Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones

"Sacred Stones huh."

Fire Emblem Sacred Stones is the 8th edition (2nd in the global editions) of the Fire Emblem series. If you aren't familiar with Fire Emblem, I'll enlighten you a little on the subject: it's a strategy RPG. The player moves the characters around on a grid in an attempt to accomplish a goal. Usually, that goal requires the player to defeat enemy units in order to advance in the game. Now that you at least know a little about a strategy RPG, I'll start with the review about Fire Emblem Sacred Stones.

Graphics 4/10

To be quite blunt, there isn't anything particularly jaw-dropping except for the cutscenes. The characters on the map screen are small and tiny and very pixelish. Characters of the same class look exactly the same, no matter how different their character portrait looks. A cavalier looks exactly like all the other cavaliers (your units as well as the enemies) except with different palette colors. This wouldn't bother me so much if the characters weren't so individualized. To clarify that last statement: each unit that you have has their own character portrait. These character portraits look quite nice (provided you look at their status and not the portrait on the battle map). The only units that really have independent animations are the trainee classes, the lords and a few bosses. Another problem was the fact that the characters had sprites that didn't even match their portrait! For example Forde (a cavalier, no I'm not picking on them, they just make a good example) has long hair. Yet, in battle, his hair suddenly becomes short. Another example would be Ameila, a trainee that is a potential cavalier, has short hair, yet in battle, she has long hair. With graphics that are already not visually impressive, it's sort of bad to have sprites that don't match the characters, especially when they are so individualized. What saves these graphics are the cutscenes. These graphics show the beautifully draw characters. While the characters don't do much besides talk to one another, they still look good. I mean, they move their mouths, and they blink as well. What I was most impressed with was the fact that the characters had the ability to blink while they talked. Something many animators don't seem to pay attention to. The backgrounds are beautifully drawn as well.

Sound/Music 8/10

The sound and music in Fire Emblem Sacred Stones is superb. The sound is great. When units move, they make noises similar to however they move. A unit that walks have the sound of quick footsteps, a mounted unit has the noise of a galloping horse, flying units have a noise that resembles flying, and monsters have well... Strange noises that seem befitting to a monster walking. In battle, the noises aren't to shabby either. Attacks have slightly different sounds for whatever weapon attacks (not all of them, but lances, sound different from swords etc...). Even if I don't exactly agree with the respective sounds, the fact that they have different noises is good enough for a GBA game. Also in battle, the sounds are excellent for battle. When a character attacks in the sand, their feet sound slushy and when a horse steps in a fort, you hear the classic gallop from the horse. For a GBA, I was impressed with the variety of sounds emitted from this little game. The music is well composed also. However, despite the fact that music is well composed, there didn't seem to be enough songs for the game. No matter how good the songs (or should I say jingles) you'll grow tired of hearing Ephraim's "Determination", Eirika's "Rise Above", and the first few chapter's "Distant Roads.

Story: 4/10

The story is not really epic or amazing. It's good enough to be a story for a game, but not engrossing enough to have you crawling back to the game simply for the story. The story starts out amazing because it places you right in the middle of the action from the start. You start off as the Princess of Renais and the kingdom is under attack. Before you can do anything, your father, the king of Renais, has one of his generals, Seth, carry you away to safety. Before you, Eirika, and Seth can successfully escape, another general, Valter (from the attacking country) manages to intervene with those plans. He attacks Seth and inflicts serious damage on Seth. Seth, realizing he can't win with Eirika in his hands (not literally) he attempts to escape. He manages to get away from Valter, and gives Eirika a rapier to defend herself... Unfortunately, these are the most exciting events you'll see in the entire game. The story is dull, and anti-awe inspiring. The story doesn't have any glaring plot holes, but it still doesn't mean that the story is good. The villain is just boring and dull. He's also a bit of a whiner (depending on which mode you play). The supports (which would basically be the equivalent to character development) are also a bit strange. Some of them range from a person sleeping, to a person telling a story to a fellow knight. However, the problems I have with the supports are the fact that they really don't develop some of the characters. Some characters simply talk about the battles at hand (yes I understand they are on a battle field, but if two people are going to follow one another around, I'd assume they would have something a trifle more interesting to talk about). Overall, the story is slightly below average.

Gameplay: 3/10

Ouch. Fire Emblem Sacred Stones got hit in the part of that matters the most: gameplay. What's wrong with it? Well... I think it would be faster to say what's right with it, but okay. Here's what's wrong with Sacred Stones. First off, they implemented a new promotion system. This promotion system gives you a choice of what class you want your unit to become. Before you get excited about this system, no you can't do much with it. Characters are pretty much forced to become certain classes. Either that or the other class is render obsolete in comparison to another class. Garcia, a fighter with high strength and low speed, can either become a Hero or a Warrior (traditionally fighters became warriors from the previous GBA counterparts). Now here's the problem, if I make Garcia become a hero, a class that has higher skill and speed than anything else, then I render Garcia's awesome strength growth, a bit useless because Heroes have a max strength of 25, while Garcia's growths don't even complement the Hero's 25 strength (he'd go WAY past that) and he doesn't even come close to maxing skill or speed of the heroes. The 2nd reason it's not very good is because there aren't enough characters to take advantage of the branching. Innes is a promoted sniper, and you only have on archer, meaning that Neimi would have to be the Ranger (in terms of having all of the various classes) and since Neimi is a Ranger, Gerik would have to be a Hero, since he's a Hero, Garcia... You get the point. It doesn't enhance the game at all, even if a person chooses a different class, it doesn't make a huge difference. Not that it matters anyways, because the enemies are so pathetically weak. Which is the second problem with Sacred Stones. The enemies have horrid stats. One of your units could be about 5 levels weaker than an enemy and still take that enemy down without any problems. The characters stats are too high, the enemies' stats are too low, and there aren't enough enemies to attack you either. Reinforcements often come at very convenient times... So convenient in fact, they you might actually be standing on top of where they come out (which prohibits them from coming out by the way). So now you have weak enemies that barely faze you, poor placement of reinforcements (that come out at convenient times and in small amounts), and overpowered enemies, so what else could be wrong? Two things actually. The first is the Tower of Valni. This little thing allows you to raise your characters outside of the story battles. Which can pose to problems: the 1rst problem is that it allows you to battle and raise your characters to insanely high levels making your characters even more powerful, the 2nd problem is the fact that while raising characters, in later chapters, you can actually make money in the Tower by opening chest and if you have the Rouge class, you can open chest for free, the third problem is, if you are particularly dim-witted, you could actually spend so much time in the tower, that you could break all of your weapons. This wouldn't be so bad if you actually had MONEY to buy the next stock of weapons (which is pretty funny that that could happen). Even that isn't all of the problems that plague Fire Emblem Sacred Stones. The last problem is the poor AI. Enemies are incredibly stupid. They simply charge at the unit that will receive the most damage in the shortest amount of time. The enemy doesn't even bother to comply by the weapon triangle! It just bum rushes you! Not to brilliant because they end up sacrificing themselves to inflict like 1 damage which is easily remedied by healers. It would be smarter to wait a while or move in confusing formations to confuse the player, but that is not the case, they are just so... suicidal. It's really annoying. Overall this battle engine is good, but the engine is maimed by problems that were probably overlooked in the development.

This game is probably a good game for a person that has never heard of a tactical RPG. However, if you consider yourself an avid strategy player, or an avid RPG player at least, you might find this game insulting. Fans of the Fire Emblem series might be disappointed with this game, but it's decent enough to satisfy them. It's just marred by the laughable difficulty.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/06/06