Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

"An incredible game with a brilliant blend of...well, just about everything."

When the game Super Smash Bros. Melee came out, I was one of the many people whose interest in this "Fire Emblem" series was spiked by the characters Marth and Roy featured in the game. A long time later, I finally bought Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. In case you don't already know (I'm betting you do, of course), Ike, the hero of this game, is in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which is why I picked it to be my first Fire Emblem game. If you want to know more about him, this is your game. This is also the prequel to Radiant Dawn, so if you have Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Wii but not Path of Radiance, I'd suggest picking this game up so you know what's going on and aren't totally lost in the plot. For those of you new to Fire Emblem, the series is all about strategy. It's kind of like a game of chess--a really, really, really advanced game of chess. If you want to know more, check out the Gameplay category down below.

PLOT: 10/10. Judging from the couple of Fire Emblem games I have and what I've heard of the ones I don't, an outstandingly brilliant plot is typical among the games in the series. PoR does not disappoint in this area. Ike is the son of a leader of a mercenary company and has quite some expectations to live up to. He's finally accepted into the company soon after you start the game. Not long after, the neighboring kingdom of Daein suddenly invades Crimea, where our heroes reside, and takes it swiftly. On a scouting mission near the Crimean capital city, Ike and the crew stumble upon Crimea's princess, Elincia, and Ike's life turns upside down. He becomes thoroughly involved in the war in ways he never expected. While at first that sounds pretty straightforward, that's not counting the plot twists, betrayals, interesting histories behind some of the characters, friendships, and terrible truths Ike discovers. Even when you start playing the game, you feel like it's just going to be another game where you take your small band of merry men through the wilderness and defeat the great evil baddie at the end with little real relation with other people. Nope. Soon, you've got so much on your plate and so many new important people that you're meeting it becomes impossible to have the quiet life you might have imagined.

Great character development is also typical in Fire Emblem games. Your friends and allies aren't just stone-faced people with no personality. Everybody's got their own personality which they can call theirs. Ike is brave, determined, and often a little blunt but gentle in his own Ike way and usually ignorant about customs and traditions. Boyd is an adventurous axe-wielder who likes to tease people and whose immense pride forbids him from admitting he does anything wrong. Soren is an always-serious, logic-minded, extremely blunt, tell-it-like-it-is mage (and is also probably everybody's favorite character). And then we have Shinon, the archer, who is sassy and rude and hates Ike's guts especially, always treating him in a condescending manner. I could go on, but this review would be novel length. You will always have a handful of favorite and least favorite characters based on personality.

The dialogue is very well written, so no cheesiness. I get tired of games with terrible lines and cliches. Don't worry about that here.

GRAPHICS: 8/10. The story parts of the game consist mostly of drawn images of characters moving their mouths to words that appear on the screen. I was slightly disappointed when I first saw this, but I grew to really enjoy the drawings, probably more than I'd enjoy actual 3D animation. The images change sometimes to look angrier or sadder. They're not tweaked much, but the difference is just subtle enough to give you the right impression. You can also unlock artwork of a lot of the characters to be viewed at the game's main menu.

There are three parts, really, to the graphics. The first part, as I explained, is drawn images pasted onto a background. The second is everything in 3D. In parts of the story that have to be told in 3D, the drawn images will appear while the 3D characters move about behind them. Otherwise, it's used for actual gameplay on the stages. The third part is the six movies you can see (one which is about five seconds long). I'll explain the movies in a second. The 3D is alright. I wouldn't call it bad, but neither is it outstanding. I suppose this is partly due to the animation. Characters don't run diagonally because everything, including "maps" that you will never play on, is a grid. Thus, they go left, down, left, down, left, down, not diagonal. This gives you a really awkward feeling when you first see it. Also, battle animations are far from flashy. It consists of one character running up to another, pausing briefly, and attacking. The enemy counterattacks in similar fashion. Rather boring, so you'd probably do well to turn off battle animations as they're really a waste of time. And then there are spots where movies would do so much better, like fight scenes. Fight scenes consist of two characters taking swings at each other once every four seconds or so. Do you expect this to be believable? Or when a character may run in the way of an attacker to protect someone. The two people meet up in one spot, pause for a few seconds, and then the attacker proceeds to slowly give the defender a small hit. All that aside, the actual graphics are pretty good, especially things like castles, rivers, and houses (although we all know that castles and houses are much bigger than that).

