, I will absolutely be candid about how I think a game in a series I love is bad.  But with Earthbound Beginnings it's become like "yeah the encounter rate can be a little ridiculous and the enemies get too many crits but as soon as I leave battle I hear Pollyanna and remember this series is perfect".  And like, I got to hear Bein' Friends in this section too!  I don't know if Mother 1 has my favorite soundtrack of the three games, but it absolutely has the one that makes me smiley the most.  It's like I'm finally getting to see all these tracks that I've loved for so long in real time, it's so good.

I'm really impressed by the Bread Crumbs item.  So Earthbound Beginnings has bread as a healing item you can use.  This is common for the series, they take place in some approximation of the modern day, so instead of like item shops you have commercial bakeries.  Beginnings, however, allows you to use the bread as an item.  This will allow Ninten, your protagonist, to set down a "trail of bread crumbs" That allows you to generate a fast travel point, you can select the "Crumbs" item in your inventory and Ninten will follow the trail of bread crumbs back to where you laid the first one.  It's such a great mechanic and I'm surprised they got it working on the NES of all things.  Fast travel itself was always such an iffy concept back then but to then be able to allow the players to set fast travel points?  I'm sure other games did this, don't get me wrong, people did amazing things on the NES but it's still so impressive, especially for a game as relatively simple as Beginnings.

It's also super interesting seeing the origins of a lot of tropes in the Mother series.  Like I guess technically the origin of these tropes is that capitalism is awful and our lives are all hell, but like.  In the Podunk section we see a lot of similar themes that would later be revisited in the sequel, once again kind of establishing Earthbound as a pseudo-sequel to Mother 1.  We have like, a little girl getting lost in an unnerving area.  A corrupt politician who is manipulating the main character into doing his dirty work because reelection is coming up and he needs to put on the impression that he cares.  A zombie infested graveyard that is slowly encroaching on the world of the living.  The same mayor sending you out after he solves all his problems in town to someplace super dangerous to reap all the benefits from your actions.  It's like the Podunk section of the game is a microcosm of the first, like, 8 hours of Earthbound, it's super neat.

I am, however, starting to get more into the "pain points" of Beginnings.  Enemy encounters are pretty ridiculous, it especially feels like it in the graveyard.  As you're walking the lost girl out of the cemetery, it feels genuinely like you're encountering an enemy every step.  It's not just annoying because of how overtuned the encounter rate is, but also because 90% of the encounters are not worth your time.  Like it's mostly just bats that go down in one hit but spawn in four at a time, making battles not difficult but very tedious.  But like, running from an encounter also isn't worth your time, you are in desperate need of the experience because you spend so much of the early game severely underleveled.  As with other NES RPGs, to pad out the time and make it more of a full experience, Mother DEMANDS you grind.  Especially in the early game, there are two immediate difficulty spikes where if you don't level up properly, you're going to be taken down in only a couple turns while you're doing nothing to the opponents.  As people who have read the blog before may know, grinding is not my favorite thing to do in an RPG, but at least Beginnings has a pretty competent auto battle system to make this point less problematic.  Still, while I am enjoying myself quite a bit for other reasons, playing Beginnings is incredibly frustrating at times.

1/23/26

We are the topiary creatures, we're very pleased to meet ya's, señors and senoritas too.  The animals we feature you know they'll never eat ya, they'll sing so very sweet to you.  You know it's kind of crazy that Earthbound Beginnings is the only game in this series to have a zoo as a proper set piece.  Like Mother 3 kind of has a zoo section where Porky keeps his prized hybrids, but Mother 1 is the only game in this series with an actual zoo.  Given that a central idea of this series is to portray the kind of adventures a normal kid might have, you'd think having a zoo in these games would be a no brainer.  It must've been iconic to Sakurai too, as the "Mother" section of the world of Subspace Emissary in Brawl is comprised of the Mother 1 Zoo.  I really wish I could capture my WiiU because it's just crazy how, despite the three pretty different art styles that the Earthbound games have, the monkeys just look the same.  They got those in one, they made a perfect monkey sprite in the first game and have just been tweaking it since.

I was surprised to get the Franklin badge this early.  Like maybe it's not actually early, I was about 3 or 4 hours into the game when I got it which was also probably about the point where I'm getting to Happy Happy in Earthbound.  I guess because you don't leave Podunk for such a long stretch of time it FEELS earlier.  It had never occurred to me that the Franklin badge is named after Ben Franklin.  Until I got it in this game that thought had never occurred to me but that makes total sense.  It's the Franklin badge because it's said to be the badge that Ben Franklin wore to make sure he wasn't hurt by lightning during his experiments.  It's also crazy to me how it's kind of optional?  In practice it's not, the boss you need it for, the Starman Jr., is likely to just hit you with an instant death move during the fight if you're not wearing it.  But if your run is cracked, you could hypothetically just go without grabbing the Franklin Badge at this juncture.  Earthbound Beginnings continues to be such a fascinating game, like an alternate history Earthbound.

