Fire Emblem: Thracia 776

Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is a Japanese tactical role-playing game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. This is the last Fire Emblem game to be released on the Super Famicom and the final game of the series to be designed by series creator Shouzou Kaga. It was originally released on September 1, 1999, through the Nintendo Power service. This Japan-exclusive service allowed people to use writable game cartridges to purchase and download game ROMs from kiosks in select retail locations. It was given a proper boxed retail release on January 21, 2000, during the last days of the Super Famicom.

Plot
Taking place in Jugdral, this is set in a generational gap within Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. This game follows Leif as he rallies a private army in an attempt to defeat the ruling Grannvale Empire and restore his lost kingdom of Thracia.

Why It's The Light

 * 1) Since this is taking place during a generational gap within Genealogy of the Holy War, the same skill system returns.
 * 2) Introduced several gameplay features that have since become a staple to the mechanics of later games of the franchise.
 * 3) *Fog of War - Some chapters have a map that is obscured by darkness and characters can only see a few tiles around them. The way to prevent this is just using torches and torch staves which can increase the radius of the vision.
 * 4) *Capturing - This is for both player and enemy units. When attempting to capture an enemy, the unit making the attempt has their stats halved. HP must be reduced to 0 to successfully capture. When captured, enemies can be looted for any equipment and items they had on their person. Bosses can also be defeated through capture. Units without any weapons can instantly be captured. If one of the player's units is captured, the enemy will take all of their items. To free a captured unit, the player must kill the unit that captured them.
 * 5) *Fatigue - This is unique to Thracia 776, when a character performs an action, they gain various points of fatigue. While this may be punishable because fatigue can make certain units unusable in the next chapter, this was meant to not let players rely on a select few units and to switch out units from chapter to chapter. If you want to stop fatigue, you can use Stamina Drinks. Don't worry though as Leif is the only one that is immune to the mechanic.
 * 6) *Gaiden Chapters - If you were to complete specific conditions in certain chapters, the story can give you a bonus chapter. Heck, you might get a valuable item or a new character.
 * 7) *Escape Chapters - They take up a bulk of the first half of the game due to the small army Leif commands at that point. In some cases, a unit captured during an Escape chapter can later be rescued in a Gaiden chapter. In order to evacuate everyone safely, the player must often have Leif linger, leaving him exposed to danger. Escape chapters in Thracia 776 give the enemy unlimited reinforcements.
 * 8) Brings back the dismount feature from ''Mystery of the Emblem. Lance Knights and Axe Knights are forced to use swords when on foot. Cavalry and aerial units are forced to fight dismounted during chapters set indoors.
 * 9) Has a new command called the Rescue command. You can let one character pick up and carry another. provided the character intended for rescue is light enough for the rescuing unit to carry. While carrying a rescued unit, the rescuer takes a temporary penalty for their speed and skill. But that's not all though as units who are rescued are safe and wont enter into combat. They will be exposed if the rescuing unit is defeated.
 * 10) Believe it or not, there are a lot of chapters to go through. When combining all the chapters, you get a whopping 35 chapters in total.
 * 11) Has good continuity with Genealogy of the Holy War. You see, this takes place during the events of the game. The game is set between Chapter 5 and Chapter 8 of the second generation storyline with Seliph is still hiding and preparing to battle Arvis's hold on the continent.
 * 12) Several characters from Genealogy of the Holy War return like Finn, Diarmuid, Ced, and Nanna while others are just cameos like Seliph, Julius, Julia, Altena, Coirpre, and Hannibal. Some characters are introduced like Halvan, Orsin, Lifis, Shiva, Dagdar, Machyua, and Mareeta. Speaking of characters, there are 52 playable characters in this game.
 * 13) A decent storyline. While you may need to play Genealogy of the Holy War first in order to understand the story since it takes place during the events of the original game, it's still worth checking out. You see, Leif's journey starts out small, but it will become large when Leif attempts to liberate the kingdom of Munster. At first, it may seem like nothing at all, but just learn more about the lore in Genealogy of the Holy War and you get the idea of what the plot is about.
