Fire Emblem: Shin Monshou no Nazo - Hikari to Kage no Eiyuu (2010)

After the failure of my company at the end of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, this part was played more carefully with permanent death. I was able to get through! There are more features in the game relative to the previous part - conversations with characters are cool. You'll learn more about them and if you lose them, you'll regret it more. The gameplay of the battles is no different. Overall, this game is an improved Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon.

P.S. Sirius + Xane is my favorite combo :) Played with eng patch.

We meet again, my old friend Fire Emblem.

The truth is I was going to skip this game as I have decided to play US releases only – but I realized this was a continuation to Shadow Dragon, so it felt very weird just to skip it for no reason.

Coming from the hot mess that Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon was, I went in with 0 expectations.

I think the bad stuff in the game is pretty noticeable. It does have its fare share of new visual content and updates, but in general terms in vastly reuses most of the assets from its predecessor. Sprites, maps, characters, music!

But then it caught me in other things that the first game didn’t do. Pretty much the first game had very poor dialogue, and in several occasions, I found myself thinking what the heck was happening. But A New Mystery of the Emblem builds strongly in the first game and makes it more interesting.

There is a LOT of fanservice and retuning cast – but to me it felt organic. Also, it just hits different when you already know who these characters are. I think it was a clever move to make a continuation of the first game.

The maps were reused but there were improved, I found several of these challenging in a good and fair way. I noticed after I finished the game that you could get locked out in a bad ending because of missing a single object in certain chapters, so I guess I was lucky. It does contain its fair amount of obscure unexplained game logics, which I can hardly support, but since it didn't affect my playthrough I can let it slide.

So in general terms, it did feel like “Shadow Dragon: The remixes” at some point, but I think it made a better use of my time. The maps were interestingly reimagined and I appreciated the small QoL improvements.

I would still only recommend it for Fire Emblem fans, especially since it builds on the first game, which I also strongly recommend for Fire Emblem fans only to be honest.

Edit: I forgot to add I played this in English thanks to the Heroes of Light and Shadow Translation Project, so... Aveyn Knight from Serene Forest.. if you are out there, I LOVE YOU.

The game was decent, although I have to say storywise it was quite weak. A lot of elements were recycled from Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, including almost all characters. It felt like the game was doing a lot of fan service, which is nice, but made it quite stale in my opinion. Fun Fact: I think I read somewhere that this game had the most units to choose from in the entire series (not sure if that's still the case), which is a funny thing and quite useless since in Fire Emblem games, you can only use a few characters the whole game to be able to keep up level wise, so most units end up not getting used all game anyway.

Unfortunately I got the bad ending. To unlock the true ending, you need to collect specific items, which you only realize once the game is over. I freaking hate that mechanic! Developers, don't make us play through the whole game again to see the end just because we missed something during the game, that's no fun. I wish I wouldn't encounter stuff like that too often. Thank you.