Last Sunday, I went to Gamestop to pick up a copy of Advance Wars 2. As I stood in line with Advance Wars in hand, I glanced around the shop and to my surprise, there it was…. FIRE EMBLEM! Without even thinking, I toss AW2 to the side a grabbed Fire Emblem. So, anyways… Fire Emblem has finally hit the US and it turns out to be well worth the long wait! This game is very similar (game-play wise) to the Advance Wars games on the GBA. Why? Simple, both are made by the same company, Intelligent Systems. So, if you an RPG fan and/or you enjoyed Advance Wars, you probably don’t want to miss out on this game.
My review:
Fire Emblem is a Turn-base RPG strategy game. Basically, it’s a hybrid of Advance Wars and Final Fantasy Tactics. Your character in the game is a traveling Tactician, similar to your role in Advance Wars, where your job is to take command of your troops and lead them to victory. The game is story rich, and is set in the past with dragons, knights, swords, and all that fun stuff. Your character is involved in the story, but most of the time you’re the quite guy who watches the tale unfold. The story of game is the best I’ve seen on the GBA this year, but will bore the casual gamers with it’s lengthy narratives.
The game play is very user friendly, just like Advance Wars and the game has a special prologue campaign to teach you the basic game-play mechanics. The game consists of a prologue campaign, which contains 10 missions, and a main campaign, which adds up to around 35 hours of average game length. The missions are typically strait forward; you command your troops across the map and defeat the enemies scattered about. Don't think the game's easy, the computer can be a challenge. The games is turn-based so each side takes turns making a set of moves and to attack you simply move a unit to another and issue a attack command from a list of various action. The terrain on the maps keep the missions interesting; Examples: Wooded areas can make it harder for the enemy to attack one of your men, Mountains make it difficult for mounted units to cross, Shops scattered across the map can sell equip to your men, Villages must be protected from bandits, and this is just the basic stuff. Weather, is another interesting factor in the game such as, fog hides units from opposing sides, while snow and rain decrease the movement range of your troops.
Your main arsenal of weapons are lances, swords, and axes. Swords are best against axes, axes are best against lances, and lances are best against swords, essentially the rock-paper-scissors thing. Magic attacks follow a similar rock-paper-scissors concept, too. Also, Bows and arrows are present. There is no advantage to attack your opponent from different sides like in Final Fantasy Tactics. Your units gain experience by simply fighting enemies like most RPGs of the SNES days. Fire Emblem is loaded with several different character classes (over 30). These include: archers, knights (I call ‘em mechs), fighters, warriors, Bards, Clerics, Snipers, Nomads, etc. etc. Unlike most strategy games, each one of the units in your army have names and play a part in the game’s story. The three main characters of the game are Lords and if they are killed… your game comes to a close. Now, this brings a few annoyances to a near perfect game. Any unit that is defeated in action is… gone, for good. You can’t bring ‘em back. They are injured and inactive till’ the end of the campaign. The only way to get them back, is to reset the mission. Also, you can’t manually save during a mission. The game automatically saves, so if you turn the GBA off at any point of the mission, it will save your very last move. This is a great feature, but has an obvious down side; you make a mistake and your stuck with it.
The sound is fairly good with the basic clanking of swords and footsteps of soldiers, not much to it. The music has good quality for a GBA title and has the Fire Emblem theme heard in Smash Bros Melee. Though, the music can get very repatitive, the game lets you turn it off and sound to, if you wish. Graphics are nice, the battle animation is awesome to watch and the game runs smoothly. Nuff said, here.
The game includes a multiplayer mode and I haven’t really played it too much, but it is a cool feature. Yet, Advance Wars offers a much better multiplayer experience. Fire Emblem is mostly about the single player experience, which surpasses Advance Wars.
Now, we can finally stop playing the Japanese import versions!
I give it a 9.3 out of 10
So, anyone else played it or want it? If so, what do you think about the game? Sound off!
