Sam's video game collection essentials

After the success of Fire Emblem on the Game Boy Advance, it was to be expected that we’d get more Fire Emblem on the popular new DS. But instead of sequels, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems decided to go the route of remakes. They started by remaking the very first game in the series, the one that basically introduced the strategy RPG genre as we know it. One motivation for doing so was that the first game had never been released outside Japan before. And very many gamers around the world were already familiar with the main character, Marth, since he was featured in the extremely popular Super Smash Bros. series. It was perhaps an interesting choice, because the first Fire Emblem game had already been remade once before. This was well over a decade previously, as part of the package that included the third game, on the Super Nintendo. This DS remake is its own thing and does not really take that remake into consideration at all. It brings back all the characters and stages from the or...

This is a remake of Final Fantasy III on the Famicom (Japanese NES), which I’ve already written about. You can read my past post here . In the late ‘90s, when Final Fantasy was more popular than it had ever been, Square got into the habit of porting or remaking the earlier games in the series to various platforms. It started with the three SNES titles getting ported to PlayStation. Then, a handheld console exclusive to Japan called the WonderSwan (released by Bandai and designed with the help of Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi) was blessed with remakes of a few retro Final Fantasy games, including enhanced versions of Final Fantasy I and II and a downgraded version of Final Fantasy IV. A remake of III was planned, but never released. The remakes of the first two games were spruced up and released on the original PlayStation in the early 2000s, but III was still left out. As the middle of the 2000s decade drew near, Final Fantasy III oddly became somewhat of a neglected, mysterious entry ...