Despite the hardware restrictions, its a fire emblem game through and through in that it captures the fun of fe combat. Heck, the map design are even better than some entries (awakening...). The character sprites are as charming as ever which helps ignore other outdated assets.

Its still an NES game and inconveniences abound. Its super slow, especially on enemy phase and inventory management wise (can only give not take) I would have docked 1 star if I didn't have access to fast forward.

Unit availability is still unbalanced due to encouraging iron manning but this should not be a surprise for those who played its DS remake.

I look forward to playing the SNES remake and its improvements

Look, obviously the Super Famicom remake is a better iteration of this game in every single way. Better graphics and sound, (slightly) easier and streamlined gameplay, and it also has the self-awareness to understand that 25 chapters is way too goddamn many and to be honest, maybe 20 is too. FE3 is better, faster, stronger, prettier, and above all, shorter.

Or is it? As a straight up game of a video nature released by a developer and played on a console system by a consumer, sure, this is by no means the ideal way to experience Fire Emblem, Shadow Dragon, OR the Blade of Light. But in Gare’s Retroarch collection of like a thousand games, well, maybe not so much.

You see, on Retroarch, there are no useful codes for the Super Famicom remake, just like, character and item modifiers that almost never work. If you want to play Shadow Dragon on the sneese you have to play it for real. But this game, THIS GAME, has a wonderful little code that, if you so choose to enter it, allows you to kill all enemies with one hit. It’s not a gameplay style for everyone, but maybe, you know, after struggling with one chapter or another on a different version, it might float your boat to punch it in and experience a diverting little epic fantasy tale with top-notch 8 bit NES sights and sounds that might take you four hours or so to beat, easily completable with a single day off. Chapter 7? Ten, maybe fifteen minutes tops!

There’s a time and place for both versions. It’s the two wolves inside me that are always fucking

This game was an unforgettable experience.
It may be old, clunky and it's filled with a ton of bullshit and pain (fuck ambushes) and cryptic garbage that screws you over 20 stages later. The sequels may be better in every way, but holy shit it was one of the most special experiences i've ever had with a game regardless of it's quality.

I played this a few years ago (when 3 Houses came out) blind, as my first Fire Emblem game. I didn't use any guides and didn't use save states or restarts.
I actually really like permadeath mechanics because they can make for very unique and tense experiences, you can have your own story with them, so instead of restarting for perfect levels without deaths i beat them no matter who died.

Playing like that made for many, MANY memorable moments. Units dying to bullshit, the sacrifices, the very tense moments were it felt like everyone was about to die, having to change the startegy mid-stage and its repercussions, etc. The tension is great, it's exciting, i loved it.

And those situations helped me "bond" with those characters. Yeah, they don't even say anything but with all the shit we've been through and cool shit we manged to pull off at critical moments i got more attached to these guys than any 3 houses character with their social links and stuff.

The most tragic moment was an event i called "the critical massacre". At the start of one of the last stages, i had most of my best units INSTAKILLED from full HP by crit after crit in a single turn. I didn't have many units left, but those guys? I know i could win as long as i had them. And they were gone, in a single turn of awful RNG. I almost restarted but i got to far to start doing that shit now.

In the last map only 5 characters survived. In a game with like +50 total units. Only 5.
Marth, Tiki, Marth's sister, Gato and motherfucking Wyrn of all things because i never used him.

Wanna know the funniest part? I couldn't damage the final boss. I didn't have the falchion because i didn't know about the mcguffins until Gato told me once it was too late. Even though i gave Marth all my status boosters and best sword he couldn't hurt the dragon. The dragon had a hard time killing Marth too. It was a stalemate.

I know i didn't finish the game but i consider it completed. That's MY ending, and ending fitting for a catastrophic playthrough.
I had my revenge in FE3 and Shadow Dragon later anyways.

I loved this experience, i don't care how objectivly bad or good the game was (i think it's fine btw), i can't give it any less than 5 stars.

Out of all of the big Nintendo franchises that are still running all the way to this very day, the one that I have had practically ZERO experience with whatsoever would be Fire Emblem. Not because I would think the games are bad, but I just never had too much of an interest in checking them out for the longest time. However, come 2020, during Fire Emblem's 30th anniversary, when they rereleased Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light for the Nintendo Switch, I decided that it would be the perfect opportunity to check out this series and see what it was all about.