The movies are pretty good. It's full motion video, so it's basically like Pixar dumbed down. The movements are fluid and realistic and colors are bright and vivid. I also like how they don't just take a "one size fits all" approach and give each character certain faces and gestures at certain times. Everything has its own animation--Ike panting after a long run, Mist (his little sister) picking flowers, capes billowing in the wind...it's all covered. I think there are really only two problems with the movies; one, their mouths don't quite move to their words, and two, there aren't enough of them. When characters speak, their mouths move slowly and randomly (the only one-size-fits-all problem in the movies). This makes it a little hard to believe. And there are only six movies--five, if you don't include the five-second one where you stare at one object until the screen fades away. They probably should have seized the opportunity to put movies in at certain points, because they would have really made the game. Ike dashing out of a collapsing building, a character transforming into a dragon, and many other scenes would have been absolutely awesome to watch with movies, but instead we have the boring animation with characters who can't move diagonally and very slow fight scenes. The movies are only about a minute and a half at best, so they're not that long, either. I think the voice acting was decent. You only get to hear the voices of seven people (two of whom only sing in a completely foreign language), which is a shame because we all wonder what our favorite characters sound like. But all in all, I think the voice actors were pretty good. Except for Mist. She wasn't so good.

SOUND AND MUSIC: 10/10. When first playing through PoR, I didn't think a whole lot about the music. Of course, that was probably because I was engrossed in either the game or the plot at the moment. But once I unlocked the Sound Test, I realized what a fool I'd been for not paying attention sooner. While the music for the maps you play on is rather boring and the fight music for the first seventeen chapters of the game (excluding the prologue) borders on annoying, everything else is great. The music is actually orchestrated, so no more Mr. Keyboard. When you need to rally the troops and man up for something, the music turns triumphant, and you actually feel your adrenaline rising. Likewise, when something sad happens, the music turns genuinely sad. Boss music tells you that this guy means business, and when things become tense, the music really makes you feel the tension the heroes are feeling. To sum it up, the music is excellent.

The sound effects are few and far between and consist of little more than beeps and ticks. You have sounds like footsteps and attacks, but almost everything else is just moving your cursor around, words appearing in a message box, or making decisions.

GAMEPLAY: 10/10. For those of you new to Fire Emblem, let me explain how it works. You have to move all of your units across a grid, attacking, using items, visiting houses to gain items, and performing other actions along the way. As I said earlier, it's like a very advanced game of chess. Once you've either moved all your pieces or decided to end your turn early, the enemy moves (allied units that you can't control directly may move before or after the enemies). And it repeats itself. You must always accomplish a goal, whether its defeating a boss, having Ike seize a square, defending a certain square for a certain length of time, defeating all enemies, and other methods of victory. When your units attack, they gain experience, and when they gain 100 experience points, they level up, and thus they grow stronger. As you will get around 30 or more units over the course of the game (you're limited to only using about 14 tops on the maps, though), you'll have to choose who you want to grow stronger and who you won't use, as you can make them sit out fights.

One thing unique to Fire Emblem is that once one of your units is defeated, they're gone for good. No extra life, no second chance. Characters that are important to the story don't actually die, but you can't use them from then on. I like this, as it creates an extra challenge for you. Unfortunately, there's no reward for getting through the entire game without losing a unit, but it's hard to let a character go anyway. Not only can they be useful to you, but there's an emotional attachment as well. So if Oscar dies, there's no more Oscar.

You also have to take into consideration your unit's stats, what weapon they're carrying, their weight, their movement ranges, their advantages, their weaknesses, what terrain they're on, and all sorts of things. We'd be here all day if I tried to explain them all. Like I said, it's like an advanced game of chess. Stats are separated into HP (health), attack, defense, magic, resistance, skill, speed, and luck. Certain classes of units have different stat advantages and disadvantages. Fighters have high HP and attack but low defense. Mages have high magic and resistance but low attack and defense. Weapons have differing amounts of power, hit rates (how often they'll actually manage to hit the enemy, in other words), critical hit rates (critical hits do three times the damage and are very rare, as they only happen by chance), weight, and other factors. A unit's weight judges who they can shove a square away and who they can rescue, rescue meaning carry in order to protect them. Movement range is how many squares they can move on a turn. An example of advantages and weaknesses would be comparing stats, or by knowing that dragons and wyverns are weak to Thunder Magic. Terrain can slow your movement, heal you, or even stick you in a hole in the ground in one particular stage. There are many things you have to take in.

