Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem
released on Jan 21, 1994
Fire Emblem: Monshou no Nazo (translated as Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem in Fire Emblem: Awakening) is a Japanese tactical role-playing game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. It is the third game in the Fire Emblem series and was released in Japan on January 21, 1994. It was the first Fire Emblem title for the Nintendo Super Famicom and the first twenty-four-megabit cartridge for the system. The game is divided into two distinct parts, or "books". Book One is a remake of the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, and Book Two is a continuation of events, following the same characters.
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Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem (or FE3) was a natural evolution of the first two games. Gameplay was a lot more polished in terms of stats, item management, and the flow of battle. Battle animations are a lot more lively as they look like paintings in action. Music (in terms of Book 2) is great all around and the core experience was still fun to experience. Despite those important evolutions, FE3 still felt slow to play in some aspects. The enemy turns took long and some animation of specific units does drag on. Another problem I had was the difference of polish between Books I and II. While Book I is a straight up remake of FE1, Book II is the actual FE3 experience. Due to it being FE1, Book I felt sluggish to play despite the upgraded hardware. It doesn't help that it only had one map theme for most of the scenario and it got really repetitive overtime. Book II on the other hand felt a lot more quicker and fun, though the sluggishness still occurred on some specific maps. It also doesn't help that Book II had a lot more map themes and thus the usual slow gameplay is elevated by a really great OST. If FE3 was just only Book II with a bit more polish, then I'll give it a higher rating. However, because development had to focus on remaking FE1, Book II doesn't reaches its full evolution of the gameplay until the next game succeeds that aspect. For that, the game is just average as Book I simply drags down Book II and thus the experience of the whole game. Despite my gripes, it still is an important game in the series due to its quality of life features and I'll still recommended to any Fire Emblem fan who is trying out the Famicom games (though just play Book II).
A fine game. A mediocre game. If you want to play Marth's story(s), but don't want the meddling of modern innovations seen in Shadow Dragon DS, then this game suits you perfectly fine. It cut a few characters and maps, but overall doesn't bring much.
i am FE3 Book One's strongest soldier
I played through this for this month's TR, as it was one of the only retro SRPGs I own. SRPG is a genre I've enjoyed in the past but am not a massive fan of. Even Fire Emblem is a series I'm not a super huge fan of, despite having beaten half a dozen of them over the years. I have this game on my Super Famicom Mini, and I honestly really didn't expect to finish it. I ended up using save states and rewinds a fair bit, and ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. They were a great way to make the game's difficulty far more appealing to me, and more like the puzzle-ish design of Advance Wars where losing a unit feels a lot less dire (and it also thankfully lowered the time commitment for me significantly). That said, it still took me over 43.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game, and that's just the end time on the SFC Mini and ignores all my restarts XP.
Mystery of the Emblem is actually two games jammed into one. The first is a remake of the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, but with some new mechanics tossed in (mostly re-balancing leveling, as far as I can tell) that help make it easier and less dependent on RNG like the original was. The other changes to it are to make it fit mechanically alongside the second game on the cart, which is actually FE: Mystery of the Emblem, a direct sequel to Shadow Dragon with much of the same cast. The stories are nothing to write home about, especially in the first game, but it's serviceable in both cases. Mystery of the Emblem is a really jarring thing to go to after Shadow Dragon, given that there is just so little text at all in the first game and SO much more in the second, even if it mostly amounts to larger exposition dumps at the starts and ends of chapters. They're quite sad stories compared to later FE games, with far less happy endings beyond the few most central characters. Even most of the end-game resolution text for characters who live (especially in Shadow Dragon) amount to "they disappeared" or had a not so great life after the war. I did enjoy the story that was there, especially in Mystery of the Emblem, but it's hardly a main selling point of the game or anything.