So, as someone who was experiencing Fire Emblem for the very first time, I would say that I really enjoyed my time with this game. Sure, it does have its problems (or moreso my own personal gripes), and I guarantee future games in this series make this feel outdated, but again, for a first experience, I had a pretty good time with it.

The story is about what you expect from a game like this, but it works, and it certainly has more story then other games of the time, the graphics are pretty good, even if they could be a little better, the music is very catchy and memorable, the control and what you can do can be pretty awkward, but once you get a hang of it, it isn't that bad, and the gameplay, again, as someone who is playing one of these games for the first time, is pretty fun once you get the hang of it, and it definitely made me a fan of this series, even if it is on the much lesser degree then others.

The game is a tactical RPG where you control an army of soldiers, you move across a large map during your turn, fight enemies, gain experience from battles, level up, and gain new weapons and items from shops and towns you come across. In addition, you can also get new recruits from stages by either going to towns or having certain characters encounter them on the map, and since each character has their own individual class, stats, and advantages, you can experiment however you want with taking on what lies ahead.

Personally, I really liked this style of gameplay, and it felt really satisfying controlling my units and taking down enemies with precision, while also finding and equipping all this new stuff to take down other enemies. It may not be too new for those familiar with the genre, but it was very fun and rewarding overall for me. Not to mention, managing to keep certain units alive, like Ogma, Caeda, and Jaegan did help out quite a bit in making the journey feel more rewarding. However, this all didn't come without its own problems.

This game is very hard, which is nothing new for Fire Emblem (or so I have heard), but there are plenty of factors that make this installment pretty tough, not just because of enemy strength, pattern, or movement. For one thing, there is permadeath in this game, where if a character dies, they are dead forever, and yes, while this won't be getting old any time soon, and it certainly wasn't that new of a concept, it did happen quite a few times to me, and not only does it feel devastating when it happens, but it can also make things much harder down the road, with certain levels being much harder without certain characters. Thankfully, with the Switch version having save states, this wasn't too much of an issue, but it did have a lingering effect at points.

Not to mention, it can take a good while to figure out how to effectively fight enemies. Since each character has a different class and stats, of course, certain characters, weapons, and moves would have a much larger effect on certain units rather then others. It isn't all too clear right off the bat who is weak to what, so a lot of experimentation is required to even stand a chance at beating it, because if you don't know what you are doing, you will be FUCKED.

I myself have no problem with experimentation in games like this, and again, it felt really satisfying finding out who is weak to what and taking down some really tough enemies with this knowledge, and it made it all more fun for me overall. However, I can see this as being a problem with others, and by the time you find out what you are doing, you probably already lost five units, so that can put a damper on things. Once again, with the Switch version, this wasn't so much of a big deal, but it was still a factor present throughout.

Overall, for the start to Fire Emblem, and MY start with Fire Emblem, it holds up a lot better than I thought it would, and I had a pretty great time with it. Once again, I'm sure future games in this series make this entry feel obsolete in comparison, but as it stands right now, it is an experience I'm glad that I finally had.

Game #106

In spite of being old and “clunky” to many, with not being able to see movement ranges or having to keep a sheet of notes with weapon stats handy, I really like the first Fire Emblem. It’s very charming and is relatively fair for an NES RPG. This game almost single-handedly invented the SRPG genre, and also my favorite series of all time. The plot is nice and simple, though I do prefer both of the remakes of this game. Still, I actually would find myself returning to it since most of the maps are fun. Biggest drawback is how insane of a spike in difficulty Medeus, the final boss, is. I had to pull out a bunch of flunkies from the bench of my party to be able to survive.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is a tactical RPG and the first game in the Fire Emblem series, developed by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems and released for the NES on April 20, 1990 in Japan only. The first official Western release happened on December 4, 2020 for the Nintendo Switch, however for whatever reason Nintendo made it a timed exclusive, meaning it is not available for purchase anymore since March 2021.

That baffling decision aside and disregarding the fact that the newest Fire Emblem game was just recently announced, this series was not an instant hit. The initial reception by some critics was poor due to "poor graphics" and the game being "difficult to understand". This resulted in poor initial sales, a situation that would improve over time through positive word-of-mouth (especially a positive Famitsu column on the game about half a year after release) and led Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light to sell well over 300.000 units up until 2002.

