Given its nature as a Long Runner, it's inevitable that certain elements of the Fire Emblem series would be criticized long after being introduced.
- As the series that overhauled Genealogy's "Love and War" system into the modern Support mechanic, fans often consider the GBA titles and Path of Radiance the gold standard when it comes to Support writing quality, character development, and proper romantic escalation when appropriate. While it's true that, overall, having to write so many Supports has led to a bit of a quality-control problem for the later titles of the DS/3DS/Switch era, just as many GBA supports contained exactly the same problems: one-note characters that don't really develop, badly-written romances, or entire conversation trees that amounted to little more than broad comedy fluff. But, since any given character could only have five conversations total per playthrough, and because characters in general had much smaller support pools, these flaws weren't quite as obvious to their detractors as they would later become. And since children weren't part of the equation, due to losing that aspect of the "Love and War" system, nearly every male character didn't need a romantic relationship to be possible with nearly every female character.
- Character Development being tied to Supports has become a recurring criticism of the more modern games (Awakening, Fates, Three Houses, Engage) due to it creating Story and Gameplay Segregation (such as Cordelia getting over her one-sided crush on Chrom, but still showing sadness about not being with him in other supports, or Peri letting go of her Ax-Crazy mindset only to revert to it whenever she starts another chain at C), and formulaic conversations (like every other Bernadetta C-support hammering you with the fact that she's a Shrinking Violet, or how all of Yunaka's supports keep bringing up the fact she was a former assassin). While this was broadly true for previous titles, games like Genealogy and Binding Blade limited the amount of Support Conversations a character could have, while doing a full Support Conversation locked you out of doing any others. This meant that, on a given playthrough, a player was probably only seeing two or three supports for a given character, and reaching the culmination of their development exactly once. Plus many Supports were the sole reason some characters had personalities beyond whatever they did/said in their recruitment, so it made sense to have Supports be based around Character Development, because that was all they could actually get. Newer games bowed to overwhelming player demand and allow for as many Supports as possible (although usually only one romance), which, combined with the characters having more defined personalities from the start, means that the Supports still suffer from repeating and contradicting each other without building on one another.
- The series' overuse of the My Country, Right or Wrong trope for some of its antagonists began to be accused of this as the series has gone on, particularly after Fire Emblem Fates had Xander remain loyal to his Obviously Evil father and died fighting the heroes rather than join them, with some feeling these characters had fallen into being Unintentionally Unsympathetic as a result. The archetype has been around since day one, but early examples were rather subversive about it, such as Camus surviving and eventually undergoing Character Development, or Eldigan and Reinhardt deconstructing the concept by showing the consequences of taking that position. Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones introduced Selena however, who played the trope straight without any exploration beyond "a good person holding to loyalty in a bad situation", even as several of her fellow allies defect, and as the game never really gives a concrete reason for her blind loyalty to her king's increasingly-obviously impaired statenote . After this tipping point, it became easier to notice the writers rely on the noble enemy general archetype without analyzing when that loyalty steps into Accomplice by Inaction, like Bryce or Xander during the Birthright route, and shed all subversive elements or deeper storytelling in favor of just having them be a good person serving an evil ruler out of misguided loyalty and patriotism and coming to a tragic end.
- Critics of modern titles often complain about fanservice-laden character designs as a sign of cynical selling-out. But as early as the first game, there was concept art of some of characters of both sexes drawn without pants, including Marth himself. Linde in Mystery of the Emblem, released in 1994, had promotional artwork of her being dressed like this
◊. Female characters in this series are often depicted wearing impractically-designed armor and clothing, and skirts on flying pegasus cavalry units were practically tradition. Thracia 776 is perhaps the ONE modest exception to this, as just about every flying unit, soldier, and archer was smartly dressed in its artwork.- Most of these came from their artwork, something you wouldn't be able to really see in the game itself due to the games' use of simple character portraits and most characters having basic sprites that were purposely designed to be used by other characters. Thanks to modern technology, characters can now almost one-to-one match their artwork in-game, meaning sexualized designs are now more obvious to many players. Also, the earliest female characters were almost universally Fragile Speedsters. Later titles democratized class distribution, so, for example, the heavily armored foot knight Effie in Fire Emblem Fates leaving her thighs exposed sticks out much more.
- Byleth's nature as an Avatar character earned criticism for being both a thinly characterized silent protagonist and one of the most important characters, which some felt hurt the game severely. Past Avatars had the same issues; The Tactician from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade was a nothing character who only existed to explain the tactical gameplay elements and act as Mission Control, while Kris, Robin, and Corrin were intended to serve as wish-fulfillment Escapist Characters. However the Tactician barely impacted the game's story, and later Avatars would get personalities, even if fairly basic ones, which made them feel enough like actual people that they weren't just a blank slate for the player to project themself onto, especially with Supports or interactions giving them depth and traits. Detractors argue that taking the lack of characterization of the Tactician and combining it with major story importance and frequent reactions from other characters and dialogue options created someone who wasn't enough of a blank-slate to be inconsequential while also not having enough characterization to be rewarding.
