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2. Fire Emblem Fates

Absolutely incredible game. I have played and cleared Birthright before and put the game down for a while, and man am I glad I came back to it. I love the core mechanics of this game so much and, as someone who does not care about story in most games at all, the absolutely ridiculously stupid story and characters in Fates barely bother me. If anything there are parts of the story that I actually am highly amused and sort of love how stupid they are.

I usually just skip all cutscenes anyway and spend hours thinking about which characters I am going to build, how I will get them the class sets and skills they want, who to pair together to create interesting child units, etc. etc. And, in all seriousness, the game does have some great characters such as Takumi, and the Birthright route does have some emotional moments that can actually land quite well.

Fates fixes every single mechanics problem that Awakening had and adds many more interesting mechanics.

In Awakening there were lots of skills, but most of them were absolute trash. I remember going through the list of skills in Awakening and being blown away by how many of them did virtually nothing in battle. In Fates there are a bunch of skills that actually have value, and the skills are distributed very nicely among many different classes.

Innate Class Sets are balanced much better in this game, and the ability to expand your Class Sets allows both parent and child generation characters to be playable; unlike Awakening's system where children inherited an expanded Class Set and were pretty much always better.

The Pair Up system in Awakening was utter garbage, giving a small % chance to sometimes activate a defensive or offensive action. It is possibly the worst core mechanic ever seen in a Fire Emblem game, as it could fundamentally change the outcome of an engagement, sometimes snowballing into derailing an entire battle based on actions with a less than 50% activation rate but checking multiple times per turn. The only way to avoid this was to grind your characters to a level of power where these activation rates stopped being meaningful.

Fates on the other hand has the absolute best Pair Up system, possibly the best gameplay mechanic ever added to a Fire Emblem game. It allows for clever movement and positioning play similar to the Rescue system from classic games, but with a ton more depth. There are good reasons to have your characters paired up sometimes, and keep them separate at other times. Both formations lead to completely different styles of play and most importantly it is 100% deterministic. Characters in Attack Stance will always attack. Characters who are Paired Up will always build up the Guard Gauge, and you can see exactly when a Guard is coming and plan around it.

Anyway, I'm going to continue playing this game a lot in the future, no doubt about that. Anything that can place above an Etrian Odyssey game on my list is very noteworthy. After finishing Birthright Lunatic I did a second run where I allowed people to pick the units I used, and forced myself to build a party around those units. The freedom of character builds in this game allows for a lot of creative decision making which makes this kind of run even more enjoyable than something like, say, FE6 where the characters all have a fixed level of power and a draft is more about wanting to get strong units. I'll probably do another 'pick my units' run at some point in 2023 -- hopefully in Conquest. I'm not sure if I'll be able to beat Lunatic Conquest before that time, though, as it's a difficult route.