Game Complete - Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

I finally take the plunge on one of Nintendo's best franchises.

Fire Emblem has been a series I’ve been interested in for a while. I’ve downloaded ROMs of the games when I was a teenager but never got around to playing them, in spite of being really into strategy RPGs at the time like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. Even recently, I’ve spent a lot of time fixing up my Super Famicom Mini to have all the ‘classics’, and I’ve even collected physical copies of recent Fire Emblems – Awakening, Fates, and Three Houses. I figured that it would be best to start with an earlier installment so that I could appreciate the QOL changes as the series evolved over time, as it would be an easier time going forward than backwards, so I chose to begin with the Tellius series.

My first impressions of the game were positive, while the graphics were rather dated, they didn’t look particularly jarring nor did they have any negative impact on the gameplay. The initial gameplay was also rather straightforward, there was a rock-paper-scissors system of strengths and weaknesses for weapons, as well as magic, and certain weapons would have bonuses against specific units (ex. Bows vs flying units).

However, as the chapters went on, there was very little information about the more nuanced aspects of the battle system, things like what allowed double attacks, the weight stat of equipment, and the body statistic to name a few. I’m not sure if this information was contained in a manual that I was missing or not, but the game didn’t make any mention of these variables to consider. Another thing that was unmentioned was the recruiting of new characters by talking with them with one of your own (usually Ike, but others required specific characters), I didn’t realize this until I had reached near the halfway point of the game. Being a completionist, I ended up restarting my game with all the knowledge I had acquired and looked up a FAQ to recruit all the possible characters.

The difficulty was lower than I had anticipated, considering all the talk I’ve heard about permadeath. I never encountered a situation where I felt particularly threatened aside from the Black Knight and his OHKO in a certain earlier chapter, and the fact that he managed to proc Luna with every single strike in the duel. I’ve read that this installment is one of the easiest Fire Emblems in the series, and that may be the reason (I played on the Normal difficulty), but I found the difficulty curve remained rather low and was almost non-existent towards the end.

I really enjoyed collecting all the different recruits and choosing which ones to develop and add to my standing army. There was a wide variety of characters to choose from, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The problem was that the game leaned heavily towards mounted units with their superior speed and no weaknesses, and that laguz units were hampered by being effective 50% of the time and useless for other half, sometimes less if you had to wait for your unit to transform. Units joining in the latter half also made it difficult to justify adding them to my active roster, as they either came with subpar stats with few remaining battles to train them, or it was just difficult to choose them over another unit I had spent time with and established a connection with. My final party ended up being (aside from Ike): Titania, Oscar, Kieran, Astrid, Makalov, Mist, Marcia, Jill, Tanith, Elincia (that’s 10 mounted units!), Ilyana, and Nephenee (probably my favourite design out of them all. I just love spear users, and her armour and colours were fantastic).

There definitely was an imbalance between many units in this game. Bows in particular I found underpowered due to a lack of counterattack at melee range, and so I dropped them in favour of axes on my sole archer, Astrid. The inability to purchase the long-range magic was a bit of a bummer, too, since Ilyana and Soren had to spend so much time moving to get in range. I know some people might argue that you can rescue them with other units, but often it was just more advantageous to attack with the mounted unit than ferry them across the board.

Other things that I weren’t so crazy about included the random stat improvements, I had numerous level ups with no statistical gain which is ridiculous. I feel that every level up should warrant some sort of minimum statistical gain, no matter how minor, progress is progress after all. I ended up offsetting this problem by some minor save scumming when I was in base camp and someone was nearing a level up. I wasn’t keen on doing this, but I read about the Black Knight duel and that it was literally impossible if you hadn’t reached a certain stat level with Ike before that point. I was also not a fan of the illustrations of the characters. There was something about the quality of it that made it look more like a low budget fan or indie game. It lacked the detail and character of a AAA game, but also was missing the charm from sprite-based graphics. I know that the art has improved significantly since, but many of the illustrations in this installment left much to be desired.

All in all, despite my various gripes I have with the game I enjoyed my time with it, and I can see why the Fire Emblem series has been so popular. I do plan on continuing through the series, with Radiant Dawn being the next installment I play (to complete the Tellius arc), before moving onto the 3DS games and then the most recent one on the Switch.