Fire Emblem Review
Ever played a game that you swear seemed like it was intelligent at first, only then you realized there really wasn't a bit of actual strategy involved? Fire Emblem is one of these games. A tactical RPG in a long series of tactical RPGs - of which this is the only one to be released in the US, specifically to the Gameboy Advance. I sort of enjoy the game, but it's very strategy-lite, and relies mostly on a highly relative RPG system to make up for its otherwise extreme lack of intelligence. It has a marginal plot, reasonable sound, but a perfectly solid gameplay experience for those times that you don't have a copy of Dynasty Tactics or Silent Storm immediately available. The game has plenty of complications, but very few that really tax an able mind.
When I mentioned the 'highly relative RPG system' what I mean is that no matter how powerful your character might seem, there are fair odds that unless he's a solid 10 levels ahead of his opponents, he's quite vulnerable to them. Unlike a considerable number of tactical RPGs - such as Dynasty Tactics, Final Fantasy Tactics, or the Shining Force games - a little power-leveling will not greatly benefit you in terms of making yourself more powerful for later fights. This is not because every level does not help, but because in a game where the effective max level is 40, and a level 20 character can take good damage from a level 1 opponent, and in fact has only somewhat higher stats than the 1st level opponent, most of the 'strategy' involved is a question of playing your characters' statistical strengths against your opponents' statistical weaknesses. Plus, there's an impressive amount of wiggle room available - the luck stat seems to have a profound effect on just about everything your character does, and sometimes high-stat characters with low luck seem to blow for no evident reason.
The major strategic features implemented into the game are similar to almost every other tactical RPG designed for the SNES and Genesis - terrain, and a slightly more interesting, but not terribly unique, weapon superiority system. Swords trump axes, axes trump lances, and lances trump swords. In short, rock-paper-scissors. In a turn based game the distinction is a lot more active in combat than it would be in a real-time, and Fire Emblem makes the distinctions fairly important. Likewise the magic users have a similar system, wherein light magic trumps dark, dark trumps nature, and nature trumps light. Bows, as ranged weapons, trump pretty much everything, though the few archers in the game are functionally useless at melee range. When you toss in the limited number of uses to weapons, including spell books, and various weapon triangle reversing weapons, you'd think the game could have some strategic finery, huh?
Wrong, unfortunately. Ultimately the game's inability to challenge players is derived from the extremely poor artificial intelligence. The computer rarely makes intelligent moves, and primarily relies upon numbers to make up for their severe lack of intelligence. Frequently I found axe-wielders would rush my sword-wielding main character, despite his sitting on a hillside. They would attack from open plains, which grant no terrain bonus to anything. They would do this when they had spear-wielding allies on their team. When I'm the attacker in a battle, I should be trying to pick off defenders with the right circumstances, rather than just setting up and smashing their waves of idiotic fodder as they rush from their positions to assault me. In other words, the game's most major problem with its gameplay is that it's made too easy on you. The vulnerability of your forces, in conjunction with the weapon triangles and highly detailed maps could allow for some interesting tactical problems - a real mental engagement - if the bloody computer wasn't dumb as mud.
This is not to say that doing everything perfectly is easy; as I said, the game makes up for its lack of brains with a whole lot of brawn, so if you're not reasonably careful, you can lose some of your more weak team members, like archers and magicians, to sudden charges from the AI. If you're a perfectionist, this game can pose somewhat more mental exercise - or at the very least, it will require you to spend a lot of time on it. But if you're more realistic, and don't mind losing the occasional extraneous team member, then the game can pass very quickly due to its sheer simplicity.
The game is very replayable, actually - the system is sound enough, and the game has a hard mode you can play it in when you beat it, as well as a second story (basically a different main character, but many of the same battles) and some other extra features. The hard mode makes the AI more clever about picking its battles, but it still tends to rush you at moments that are entirely inopportune for its own intents. If you like a good strategic challenge, though, there's never, ever a reason NOT to play on hard mode - at least that way you'll need to think some. Rather nicely, there's also a vs. mode that can be unlocked, though I have yet to play it, so I don't know what it's like. In short, if you put the effort into it, the game can reward you.
So how about graphics? As with most GBA games, it's pretty much SNES quality stuff. It looks decent enough, though I found the portraits of the characters to be pretty bland. A lot of characters looked similar to my eye - and I'm even an anime fan. Varying costumes and hair-styles serve as the primary means of differentiating characters, rather than more detailed facial features. Terrain is clear and reasonable, if not pretty, and the larger backgrounds for the battle sequences are fairly good looking, though hardly spectacular. The game isn't much of an artistic achievement, but there's not much to seriously complain about - it gets the job done well enough.
I don't really like the game's music. It's either bland or bad. Battle music is mainly generic 'march to war' stuff, only rendered on the GBA - so it sounds awful. I suppose with a full orchestra it'd sound alright, but it's not catchy, stirring, or any other advective one can apply to music, other than monotonous. I'm no expert in music, but I know what I like - and Fire Emblem's music is definitely not it. One of the things that's always bothered me about the GBA is the fact that its speaker makes everything sound tinnier than it needs to. As such, all music out of it sounds pretty cheesy, and often painful when it reaches the high registers.
This game, being a tactical RPG, should have a decent story and some interesting characters, yeah? Nope. A lot of the story is underdeveloped. A lot of the motive it provides is reasonable enough - I can understand why the characters are doing what they're doing - but it's not particularly interesting. Poor dialogue, and an impressively bland array of cliché characters hurts the game a lot. The main character for the prologue, Lyn, loses her parents to a bandit attack. Oooh, original. Then Eliwood, the son of a Marquis in the country Lyn's mother hails from and the REAL main character, goes off to search for his missing father, who mysteriously disappeared with a band of his best knights a year prior to the game's events. Most of the other folks in your army have little or no meaningful background - some join with as little back-story and personal information as 'because that guy's traveling with you.' Others have a relatively decent setup, and then no future lines. Add in the really awful names some of them have - Dorcas?!? - and you have pretty uninspiring characters, and an equally boring plot. As most RPG plots tend to, this one culminates in saving the known world from an unspeakable evil - but you know, what else is there for a band of rag-tag heroes to do anyway?
In the end, the game is perfectly fun to play, but is far too light a game to be taken seriously as a great. If you've got a spare $30, a GBA, and enjoy tactical RPGs, it's not a bad choice, given its portability. However, if you want a more challenging, and ultimately interesting game, I'd recommend you save your money for Silent Storm or Dynasty Tactics 2, both of which are far superior games on all counts.
Final Scores:
Replayability - 7/10
Gameplay - 7/10
Characters and Story - 4/10
Graphics - 6/10
Sound and Music - 4/10
Overall - 6/10