Being that it's SUCH an early entry in the series, and this is also the only pre-GBA Fire Emblem game I've ever played, I expected it to be quite different and my goodness is it. No weapon triangle, no supports of any kind, and the ability to dismount and mount up your mounted units to name some of the biggest differences to later games (a lot of that being innovations introduced in FE4, after all). The mounting/dismounting thing is easily the most annoying mechanic, and mostly seems to be an arbitrary way to hamstring your movement on some levels, and it's something that wouldn't be so annoying if it didn't make mounted units SO much worse (not to mention it's really annoying since you need to swap out their lances for swords whenever you do it).
Beyond that there are just lots of weird design decisions or lacking quality of life features, like there being no way to check threat ranges of you or your enemies (which REALLY sucks in a game with so many long-range casters and ballista to worry about) as well as you needing to do all the math yourself for how much damage you're gonna do across menus on two different screens (and the same goes for hit chance, quite often). At least if there IS a threat-range checker (or even a range-stat-checker) feature, I could never find where it was. Most of my resets and rewinds were down to frustrations with "oh, I didn't know how far this could hit me, so I moved forward and now I'm dead." Then other weird things like some characters like Marth and the entire fighter class (that being anyone who uses an axe, of which you get 3 in Shadow Dragon, one of whom was one of my best characters in that game) simply having no promotion items at all. Thankfully for the latter aspect, Mystery of the Emblem remedies this by simply never giving you any axe-users. and the absence of any weapon triangle makes it fairly inconsequential on an overall mechanical level.
The map designs and such are good fun, and the music and graphics are excellent and hold up great. I usually end up turning off the battle animations in FE, but I never did in this game. Part of that may have been down to me playing so much of the game streamed to my friends over Discord so I could have the anticipation of getting a hit or a miss, but part of it was also just how pretty and nice the animations are~. There are never any missions that aren't "capture the throne", but there are a lot of neat setups for missions that make them have more interesting aspects around that (like a mission where most of the enemy soldiers don't actually fight you, and if you don't pick them off for easy XP, you get more recruitable characters out of it). There are some problems with the game actually giving you the information on how to recruit many characters, especially in Shadow Dragon (you basically need to guess a TON who is actually related to whom so they could talk to and recruit them), but MotE has a lot less of that. Either way, especially if you don't wanna miss the extra final levels in MotE, playing this game with a simple recruitment/item guide to make sure you don't miss people is something I did and I would also recommend doing to help alleviate any stress over missing recruits.
Verdict: Recommended. I think it's age has not been super kind to it, but that's also because of what a definitive game it is. The mechanics and design philosophies laid down in FE3 and then FE4 helped establish the future of the franchise in a big way, and even though it's lacking in a lot of QoL features, these early games still play in a very familiar way as a result. There will likely be some frustrations and resets in both parts of the game, but if you're into SRPGs and want something that isn't too brutally hard, this is yet another game from Nintendo's 16-bit catalog whose main failings come from how well Nintendo and others have innovated on it since.
Mystery of the Emblem is actually two games jammed into one. The first is a remake of the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, but with some new mechanics tossed in (mostly re-balancing leveling, as far as I can tell) that help make it easier and less dependent on RNG like the original was. The other changes to it are to make it fit mechanically alongside the second game on the cart, which is actually FE: Mystery of the Emblem, a direct sequel to Shadow Dragon with much of the same cast. The stories are nothing to write home about, especially in the first game, but it's serviceable in both cases. Mystery of the Emblem is a really jarring thing to go to after Shadow Dragon, given that there is just so little text at all in the first game and SO much more in the second, even if it mostly amounts to larger exposition dumps at the starts and ends of chapters. They're quite sad stories compared to later FE games, with far less happy endings beyond the few most central characters. Even most of the end-game resolution text for characters who live (especially in Shadow Dragon) amount to "they disappeared" or had a not so great life after the war. I did enjoy the story that was there, especially in Mystery of the Emblem, but it's hardly a main selling point of the game or anything.
