OK so this is the first in a series of posts about my favorite games on the GameBoy Advance. I dont intend to do full reviews more just to talk about the games in general and how they came into my life and the effect they had on me as a gamer. As a massive fan of the 16bit consoles like the SNES and the Megadrive its probably not that surprising to find that I am also a great fan of the GameBoy Advance what with it basically being a sort of pumped up portable Super Nintendo. I have written a lot of things about the SNES and the Megadrive in the past and have hardly ever stopped to talk about the GBA so it seemed like a perfect time.
When I talk about the SNES and the Megadrive it is often very hard for me to think about and remember all of the details about where I first saw the games or where I originally brought them from, I really need to stop and ponder and the truth is sometimes I can remember and sometimes I cant. The good side about talking about newer consoles is that I am not having to think back to my childhood. Not only is it longer ago but I also didn't pay as much attention to what I was doing back then, I was like most kids always rushing to the next thing and didn't really take a second to smell the roses. I am hoping that with these GameBoy Advanced titles my memories will be much fresher and I thought well why not get them down before they are ravaged by the tides of time.
I cant tell you the date that I got my favorite GBA game but I can tell you the day of the week I purchased it, which I think is pretty darn impressive. It was a Thursday and heck I can boil it down to even the rough time of day. It would have been somewhere between 6pm and 6.30. It was while the GBA was still current and it was gotten from a local second hand market which used to run every Thursday 5 minutes away from my house in my local towns market place/center. The market would open at 6pm and I would providing I wasn't working always be there on the dot and it would take approximately 15 minutes to rush around all of the stalls, so even if I was late or I had been haggling on the price of something I would always have looked at everything on it and either be ready to leave or at least ready for a second look around by 6.30. The day I got Fire Emblem there was a stall which had a whole load of GBA games, every game was £5 and nearly all of them were cartridge only, in fact the only one which wasn't was Fire Emblem, which was in fact complete and in a very good condition. I basically purchased Fire Emblem because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that if I thought it sucked I would be able to trade it in somewhere and make a profit or get a lot more than £5 in trade credit. It seems really strange to say this now as basically after getting the game home I have never let it out of my sight. As soon as I tried it I loved it, it instantly reminded me of two games I had played before one of them being a Japanese PS1 copy of Final Fantasy Tactics and the other being konami's Vandal Hearts.
You kind of can't blame me for originally thinking that Fire Emblem was like Tactics and Vandal Hearts as despite the fact Fire Emblem was a long running Nintendo franchise this original GameBoy Advance Fire Emblem was the first to be officially sold in Europe and America. The even funnier thing to admit though is how comfortable I was with the idea of selling the game if it didn't live up to my standards when now I think id sooner sell half of my collection than loose this title. The game became a lot more than just a game to me it was the start of me loving the entire series. I waited with baited breath for the GameCube version to come out and I have waited for every Fire Emblem game since that one with the excitement of a child waiting for Christmas day. Its a series I have introduced to my daughter and we now both play it comparing strategies and experiences. The only proper Fire Emblem game I have missed was Sacred Stones, which unfortunately every time I see it in the wild is counterfit and the one time I tried purchasing it online I received a bootleg, fortunately it was a fully functioning bootleg which I both got a refund for and was allowed to keep for my trouble, this means I have played it on the original hardware but it also leaves it as the sort of missing piece in my tale.
As far as the games worth now and its place in my collection well I didn't really click on to how important it had become as a game outside of my own personal love for it until the time when I had grabbed the Wii Fire Emblem (which I got on its day of release from Tesco for £35). This was kind of the point when I noticed wow quiet a lot of people seem to want the previous games in this series I better not let the ones I have slip out of my clutches. I actually had my original copy of the GameCube Fire Emblem sort of stolen and had to buy another which is the reason I never ever let people lend my games anymore but I guess that is a story for another time.
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