I'm not a Fire Emblem lifer. I've only recently learned the difference between The Blazing Blade and The Binding Blade, or pondered the canonicity of Tokyo Mirage Sessions. My journey with the series began with seeing a friend play one of the games on his Game Boy Advance during the bus ride to school, and that's the level of familiarity I maintained for the next decade.
I distinctly remember feeling like I had missed my jumping-on point for the series. This is especially funny given that I'm pretty sure my friend was playing Fire Emblem (no subtitle), the first entry released outside of Japan – yet still the seventh overall. I needed a firm handhold if I was ever going to dive in. Conversely, the story of Intelligent Systems has been the story of a developer with ambition bigger than the hardware it had to work with. I needed Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and Three Houses needed the Nintendo Switch.