Since the Switch version is no longer for sale, I wasn't able to play with the official translation. The translation I got, as I noticed after playing for many hours, did not really fit with the official names for items, characters and locations. The main protagonist / the prince is called Marth, not Mars.

STORYTELLING
The translation differences on seemingly everything notwithstanding, it was still "easy" to follow since the different translation was used consistently. Unfortunately, the game throws around a bunch of names of people and kingdoms all the time so it takes a while to get a grasp on what is going on. At first, many names simply end up sounding the same, so I had to find my way out of that web of confusion.

There are 25 chapters/missions in this game, and before and after each, there is some text or dialogue progressing the story, plus a small monologue during missions when you would get near the more notable chapter bosses.

You play as the Prince of Altea, Marth, who was able to escape when Altea was under attack by the Dolhr Empire. Marth's sister Elice sacrificed herself so that Marth could escape. During this time, their dad had left an ally, Gra, to watch over his kingdom, but Gra betrayed them to the Dolhr Empire. Meanwhile their dad had left to fight the leader of the Dolhr Empire, the Shadow Dragon, but failed and died. He used a Falchion in battle, a divine weapon that had stopped the Shadow Dragon 100 years earlier and it was taken from Marth's dad when he lost the battle. It is needed to fight the Shadow Dragon.

At the start of this game you stop an invasion of the new home of Marth, Talys, and then move out with your allies to fight the Dolhr Empire. Before that, you visit and free many other kingdoms and find more allies to aid you in your quest. All characters that aid you are named and have their own little back story (once the game ends, there is a brief summary on what each character is doing after the story conclusion, provided they survive).

And this is where the game gets its uniqueness from. The dev team decided to build on their experience from war games such as Famicom Wars, and add "RPG elements" to them. I think this game pushes the definition of an RPG, but that's a different discussion.

Each character is assigned a class and can level up to increase their stats. While this has gameplay implications only at first glance, it goes way beyond that. Characters barely have any dialogue apart from when your first recruit them, so building a connection to them is only possible on a limited scale. However, it still happens as you find characters that increase in level over time and improve in their abilities. You're excited when they then get criticial hits at the right time to get you out of tricky situations or you love them for simply being consistent throughout. And ultimately, this means it can hurt for a short while when you lose them to the perma-death system. It's a feeling I only know from XCOM games, but in those characters don't even have that backstory like they do here.

It's a system that is very limited here but is effective in general, and I can only imagine how much later entries built on it.

The main plot itself is convoluted for a first time player because you get a lot of lore dropped with no way to read it again or look up any info on anything. In general, the game lacks a tutorial or codex.

Once you get to grips with it, it is a solid plot but basic storytelling due to the technical limitations of the time. In addition, it was pretty typical for the time. I have just played 9 games in 1990 through this challenge so far and more than a few included the concept of "divine weapon is the only way to kill final boss". It works for a game to give the player needed motivation, so I can see why this seems to have been a popular choice for the overall theme. You'll be content with the storytelling for a game this old and with this much content outside of it, it'll the do the job, but nothing beyond that.

GAMEPLAY
Lots to discuss here. The game is a tactical RPG. Back in 1990, you would have found a lot of strategy games and a lot of RPGs, but few, if any, that combined the two.

The tactical part looks like this: You control a battle unit out of a set number of characters based on the level. Often, you would have about 15 units on the battlefield at once. If you had more characters available than the maximum possible amount - through recruiting them - a level would start by making you select the specific units that you want to deploy.

Once you do that, battle commences on a grid-based map. Maps changed for each level and would add strategical challenges, but wouldn't really change anything graphically or of their tone. The game has a turn-based battle system. You select a unit, move it up a specific number of grids based on the unit's Movement stat, and then attack an enemy if it is in range.

There are 21 classes in this game that mostly are specialized in something. There are your typical Fighters and Mercenaries who wield swords and axes and have average Movement range. Then there are your Archers who can only use bows, Clerics who cannot fight but only use a staff to for example heal or warp units (send them to anywhere else on the map, very useful) and Mages who can use powerful Magic and have high resistances. There are also "Pegasus Knights" that are on horseback and can fly over obstacles on the ground like buildings or trees, which usually take an additional step to move past for ground units.

