Topic: Fire Emblem Love Thread

I've just completed the Wii game Radiant Dawn for the 1st time last night after a bit over 40hrs. of play. What a nice game this was and thanks Nintendo for localising it (pity about Captain Rainbow)!

The number of dead and severely wounded characters was truly massive, but I got through to the end nevertheless with minimal replays (hence the casualty list -- I never replayed a battle just because someone I liked died, because that's life man!). Given the higher difficulty level and the challenge of keeping other characters alive and therefore different interstitials to view, there's plenty of incentive for a future playthrough.

Great strategic RPG game and I sincerely hope Phantom Brave -- which appears to be more of the same -- comes to Europe as well. Of course if Nintendo wants to do a Wii version of Path of Radiance (a used GC version sells for more than many new Wii games on Ebay) I will gladly buy that or any of the previous console entries if they ever come to the VC (I think those would be logical candidates for a future VC release, no?).

Anyway if you want to share your feelings, please do so!

One of the underrated franchises i love.
Thank god it saw the light outside Japan! (EarthBound didn't had such luck, only the nº2 in america TT_TT)

I loved Path of Radiance. Rented it and played it nonstop whenever I had the chance. Beat it and wanted to play it again but never got around to it.

Radiant Dawn though... It's just too hard. Normal mode was brutal, but even on easy, when I got to the final run (when you have all the characters and split them up into teams of your choice), I just found it to be absurdly difficult. It's annoying that you have to pick your teams without knowing the levels first. Sure, it's realistic, but I had no idea what to plan for. I tried to keep them well-rounded, but I still barely made a dent in the enemy's units for the first level before losing horribly. And I made sure that no one but one or two characters died throughout the game (I think just one, Meg... who needs her), so I wasn't short of characters.

Don't get me wrong: I loved every minute of it. But I wish the Easy mode had better lived up to its name. I had none of these problems finishing Path of Radiance, and if there was even an easy mode offered on that game (I don't think there was), I didn't use it.

If you liked Radiant Dawn, Path of Radiance is worth every penny. There's a reason it's so sought after. I don't want Nintendo to remake it though. They need to make a new one, and just try to live up to PoR's quality. A multi-player mode like in the DS game (I need to get that once I get a DSi) would round it off nicely.

Have you played the DS or GBA games? I'd be interested to know what you thought of them. I played the first GBA game for a few minutes, but the endless tutorials put me off from it. Now that I've played the latest two console games though, I want to give it another shot.

Also, whoa, Phantom Brave is coming to Wii in North America? Can't wait. Wii needs more strategy games. Do you know if this is closer in difficulty to Fire Emblem or Disgaea? As great as Disgaea looks, it sounds too hard for little ole me.

I really really really hope Shadow Dragon or whatever is the start of a trend of old Fire Emblem remakes released worldwide. I'd love to play more of the series. I've been looking for fan translations in the mean time but have had no luck.

I've really loved Fire Emblem ever since I bought myself a copy of Sacred Stones. I bought it because I thought Marth was in it (big fan of Marth and his appearance in Melee), and while that wasn't the case, I fell in love with the gameplay and the characters. Ever since then, I've made sure to buy any Fire Emblem game that comes out in the Western world. It's my game series of choice to get my SRPG fix. Challenging gameplay, interesting, deep characters (and there are a lot of them!), and a pretty good (if cliche) storyline make it a favorite. Hopefully all the Japanese-only releases will make it to our shores someday. I really want to try Genealogy of the Holy War.

EDIT: And Adam's right about Path of Radiance. It's the best in the (Western) series so far.

On a side note, I've heard some long time fans (I guess this means Japanese, or maybe it includes Western GBA owners) don't like the laguz. The forced timed shift is a bit weird, but shift-meter-increasing items aren't expensive and they add a surprisingly mature theme of racism for a Nintendo game when all I expected was some childish Animorph-ish story. Path of Radiance surprised the heck out of me.

I've never played another Fire Emblem game, but I am keen to get my hands on Path of Radiance. I'm just not keen on spending more than £20 for it second-hand when I've got a backlog of new releases I'm hoping to buy.

I bought Path of Radiance from CEX (only one I've seen in my city) and it was about £22, on ebay I hear it goes for much more, haven't finished it yet but I'm working on it and it's a great game. Just having trouble on the fortress defence level after you first meet the Black Knight 'cos I'm trying to get through the game without any deaths. Intelligent Systems sure do make some great strategy games.