Speaking of which, we got to Magicant!  First of all, amazing song.  Love the Magicant theme, even if it's very scuffed in the NES soundfont.  I'm a little surprised this is the only game that has Magicant as like.  A recurring location we can and do visit.  In my opinion, Magicant is one of the most decidedly "Mother" areas in the series and it's really only a proper location in this game.  Side note, is Sakurai just a very big fan of Mother 1 specifically?  I'm realizing now how much Mother 1 keeps showing up in Smash, to the point where one of the new stages in Smash 4 was Magicant which, while it does have some bits from Earthbound (Dungeon Man, the Flying Man sprite), it's clearly built after Mother 1.  It's very interesting how "real" Magicant feels in this game, like it's an actual magical world in the clouds that Ninten is just passing through.  In Earthbound, they're very candid about Magicant just being a place in Ness' subconscious but the Magicant in this game is like a proper kingdom with a Queen who Ninten needs to aid.  It feels very Little Nemo-esque, where this world, despite being very dreamlike, feels as though it exists independently of the protagonist.

But this also somehow makes Magicant feel more like a dream that Ninten is having as a result.  Like, in dreams you don't know the world is a dream, right.  You do think that this is all "normal" until you awaken and your memory grounds you into reality.  Much like the other Magicant, the people in Magicant are there to love Ninten, to make him feel safe.  The literal queen of this realm says as much, that this world exists to love Ninten unquestioningly.  It also exists in a neat contrast to the "real world".  Whereas before entering Magicant, Ninten was fighting normal animals and weird, angry people, in Magicant we get more into the Earthbound style of enemies the series is famous for.  Weird floating eyes, sentient trees with unnerving faces, creatures with backwards names and designs.  There are talking cats who swim through the clouds and birdman who serve Ninten in the hopes of dying a glorious death in battle.  It's a truly magical place, I'm glad we will seemingly be coming back to visit it often!

I'm surprised how many of the 8 melodies we already have.  In Podunk alone, 3 of the 8 melodies were hidden.  I have to wonder if this indicates we're either, a, going to go a long time without another melody being added to the song or, b, the eight melodies aren't actually the "end goal" like they are in the sequel.  Like, clearly the eight melodies are the main quest of this game, the Queen of Magicant needs to hear the complete song in order to sing it for you to beat the game.  But I have to wonder if this quest will end much earlier than I'm expecting.  Like there's maybe more to the "endgame" in this one than there was in the other game(s), we maybe go to Magicant and finish that quest at the 2/3 point and then have to quest to find the final boss.  But I could also see it being an instance of going a very long time without obtaining a new melody, just by how freeform Beginnings' design is.  Like there's not as much of a solid linear structure to Beginnings like there is in the other two games, it's way more of an open experience where you can tackle objectives at your speed.  We'll see, I guess, there's a lot of game left!  I haven't even gotten a second party member yet (even though I'm already level 18, oops).

The pain points of Earthbound Beginnings are real bad, by the way.  I want to be clear, because I know I'm gushing about this game 90% of the time, this game sucks.  I could not recommend this game to anyone who doesn't already love the Mother series and have a lot of patience for old game design.  I will inevitably rate this game much higher than it deserves because I am just feeling very good about playing it, I have a lot of bias going in.  But this game is awful to actually play.  Its encounter rate is ridiculous and enemies just exist to be annoying.  Like, maybe it's because I'm fairly overleveled I think, again I'm level 18, but enemies are doing like 1 damage to me.  So basically every fight is "get into it, enemies poke for one, I try to run, probably fail because running is not always a guarantee in this game even with a massive level difference, have like three more enemies poke for one, do it again next turn".  It's a very annoying game to play and if I didn't love literally every other aspect of it, I would be out.

Earthbound Beginnings hates cops and the American healthcare system.  Based take.  When you finish up at the Podunk Zoo, the mayor is hesitant to "lift the curfew" that restricts access to and from Podunk and keeps most residents in their houses because like.  He already secured reelection through "saving the lost girl", what does he care.  So the cops near Podunk proper are like very hardline about the rules and are enforcing the barricade.  But talk to them and they just literally go "yeah, we may be doing our jobs, but that's just because eyes are on us.  Those guys up north near the zoo will probably let you around the barricade, cops are lazy after all."  I've had very little time to delve into the second town in the game, Merrysville, but one of my few interactions is a cop just roaming the streets harassing minors to get to school instead of doing, like, anything worthwhile.  Shigesato Itoi hates cops as much as he hates capitalism.  He also takes time to have a go at the American healthcare system.  When you reach Merrysville, there is a hospital you can visit and, should you go inside and require their "services", they charge you like half of the money you currently have on you.  Just straight up being like "yeah, American doctors squeeze more money out of you because they know that they can get away with it".  Even on the NES, Itoi's social commentary was on point.

1/24/26

I finally got another party member!!!  Unfortunately it's the items guy!!!  So, I made it through the quest in Merrysville.  The railway out of town, funny that Itoi thinks that America has a usable railway system, anyways the railway outta town is blocked and you have to find someone who knows a lot about explosives to remove the blockade.  It is here that you find Lloyd (I accidentally spelled it Lloid because I didn't look up the names and thought it was like the Gyroid from Animal Crossing for some reason), a shy but intelligent young boy who has been sneaking into the factory south of town to experiment with the fireworks they have there.  If you can bring him back a firework, he'll join your party and help you on your quest to clear the rockslide that is preventing the train from running.  Lloyd, unfortunately, is awful, at least in the stage of the game I'm in.

