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Fire Emblem: Reviews

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Game Score: 10/10

Write your review here..Fire Emblem has gone from a seemingly nonexistent series in the US to a fairly well known one. With the characters Marth and Roy appearing in Super Smash Bros. Melee, Americans began to wonder just what ''Fire Emblem'' was. Unfortunately, Marth and Roy are not in the game; rather, it features an exciting cast all its own. Truth be told, it is not only a very popular series in Japan, but is actually the inventor of strategy RPGs. Why Nintendo kept a masterpiece like this from US gamers for so long we'll never know, but after many letters, petitions, and support (about 15% of which was probably me), Nintendo finally translated their latest release into English, thus giving hardcore English Fire Emblem fans hope for more to be translated, saving the lives of organized teams setting out to hack the ROMs into an English format, and saving me the time of sending NOA letter after letter bugging them to bring the series over.

Developed by Intelligent Systems (the team responsible for such other popular series as Metroid, Kid Icarus, and Famicom Wars, headed originally by Gunpei Yoki), the Fire Emblem games are very unique. Usually, one thinks of Strategy RPGs as games on a large scale map with battalions, or squadrons of units represented by their commanding unit, and the battles would take place between the squadrons. Simply put, Fire Emblem is like a cross between the Nintendo Wars series and Tactics Ogre. The main focus is still on strategy, but every character is a single unit. There are no groups, or anything like that.

So, take your average Advance Wars scenario. Then, turn all of your present units into heroes (unique units), switching their primary means of ascension to levels and experience points. Replace all high tech weapons with swords, bows, and spell-books, and then turn all buildings into houses, shops, and castles. Finally, add a touch of other RPG elements, such as the ability to recruit new characters, an important story, etc., and add a nice amount of impossibly outnumbered battles making the slightest error fatal. Mix together, and you have Fire Emblem! Sound fun/hard/irritating? Well, it ultimately is. But the momentary irritation is so far outclassed by the amount of fun you'll be having that there will be few times where you'll start to care.

It works amazingly well because you wind up having to be more strategic than in other games. By giving you individual units, all of which can die easily, you must very carefully plan how each unit is used in a mission. You can't send a buff character you like into a hoard of enemies and expect him to win, one reason being that if he dies, he's dead for good (did I forget to mention that?). Another reason is that while you can save the game at any time, the game saves for you to. After every action of every character. That means you can't experiment and send your puny little archer against the boss to see how she fares, and save right before it. The game will save her firing, her doing her minimal damage, and him slaughtering her. You can't simply go back and load the save, because it will be saved over, and now your only choice is to let her stay dead, or restart the entire chapter (mission). This means you must be exceptionally careful with your essential characters, because resetting while one of them is dying will only result in you watching their death over and over.

Yes there are many many times it will wind up irritating, and you might turn off your GBA and be tempted to through it out of the window in frustration because your favorite character or your healer was sniped, but ultimately the challenge is only to make you more cautious. The sad thing is that this game is probably one of this generation's most difficult, and it's actually by far the easiest game in the Fire Emblem series. So, be grateful it isn't Fire Emblem 2. But, I still enjoy it. Nothing beats watching your favorite character (and you're bound to have a lot; the game has a ton of cool and likeable characters) plow down an enemy in two hits, or see their awesome critical attack with a powerful weapon.

And the story I simply can't get enough of. Finally, FINALLY, we have a strategy RPG with a non-political storyline. Every other strategy RPG I can ever recall is ''Country A attacks Country B; watch war unfold'' or ''Character from Country A in high position joins rebels''. Fire Emblem starts off with a very personal story, nothing more than your typical ''Find this person in close relation to main character'' storyline, with a bit of foreshadowing to more important events, and then slowly turns more serious until it ends up with an incredibly epic and satisfying story.

If nothing else the game has some of the best presentation I have ever seen. After just turning the game on we are greeted to an amazing opening showing the past of the war between Humans and Dragons, accompanied by what might be Nintendo's first vocal soundtrack. The entire game features a compelling and atmospheric story, intertwining with great gameplay and characters. For awhile I was worried that Nintendo would have to dumb down some things to keep it appropriate for American audiences, but everything remained intact, keeping the same lustful personalities of some, and the overly-feminine looks of some characters, down to the (attempted I should say) murdering of little children. The game is probably Nintendo's darkest game story-wise yet (and for those angry at the changing of Captain Falcon's shirt in SSBM: they let the word ''hell'' slip once here. Now why not there?)

