What I'm Playing (Volume 42): Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

Seeing as I enjoyed Fire Emblem: Awakening so much, I went back through and revisited the only Fire Emblem game which I own, but haven't beaten, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon for the DS. The prices are absolutely NUTS on the Gamecube and Wii titles, so I'll probably wait a few years to grab them, and focus on getting the more affordable 3DS titles for now.

Back in the day, I bought this game and didn't really care for it for one main reason: the visuals. Rather than the incredibly charming and gorgeous hand drawn sprite animation from the GBA games, the DS game shifts towards an absolutely soulless and drab quasi-3D look that infuriates me every time I play it.

DS version. I tried to find the "coolest" looking example I could, and it's still gross.

This may be the most beautiful game ever made when considering pound for pound power of a console.

Anyway, the point is obviously made by the two screenshots here. Fire Emblem's GBA entries absolutely blow the DS games out of the water, and there's precisely 0 reason why. They had old sprite animations that they could have easily reused, making new animations only for heroes, new classes, and new weapons. Think of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, which merely polishes up existing spritework to delightful effect. There's also no reason why the DS can't handle this type of animation. I'd be happy if they made Fire Emblem games on the same engine til the end of time, but Fire Emblem: Awakening at least has its own visual charm and identity (despite looking unambiguously worse than the GBA titles), which the DS game very clearly lacks. Keep in mind this fact as well: the DS title looks even worse in motion than it does in stills, which makes the above comparison mind-numbing, because the GBA titles look way better in motion than in stills.

So, knowing that my opinions of the visuals weren't going to change, I did what any sensible person would do. I played a few levels with animation, and after cleaning out my vomit bowl, I turned the animations off and enjoyed the game much more, although that's certainly a relative benchmark.

So what is Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon? The game is a remake of the very first Fire Emblem game for the Famicom, which was never released in America. It is thus the most intriguing and defensible of all variety of remakes (and I'm a sucker for remakes), the kind that was never released in a region, and had great ideas that were super rough and greatly improved on in its successors. The idea is great, therefore, to give Fire Emblem fans in America the chance to enjoy the first game in the series, featuring it's most famous protagonist, Marth (who most people know from Super Smash Bros. Melee, aka the greatest game of all time), with a fresh coat of paint for modern audiences.

As remakes go, it fails on most counts. Somehow the visuals are even worse on the DS than they were on the Famicom. Keep in mind that this was released almost 30 years afterwards.

Ooooohhhh, pretty.

These are seriously some of the best 8 bit graphics ever, so whatever. The game also looks worse than Mega Man through Mega Man 6, Castlevania, Little Samson, DuckTales, Super Mario Bros 3, and a host of NES/Famicom games, so it's not necessarily a horrible thing. But if you're going to remake a game, just keep the original graphics unless you're improving them!

They do clean up some of the imbalances in the game, apparently (note, I've never played the Famicom game). New and welcome introductions include the weapon triangle, the rock-paper-scissors relationship between the different kinds of weapons that informs a huge amount of the strategy in the game, a nice new prologue that fleshes out the story a bit more, and the ability to see how far enemies will move and attack for planning purposes.

One new addition which is awful is the not optional "save points" in the middle of levels, which encourage reckless play over good strategy. This allows you to save at difficulty points in the level, and just keep redoing it over and over again until RNG goes your way, or use it to experiment with high risk, high reward strategies. You can also use it to abuse RNG to ensure that you get good level ups for your characters, as stat increases are probabilistic after each level.

Other than that, it's  fairly standard, if hideous, Fire Emblem game, and that means that the core gameplay is mostly enjoyable. The music is really excellent, which has never really been Fire Emblem's strong point. The game's length is good, taking probably 15 hours or so to complete. The story is fairly good, and really impressive when you consider that it's more or less intact from a Famicom game released 30 years prior. The one area story wise in which the game really struggles is in peripheral character development. The story is basically told purely through the eyes of Marth, the hero, and it lacks even a single other interesting character throughout. One of the charms of the later games, and especially Fire Emblem: Awakening, is the charming cast of smaller characters who you get to know throughout your journey, and this is completely lacking here. Given that this would have been a very difficulty challenge to faithfully adapt from the original, though, I'll mostly give it a pass.

It's got most of the strategy you enjoy, although it's a bit clumsily done, and misses out on some of the modern advances that would have been nice additions to the game. For example, part of the appeal of the weapon triangle is that each class is useful in certain situations, and struggles in others. In a well balanced game, this is true, but not in the DS game. Early in the game, you'll face tons of axe characters, which makes it necessary to utilize your sword wielders. However, about a third of the game in, axe characters nearly disappear from the game, making it extremely challenging to continue to level up your sword wielders, including your primary sword wielding hero! At the end of the game, weapons are almost nonexistent, and almost all remaining weapon wielders have lances, so you'll have to go with heroes that can tangle with mages or lances.

Another example is the lack of branching class development, included for the first time (to my knowledge) in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. This made it possible to select from two promotional classes upon using the promotion item, rather than just one. This increased your flexibility in building a team, and I'm not really sure why it didn't make the jump here.

If you love Fire Emblem, I'd recommend this game, with animations off and expectations tempered. If you don't know anything about Fire Emblem, go play the positively delightful Fire Emblem on GBA, or Fire Emblem: Awakening on 3DS. If you know you don't like Fire Emblem, avoid this one at all costs. I'll give it 7.0/10.

Up next on the handheld side is a thorn in my side for decades that I plan on crushing! Here's a quick and cryptic hint.

-TRO