So, the Mother series has this archetype in all three games.  The guy who fights moreso with items and tools than he does with weapons.  Jeff is a very famous example, so much so that Jeff's usage of bottle rockets made it into Smash.  And then Mother 3 has Duster, who uses a variety of tools instead to inflict statues on enemies.  Lloyd is more like Jeff, his whole deal is using items in his inventory, namely explosives, to gain an advantage in battles.  He's the first party member who can hit multiple enemies at once and, if given the right tools, can deal massive damage to all of those enemies.  Unfortunately you just don't really have access to anything good that Lloyd can use just yet, assuming there is anything Lloyd can use at all.  Bottle Rockets are a now iconic weapon in the Earthbound series, dealing massive damage to groups of enemies and being the big win buttons in Jeff's inventory in Earthbound during various parts of the game.  In this game they do around 20 damage.  Not exactly 20 damage, they instead roll a random number that seems to be no less than 16 and no more than 24.  Which not only makes them incredibly unreliable, they are also already powercrept when you get them.  20 damage is insufficient, even as a full party attack.  By the time you get Lloyd, enemies are regularly beginning to have 80-100 HP, Bottle Rockets are just a waste of time.

Getting a new party member also meant that I had to grind them up.  Earthbound Beginnings starts the "main" party members at level 1 regardless of where or how you get them so you probably have to grind the moment you get them.  First off, just wanna say how amusing it is that Earthbound Beginnings constantly displays your EXP in your UI.  It's amusing to know that there will always be around a 6000 EXP gap between Ninten and Lloyd.  As far as grinding is concenred, luckily this isn't an impossibility for them to get caught up easily, the game gives you the ability to transport yourself to Magicant at any time so you can grind off the relatively easy, high EXP enemies there.  It's a little funny, actually, for how infamously brutal Mother 1 is, it feels like it has a lot of little things to make it a much easier experience for the player.  That being said, grinding is still super annoying.  Like even if I'm one shotting every opponent in Magicant, which I am, it's still just fighting the same basic enemies over and over ad nauseum for like an hour straight while I get Lloyd up to a workable level.  

The most annoying thing is that the best enemy for this, the Grouchos, are entirely luck based for how they give out EXP.  The Grouchos, modeled after Groucho Marx's iconic look, are non-threatening Magicant enemies that both have low HP and low strength.  They go down in one hit and deal 1 damage, but they have this gimmick where if you leave them alone they'll just leave.  In doing so they will gift one member of your party randomly about 130 experience, way above what the average currently is for EXP.  It's a great way to grind up your party fast, unfortunately it's also entirely random.  There is no way to get the Groucho to put experience onto the party member you want it to go to, just a coin flip at two party members and a 1 in 3 at 3, which I did also get the third party member but I haven't done any grinding with her yet.  It's really not difficult to see why Beginnings has numerous fan mods to make EXP grinding a lot less problematic, this game has so much of it.  Again, if I didn't love basically everything else about this game I would be bouncing off of it due to the excess grinding.

There were some really cool tracks in this section of the game.  The theme to the elementary school where Lloyd attends, Twinkle Elementary, was a neat track to experience.  Like it has the normal chimes you associate with like a school or a clock tower, but then it also has the melody for the file select theme from the sequel in it.  Was excited to hear that out of nowhere.  The train theme, The Paradise Line, is such a good train theme.  Very high energy, very bluesy, you can absolutely tell the impact it had on the rest of the series.  I got to the town of Snowman in this section, Snowman is one of the most iconic and possibly my personal favorite Mother song.  To me, Snowman is THE winter song in gaming history, there are loads of good ones but Snowman is THE track.  Also now that we have party members, the "generic overworld" song has shifted from being Pollyanna to being "Bein' Friends", which isn't like "better".  Pollyanna is undoubtedly the better song, but I do love Bein' Friends.

I think it's really interesting how they depict Merrysville.  Like, Mother is obviously a satire of American culture but I feel like this is probably also very personal to Itoi as he grew up in the ever changing, rapidly urbanizing Japan of the post war.  Whereas Podunk is a small town through and through, a place with a single shop and a small hotel and not even a proper hospital.  It's very rural.  Merrysville looks like it was much the same until pretty recently, when factories started popping up in the area, causing a rapid industrialization.  This tiny town is suddenly being grown into a "big city", or at least the kind of smaller city where a lot of people live for work but want to get out of.  And you're seeing that impact through NPC dialog.  They mention that one of the corporations that has set up in their town has started buying up land en masse, including land where people work and live, to try and establish more facilities to entertain their workforce.  In a surprising move they even directly reference that they're building a strip club, much to the chagrin of their citizens.  Surprised Nintendo allowed that one past censors when they rereleased the game for WiiU.