Weapons usually have multiple different qualities. The lowest is the "Iron quality" and the best quality that is usually accessible is the "Silver quality". As you make more progress in this game, you come across many enemies that can resist Iron quality weapons, making the upgrade necessary. Luckily, money is literally no issue in this game, so all you need to do is buy new items. Unluckily, there is no "safe hub" or anything like that to stock up. Instead, shops are somewhere on the map in levels and usually guarded by enemies. Often, there would only be one store as well, so you could only send one unit to buy something per round. So I would spend multiple rounds after a map was cleared to just get everyone new items. This is a typical QoL issue that is surely handled differently in newer entries. I haven't played any Fire Emblem game up to this point, so I don't know.

Another QoL issue is how slow progression in this game is. When you control 15 units, you have to move all 15 units at a time, of course, but that takes a lot of time. This is probably a thing in current Fire Emblem games as well, and not the worst thing to do, but it does take a while and gets kinda boring once you are 10+ chapters in. I prefer the XCOM games here, where you only have 6 characters to control.

But again, this isn't the worst thing in the world. What is much worse is the individual battles themselves. The animation for one attack takes seemingly ages and when you enter over a handful of fights in a single round, it will take minutes to go through them all. Luckily, my emulator had a fast forward function, so I could skip through these much quicker. I didn't finish this game (I made it to Chapter 22/25) but I think it's worth pointing out that I got there in just 17 hours compared to the 26-40 hours it takes on a normal playthrough according to HLTB.

Strategically, there are a lot of ways to play this game thanks to the different classes and their specialties. If you want to bring a Cleric, Thief and Archer for example, they will not be - or you don't want them to be in the Thief's case - in close combat. A big system in this game is the "counter", which means if an enemy character attacks you, your character can counter and vice versa. If the Archer is attacked in melee combat, he will not be able to counter, which can make a big difference. Clerics don't attack at all. Thieves barely have any strength and limited health, so they usually will only be part of your squad to unlock doors and/or open chests. Clerics heal and warp and Archers can be devastating in long range combat, so they all do provide arguments for why they should be included in the squad.

But bring a few more Mercenaries, Fighters and Paladins and you'll have a lot more strength in Melee Combat. So do you go for more of them, or for a more mixed approach? All strategies have their advantages and disadvantages and more than a few will work, so it's nice to see these options being available.

Bringing the right squad to do the job becomes more important however when different Chapters are filled more with specific enemies that can only be significantly damaged with specific weapons. Some need to be fought with Magic, some with Arrows and some with Melee weapons. Plus, maps have enough strategical differences that having Pirates or Pegasus Knights that can go over water or having Mages and Archers who can shoot over walls becomes more important.

On the flipside, you can quickly find yourself in a bad situation when the most useful units for a particular level are the most under leveled. The only way to level up units is by having them battle. Especially later on, bringing those low level characters with you can be pretty bad since you will need all the fire power you got when the game starts throwing infinite reinforcements in your face until you finally defeat the boss and send Prince Marth to the Castle, which is a location he must visit to finish the level.

There is a balance that must be struck here, but I would have liked to get more additional ways to train my units outside of battle (probably expecting too much in a 1990 game). Especially when my strong units started dying late into game and enemy units just started being filled with strong Dragons that would show up in the dozens, the game pretty much had me in an impossible situation. You can't now level your low-level guys, nor can you even get them weapons since you need to do that within levels. When never ending groups of enemies come at you, when are you supposed to find the opportunity?

Due to this, I didn't get to finish the game, but there is a lot to like here.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. There is nothing noteworthy to discuss regarding the sound design, it sounded average for the time.

The music was definitely one of the highlights for me. 3 or 4 tracks were playing for most of the game, so it didn't necessarily have variety, but some tracks just were bangers, especially the start of chapter track. Look for "Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light- Chapter Start" on YouTube.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Even back then the game wasn't considered graphically pretty. I'd say it has some strong colors and the varied character design is pretty good, but there isn't much else to it besides that. You see the same few assets on every level, maps are mostly green spots of grass and even battles take place in a black background with nothing else on it.

