I’ve played approximately a 15 year stretch of Fire Emblem games. That qualifies me to explain Fire Emblem. In brief, Fire Emblem revolves around moving a set of 9-12 bright-haired characters around a grid-based battlefield while optimizing how close they are to one another to ensure that the mid-battle banter is lit. The better the banter, the more the characters like each other, and the more fire emblems you can add to your resume.

What is a fire emblem?

When consumed, a Fire Emblem can only be described as an interactive visualization of what it would be like to live in a world where hair color is a defining personality trait.

In the most recent installment, cleverly subtitled “Three Houses” because of the three different hair color schemes (red-ish, blue/green, and rainbow), you play as a green-haired normie who is selected for purely religious reasons to teach advanced military tactics. In this iteration, you dote on your 9-12 characters during their teen years through morally ambiguous professor-student flirting. Things get spicy when a goddess possesses you, causing the player character’s hair to change from deep teal to a washed-out aqua, symbolizing your growing disillusionment with the green-haired ruling class. As a result, you shirk your academic duties and decide to nap for the foreseeable future. When you wake up five very formative years later, all the voice actors are trying their very hardest to do a grown-up version of their characters voice. Importantly, the color of the character’s outfits now match their hair color.

In a world where your values are defined by the color of your hair, it’s important to know where you stand on the visible light spectrum. Fire Emblem is an excellent journey of self-discovery, assuming what you want to discover about yourself is your favorite hair color.