It's really interesting how Beginnings has more or less already settled on what the Earthbound character archetypes are going to look like, but it doesn't balance them in a way to where they're particularly effective.  Ninten is a good example of this, much like Ness and Lucas after him, Ninten is your tank.  While he does decent damage in a fight, and especially in a game like this where Ninten being overleveled is almost an inevitability due to how long you go with just him and how crucial it becomes to ensure you can one shot enemies because of that, Ninten is meant to be your support.  His "magic" is all healing and support.  He casts shields and heals statuses and stuff like that.  Ninten is supposed to be your support line.  Ninten does not have an HP healing spell better than the base one at level 23, which means that his PP doesn't really do a whole lot right now?  Like Ninten is one shotting most things and there's rarely a moment where he needs to set up a shield so all Ninten really does is go super aggro on opponents.  His status healing PSI abilities also don't seem to be useful, though I imagine that will change?  I've encountered like two statuses so far and neither of them are healed by his status healing techniques.  What's more is that Ana, the offensive PSI user, COMES with the level 2 HP recovery PSI, something Ninten still has yet to learn.

1/25/26

I swear it feels like in each of these sections I don't get, like, anything done because of how much grinding I have to do.  I promise I won't complain about the grinding again, it's obnoxious, we all know it.  There's only so many ways I can say "I love everything about this game except for the process of actually playing it, which is often rather annoying".  I will say though, it's very funny how much NES RPGs rely on grinding to pad for time.  Like, this game would be 10 hours EASY if you took out all the grinding.  This isn't the first or last grind session I've had that took up the majority of my play time, two of the three hours I played last night probably went to grinding.  This is not the only NES RPG on my "to-play" list either so expect me to be complaining a lot about grinding again when I play Final Fantasy 1.

A lot of this session was spent just exploring the world.  I think I commented on this once, but I'm actually a pretty huge fan of how open Mother 1 is.  Like, the game started out "open", the town of Podunk was a very open area for the player to run around in and explore and just kind of find the walls on their own.  Which I'm sure a lot of people were mad about when they first played, the fact that the game doesn't have any real guard rails up for the player to be like "you can't do this yet", but it's game design I'm rather fond of myself.  Anyways, after you finish up the quest in Merrysville, the game becomes fully open to you more or less.  You gain access to the train line and after that point, the world's your oyster.  There are large parts of the game that you could theoretically never go to if you know what you're doing, entire party members and towns that you could entirely skip.  Ana, your primary offensive PSI user, is entirely optional, at no point in the game do you have to go to her hometown of Snowman and even if you did, the quest needed to unlock her is also optional.  It's so interesting how freeform Beginnings is, the Earthbound series has always been good about feeling like "the kind of adventure a kid would imagine they had" but in Beginnings it feels very grounded in a way that's like "this is just the kind of adventure a kid would have".  I could imagine Mother being adapted into an 80s kids movie and becoming a massive cult classic, it's that sort of vibe.

I think it's also interesting from a historic standpoint as well.  Like we now associate JRPGs with linearity, you know?  JRPGs tend to be very narrative driven and their game design trends towards having either partial or full linearity.  A lot of JRPGs prefer a "world map" style where there is technically an open world but it's really just a big field to roam around to simulate passing over long distances quickly.  The sort of open design where you can explore the world at your own pace and tackle objectives in an order you prefer tends to instead be associated with Western RPGs, games like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls.  It's to the point where a lot of JRPG fans are mad in the modern day that so many JRPGs are trying this open world game design, believing that it is just a cynical ploy to appeal to Western gamers.  So it's really fascinating to see these old NES RPGs where the game design is super open, that the player kind of has full reign of the world and it's just whether or not they can fight the enemies that determines whether they can progress.  That these game design ideals that we now associate with entirely different cultures and thought processes were once more similar than they are different.

I think I was wrong about the "character archetypes" as I talked about them last time.  While Ninten is clearly meant to be a support unit, don't get me wrong, I don't think he's necessarily meant to fulfill the same role as Ness and Lucas in the subsequent games.  I think Ninten is just supposed to be your primary damage dealer who just so happens to have a lot of support options to take advantage of his high speed stat in harder battles.  The more I play the game, the more clear it is that Ana is instead just intended to be your all around PSI user.  She learns, like, every PSI tech in the game it feels like, be it offensive, defensive, or support.  Each levelup comes with some new tool for you to use, be it a powerful offensive attack, a powerful healing spell, or some sort of really strong support tech.  It's become clear that what Mother 1 wants you to do is attack with Ninten, use items with Lloyd, use PSI with Ana.  Which makes sense, as far as I know Ninten never learns a really powerful offensive PSI technique like the subsequent protagonists of this series, so his primary option is just a standard attack.  And his attack stat is overtuned on top of it, while enemies are finally keeping pace with it as I get further into the game, Ninten is still regularly dealing between 60 and 80 damage to enemies whose health remains in that range.

I previously mentioned how strange it was to get three melodies effectively in a row at the beginning of the game and one of my speculations did end up coming true.  You do kind of get three melodies and then go like 4-8 hours without grabbing a fourth one.  But once you do grab the fourth one, four, five and six are kind of all lined up for you.  Granted, I have a rough idea of what I'm doing, I'm not super familiar with Beginnings like I am with Earthbound and Mother 3 but I had seen a Let's Play or two back in the day, I know the rough structure of this game even if I don't know the details.  But it seems like what the game intends for you to do is "get three of the melodies, play for a while, get three more of the melodies, play for more of the game, get the last two".  