Arguably the game's strongest point would be the game's characters. Despite having a cast of well over 20 characters quite early in the game, you manage to get a very good idea of each person's character and personality. Most amazing is that you have 3 main characters, and all wind up well developed and extremely deep. Your main character starts with Lyndis, a young orphan in Sacae. You yourself are simply a tactician who happens to find her, and decide to stay with her for a while. Along her journey to meet her grandfather, she stumbles across Eliwood (Roy's father and the predominant main character) and his best friend, Hector. All three of them develop over the game and gain very vivid personalities. Like The Seven Samurai you have a large cast all consisting of cohesive and likeable characters. It arguably may be the single pinnacle of RPGs in terms of sheer amounts of deep characters. You find yourself getting very attached to them, making it that much harder to let one go when it dies in battle.

Battles themselves are fairly simple. Characters can use a variety of sword, axe, and lance arrangements, as well as bows and spell-books. Weapons fall into a weapon triangle for strengths and weaknesses; sword beats axe, lance beats sword, axe beats lance. Magic falls into a similar one, with dark magic, light magic, and anima magic. Different character classes will be more adept to different types of weaponry. A fighter might be quite handy with an axe, while a knight might favor a lance. There are also different qualities of weapons, which characters must grow to be able to use effectively. For instance, one character might be able to wield a steel sword over an iron sword, but the steel sword may slow them down, allowing them to only attack once as opposed to twice, making the iron sword actually the more effective weapon. A lot of weapons take a lot of growth to be able to wield, period.

While characters still attack and move like in Advance Wars, once a battle between two starts, it switches to a different screen, where they may or may not (depending on if they are doing ranged combat) exchange blows for a turn or two. Experience is then given accordingly, obviously much more given if the enemy is slain. Once a character reaches 100 experience, he or she levels up, and their stats grow. What grows itself is completely dependent on a random number generator. This means that you can wind up with 5 or more stats growing in one turn. It also unfortunately means that a lot of times only 1 or 2 stats will grow, or even no stat growth at all, once in a blue moon. On the upside it adds a lot of replayability, because your characters will never be the same, and it will require you to let characters play out. A character, which looks strong, now may have terrible stat growth, while the little weakling you refused to train in favor of the big guy may become a virtual god with a little training.

What's so great about the large cast is that you are never required to use anyone but the 3 lords (the main characters). Everyone else can be trained or used how you like. If you wish, you can use as many or as few mages as you want. Screw them if you like! A team of all fighters can be effective if you've got a few with magic resistance, and at least one healer. Make your team up of mostly archers, or flying units. It's completely up to you, and the large variety in the cast of characters means that you'll almost never have just one choice for the type of character you want. Thus, it all comes down to preference; maybe you'll pick the character who looks cool or whose personality you like, or maybe just who can wield that oh-so-special weapon you picked off a boss.

Visually, the game is great for a Gameboy Advance game. Everytime a character speaks they will have a large anime portrait with animated lips as they speak. Unfortunately, there are a few points where the drama is significantly covered because the stabbing of a character consists of one character moving forward and backward really fast, then one's head sinking slightly lower and giving a death speech. But for the most part, it works. In battle you have fairly large and detailed characters fighting, going at a very smooth rate, accompanied by awesome special effects here and there, and very creative anime style attacks. At key points in the game there are even hand-drawn CG pictures for moments when anime portraits just cant convey something well enough. More importantly, some of the bosses just look amazing (people who have played the game will know what I mean when I mention the dragon). Character designs themselves look pretty good too.

This is definitely one of Nintendo's best soundtracks in awhile. Despite being on the GBA, the sound quality is excellent. Not to mention of course the quality of the songs themselves. Ranging from your typical battle/army songs to more mysterious creepy music, to sad tunes (and of course the opera-esque vocal song of the opening). Take a good note Nintendo: Use voices more often. These songs seriously rock, and I want something on par with Metal Gear Solid soon.

I've played a fair amount of the Fire Emblem games, and what I've noticed different from this one is the huge amount of polish Nintendo put on this game. Additional character classes were added to make almost every class have a promotion so that every character has something to work for. The soundtrack is the best so far, and the game has a ton of extras. The entire game can be played from one of the main character's point of view, giving about 1/3 of the game alternate missions, and some extra ones. There are many different endings you can get depending on Support Conversations, little talks characters can get with each other. Getting an A conversation with certain characters (usually those of the opposite sex) will give them a different ending (sometimes even giving you a CG ending). The game has several different things that can only be done in the hard modes of the game, as well as including a multiplayer.

So overall, you have a very polished, fun, but difficult strategy RPG. With a large cast of very deep characters, an epic but simple story, and a near flawless battle system, Fire Emblem may be my favorite GBA game, and certainly my favorite Strategy RPG. It's a shame that only now do American gamers get this gem of a series. But who knows? Maybe if this sells well, Nintendo will translate its predecessor, which ironically is actually it's sequel, Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi (the one which actually has Roy in it).