Lurker > NeoElfboy

Blazing Blade
Awakening
Three Houses

all locks

The last spot has a bunch of candidates. I think the best ones are...
-Mystery of the Emblem: best-selling game in the series until Awakening (actually I think Blazing barely beats it? I forget), really established the series in Japan, still gets lots of random Japanese nostalgia.
-Fates: There's an argument that Awakening/Fates/3H are a bit of a big three for the series; they certainly are based on both sales and volume of fan work (go look at the AO3 numbers for the series for a metric that's easy to quantify), and to this day Conquest will on-average win a "best gameplay" poll.
-Heroes: Hugely successful for what it is. It's hard to over-state, actually. The best argument against it is that it's not a "real" Fire Emblem; if it is it definitely belongs. I am definitely at least somewhat sympathetic to that argument, though.

Things I definitely don't think it is, despite them getting some votes:
-FE1: Really eclipsed by FE3 for the Japanese fanbase, irrelevant everywhere else.
-Path of Radiance: This one just confuses me. It didn't sell well or bring in a significant number of new fans, it didn't significantly innovate or influence the rest of the series. The only substantive argument I've seen is that Ike is the series' most popular character but (a) I don't think that's even true any more, and (b) even if it is true I don't really think it should carry that much weight, Ike's popularity is at least partly due to RD and Smash Bros. as well.

Anyway of the games I thought of as plausible fourths I'm not attached to any of them, but reading through the thread I'll vote for the one it doesn't look like anyone has voted for...

Fates

Neat to see someone playing these games for the first time. And yeah 2 really is quite a bit better than 1. I think 1 is actually solid for the time, it starts the fundamentally cool idea of the series of getting new weapons from bosses and clear the stages in any order you want, but it's obviously a formula that many later games do better.

Not 7 though.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

7 is the worst of the mainline games, they made it in like six months. The character:screen ratio is f***ed up, boss design/balancing is all over the place, and I think most of the music isnt great

Yeah this is how I feel too. I can't really think of anything I remember fondly about 7.

I do like 8 though. It's different and I totally get why someone wouldn't care for it (if you don't vibe with the physics or whatever), but I like the larger stages that iterate on themselves and the higher number of checkpoints, and the weapons are powerful and great fun.

2/3/9 > 8/11 > 4/5/10 > 1/6 > 7 is probably my order, but it can swap around depending on my mood.

Definitely play X8 if you play the X games, it's the best of them IMO (aside from one terrible stage). Being able to switch between multiple characters who play very differently is so cool.