Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

"The Most Laughably Mediocre Game in the Series."

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, the remake of the original Fire Emblem game in Japan on the Famicom, is the latest installment in the indie-esque series that worked it's way to the States in 2003 through Fire Emblem for the Game Boy Advance. The object is simple in this Strategy RPG: build an army from nothing and march forward murdering everything in your path while enjoying a usually well thought out storyline and good music. Should you lose a battle and one of your soldiers bites the dust, they're dead for good. I didn't enjoy this Fire Emblem as much as I could have, but maybe that's just me.

But let's start with the basics; Shadow Dragon is the first Fire Emblem game to hit the Nintendo DS. I was curious to see how this would work with the general feel of Fire Emblem games. It felt very awkward: the touch screen on the bottom is used to show the map for unit movement, and the top can be used to show either more detailed unit information or a map that shows how many there are of the enemy compared to how many there are of you, which is toggled with the shoulder buttons. You can use the standard unit movement controls (select a unit and move them with the Dpad) or you can use the stylus, touch a unit, and move using the stylus. I found myself using the more traditional method, and the whole thing seemed awkward. If they want to make a better game next time around for the DS, they should consider revamping this.

The story is pretty standard as well. You play as Marth, an extremely feminine prince of a land called Altea. His kingdom is invaded, his parents are killed, his sister is kidnapped, and he's forced out. He plans to regroup with a small amount of units and take back his homeland in the most roundabout way possible. This is pretty much the same Fire Emblem fare as the last 10 games, but at least the other games made you care about some characters. No one stands out, all plot developments sneak into the game like a 400-pound gorilla, and no one really develops a personality. When you recruit someone who actually might have some semblance of a static personality, you never talk to them again and they become another face in the crowd.

The game is fairly short (my playthrough was about 19-20 hours long), but it can be longer if you take on the several Gaiden chapters, which are little sub-chapters that can be accepted if you fulfill some circumstances along the way. However, most of them require you to send your units into the heat of battle and hope they get killed. To even get the option of Gaiden chapters, you have to kill off several characters. The game throws characters at you like candy at a St. Patrick's Day parade, so it's doable if you want to get rid of the characters that you never use, but I don't look favorably on a game that requires me to kill off 5 of my comrades just so I can get one slightly better one.

The game does get credit for the class system, however. Every character you recruit for your army has a class, ranging from the ordinary swordsman to the dragon-mounted Dracoknight. If you don't like the class you've been given, you can turn them into another class (with a few exceptions.) depending on the character and their gender. Some characters will actually turn out better with this system, though. But with the way the game is designed, you only need about 5-6 units tops for most chapters. Let me give you an example.

In one chapter, I had a Ballistician (capable of using a ballistae without stealing one from the enemy) positioned behind some mountains. I didn't even have to use the rest of my army: just a forged ballista. The forge in this game allows you to take a weapon and change the characteristics of it. You can make a strong weapon that doesn't hit very much, increase the accuracy of it, pump up it's power a little bit, give it some critical hit chance (all of that is what I did.), and go to town. All this is fairly expensive, but it makes up for it with unmaking the rest of the game. I didn't even have to do anything else: I took out the boss and everything within a 10 mile radius of him, moved in Marth, conquered the castle and ended the chapter.

Graphics and sound are very lackluster. At first glance, everyone looks different, graphics look better, and attack animations are good. Once you actually begin to play the game, it sings a different tune. Everyone will eventually start to run together in your head because a lot of characters have the same face model with different features, graphics begin to look average, and animations are every bit as good as the GBA animations. The sound is average with remade music and sound effects you'd expect in all the other FE games.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon could have been so much more than what it is. The game is just so mediocre that it tries to run with the big dogs of the DS, trips all over itself and crashes into a wall, where it just throws in the towel. If it had better graphics and sound and a better control method that was innovative and didn't feel like you were piloting a boat loaded with bricks and barbells, it may have been more likeable. If it had fleshed out it's characters without shoehorning in a predictable plotline and laughable dialogue, then I would have enjoyed it more. But hopefully Nintendo and Intelligent Systems will take this in stride and release an even better FE game next time.

Maybe. Maybe.

Score: 4/10.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 04/07/09

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