Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (2008)

Unfortunately, I’m bailing in this game.

I’ve loved every game I’ve played in this series, and this is the first one that didn’t capture me. It’s where it all started (in remade form), and maybe they just hadn’t nailed the formula yet, but neither the story nor the maps were droning anything for me.

I’ve seen online that chapter 8 is notoriously difficult, and indeed that’s where I dropped off. For whatever reason, I put it down one day and didn’t pick it up for a long time, then I played it again, and I made one mistake near the end of the chapter that made me lose an important character, and frankly I just have no desire to replay the chapter.

So I’m putting it down for good. For now, at least.

After playing the game for 30+ hours on the last map with Medeus, I realized that this was the end. I had a 24x level before that where I was given a dragon lady with falchion at the end. But the overall condition of the team was already too weak to kill Medeus. It is worth noting that before this game, this franchise was not played and played without reboots at the basic difficulty level. But I played carefully (as best I could).

I advise you to read the passing guides before starting this game and try not to lose units (although there are situations in the game in which it will not be possible to pass without losses).

The gameplay itself is quite interesting and addictive. The plot is quite banal, but you empathize with the characters. Especially when you lose them.

P.S. The game mechanics of the walls, through which archers can shoot and magicians can attack, are very strange.

Definitely the one I liked the least so far. I understand this is a remake from the first game, so I wasn’t expecting much from the story – but the truth the weakness of this game lies in its presentation rather than its age.

Coming from Path of Radiance this was a huge step down for me. The story was ok and the music too – but it really needed some love in the graphic department. The sprites were soulless, which is funny because the GBA with much less power was able to make it work so much better.

I appreciated the developer team decided to put it on speed with the gameplay features those newer entries had, but the truth is not even that saved most of the chapters from being completely uninspiring. I really hated that reinforcements would continue to appear just because, the excess of ballista weapons in some stages, plus the recruitment needs for some characters were unclear or non-intuitive.

I also noticed if you try to skip the enemies’ turn it gets completely skipped so it won’t stop to let you know someone from your party died. I lost a party member and realized stages later because of this.

I would only recommend it for Fire Emblem fans who really want to see where it all started. Otherwise go try something else.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is a decent remake of the first game in the series. In terms of mechanics, the original was brought to the standard one would expect from the GBA Fire Emblems. The original's difficulty was tamed through difficulty options. "Hard" is probably closest to the original, whereas "Normal" adds several prologue chapters. Those contain tutorials and allow you to level your units before chapter one. The game was further made more approachable by inserting several paralogues in-between regular chapters in case too many of your units die. These allow you to meet and recruit new characters. There are some story additions to what was there originally. But it's not much, considering how thin the narrative was in the NES original.

The problem with this game lies in shying away from making further broad changes. So the not-so-great things are almost exclusively carry-overs from the original.
The maps were left entirely untouched. This is a small problem since their design in the original was, at worst decent. But what I absolutely cannot stand are the repetitive enemy spawn waves. Enemies will repeatedly, though not infinitely, spawn in the same locations. You will either have to deal with the enemies until the spawn wave subsides or block the spawn positions. There isn't much strategic fun in that. This also goes for ballistas, especially the movable ones. As long as they are up, your flies are almost useless. And your best way of handling them is to either throw your strong units into their range and hope for the best or deploy a counter-ballista. My nemesis is ballistas spawning in enemy waves. And finally, I hate the healing spell Fortify. Healing all allied units would be fine if deployed sparingly, but on every map in the second half of the game, there is at least one (!) enemy healer with this spell.

12/10/22

Shadow Dragon is my 6th Fire Emblem game, and while easily the worst of those I've played, I still enjoyed it a bunch. It had a similarly addicting gameplay loop at the other FE titles I've played, but it was a markedly worse experience overall. The newer art style is kinda fuzzy and drab compared to the rich, colorful spritework of the GBA games. There's really no comparison -- Shadow Dragon looks pretty bad. Soundwise everything was OK; nothing stood out much but the satisfying squishy death sound from previous titles remained. The story was an absolute disappointment. It started off comprehensible but uninteresting and very rapidly went into "I'm tuning out the story for 80% of the game" territory until I finally just started skipping cutscenes in the last few chapters. The gameplay was also weaker than previous titles. It's mostly the same formula, except you recruit what feels like 3x as many units, many of whom are redundant or useless. It just feels wasteful, although it's always fun getting new comrades. The maps are way too huge and take forever to navigate. There's also a lot of missable stuff with esoteric requirements that I don't even want to get into. But the story -- Marth is the main character so as a Smash Bros. fan I had high hopes for him, however, he has no charisma or personality at all. The story is as bland and cookie cutter as it can get with truly no interesting turns or lively characters to spice things up (I'm jumping around a lot). One thing I hated was how you can change classes to whatever you want. You can make an archer a mage and a swordsman a pegasus knight. It seemed to defeat the purpose of recruiting characters with consideration to their class since you can make whatever you wanted, but I just skipped this feature. Forging weapons also made the game too easy. Speaking of which, you can break the game using the warp item to send Marth to the boss unit and instantly win maps. It's just a mess. The gameplay is still perfectly serviceable if not compared to the other FE titles and I was addicted to the middle chunk of the game as I had fun strategizing in map after map. I did enjoy how this game seemed to encourage you to sacrifice your units because there were always an abundance of others. In other FE titles I grow a bit attached and am ready to reset, but in this game I was basically like "ah fuck it, Wendell died but I still have Merrick, it'll be fine." I'm not really selling this game well, but it was a good experience. I would save this game for much later in one's Fire Emblem journey though; there are much better games.

my personal review / opinion

this game was alright, not that good or that bad, however it was worth it to me because i was interested in learning about Marth's origin story after having used him in Smash bros over the years, the characters were mostly lifeless, battle animations had the characters looking like Gumby, and the story was easily forgettable, to me its a 3 out of 5, not worth a replay.

In most respects this is a "classic" Fire Emblem game. If you have played any other entry in the series you will find this one to be comfortably familiar (which is no surprise since this is a remake of the very first Fire Emblem game). Even if you are new to the series this is not a bad place to start. The maps are well balanced and approachable without being too long, and the game has some challenge to it without being too aggressive or overwhelming.

The art style is a little bland, with the character portraits blending together to some degree. And the pre-rendered 3D battle animations made all the characters look like floppy rubber dolls. I had a better time once I turned those battle animations off.

Otherwise I have no complaints. This game has aged pretty well (thanks to this remake) and is still worth the 20 hours it will take to get through it. That's especially true if you enjoy the series in particular or if you enjoy tactical games in general. It may not be flashy (like some of the later games in the series) but the stage designs are solid, the mechanics approachable, and the game-play balanced.

(PS - Warp Wands are overpowered. I beat the final stage in my first turn because of them.)