Game 1 - Fire Emblem (Stages 23-25)

I have to admit at this point I was getting a little tired of the game so I tried to see if I could use the Warp Staff to power through the last stages. It sort of worked, but there were a number of unforeseen hiccups.

Stage 23 - The Evil Priest Garnef
"The final fight against Garnef in the legendary city of Thebes."

I gave Marik the starlight magic and had him warp up next to the throne boss, although I noticed later that Marth was able to hurt him with the Mercurius as well. Since Marik would die and Marth wouldn't, I just sent Marth up to the top to finish the stage. This would later bite me in the butt because there are several fake Garnefs, and the one on the throne is not the real one. So I beat the stage without getting the Falchion, which is all but necessary to defeat the final boss.

Garnef is defeated, and can't realize his goal of defeating Medius himself. But he mocks Marth as he dies. Now Marth's sister Ellis finally appears.

She has a resurrect staff, which can be used in the next stage.

Stage 24 - The Kingdom of the Mamkute
"Drua Kingdom. This was the kingdom of the Mamkute people..."

This stage is easy to warp clear; I sent Abel down there with a Dragon Killer to deal with the boss and then moved Marth in to the castle. There's a place to resurrect dead people below but the only one dead was Kashim (from way before) so that didn't seem necessary.

Stage 25 - The Chosen Ones
"The fight against the Dark Dragon Medius. Marth's last deciding battle."

This is the last stage, and it's a tough one. Not only does it have strong grunts with reinforcements, but your team starts off split into four and dispersed around the map. You have no direct way to control the placement. Also this is where I noticed that I did not have the Falchion. Fortunately I had a save state back on stage 23 that I could go back to and beat the real Garnef. In doing so I lost Marik, but that seemed a reasonable price to pay.

Second problem was that none of my mages started near Marth. Someone on the Discord reminded me that if Marth has a Warp Staff, he can pass it to Gato, who joins on this map and appears near Marth. So I went back to stage 24 to do that.

Even then it didn't work. Marth got killed before he could even face Medius, who is behind another powerful Mamkute.

My next effort was to first send Abel there with the Gladius. Although he was not able to kill the Mamkute, he killed both of the Snipers, which was very helpful.

While this was all being set up, everyone else on the map died except for Gato and Sheeda. This left Marth alone to face off against Medius, with a lot of casualties in the final battle.

The Falchion is a fairly weak sword, but it does have a bonus to damage against Medius. It took me two turns.

But Marth was victorious! Of course Medius gives the usual bad guy speech about how he'll back some day as long as there is evil in the hearts of men, blah blah.

Sheeda managed to survive so Marth proposes to her (there's a different scene here if she died, where Marth says he'll never forget her. Now we get the English ending scene:

I'm not sure what that last sentence means; if they were referring to Fire Emblem Gaiden or not. A lot of games from this period say something like this at the end so it might not mean anything. Next up is a cast list that shows some odd romanizations for characters.

Next up is a list of all the stages and how many turns each one took, followed by your final turn count. This is a nice touch.

Finally, there's a short description of what each character does after the war. If they died, it says which battle they died in. Another nice touch.

And that's the end!

I'll post in a few days with some sort of wrap-up or review post but I'm not sure exactly what it will look like yet.