ATMOSPHERE
Once I got firmly into the gameplay loop, playing this game was rather comfortable thanks to the mix of a solid soundtrack, uninspiring but not-ugly graphics and simply being around a cast of characters that have a place in this world and start to grow into trusted allies. It is nothing special but to me the atmosphere was rather positive than negative.

CONTENT
25 chapters, each take about 30-60 minutes on average. Lots of repetition here but also a satisfying strategical challenge throughout.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There is a good mix in the design of the maps, especially considering what technical limitations the devs had to battle. Map design and enemy placement means that challenges that players have to fight through are varied, but sometimes the enemy placement and especially reinforcements get so ridiculous that you have no way of progressing through them with the units you have on hand. And this was clear hours ago, you just weren't aware. Infinite reinforcements also mean that the amount of opportunity is limited to level up underleveled units and to stock up on weapons and other items in the lead up to chapters 20+, which was frustrating.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION
One of, if not THE first tactical RPG that started a whole genre. Due to that, this game already gets iconic status, and it's a mix of genres that works pretty well too (as evidenced by the series status even today).

REPLAYABILITY
This game can be played in different ways, but the hours and hours of watching animations and moving your units make this a hard sell for people looking for replayability. Apart from improved stats, there also is no incentive to play through the game and try to keep different units alive compared to previous runs.

PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.

OVERALL
Definitely worth checking out if you're a Fire Emblem fan and want to see its origins. There is also some fun to be had and mostly the game offers a fair strategic challenge. If you're a veteran of the series, you might also do much better than me in the first half of the game and go into the second half more prepared, which will make or break your chance of completing this game.

WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Japan-only release, nothing to find in Western magazines

The total lack of informational QoL (no battle previews! no ingame weapon stat display!) forces you to play fast and loose with your units, putting them into situations where they'll receive unknown and possibly lethal amounts of damage. In a modern FE game that would be horrible, but FE1 doesn't have support conversations and the like; with a handful of exceptions, the death of a unit means the loss of a gameplay asset and nothing else.

Inventory management is beyond awful. Units have four inventory slots, trading is one-way, and the convoy is tied to a static tile on the map, not Marth.

Pretty good game!

FE1 is outdated. I think that's just a fact of life, but I'm making my judgement on the game that exists, not the fact that modern technology is capable of and has created better games. I'm trying to be fair to the game because it's old.

So, with that said, FE1 is actually pretty good! You can see that the core Fire Emblem gameplay loop started off very strong from the original. Several of the maps, while ugly to look at and very green due to technical limitations, are actually well designed and clever. This game does have some oddities and UI jank, such as the way the game handles items (the storage system that is the early archetype of the convoy) and the way that magic works, but you get pretty used to it after a few chapters and honestly, it's not that bad.

The ending falls off a little bit. The last few maps (21, 24, 25) are not that great, throwing a lot of bullshit at you for you to deal with. The final boss is only susceptible to Marth with the Falchion, which creates two problems:
a) you can softlock yourself out of being able to win the game in Chapter 19 if you don't get the spheres, or Chapter 22 if you don't get to the village with the spheres
b) Marth is not an amazing unit and if he can't get to Medeus and survive, it's over

But overall, I think this is a good game and an excellent start to the series. If you can get used to the quality of the NES, it's a worthwhile play if you're into Fire Emblem the series, if only to experience a historical relic.

And also, Bantu is good in this game. Never forget what they took from us.

There’s an outrageous amount of character to Fire Emblem Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light. It’s easy to forget what 8-bit consoles were really capable of, I think. The internet so inundates us with images of like the cheapest and most rushed out shovelware of the era and there was SO much of that that, and there are so few games LIKE Dahk Dragon n Da Sword o Light that it can be hard to conceptualize stuff that doesn’t look like a side scroller or a final fantasy-like. I know I talk about this kind of shit every time I write about a game this old please forgive me.