When you first start playing Fire Emblem, you'll feel like every move you make is a wrong move and that now poor Rhys will die, but this paranoia wears off and lets you make smarter, more logical strategies after awhile. You should always have a strategy planned out for every stage that keeps your units relatively safe, and ALWAYS plan for the unexpected, because it likes to rear its ugly head now and then.

For those used to Fire Emblem, they now have a forging system where you can make your own weapons for a price and give them customized stats. You can also use Game Boy Advance-GameCube Link Cables to transfer data from GBA Fire Emblems into PoR, giving you extra drawings or trial maps (difficult levels you can do after beating the game).

REPLAY VALUE: 9/10. By beating the game multiple times, you can unlock more characters (usually bad guys) for use in Trial Maps. You can also get more Trial Maps by beating the game on various difficulty levels. Support conversations let you in on a little background and history of the characters, and you should strive to learn all you can. Write it down if you need to (if you have a Wii and Radiant Dawn, you can transfer data from PoR to RD so you can keep a library of your support conversations). Each character can only have five conversations, and they can't talk with every character. Support also gives the characters some stat boosts if they're nearby. By playing the game again, you can also come up with better strategies, find characters or items that you failed to obtain, and pick up more of the story so you understand it better.

CONTROL EASE: 10/10. It's a strategy game where you sit back, look at the battlefield, take your time, and move when you feel like it. What do you expect? You don't need to rush or press anything quickly, so it's rather hard to screw up. The worst you could expect is to accidentally double tap the A button and send one of your units into a fight you never completely planned out. (Which is why you soon learn to ADAPT because unexpected things happen quite often.) I have done this a few times myself and nearly given myself a heart attack when I just sent Soren on a guy twice his size with a Killer Axe.

GAME LENGTH: 10/10. Looking for a long game? Look no further. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance should last you at least 30 hours. The typical length is 30-45 hours, I'd say. The game is divided into chapters, with one stage per chapter (with the exception of one chapter which is further divided into four miniature stages, and by the end of it your units are weary and beaten, your weapons are almost broken from so much fighting, and you've used lots of healing items). There are 30 chapters if you include the Prologue and exclude the Epilogue, which has no fighting. Early chapters may take you about twenty minutes to complete while the later ones will literally last you a couple of hours.

TOTAL SCORE: 67/70. Three points from perfection. One of the highest scores I've ever given a game.

FLAWS: Once you've beaten the game, the only way you can play with the characters you have is by using the Trial Maps. You can't go back and redo any of the stages. And the only way you can unlock a certain Trial Map is by using the GBA-GC Link Cables with a Japanese Fire Emblem game. I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have a Japanese FE, so it's impossible for me to get it with using an Action Replay or something similar. There aren't enough movies, and the movies aren't quite long enough. Battle animation and general "cutscene" animation isn't so great. And finally, the only ways you can view support conversations you've gotten are by transferring them to Radiant Dawn, looking them up online, or by writing them down yourself when you see them.

CONCLUSION: Rent or buy? If you're new to the Fire Emblem series and you're not sure about it, I'd say rent it just to see what it's like. If all you're looking for is a brief thrill, just buy the darn thing. It's practically impossible to beat it in a week without spending way too much time in front of that TV screen, and you can forget about playing it through again to unlock other things. Not to mention the game's too engrossing to let go. I've been warned by some reviewers that you probably shouldn't start your first step into the Fire Emblem series with this game, but I say why not? It sure worked for me. In my opinion, Path of Radiance is one of my favorite games, if not the most favorite. In fact, from what I've seen of reviewers who don't like the game much, they're usually comparing it to other Fire Emblem games, not saying the game itself is bad. And if such is the case, I figure you should like this.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/09

Game Release: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (US, 10/17/05)