Tales of Symphonia.... well, Fire Emblem

[OB1]

This game really shows how much a good story can help a game. One of the biggest problems with the otherwise-fun Advance Wars titles is the quite bad and illogical story, after all...

And yeah, I'd hope that they'd either give you new characters or something because if they didn't the game could get impossibly hard and NO ONE would want to have to start the whole game over from the beginning. But getting through with no losses is obviously really, really hard... what, did you manage it?

To tell you the truth I think the story got too convoluted at times and relied on way too much dialog for what was a very simple plot. But it was entertaining, and did make the game better.

However I think AW's non-existent plot works very well for it because it really is the kind of game you pick up and play every once in a while, doing single missions here and there. I haven't finished FE and play it every so often, confused by some of the story elements that I forgot about. So they both serve their purposes. AW is a terrific, pure strategy title that is perfect for a handheld since you can stop playing the game for a year and come back to it and know what to do, and FE is a strategy-RPG that requires long, consecutive days or weeks of play.