- Many players have criticized gender-locked classes as a major Scrappy Mechanic at best and full-on Game-Favored Gender at worst. The series wouldn't see a playable female cavalier until Mystery of the Emblem, similarly applied to Mercenary/Hero, Armored Knight/General, and Archer/Sniper. Mystery of the Emblem also hinted that most of the brutish axe-wielding classes were generally male by their weakness to the Ladyblade. But otherwise, crude and repetitive sprite-work meant most characters looked the same anyway, so there seemingly could be individuals outside their stereotyped class lines, and with class progression being linear people didn't complain that much. When Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones broke away from the linear class progression in favor of a full on class tree only a handful of classes weren't democratized, and while Shadow Dragon's reclass feature did gender-lock a few classes, most of them were just side-grades to each other. But when Awakening introduced the series to a wider audience, the most overpowered classes and skills, such as Dark Flier with Galeforce and Bride with Rally Heart, were exclusive to females. This heavily escalated in Three Houses where 9 classes are gender-locked, ensuring entire weapon groups were sub-optimal for many characters entirely on the basis of gender, even when characters are inexplicably pre-specialized in them to seemingly qualify for classes their gender keeps them out of.
- This is a particular thorn in the side of the flying classes, since flying cavalry tends to be really strong and gender-locking it to women is a frustrating series tradition for, as far as most fans are concerned, no good reason. This was also present from the very first game, with the only playable Pegasus and Wyvern Knights being Caeda, Palla, Catria, Est and Minerva, all of whom are female, and with seeming male Pegasus Knights and Wyvern Knights uniformly non-playable. There's even a mention in Thracia 776 that Pegasus Knights were typically female, hinting at the possibility of male Pegasus Knights. But no subsequent title ever followed up on that, only making Wyvern Knights available to males, even as female mounted units only got stronger and stronger with each passing game, to the point of having a seeming near-monopoly on mounted casters without a lot of frustrating Empty Levels in Three Houses. Even Fire Emblem Fates, often complimented for getting rid of the gender barriers, clarified the male Sky Knights were not actually riding Pegasi.
- Many fans have complained about the over-the-top character designs of Fire Emblem Engage, most notably the protagonist Alear, who has two-toned hair and eyes, leading to derisive comparisons to Virtual Youtubers and commercial mascots. Some have tried to pin the problem on whichever era of Fire Emblem they, personally, feel things started to go wrong and become "too anime," but in truth, Fire Emblem character designs have always reflected popular trends of anime in the eras they were produced in. From the very first installment, Katsuyoshi Koya's art resembled and evoked then-classics of the medium like Record of Lodoss War. Alear's outlandish hair mainly represents the breaking point between "over-the-top" and "over-the-top even by anime standards."
- Some critics of Engage complain about Continuity Lockout regarding frequent and thick callbacks to previous titles. Awakening, a beloved series classic, did so extensively. However, not only was Awakening a deliberate "greatest hits album" made against fears the franchise would be indefinitely shelved, the call-backs were relatively subtle so new players didn't feel as though they were missing much. Awakening took place on Archanea and Valentia, and had weapons wielded by past heroes, plus a few cameos from long-lived characters from those games and a few Mythology Gags, so none of the references felt out-of-place, and the story carefully explains all of these things to the player and the characters. Similarly, Three Houses included several reforgable weapons from past games, such as the Gradivus, and had the items in the Chain of Deals quest for Shamir or Catherine be references to previous games (e.g. the Tome of Crestological Mysteries is a reference to Mystery of the Emblem), but these were also just cute gags, unrelated to the overall plot. Engage, on the other hand, has a plot entirely centered around summoning the heroes of other Fire Emblem games as "Emblems," the Emblem heroes reminisce about specific events in their bond conversations, and their Paralogues are full-on based on their old adventures, all of which is much more front-and-center, on-the-nose, and almost impossible to fully appreciate if you haven't played their games.
- One of the biggest complaints with Fire Emblem Warriors was the sheer amount of Moveset Clones among the roster, with the only unique characters in the roster (DLC included) being Tiki, Linde, Corrin, Azura, Xander, Oboro, Frederick, Lissa, and Olivia. Even the NPCs and villains were clones of some of the playable characters, with Gharnef, Validar, and Iago all being clones of Robin, and Darios being a clone of Rowan and Lianna. While fans have criticized Koei for being lazy, the entire Dynasty Warriors series was practically built off of having most of the roster be clones of each other; the actual number of unique characters has always been quite low compared to the sheer number of clone characters. The main reason this proved to be such a problem for Fire Emblem Warriors was because the previous Nintendo Warriors collaboration, Hyrule Warriors, had no clones at all, and there were fan favorite heroes and villains alike that fans were hoping for that got left out in favor of less-popular characters who seemed like they were only included due to laziness (such as Iago, whose inclusion was met with widespread derision and bafflement). Koei would go on to overdose on moveset cloning again in one of their flagship series with Dynasty Warriors 9, to a similarly unimpressed reaction from the fanbase.
- Notably, the next Fire Emblem Warriors game also inevitably has moveset clones note , but this is far less of an issue because the movesets in question are tied into the class the character is in and some characters have unique warrior specials if the character in question is in their favorable class. Moreover, each character has unique abilities and support skills, so playing certain characters from the same class isn't stale. Otherwise, the only characters with unique movesets are Shez, the three lords (Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude), and Byleth, just 5 characters out of the aforementioned 44. Jeritza and Rhea don't count because their "unique" classes Death Knight and Saint are a reskinned Dark Knight and Mortal Savant respectively.