But IMMEDIATELY it’s shocking how fully formed Fire Emblem is. Pretty much everything you expect to be here is here. You got all your little dudes, they all have their cute little idle animations on the map screen, units don’t have unique sprites but classes have bespoke animations for crits and the battle screen is a full on Fire Emblem ass battle screen. There’s so much text in this game! And while a lot of it is using characters to tutorialize stuff for you, or to tip you off about which guys you might be able to recruit, those dialogues and the ensuing recruitment ones are full of personality. They’re thoughtful too – rarely do you just have Marth walk up to a guy to make them join, a lot of the time there’s more specificity to their wants or needs. And sure, more often than not that’s Sheeda instead of Marth lol but because of this you get a very full sketch of Sheeda as this guile princess who knows how to play people but is compassionate enough to use that skill for their good instead of just callously using them for more manpower, SOMETIMES. Other times she is just kind of playing dudes in a very funny way, she’s a great character. Riff is a crusty old man and he sucks ass and guess what his weapon skill sucks shit and he’s the worst healer in the game, they’re interlinking systems and character immediately, it’s a well-designed game!

I found so much here and so much that was familiar that I didn’t even REALLY mind that I had to count out every unit’s individual movements because those aren’t mapped for you here, or that the AI, impressive as it is for the platform, can be gamed somewhat easily, or that without even a weapon triangle the actual strategy is somewhat more shallow, if a little more exactly weighted towards stats.

It’s simply a good time. It’s a little slow, a little meandering, and a little long. IDK that this is a game I would go around RECOMMENDING to people sight unseen, but I wouldn’t recommend fuckin, Path of Radiance or Three Houses to anybody off the street either. It’s a worthwhile bit of history if you’re already inclined.

It certainly resembles a lot to chess since, in its own terms, it’s a game majorly about positioning. Sure, there is resource management and a bit of random number trickery, but most of the strategy will revolve around who is where to counter what. Though this could be said of most tile-based strategy games, and the comparison wouldn’t be untrue, something like (ironman) XCOM (forgive my limited knowledge in strategy yet) falls a bit further when the enemy units, or the terrain, are unknown upon arrival, the base management could be its own independent game and it explicitly wants you to take into account, and use, probability percentages. XCOM asks you to take risks and to take all the consequences, no turning back.

Since competing against an AI on equal grounds isn't the most exciting approach to a chess-like game (especially at this era) Fire Emblem looks more like a chess problem. A small hint to this is that the final ranking in further entries is decided taking into account your number of turns. So Fire Emblem ends up having a lot of a puzzle game too.

If everything goes well, a map in Fire Emblem will be completed in one smooth try. But maps are usually designed so that everything goes wrong. The board then turns into a full puzzle where to calculate what the enemy can do when and how to counterattack. Of course, there are some random numbers, mainly affecting criticals and dodges, but those are small things in the greater picture, a reason to restart the level again in the worst case and a small appreciated advantage in the best. Strategizing a map ends up being a planning exercise of eradicating dangers and exploiting weaknesses.

Some problems arise when seeing the game like this. It's not fully transparent like chess since there can be, and usually are, a few hidden surprises on the map and a lot more attention needs to be put to every enemy unit since each is unique unlike the six chess pieces existent. But these secrets end up losing the surprise factor on repetition, eventually becoming just another predictable piece of the board, and errors due to a lack of proper attention end up being resettable. Unlike chess, there are a lot of units to move each turn, and in consequence turns drag on and on with too many uninteresting decisions to repeat in every try.

It could be well questioned that this is not the way to play Fire Emblem at all, except for hardcore fans who seek a good score, that the first try should be about continuing however you can, imagining your own ironman mode because autosaving in every turn was not that possible in the system and keeping only the temporal save would be troublesome in such a long game, in case some outside factor would power off the console. However, that, to my knowledge, not a single Fire Emblem or Shouzou Kaga game has completely erased this saving system makes me think that it is more of a fundamental design element. Furthermore, the conclusive evidence lies in this very first game itself. Finishing a map asks you if you want to save since maybe you are not always sure that you can continue for long just by finishing the map in any state (and maybe, in a lot of cases, you can go on, but what's always sure is that you can retry to optimize the result, resources are too scarce to give them up so easily). And, what would Marth role be? Would he still be the warrior that leads an army by actively taking arms in every battle like any of his soldiers, or would he be the subject of an escort mission where his single death could mean losing dozens of hours of progress?

I see a very thought out strategy game in here, but, ultimately, I see that it's indecisive, it wants you to examine, to try out, but also to surprise you, to clearly punish for your mistakes, and I don't think it finds harmony and rhythm in its proposal. And my biggest fear is that the failure is so fundamental that no Shouzou Kaga or Fire Emblem game can really do anything about it. I'll have to see.

