While this is common knowledge to most RPG enthusiasts, the Fire Emblem brand is a long running one, seeing its debut on Japan's Famicom system (NES) close to 15 years back. Fire Emblem for the GBA is actually the seventh game in this series, and is a prequel the Japan only Fire Emblem 6: The Sealed Sword.
Fire Emblem's developers, Intelligent Designs, are best known stateside for Super Metroid and the Advance Wars games. Like Advance wars, Fire Emblem puts you in the role of the game's tactician, who is often referred to but rarely seen.
Story
Fire Emblem follows your typical fantasy RPG storyline. The game's three protagonists, Lynn, Eliwood, and Hector, are united following a series of circumstances, and must pool their strength and resources in order to overcome a great evil threatening not only their homes, but the entire world. While clearly a storyline most gamers have played through dozens of times before, Fire Emblem manages to pull it off quite well thanks to a group of mostly charismatic characters. Although, the game's large cast (Over 40 including hidden characters) means that not every character is completely fleshed out, there are plenty great moment involving minor characters. However, I can't help but think that this story would be even stronger if Nintendo had decided to release the previous instalment, since so many of the game's events and characters elaborate on the happenings of its predecessor.
Graphics and Sound
The graphics for Fire Emblem are hard to comment on without breaking the game down into components. You will spend the majority of your time in Fire Emblem either reading text which progresses the story, looking at the battle map for a given stage, or watching cut scene battle animations.
A good deal of the story is told through character speech boxes in front of a static background picture. While these text sessions can be a tad long at times (especially if you're reading it for the second or third time), they are pretty easy on the eyes. Text boxes are accompanied by well illustrated character portraits which, while not fully animated, are not simply the static images present in most games.
Battles in the game take place on maps which, unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, are quite large in size. However, the large size and quantity of characters that may be present on a single map (over 50, including your party, in some instances) means that the map graphics are a lot more simplified than one would expect to find in a 32bit game. These simplified visual can be a little off putting at first glance, but all is forgiven when you cut away to a battle animation. When you attack an enemy character, you are taken to a battle cut-scene to witness the outcome of the encounter. These battle animations are very similar to those found in the genesis Shining Force games, and should be a treat to fans of those games.
The sound and music in this game are alright considering the platform. The beginning piece of music that plays before the title screen is very well done, but there are a few grating songs encompassing areas of the game. Sound effects are nothing special, but sound is not that important in a Gameboy title as far as I'm concerned. Good sound/music can enhance a game, but poor sound can always be muted without destroying the atmosphere to the same effect it would in a console or PC game.
Gameplay
Underlying the Battle system in this game are two trinities, one involving melee, and one involving magic. Each trinity determines what a given class of weapon/magic is proficient against, and works like a classic game of paper-scissors-rock. For instance, spears are strong against swords but weak against axes. This requires you to either develop a well rounded, cosmopolitan party which can adapt to any scenario, or at least know what type of fighters or mages the majority of opponents will be on a given map. Healers and Archers fall outside the trinities, but have strengths and weaknesses of their own.
All this is thoroughly explained in the form of a ten chapter tutorial involving Lynn's story. These tutorial chapters are mandatory the first time you play the game, and while later chapters are very informative to those who don't read instruction manuals, the first few are mind numbingly boring as they treat you like you've never played a strategy game before. While, this can't really be taken as a weak point in the game, as it eases new comers into the genre, it will be a source of annoyance to seasoned strategy RPG'ers. The tutorial is much help by the fact that it has a full fledged story of its own though, and therefore doesn't feel like work that you have to complete in order to play the real game.
Despite a detailed tutorial, Fire Emblem can be a very frustrating game to novices of the genre as it is possible to make mistakes managing your characters early in the game which won't become apparent until much later on when the difficulty really starts to ramp up quickly. Again, like Shining Force, each different character class can be promoted to their more advanced form upon reaching a certain level (level 10) as long as you have the prerequisite transforming item. You find these items at given locations throughout the game, and most are conspicuous enough, that you won't pass them by. However, in a move that the series is infamous for, you are given a high level promoted character very early in the game when your other party members are nowhere near being promoted. While this character seems amazingly strong and can more or less clear an entire map of enemies solo, his REAL purpose is that of an EXP sink. His high level means that he gets very little exp for defeating enemies, and on top of things, his state growths are about the worst in the game. Relying too much on this "amazing" warrior will cause other characters to quickly fall behind in levels and there will come a time in the game where progress is no longer nearly as easy; much harder in fact than it would be if you took your time to keep all your characters at relatively even levels.
Another potentially frustrating aspect of the game is that once a character is killed in battle, they're gone for good. Characters you lose in the tutorial will come back in the course of the real game (being Eliwood's story), but after that dead means dead. Along with losing the ability to use that character in battle, you also miss out on any subsequent story or dialog involving them, as well as the ability to recruit some special characters whose joining depends on talking to a specific person in the course of the battle. This can lead to a lot of resetting for completists who want to finish the game with a full cast.
Concluding Statements
Despite these minor quips, Fire Emblem is a solid game which fans of the genre will no doubt enjoy. It runs a solid 20+ hours the first time through, and upon finishing the game, you unlock another campaign helmed by Hector which adds to the story as well as the playtime. Furthermore, there are many different conversations that can be witnessed via a command option which allows a character to talk to another during battle. The functional bonus of these conversations is that they build up the rapport between certain characters enabling them to provide a bonus to fighting/defending if they are in the same vicinity. A male and female pair with an especially strong rapport could actually unlock hidden ending messages in which the two become a couple after the game's finale. Fan favourite couples, as well as those characters whose offspring are characters in the previous game are some of the more obvious pairings resulting in hidden endings. The number of these conversations that are possible means you will likely have to play through a few times in order to read them all adding to the replayability of this already replay friendly game.
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