The sixth melody in particular is pretty tricky to get, as it requires you to fight what is probably the hardest boss in the game: the Magicant Dragon.  The Magicant Dragon lies in wait in the labyrinth that bridges Magicant with the real world, sleeping eternally until Ninten is strong enough to fight it and obtain the sixth melody.  I'm honestly surprised it only took me two attempts to beat the Dragon, I'm kind of underleveled for it to be honest.  I fought it more or less as soon as I was able, you're able to fight it when Ninten is level 25, I got him to 26, and Lloyd and ESPECIALLY Ana are super underleveled for it.  Like if the dragon had done anything else but PK Fire turn one, which trades off damage for the ability to hit your opponents' entire party, Ana would just not have survived long enough to setup properly and mitigate the damage it otherwise would deal.  To be honest, it's probably the only super interesting fight I've had so far in this game, most of the others are just like "Ninten hits hard, Lloyd hits less hard, Ana uses PK Beam to one shot".  And that's only if the enemy doesn't have an instakill attack, which for some reason, one in 10 enemies have instakill attacks!!!

We kind of got back into the Earthbound tropes in this section, though again they're just a little off.  Like, this section featured an abandoned town where the residents were run off by the undead, very similar to Threed in the second game.  There's even a fake hotel where the owner tries to dispose of you immediately.  But in this one the spirits are directly attributed to alien meddling and not something more supernatural, a Starman is pulling the strings.  You go to a desert and adventure around the endless sands, but the sands are untouched, the only person living out there being a pilot who suspiciously wants you to get rid of his definitely not stolen tank for him.  There's a secret civilization comprised of bizarre characters who speak in weird ways, but in this game they aren't Mr. Saturns, who haven't been created yet.  No, they're monkeys.  Just an underground civilization of monkeys.  Which ALSO harkens to a trope in later Earthbound games, wherein there's a cave system inhabited by intelligent monkeys, but these monkeys are also wrong because they always lie and don't want anything from you.

The more I play Beginnings, the more I'm like "this might actually be my favorite soundtrack of the three".  Like, it doesn't sound the best and the other two probably have more tracks I'm passionate about, but genuinely this is what Mother sounds like.  This is Earthbound.  These songs are primitive, don't get me wrong.  And they don't always sound the best because of the hardware.  But this soundtrack is masterful.  I'm glad most, if not all, of the songs that originate from this game have gotten remade in later entries.  Yucca Desert is an all timer, an iconic desert theme that made it's way into Earthbound, complete with a little radio effect.  Airplane Ride is a classic, a very 80s rock inspired tune that really feels like you're flying above the ground in a small plane.  Monkey Cave, though, was such a wild track to hear.  Sometimes when you're playing Mother 1, you can feel like you've stepped an alternate universe.  So many things are like Mother 2/Earthbound but they're all just somewhat wrong in some way.  An uncanny Peaceful Rest Valley, if you will.  Monkey Cave sounds like "Saturn Valley but wrong" and it's one of the most uncanny valley moments I've had in this game.

1/27/26

I made it to LA baby!!!  Literally, the last town in this game is called "Ellay".  It's very funny that Itoi's opinion of Los Angeles is apparently "it's a city that's ruled by gangs where the cops are corrupt and ineffectual".  To the point where if a grown woman offers to buy a minor a drink, the cops arrest the minor, for seemingly no other reason than wanting to steal their cool stuff!  I have to wonder if Itoi had ever actually been to LA before making this game or if he got this depiction from, like.  Movies and TV shows.  There were a lot of depictions of LA in the 80s especially that depicted the city as grimy and violent.  Which I guess wasn't inaccurate given what would happen there in the early 90s when all that tension in the city came to a head, but like.  It was definitely exaggerated to essentially fearmonger to middle America.

But before you go to Ellay, you have to go to Youngtown.  Youngtown is a town we've heard a lot about throughout the adventure.  Various NPCs have talked about trying to venture onto Youngtown as their friends and relatives have, previously, headed off to Youngtown as it's the last train stop before you get to Ellay, only to never be heard from again.  This is the reason Ana had joined us on our journey, her mother had left for Youngtown and had disappeared shortly thereafter.  When we arrive in Youngtown, we find out why pretty quickly.  All the adults in the village have been abducted by mysterious ships that come from the giant mountain to the East.  The children have been left to fend for themselves, trying to develop a sense of normalcy by mimicking their parents' jobs and roles while constantly breaking down from how scared and alone they are.  A lot of children have taken to wandering the streets, crying for their parents, and those that are trying to keep it together are still like "I'm so lonely, please come by more so I have someone to talk to".  Except for the guy who took over running the town store.  He seems to be doing great!