As far as I’m concerned the grand innovation of 1990’s Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is the introduction of mechanics and storytelling concepts typical of JRPGs into the strategy game genre for the purpose of crafting a more intimate ludonarrative. Marriage between gameplay and story, and even the word ludonarrative itself, are kind of played out concepts for games criticism at this point. That being said, the original Fire Emblem stands tall as both a landmark moment in video game history and a remarkable example of the concept even today and, because of that, I think it’s worth discussing. In preparation for this analysis I played the game twice, firstly through its original Famicom release and secondly on the Switch using the 2020 official English localization. I will not be referencing either the Super Famicom or DS remakes of this game, or any other Fire Emblem in this write up. Mild spoilers to follow.

War stories are a common aspect of not just strategy games but games as a whole; and for good reason. The context of a fight to the death is both universally understandable and inherently interesting. In a move clearly inspired by 80’s sci-fi classics like Mobile Suit: Gundam and Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Fire Emblem decides to characterize its combat not through a heavy action focus but through an exploration of the drama, characters, strategy, and resource management associated with large scale conflict. This isn’t to imply that an action focus is somehow “lesser” than what Fire Emblem does, but it was still quite a bold direction for the time.

Those who have played the game may find my mention of “drama” to be curious. As a Famicom game, Fire Emblem’s script is quite small. A cursory search on YouTube shows that all cutscenes in the game including optional village dialogue take less than an hour to watch. In that hour, only the circumstances surrounding a certain late game enemy general can be considered particularly “dramatic.” This, however, is offset by a system that is nothing short of transformative for the game, permadeath. The fact that every single character in your party can die at any given point in the story and that their death has logical mechanical and narrative consequences allows for an absolutely insane level of emergent storytelling for the game. Thanks to Fire Emblem’s focus on encounter variety and level design all of this “emergent storytelling” is also way more complex and interesting than JRPGs of its time. While in the original Dragon Quest one could describe most interactions with “X healed/damaged Y” Fire Emblem provides something richer. “When reinforcements spawned from behind I had to leave Hardin at the fort so he could stall the enemies while Marth raced to the throne, hoping to seize in time before Hardin died.” Instead of relying on narrative expository set pieces to contextualize its battles, Fire Emblem can present you with such a dynamic story entirely through its mechanics AND THEN permadeath ties that scenario right back into the actual narrative. While most characters do not have a very grand effect on the story when they die; thanks to the game's small script every single one affects a more significant part of the story than most games just through their own character endings. And of course the mechanical loss of a character is intrinsically linked to the narrative as we’ve mentioned already. When people speak about a game’s narrative themes being represented in gameplay they often do so through vapid metaphor by saying something like “the necessity of persevering is conveyed through the game rewarding you for pressing on.” Similarly, when developers try to marry their gameplay and narrative often times it is boiled down to a series of transparent binary choices. Fire Emblem did not see fit to articulate itself with such basic design and, as such, cannot be analyzed effectively that way. Even though permadeath is often avoided by series fans through the process of save scumming (and the developers of the original Fire Emblem were keenly aware this would be the case) I implore you to play this game without resetting if you give it a shot. While the process of engineering a so-called “perfect playthrough” can be quite engaging in its own right, the beauty of Fire Emblem is on full display in an “ironman run.”

The intensity lended to every situation by permadeath also does a great deal to characterize the player’s units. While the variety of classes and statistics do a lot of good for making the game's roster feel more diverse, those aforementioned anecdotal play experiences are paramount to characterizing the characters. When speaking about the game. designer Shouzou Kaga said “Yeah, as much as possible, we tried to remove ‘stats’ and numerical data. We tried to make it so that even without relying on stats, players could still get a sense of an enemy being really powerful by how much damage they dealt.” While this ambition to remove stats from a turn based strategy game is on the surface, kind of flawed, the desire to convey characters through their mechanical play experience is something I find to be extremely valuable. If you sit two people down who have played Fire Emblem once, even if they used the same units, they likely have completely different thoughts on how useful they are just by virtue of the dynamic nature of unit growth and combat. The unit growth system is also a very clever design decision in that it allows units to trend toward certain baselines while keeping them varied enough that maps are not linearly solvable in the way traditional puzzle/strategy games are.

