Sacred Stones is an underrated visual masterpiece. Not just graphics, but the animations are insane

A standout of Engage to me is the feel and flow of combat animations. You can feel the impact of each hit, and the flow between the movements is incredible. The characters move so naturally, like how they go right from a dodge into a counter attack in one smooth movement. It makes the combat feel very alive and exciting, i love it.

FE12 has my favorite portrait style. It's pretty anime-y, yet almost none of the characters are smiling. I have a pet peeve with how many FE characters are jolly despite the horrors of war (even though the games are meant to be kid-appropriate).

There's something to be said about the Jugdral aesthetic. Pixel art is great, the muted color palette just has something about it. I love the 90s hair And the battle animations were sooo great. The battle animations felt continuous and the specific weapons were showed for the first time in the battles.

Yeah Engage, Metroid Dread, and Xenoblade 3 are games that really show how some of the smaller studios at Nintendo with some outside help can push the system to its highest fidelity.

Lol'd @ the Sacred Stones clip of Ewan just OBLITERATING the Dracolich.

I must say though, I am still flabbergasted that Radiant Dawn isn't S in your tier list, given the utterly gorgeous artstyle it has, arguably best in the series

Hey Tom, I think you should add a link to the previous videos so newcomers like me can watch them.

Me: Ordered S: Shadows of Valentia, Radiant Dawn, Path of Radiance A: Blazing Sword, Sacred Stones, Binding Blade, B: Thracia 776, Engage C: Genealogy D: Awakening, Three Houses E: Heroes of Light and Shadows, Shadow Dragon, Fates I can't stand Fates designs, not its overall visual style. It's Kozaki's artstyle at its worse, and I loved what he did in games like Valkyria Chronicles. SoV was just incredible, presentation-wise. And while Radiant Dawn looks better, PoR's character designs are also quite amazing. Just less polished art by Senri Kita, who had more time to hone it for Radiant Dawn. Awakening, Fates, and to a lesser extent, SoV do have blurry visuals syndrome, I just think SoV's presetation is otherwise so good, I can excuse it. Awakening's armour designs make nos ense to me, but it's still better than Fates. It doesn't have Camilla, Peri, both Corrinsm and other weird designs that frankly, I find unappealing. Genealogy's art is bad, but consistent. Still, the on map sprites aren't terrible, they just needed to move faster. I dislike Engage's designs compared to three houses timeskip, but animations are better.

Shadows of Valentina is the best in terms of Art. Praying Hidari returns for FE4 Remake or the next mainline title.

It´s just a silly crime that whoever is in charge is not letting us purchase Echoes for the switch, I know it´s not for everyone but the art and music of this game is just amazing and worthy of collecting and gameplay wise I would recommend it to newbies.

We have similar opinions on the visuals minus the switch games. I personally would put both in A tier for polar opposite reasons lol. 3H had amazing character designs while Engage looked great in everything else. I do think Engage art style is going to be timeless compared to 3H though, but character design is weighted higher in this type of community imo. Great video! I loved your take on Sacred Stones as well. That's probably my personal favorite visual over Echoes.

Story wise, Genealogy was my favorite. I agree the art could be abit sharper. Generally I dont like the 3d characters in the new FE games. I prefer the pixel sprites more. I just couldnt get into the later FE games because of it. I am so glad Unicorn Overlord was sprites, and how good the gameplay was.

I'd probably swap some stuff around like I am a bit more amiable to FE7's color pallete than FE8 (despite the art/animations being kinda worse in general), but I think the main think I disagree with is 3H (lol). I'll admit that I am kinda biased because I really dislike Three Houses in general, but that game is like D or bottom of C tier on the visual level and is on par with Shadow Dragon imo. It has uncanny character models, ugly environments that look way too realistic, sucky animations, and an uninspired art style (this last one is much more subjective but still). I know this isn't a hot take, but Hidari does the character designs for a middle realism anime style way better than Chinatsu Kurahana.

I'd can't speak to some of the older (SNES) games. I wish I had been able to play Scared Stones small clips show it's charm. Only change I'd make is to the list is dropping Engage down to top of A tier. While technically it's visuals are superior to Three Houses. It's character designs are just a bit much (sometimes), visually noisy to look at and probably does not help many of them are unlikeable. I also have similar issues with Fates, like what is Charlotte wearing? She's part of Nohr's border guard and she's in that, especially so when a lot of Nohr's design has this medieval European fantasy design that's edgy and dark tones.

My one complaint with this video is you calling Fates character designs good lol. That said, if Engage is S-tier despite it's character design abominations, so is Fates (which isn't nearly as bad in that regard). Part of the problem with some of the later games is that 'visuals' encompasses both graphics and aesthetics, which causes problems when you look at Three Houses (which has excellent aesthetics in a lot of areas but bad graphics) and Engage (which has amazing graphics but a very jarring aesthetic). Rating them depends on how much weight you give each aspect, that said Three Houses is definitely worse since it does have aspects with bad aesthetics (the lifeless maps for example) while Engage's graphics are excellent throughout.

Very agreeable tier list! I would probably drop 3H down to PoR tier, they're both kind of trying their best while getting used to new hardware.

Putting the gba games in different tiers is pretty stupid