The song that plays in Youngtown, by the way?  One of my absolute favorite Mother songs in general.  I know I said that about Snowman too and probably a hundred songs in Mother 3 but this is really high up there.  The Youngtown theme is the theme that plays in Earthbound when you enter Paula's home and she's not there.  It's one of the most beautiful pieces of music in this series to me, it's unnerving and hopeless but so mystical.  It's the exact perfect theme for "something very strange and potentially supernatural has went on and really imparts a sense of "this is bigger than your adventure, this is about the fate of the world".  I don't know if anyone reading this is familiar with the Rock Candy albums, they were Mother fan albums back in the day that you could download off Starmen.net which featured loads of interesting and amazing Earthbound fan covers.  Shoutouts to Stephen Georg and his evergreen classic I Am Earthbound.  Anyways, I loved the Rock Candy albums so much back in the day and one of my favorite pieces from that collection was a cover of the Youngtown/Paula theme, PSI Piano Omega.  It's so beautiful, I love it so much.  Still sad Rock Candy 6 never materialized but like, most of the core people from Starmen had moved on by that point I feel.  Shout outs to the community.

As we are approaching the end game, I feel like combat is finally becoming interesting.  Like, a big problem with how Beginnings is structured is that you spend so much time in the early game leveling up Ninten and accomplishing your goals there that for the next like 50% of the game, you are just going to breeze through it.  Even moreso because enemies pose no threat to you, you have access to the best defensive equipment in the game once you reach Magicant.  Ninten is probably going to one shot everything at least until you make it to Duncan's Factory, there are very few enemies that require any actual strategy.  And even past that, you're going to be running into a lot of enemies that, thanks to your expanded party, still go down in one or two turns with basic attacks.  Namely because there are very few encounters for the first 75% of the game that even contain multiple enemies.  But as I approach the endgame, I'm encountering more enemies with interesting stat layouts and party compositions to where I'm like "okay, turn one, Ninten sets up our defenses while Ana goes for PSI damage and Lloyd uses his Plasma beam to get off some beam damage, turn two I attack with Ninten to clean up the HP of whatever wasn't finished off turn one and then finish off the remaining enemies".  It's not AMAZING, the gameplay is still the worst part about this game by a mile, but it's something.

We also received the second third party member.  Mother 1's party is a party of three, Ninten, Lloyd, and Ana, but there are technically four party members as, in the endgame, Teddy joins you.  Teddy is the leader of the gang in Ellay and took great offense to you roughing up his guys.  After a brief back and forth in a boss fight you can't actually lose, he joins up with the party, telling Lloyd to take a breather as Teddy needs to go up to the mountain, Mt. Itoi, to seek revenge for his murdered parents.  Teddy is broken!  Teddy is so incredibly strong that once he joins the party and you equip him with the best stuff possible, he's probably one-shotting whatever you throw him at.  A big part of this is that, unlike the other party members, you don't receive at level 1 and need to train him up.  You receive him at level 18, already kind of on pace with the rest of your party.  And with naturally high strength and speed, he becomes the one shot king either out the gate or after a few level ups.  It's actually kind of nice QoL, you can, theoretically, beat this game at very low levels aside from Ninten if you wanted to avoid the process of grinding, and Teddy just lets you cover your weaknesses if you're doing that.  He's just a big ol' beatstick.

Ninten finally learned Lifeup Beta!!!  PSI techniques are wild in this game.  Like I'm fascinated by how they function and how the characters get them through level up.  Ana didn't get the ability to use PK Fire until she was like level 20 or something crazy like that.  PK Fire Alpha is a useless PSI ability that deals ~20 damage to all foes.  PK Freeze Gamma, the penultimate upgrade of Freeze, doesn't actually deal damage, what it does instead is reduce the target to 1 HP.  It does this whether or not the enemy has already taken damage as well, meaning that because Ana goes after Ninten, it's useless in a lot of one-enemy scenarios as it would just be "Ninten hitting only to have progress undone because it's being set to one anyways".  Ninten, the "healer" of the group, doesn't learn a proper healing spell until like ~level 30.  The game design is just exceedingly weird and while it definitely feels intentional with its quirks, it doesn't always make for the best experience.  I'm glad that later Earthbound games really refined these ideas.

I am very close to finishing the game.  I have just entered Mt. Itoi, the game's final dungeon, and I find it doubtful that I will have to split it up into two play sessions.  So, as I typically do with the "penultimate chapter" of these gaming diaries, time to post my sort of overall feelings about this one.  In many ways, Earthbound Beginnings was a delight to play.  As I mentioned in entry 2 of this one, as a fan of this series, Earthbound Beginnings is a magical game for me.  It feels a bit like coming home, Beginnings is seeing this franchise I love so much at its origin point.  Unrefined, but still every bit of itself.  The music, the presentation, the themes.  It's all stuff I do love and have loved for many years.  It's also just an awful video game.  I will not mince words with you, for as much as I love about this game, it's like genuinely terrible.  Poorly balanced, poorly paced, uninteresting gameplay, insane encounter rates.  It's an archaic NES RPG, and I can totally understand why so many people just skip it outright.  When it comes time to rate, I will be very kind to it because I've adored playing this.  But I just wanna be clear, this game is awful.  See y'all next time for the finale!