Being that it's SUCH an early entry in the series, and this is also the only pre-GBA Fire Emblem game I've ever played, I expected it to be quite different and my goodness is it. No weapon triangle, no supports of any kind, and the ability to dismount and mount up your mounted units to name some of the biggest differences to later games (a lot of that being innovations introduced in FE4, after all). The mounting/dismounting thing is easily the most annoying mechanic, and mostly seems to be an arbitrary way to hamstring your movement on some levels, and it's something that wouldn't be so annoying if it didn't make mounted units SO much worse (not to mention it's really annoying since you need to swap out their lances for swords whenever you do it).
Beyond that there are just lots of weird design decisions or lacking quality of life features, like there being no way to check threat ranges of you or your enemies (which REALLY sucks in a game with so many long-range casters and ballista to worry about) as well as you needing to do all the math yourself for how much damage you're gonna do across menus on two different screens (and the same goes for hit chance, quite often). At least if there IS a threat-range checker (or even a range-stat-checker) feature, I could never find where it was. Most of my resets and rewinds were down to frustrations with "oh, I didn't know how far this could hit me, so I moved forward and now I'm dead." Then other weird things like some characters like Marth and the entire fighter class (that being anyone who uses an axe, of which you get 3 in Shadow Dragon, one of whom was one of my best characters in that game) simply having no promotion items at all. Thankfully for the latter aspect, Mystery of the Emblem remedies this by simply never giving you any axe-users. and the absence of any weapon triangle makes it fairly inconsequential on an overall mechanical level.
The map designs and such are good fun, and the music and graphics are excellent and hold up great. I usually end up turning off the battle animations in FE, but I never did in this game. Part of that may have been down to me playing so much of the game streamed to my friends over Discord so I could have the anticipation of getting a hit or a miss, but part of it was also just how pretty and nice the animations are~. There are never any missions that aren't "capture the throne", but there are a lot of neat setups for missions that make them have more interesting aspects around that (like a mission where most of the enemy soldiers don't actually fight you, and if you don't pick them off for easy XP, you get more recruitable characters out of it). There are some problems with the game actually giving you the information on how to recruit many characters, especially in Shadow Dragon (you basically need to guess a TON who is actually related to whom so they could talk to and recruit them), but MotE has a lot less of that. Either way, especially if you don't wanna miss the extra final levels in MotE, playing this game with a simple recruitment/item guide to make sure you don't miss people is something I did and I would also recommend doing to help alleviate any stress over missing recruits.
Verdict: Recommended. I think it's age has not been super kind to it, but that's also because of what a definitive game it is. The mechanics and design philosophies laid down in FE3 and then FE4 helped establish the future of the franchise in a big way, and even though it's lacking in a lot of QoL features, these early games still play in a very familiar way as a result. There will likely be some frustrations and resets in both parts of the game, but if you're into SRPGs and want something that isn't too brutally hard, this is yet another game from Nintendo's 16-bit catalog whose main failings come from how well Nintendo and others have innovated on it since.
I don't like the way that units are designed in this game; they all kinda suck. The map design varies in quality wildly. Every map is a seize map which gets repetitive.
Marth, you have to stop, your movement too low, your map designs too dependent on you running around everywhere, your stats nerfed from the first game enough to make it so you can't handle yourself easily in combat anymore, they'll kill you.
(First Fire Emblem game that feels genuinely enjoyable to play on a moment-to-moment basis, but the story is all overly long exposition dumps, the Marth reliance is particularly annoying in the remake of the original game, and there are just a variety of QoL things this game doesn't have that are actually sort of unusual for 1994, a point at which other JRPGs were getting pretty polished).
(First Fire Emblem game that feels genuinely enjoyable to play on a moment-to-moment basis, but the story is all overly long exposition dumps, the Marth reliance is particularly annoying in the remake of the original game, and there are just a variety of QoL things this game doesn't have that are actually sort of unusual for 1994, a point at which other JRPGs were getting pretty polished).