I wanna play it, but I can't find it anywhere. Rawr I need gamefly.

loved PoR and RD with it's great character development and complex story ~ i found myself in love with people like Volke and the Black Knight (who you get to USE!) however Shadow Dragon dissapointed me. liek none of the characters were developed at all (exept for marth, ogma, caeda, and tiki for the good guys; and the two bad guys) that, with a 50+ character list made me not care if i lost half my team in one battle
PS: beast characters:
1. Ike
2. Nephenee
3. Amelia (as a general)
4. Gilliam (as a general)
5. Ogma (general)
any others people can think of?

Aside from the story did you like Shadow Dragon? I'm willing to cut it slack in that department since it is a Famicom game originally, after all.

yeah, it was great in terms of gameplay; having whe ability to make your people swich classes was a feature i loved (hence me saying ogma, a mercenary was a great general); it was a little to short though

If Nintendo is charging you full price for an slightly updated NES game, it doesn't deserve to be given slack (the story does but nothing else), and judging it that way it's terrible compared to the other worldwide released FEs.

-Lots of characters don't have any dialogue.
-You're given dozens of characters, whose only special characteristic is their face.
-Side-chapters can only be gotten to by having around 13 living characters, so if you want them, have fun spending a while letting a bunch of your characters die.
-Weapon triangle is practically useless (I think it's only +10/-10 hit)

The GBA Fire Emblems are awesome, RD was really good (it's too bad some characters had such terrible availability), SD is vastly inferior to the others.

Unfortunately I haven't played PoR,it's so expensive , I saw it at EB games once: $40 used...

i agree, the lack of character dialogue made me only care if my power units (ogma, Navarre, etc) died

The story is what is clearly what I was talking about... but from the rest of your post it seems like I got my answer anyway.

Also, $40 is worth it. It's the best FE available, and it's not like you're buying an SNES game. It has just as much content as Path of Radiance.

Of course, I'm saying this as someone who was fortunate enough to play it during a rental, so I can understand why you'd be hesitant. Still, you can always re-sell it for about as much, considering the demand for it. All you'll end up losing is shipping and maybe a bit extra.

Lies! Disgaea is probably even easier than Fire Emblem. The combat system is more complex (and the character classes are significantly less interesting), but if you get stuck it's quite easy to grind to an appropriate level. The atmosphere is a lot more relaxed than Fire Emblem too and there isn't perma death.

Well, I don't know anyone who's played both, but a friend of mine played the most recent one on PS3 and said it's absurdly hard. He's a lot better at this kind of game, too. The Nintendo Life review describes it as having "cruel difficulty."

I'm not a fan of grinding either. I wish they'd put a demo on PSN.

I played it on the DS and have gotten pretty far, but stopped playing because I got tired of it. It's a good game, but it isn't the best strategy game. It lacks in the class department. Too many of the character classes just aren't different enough.

IM in love with the handheld ones, path of radiance was a lot easier than the handheld's for me but it had good cut scenes. The handhelds are the bomb tho. Eliwood, Lyn, and Hector's game was the best, never got Roy's cuz im in North America. Sacred stones was 2nd best, and the new DS one is the worst of the handhelds.

But as i said, i could not go thru eliwood and Hector's journey's enough, I've probably beaten that game over and over at least 25 or 30 times, just so i can focus on different characters to get to level 20.

You guys are havin trouble finding PoR? I bought mine used for $25 at the Supermarket of Ripoffs (GameStop). I loved it. Path of Radiance was probably the 2nd best FE game to date imo. 1st definitely goes to Fire Emblem for the GBA (Also known as FE7 in Japan ). I've also played Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade for the GBA (The one with Roy in it, it's #6 in the series) and I've also played Fire Emblem 4: Geneology of the Holy Wars and Fire Emblem 5: Thracia 776.

Fire Emblem 6 was quite good, but the ending was really cheap and the game just felt unpolished imo. Roy is WAY overpowered when he is given the Sword of Seals and he can actually kill the final boss, Idoun, in 2 hits, 1 if he criticals.

Fire Emblem 4 was okay, but the maps are effing huge! This one takes more of a RTS type of strategy as well, in that units are much more mobile and can move after they're done with their turn, with a few exceptions of course. The story for FE4 was actually pretty good though, so out of the SNES ones, I'd recommend this one the most.

Fire Emblem 5...where to start. This game is cheap as hell! You thought Radiant Dawn was hard? Well play this damn game. Seriously though, this game easily wins hardest/cheapest FE game ever award. I won't even look at it anymore because of the traumatic incidents I received from this game...