1/28/26

So uh.  I'm emotional now.  Look, I've made no pretense that I am being overly kind to this game because of how I much I love this series.  I am being overly generous to it, I am too emotionally attached to judge it fairly.  But y'all don't understand what the Eight Melodies do to me.  This song is ingrained into my soul at this point.  Finally forming this song after an entire game of hearing it bit by bit, here and there, it's just.  I can't help but cry.  I'm sorry that I love the Mother trilogy.  It as I said forever ago, "yeah, the encounter rate is ridiculous and enemies get too many crits but then I get out of battle and hear Pollyanna and I remember this series is perfect".  I'm apologizing more to myself right now, by the way, I know you, dear reader, don't care if I'm an Earthbound shill.  I'm more mad at me for always being like "if the game's story is good but its gameplay is bad then it's just a really bad game and/or a really weird book" and now here I am having feelings about this objectively terrible NES RPG from 40 years ago.

I'm honestly starting to wonder if, at a certain point, Itoi was just like.  "You know what, we screwed up, our game is too hard, let's just make the coolest enemy designs possible because our player is just going to run from everything anyways."  Mt. Itoi is grueling, it's the first time I would say this game's infamous reputation for being brutal is founded.  Between the bottom of the mountain and the top, enemies start snowballing out of control in difficulty.  It's to the point where, by the time you reach the peak, you are fighting enemies that have the potential to one shot you if you're at level cap.  They even give you the Ultimate Weapons for this game all together just so the player has some sort of safety net, even though giving Ana any weapon at this point is little more than a funny joke.  On top of that, you have to climb the mountain twice, once with the very powerful Teddy who can split the difference for you and deal massive damage to opponents, but then a second time with Lloyd who just, frankly, can't do anything.  Lloyd might be the worst party member in the entire series, even moreso than like.  Salsa from Mother 3.  And like, there's not really any reason to level yourself up other than to just get ever PSI technique because the final boss is, honestly, kind of a joke.

Oh also Teddy just straight up dies.  Not really, but he does go into a coma after a certain point in the story and that's why you have to take Lloyd back up the mountain.  There's a very interesting tune the game plays both at Teddy falling into a coma and later on when you reach the peak of the mountain and find the Gravestone of... I think the game implies it's Ninten's great-grandfather George's but it makes more sense for it to be Maria's.  Simply titled Tombstone, it may sound very familiar to Earthbound fans but in an entirely different context.  It sounds eerie now.  Sad.  Like the kind of song you would hear while mourning or reflecting on the dead.  It's a bit like how the core theme of Mother 3, the "Love Theme" that plays in various contexts, is kind of a reinterpretation of Eight Melodies.  The music in this series is so good and so impactful, I adore it.

It's unsurprising to me that they do try to put in a romance between Ninten and Ana right at the end.  Again, in another way Earthbound is sort of a remake of Mother 1, Ana, like Paula, has developed very strong feelings for the protagonist despite only having met them recently.  The reason being that, due to their psychic powers manifesting so much sooner than Ninten/Ness', they've spent their entire lives plagued with visions of the boy they would eventually save the world with.  And like, especially in Mother 1, it makes sense to do this, this is way more of a traditional RPG where the protagonist isn't a character in their own right but rather a blank slate for the protagonist to put their self into.  But also like, this does just come out of nowhere.  Even among the scope of NES romances, which are all bad due to how primitive storytelling has to be, this is a bad one.  Ana is on this journey for her own goals, she does not have a specific reason to latch onto Ninten, it's just.  You get to Mt. Itoi and Ana is suddenly like "I love you and have loved you since you first entered my dreams".  If anything I thought that it would end up that Pippi, Ninten's neighbor he rescues back in Podunk, would be Ninten's love interest at the end, since at least those two have that "saving her life" connection.  Oh well, at least the song that plays, Fallin' Love, is lovely!

I cannot believe that they just give Ana an instantkill move.  Once again, the game balance in this game is actually insane.  PK Freeze Gamma, one of Ana's oddest moves, is already a move that reduces your opponent's HP to 1.  This is very powerful, obviously, but not the most useful because, at least at the time Ana learned it, she was in a party with two people who were faster than her.  She would just be setting up for next turn.  Thankfully, Lloyd rejoins the party so that solves that issue in theory but by that time you've learned PK Beam Gamma, a move that just kills any enemy that isn't immune to Beam damage.  This does make Ana the "win condition" of the party, mind, and keeping her PP up is a main objective of the end game.  It's just weird.  Looking at PSI I didn't get too, Ana just will learn a move that instakills all enemies if I wanted to grind her up that much?  Handy, why is the game designed like this?

So, as you may expect, once you get to the top of Mt. Itoi, a lot of the questions this game has produced get answered.  You reach a lake at one point, despite the aliens' attempts at stopping you, and by boarding your grandparents' boat to head to the center of the lake, you find their underwater lab.  In it, there's a massive robot named EVE, who explains that she was built by George to combat the evil alien Giegue and to protect the chosen one, Ninten, on his journey.  In the two years that George and Maria disappeared, they encountered the evil alien Giegue, who held them for two years at the end of the universe.  Eventually George would escape and, knowing that the alien would eventually find him and his family again, built EVE as a measure to defeat the alien.  Unfortunately, Giegue was keen to their plans, and EVE would end up being destroyed by his own robot, the two taking each other out and leaving the children helpless and alone at the top of Mt. Itoi.  EVE's last parting gift being the seventh melody, allowing the children to continue their true goal.

