Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

"I expected disappointment. In that regard, I was not disappointed."

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is the latest installment in the Fire Emblem franchise. Previously featuring excellent games like the first Fire Emblem for the GBA, and the sequels Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, this game ends the tradition by doing various things not unlike the sensation of dropping acid on your brain. I will in this review point out why this game is so awful, you should never even touch it.

Story: 1/10
The story is an atrocious abomination of the video game franchise. It is beyond my understanding why anyone would make a story this horrible in the year 2008. The story starts off with Marth's kingdom being attacked, finding out that it's the dark dragon Medeus, and Marth heads off to beat him. That's it, period. I don't think I've encountered a story this bad since... Oh, I don't know, some pretty old game like Halo. The story is completely linear, lacks any twists what so ever and you can figure it all out by Prolouge-2. A lot of people say that story is far from necessary. I definitely agree with that, but when they decide to add a story and it gets THIS horrible, it's painful enough to detract from the enjoyability of the game.

Characters: 1/10
You thought the story was bad? Characters are pretty much the same, except worse! While the story might keep someone with low standards interested due to the minor, but not nonexistent, character interaction, the characters fail to do even that. Beyond the moment you recruit a character, in 96 percent of the cases, that character is never mentioned in a conversation ever again! Remember in the previous Fire Emblem, where a recruitable character would partake in discussions, or when there were, god forbid, support conversations? That's no more; enter the era of bricks with faces. The lack of notable characters is another serious flaw in the game, and it detracts from the theoretical enjoyability of the gameplay as well.

Music: 5/10
Not too awful. Most are classic songs from Fire Emblem (GBA) remixed, but the DS' speakers just aren't too good, and the MIDI blips and blops get annoying after a while. Not too much to say here, but if you enjoyed the music of previous games, you'll find this passable.

Graphics: 3/10
I have no idea what they were thinking when they decided to discard the classic hand drawn portraits of the previous Fire Emblems. In this game, mugshots look like prerenders of Cel-shaded 3D models, which do not match the backgrounds AT ALL. Most characters just stare into some faraway star, which also adds a stale feeling to the conversations (As if you were reading them in the first place). Battle sprites are even worse - These are prerenders of 3D models as well, but characters move in ridiculously stale fashions, rather than the smooth movement of previous installments. They've also found some weird middle ground in-between the battle animations of Fire Emblem and Path of Radiance - Characters have two animations, but still walk back to their spot after attacking. Battles just feel torturing to look at. I always skip them (A nice feature, by the way, you can now skip battles by pressing the screen. A minor plus.)

Gameplay: 4/10
The gameplay is the better part of the game. Note that "better" is used in a relative sense - I do in no way want to insinuate that the gameplay is good. The basic structure is the same as the previous installments. You deploy a number of your characters, move them across a grid, close to an enemy, and attack it. The enemy counters, you move all your allies and repeat this, then it's the enemy phase, enemies do this as well, etc. A feature that sets Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon apart from some turn-based strategy games is that once a character is gone, it's gone, and you just cannot get it back. This was one of the most appreciated features of Fire Emblem; sadly, they managed to add a feature that screwed that up as well...

Fire Emblem (GBA) featured so-called "gaiden" (side-story in Japanese) chapters, which are chapters irrelevant to the story (Just like every other chapter in the game) that are accessed by fulfilling special requirements. In Shadow Dragon, these requirements are absurd. You have to kill off characters to access them. That's right, you have to commit the one unforgivable crime of Fire Emblem - Killing characters. Every time I think about this, I cringe. You have to kill off about twenty-odd characters to keep the count to access the secret chapters. These chapters offer extra experience and rare stuff, so it's a lose-lose situation. Sure, you won't be USING whoever you kill off, but it's sure as hell annoying to have to do it.

Finally, Shadow Dragon took a feature invented by Final Fantasy - Swapping classes. Everyone at Intelligent Systems must have not have been thinking straight that day, because it's the most horrible implementation in the series to date. Completely ignoring the aspects of a character, you can swap them into almost anything you want at will in the base. This changes their stat increments, weapons equippable, and things like that. Way to utterly destroy the very essence of Fire Emblem, Intelligent Systems! You can now completely neglect a character's back-story, abilities and personality, and just turn that valiant knight into a petty pirate, or that evil sorcerer into a hero. I choose to never use this system, but this also leaves me with the shortest stick, since I cannot make the most out of my characters, and are stuck with the potentially non-optimal setups that Intelligent Systems decided to give them.

Despite all these flaws, the gameplay is still sort of possible to play (Unlike the horrible story, which is unenjoyable) but the other parts of the game really drain it. Now to the final parts...

Challenge: 5/10
Playing on normal will yield almost no challenge at all, so we knowledgeable veteran players turn to the hard modes. The thing is... These hard modes are ridiculous. There's H-1 to H-5, H-5 makes random grunt enemies stronger than your champions. Even H-2 is nearly impossible for a veteran like me who beat Path of Radiance's hard mode with ease. Why couldn't they include a medium option?

Still, if you're looking for raw, not so well thought out challenge, Shadow Dragon sure delivers.

Replayability: 4/10
There are some exclusive characters and such, and plenty of difficulty modes, but the sheer horridness of the game makes imagining a second playthrough very hard. I have a hard time imagining why anyone would want to replay this game.

Rent or Buy: Rent or don't.
As bad as this game is, some people apparently enjoy it, so I suppose you should rent it to see if you're part of that very small amount of people.

Final score: 2/10.
In the end, it's not completely unplayable, but the serious flaws that are the story, characters and graphics detract from the enjoyability of the game, leaving us with a rushed mess to try and find ourselves at home with. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/12/09

Game Release: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (US, 02/16/09)