 * 14) Unlike Genealogy of the Holy War, the maps are normal-sized which is an improvement to the predecessor.
 * 15) The thieves in this game can literally steal anything including the weapon your enemy has. This is the only game of the series where the thieves can do just that.
 * 16) Like the predecessor of the game, the graphics are pretty good and stay true to the previous game. Believe it or not, the sprite graphics are still good for a very late Super Famicom title. This is very notable on the maps.
 * 17) Even though the difficulty is notorious, it gives players enough time to strategize as in using your brain via actual thinking. If you really want to use your gray matter, now it's the time to do so regardless of whether you are a veteran of the series or not.
 * 18) Instead of the Love System, the Bond Support from Mystery of the Emblem is introduced. Supports give a flat bonus to Hit, Critical, Critical Evade, and Avoid when the characters are within three spaces of each other.
 * 19) Exclusive to this game are Crusader Scrolls. They are 12 pieces of parchment that are named after the Twelve Crusaders. These scrolls have unlimited durability and each of them has some different stats and strengths that define each of the crusaders.
 * 20) There is a secret mode called Elite Mode. You can activate it by starting a new game, highlighting an empty save slot, then pressing right, left, right, left, right, left, right, right, in that order. Then you need to press B and a chime should show up. This gives every player unit in the game and innate Paragon skill, doubling their experience gain. Any unit that already had the Paragon skill will also gain the innate Paragon skill from Paragon Mode, furthering their experience gain to 4x.
 * 21) Skills can now be learned from manuals or gained from equipable weapons. Something that needs to be mentioned is that Pursuit is no longer a skill and all characters can double attack.
 * 22) In Chapters 5, 6, and 24, you have the option to either let Galzus live or die. In his first appearance, you can still beat him yet it's really not recommended, as it means he can't join you. In 24 however, he's much harder.
 * 23) The soundtrack is really good for a late Super Famicom game. They fit well with what's going on with the game.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) This game is known to be really hard. Sure, Fire Emblem has moments of difficulty, but this one happens to be considered to be in a different league of hard difficulty. It gets even worse when you play it blind for the first time.
 * 2) The infamous fog of war was introduced despite being an interesting feature.
 * 3) Fatigue can be really screwy for some. You see, some would rather use better units and not use wimpy units. Heck, it is used for anti-grinding which can be really tricky to do so.
 * 4) The AI is quite aggressive and can do some really clever things like they can go after you for stealing a weapon or enemies who have no weapons can go to the nearest shop to buy new weapons.
 * 5) Some maps are too reliant on RNG and luck instead of good strategy. Chapter 4x is infamous for that.
 * 6) There's never a guarantee of hitting or missing due to the wonky measure of the outcome.
 * 7) The story is quite ignorable, small, and pretty predictable. This is very evident when you don't play Genealogy of the Holy War or at least learn about the lore of the game. It feels like the story is picked up near way later on.
 * 8) Even though Elite Mode is basically the "Easy Mode" of the game, it's really difficult to capitalize on growth rate boosts from Crusader Scrolls.

Reception
Upon release, the Nintendo Power version was proved highly popular with people coming in high numbers to stores supplying Combined sales of its Nintendo Power and ROM Cartridge releases proved to be the franchise's worst-selling game. Reviews however were positive as Nintendojo gave the game a 9.9/10. Kerry Brunskill of Nintendo Life again noted the steep difficulty even when compared to other Fire Emblem entries, but also positively noted its sound gameplay base and praised its "well thought out" story. The game was noted by RacketBoy as a rarity due to its release while TechnologyTell included among their lists on the top Super Famicom games that had not been released overseas.

Trivia

 * This was the last game of the Fire Emblem series to be done by Shouzou Kaga.
 * The intro is in complete English despite the game being Japan only.
 * There's actually a deluxe pack that has stuff like flying mount plushies and a VHS tape.

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