Upon receiving the eighth melody from George's spirit at the top of the mountain, we return to Magicant for the final time.  We must go to the Queen, Mary, and finally restore what she has lost.  Unsurprisingly, Queen Mary of Magicant is actually our Great-Grandmother Maria.  While George was able to make it back home, Maria got caught in between dimensions, attempting to set things in motion to stop Giegue.  Her body fell into an eternal slumber, a state of both waking and sleep, and from it spawned forth the magical realm of Magicant.  This is why Magicant was seemingly created to protect Ninten, to make him feel safe and loved, it's a reflection of the love Maria herself has for her family that she never got to show them in life.  Her soul, though, scattered across the world, finding its home in various melodies hidden throughout.  The Eight Melodies, once returned to Maria, restore her memories and awaken her finally, allowing her to rest after eight decades of being trapped in limbo.  But before she does, before she moves on and reunites with George, she tells us a story.

When George and Maria were sent to the end of the universe, they did indeed meet Giegue.  But unlike what EVE implied, Giegue was not some sort of horrible alien conqueror.  Not yet, at least.  No, Giegue was a baby.  Maria mentions specifically how happy he was, how his adorable little tail would wag.  Seeing the alien conqueror like a small animal to be loved and cherished.  But darkness entered his heart.  Loneliness.  He was a sole being at the end of the universe and eventually, George and Maria would have to go home, have to return to their family.  He grew bitter and resentful of this "real world", and wished to keep George and Maria to himself.  And that is why he has arrived on Earth these 80 years later.  He wants to kidnap or eradicate Earth's populace out of his resentment for their love for each other.  Love he only had for a fleeting instant.  With Maria awoken, Magicant disappears, and she imparts us with the final weapon we need to defeat Giegue.  The lullaby she used to sing to him when he was a baby.

Equipped with out final gift from our great-grandparents, we enter the cave where Giegue has been hiding this entire time.  Bypassing a room full of all the people Giegue has kidnapped, including Ana's mother and all the adults from Youngtown, we reach the end of the pathway and find Giegue's mothership.  The alien steps out of it, existing within a giant life support pod, and enters battle with us.  In true Mother fashion, his attacks are incomprehensible, so powerful and so metaphysical that our protagonists cannot even begin to understand what they are.  It is here he tells his own version of his past with George and Maria.  Giegue paints them as liars and thieves, saying that their love was simply a ploy to steal his secrets, exploit his technology.  His heart is so infected by his bitterness, by his resentment, that he no longer remembers the kindness he was shown.  The love he experienced.  But some part of him still considers them his family.  In all his want to eradicate humanity, he cannot bring himself to hurt Ninten outright, hurt this boy that he considers family.  He offers him a choice, join him and conquer the universe by his side.  Ninten, unsurprisingly, refuses, and Giegue flies into a rage.

Unable to hurt him and with our backs against the wall, the party only has one option: to sing.  To make Giegue listen to the lullaby that used to soothe him so long ago, to feel Maria's love for him envelop him.  It's a long fight, he interrupts you before you finish the song many times.  His own hatred fighting the battle against Maria's love directly.  He becomes more erratic and violent, devolving into incomprehensible screams as he loses his battle against Maria's love for him.  In the end, the lullaby soothes the conqueror.  For a brief moment, Giegue allows himself to be wrapped in that warmth that he had so long ago.  But before he can allow himself to be taken by it fully, Giegue retreats, promising one day, one fateful day, he shall return to have his vengeance on this world of love.  Giegue flies off to the far reaches of time and space, wherein he will fester in his hatred until he becomes Giygas.  But for now, the day is saved.  Everyone returns to their normal lives, Ninten, Lloyd, Ana keep in touch, and the world seems to go back to normal.  That is until a post credits stinger where our father, who had been talking to us this entire time through the phone, calls us with "important news", setting up a sequel that will never technically come to pass as the actual sequel is effectively in a new universe.

I really liked Earthbound Beginnings.  Is it a good video game?  Absolutely not.  It has so many problems, a lot of them due to its age but even more due to just transparently bad game design.  Like a lot of what is wrong with Beginnings does come from it being an NES RPG, lots of padding, lots of grinding, not enough structure to point the player in a proper direction.  Final Fantasy 1 was an NES game and I don't Final Fantasy 1 has aged especially well either but a player who really likes RPGs will be able to pick up Final Fantasy 1 and still get a lot out of it.  Because despite its age, it's still a good game.  Beginnings doesn't have that, the gameplay is just strictly very bad.  But as an Earthbound fan, as someone for who this trilogy means a lot, this was masterful.  It made me happy, made me emotional.  It felt like coming home.  This game, this trilogy means a lot to me.  I will never tell you, you should play Earthbound Beginnings.  But I will always tell you that I really liked it, and if the gameplay was just a little more interesting or better designed, this would probably sit with its brethren in my favorite games of all time list.  8.1/10