2012's Fire Emblem Awakening has turned out to be quite an aptly named game, as its massive and unexpected popularity in the West has prompted a flood of new entries in a strategy series that was once enjoyed only in Japan.

While the three distinct versions of 2016's feudal-Japan-themed Fates expanded on the modern Fire Emblem style — as full of romance and relationships as it is turn-based fighting — Echoes is a remake of 1992's Fire Emblem Gaiden, a game that was never released outside its home country.

The much older mechanics — and the fact that Gaiden itself is something of an outlier for the series — mean that parts of the game do feel like blasts from an unfamiliar past. But pretty new graphics, endearing characters and some smart modernisation of the gameplay mean it comes off more as an enjoyable twist on the franchise than a step backward.

Players take on the roles of both Alm and Celica — and their respective armies — teens who have only just reconnected after being separated as children but now find themselves divided by politics amid a bloody war. It's a standard battlefield soap opera for the series, but one that comes across well through beautiful animated cut scenes and a well-voiced cast. The anime-like charm of the characters — especially their cute, childish dramas juxtaposed with their brutal combat abilities — has long been a selling point of the series and is at the top of its game here.

Battles themselves are a familiar – if slightly less modern – affair. You still take turns positioning and commanding your armies, but the strategy is much more pared-back and analytical. There's no rock-paper-scissors mechanic to decide who has a weapon advantage against against who, and you can't team up with adjacent allies for powerful attacks. Putting certain characters next to each other will still occasionally prompt some battlefield banter, so it's worth pairing your favourites up to see their relationship progress, but the marriage system of recent games is nowhere to be seen here.

The bones of the original 1992 game most show through when Valentia occasionally becomes incredibly difficult. The fact that spells and special abilities consume HP, combined with certain battle scenarios that fill the map with dragon-summoning cantors or teleporting witches meant there were several times I just couldn't find a way to progress, forcing my army to travel backwards to an easier battle where I could train up.

Conversely, steps have been taken to solve one of Fire Emblem's most frustrating issues in Valentia. A prominent feature of the series is that if you're too careless and a character is killed, they stay dead forever. But losing a character can significantly hamper your ability to succeed in the game (not to mention being emotionally taxing), meaning players will usually just turn the game off and on again if it happens. Recent entries have allowed you to turn off "perma-death", but then the battles lose all emotional stakes.

"Mila's Turnwheel" is a new system that lets you turn back time mid-battle, but at the cost of consuming a scarce and difficult-to-find item. The result is that you'll have a chance to go back and re-strategise in order to undo a death, but if the battle seems unwinnable you'll have to retreat or risk running out of do-overs. Thus Valentia strikes a balance where I still had to play carefully and strategically, but it was rare that I lost a character I loved and just had to deal with it or reset the game.

The biggest non-battle gameplay change for series fans is the introduction (or re-introduction) of exploration sections. In addition to recruiting, equipping and getting to know your characters and sending them to war in a top-down, grid-based battle system, you can now run through ruins and caves in search of loot and other benefits. It works just like a 3D adventure game, except if you run into an enemy you'll transition into the standard battle interface for a strategic turn-based encounter.

Valentia's old-meets-new approach is an interesting twist on the series, with the juggling between two parties, free exploration sections and simplified combat balancing out the lack of relationship options and the occasional killer difficulty spike. While the next mainline Fire Emblem game will no doubt return to the more fantastical, romantic themes of recent games, Valentia has me hoping Nintendo continues to dig into the series' back catalogue for more modernised versions of unfamiliar classics.

Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia is out now for 3DS.