Fire Emblem was the first game I ever played on the GBA, and the first game I bought for my shiny new GBA SP.
Fire Emblem is usually called an RPG, but from my perspective its an SRPG, a genre that is practically unique to consoles for whatever reason. The S, of course, stands for Strategy. Some other SRPGs would be Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force, Disgaea, and Gladius (unique in that its the only 'western' (as opposed to eastern/anime style) SRPG I have ever seen).
The Fire Emblem series is very popular in Japan, but I know nothing about it beyond its GBA incarnation. In this version, you play the role of a faceless tactician whose goal in live is to master battlefield tactics and the logistics that allow victory.
It starts off in a tutorial mode, which I found very helpful, masked as a mini-campaign. Here you are introduced to most of the game's important concepts and you meet some of the game's characters.
The meat of the game is its tactical combat. You manage a team of characters from among various classes like Pirate, Mercenary, Knight, Mage, etc. You equip them, and give them orders in a turn based combat mechanic. Later in the game you will have more characters in your squad than you can field at one time, so you must make choices like which characters to leave behind for each mission, and which characters to devote the most time to leveling.
The combat model is based loosely around a rock/scissor/paper system in which Axes beat Lances, Lances beat Swords, and Swords beat Axes. Adding to this you have flying units, missle combat, and a rudimentary magic system that uses a similar 3 way mechanic.
Your characters earn xp for successful actions (mostly combat related though healers and thieves get xp for their related activities), and when they level up their stats randomly increase based around their class. For example, Knights are more likely to gain Hit Points upon leveling than are Mages, who are prone to getting their magic resistance boosted instead.
Each character can level up to 20, and each class can be 'promoted' to a more powerful version of itself, which resets the level counter to 1 but without any stat penalties unlike some games like Disgaea.
While being primarily a turn based tactical combat game (if you don’t like turn based combat, stop reading now...this game isn’t for you), it does have a surprising engaging story. The dialogue is generally well written and there is a lot of it before and after each mission, called chapters in the game. All of the 40-odd characters you can recruit for your team have distinct personalities and you will find yourself getting attached to them. Which is good and bad. Good because it makes the game more engaging, bad because this is a very unforgiving game that treats death (after the tutorial mini-campaign) as permanent. If one of the three main characters dies, its game over. If any of the supporting characters die, they are gone for good. This can be *extremely* frustrating when late in a chapter you lose someone.
The games story and character development is further fleshed out by what is called the Support system. In a nutshell, each character has a network of friends that they can interact with via scripted conversations which reveal more about the characters, and also make them more potent in battle when the same two characters are on the field together. The thing is, each character can only have 5 levels of support, so you'd have to play through the game dozens of times to reveal all of the inter-character stories and interactions. A nice touch that adds some replayability.
These conversations are essentially unlocked, with the ones you have witnessed being available for viewing from the main menu after you have beaten the game at least once.
As I mentioned earlier, this is my first GBA game so I don’t have much of a benchmark to compare the games technical achievements to. The graphics are very functional though, and generally very good, surpassing my expectations. The sound is acceptable, while the music is not. However, I generally don’t like music in my games, almost always turning it off, so your mileage may vary. IMO though, the FE soundtrack sounds like a MIDI game from 10+ years ago.
So, if you like turn based tactics, then this game is for you. Its got a nice combat system that keeps you paying attention and a good backstory that will have you playing more to see what happens next.
Create an Account
Member Login