Of course in most games the player characters are only half the equation. I suspect that because the characterization of player units is largely determined by the player, Intelligent Systems decided to focus pretty heavily on diversifying enemy behavior. Basic enemies can be stationary, aggressive, wait for you to get within movement range, and even flee to be healed when they’re on low HP. Beyond that about 1/3 of your playable units actually start off as enemies. A cute little detail about this is that because Marth is not an avatar for the player and wouldn’t be aware of which enemies are friendly you often can’t recruit enemies by talking with Marth, instead they have to talk to him of their own accord. Similarly units like Minerva behave irrationally for “enemy” units because of course their disposition as a character is more complex than just being an enemy. This culminates in the iconic 20th chapter of the game “Camus the Sable,” where Fire Emblem spins its most dramatic narrative. The decision to make Camus impossible to recruit is a clear homage to Mobile Suit: Gundam again, but the effectiveness of this trope in adding reality to the world of the original Fire Emblem shouldn’t be understated. Camus is effectively the most complex character in the entire game and you can’t recruit him! The realities of war, where your enemies acknowledge the errors of their way and die for them anyway because of the context of their lives. Good stuff.

Strategy is of course the name of the game with Fire Emblem and even from this first outing most of the mechanics are very well considered. Of particular note to people who may be familiar with the genre is the way Fire Emblem structures its turns to emphasize thinking ahead. In Fire Emblem you have the opportunity to move every player unit once before the enemy gets the opportunity to move all of theirs. The significance of this combined with the relatively predictable AI is that you have to plan to take multiple attacks from the enemy before you are able to respond and don’t have to play as reactive as you would in a game with smaller turns. The game also offers a large amount of incentives for most of its maps that encourage the player to charge ahead and meet the enemy head on to prevent turtling, which would otherwise become a boring and dominant strategy. Every map also requires Marth to seize the throne (well I guess the last one is defeat boss) which is a solid objective when compared to something like routing the enemy as it allows the players to rush the throne with their strong units and warp staff for an early clear or methodically work their way through the map and move their inventory around afterwards if that’s what they’re into. Inventory is honestly quite the drag on this game's pacing. I won’t dwell on it here because it’s not particularly interesting but there’s some convenient tips on how to make it as painless as possible by one of my friends at the bottom of this post.

There are a few other complaints I’ll take the time to make here. Weapon stats and formulas are all contained within the manual but Nintendo of America didn’t actually translate that part of the manual so you’ll have to use sites like Serenes Forest to get weapon stats. Units also make any tile they’re standing on look like a grass tile even when it isn’t one (assumedly because of some sprite limitation) which can be a minor annoyance as terrain is important in this game. Also while most recruitments are pretty transparent as the game makes excellent use of its sparse script in setting up characters and situations, some of them are not very obvious which can lead to very slow trial and error recruitments(Just google it if you don’t know). Marth is also an absurdly strong unit and it seems the AI has a tendency to target him, assumedly because his death can cause a game over, which can lead them to kind of suiciding on him a bit too often.

Yet another stroke of genius in the design of the original Fire Emblem is its limited resource economy. Money balancing is unfortunately way too much in the players favor but the decision to forgo the ability to grind brainlessly to make the game easier, does a lot for the game. Experience is a limited resource in Fire Emblem. It adds a long game of strategy to the experience. At any given time you’re considering trade-offs of options in the short term (surviving the current situation,) mid term (how you outfit your units for the next couple maps,) and long term(which units you plan to take a risk on investing in.) This consideration is almost more reminiscent of classic Resident Evil than it is Dragon Quest. Fire Emblem does actually have a way to grind infinite experience and money though. In maybe one of the games most charming touches, on any map with an arena you can gamble your money on your units ability to win a one on one fight, but if you lose that fight you’re paying with not just your gold but also your life. Some really intense risk reward right there. Good shit.

At the end of the day it’s hard to call Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light anything but a classic. While the game has its misses, particularly in regards to quality of life decisions, this game really does showcase a confident core design philosophy that exemplifies many of the strengths of games as a medium. It’s hard to find a turn-based RPG with a tighter mechanical loop than Fire Emblem. Consider giving it a shot if you have the chance.

Thanks for reading y’all. If you have any feedback I’d love to hear it as I plan to expand on this and then turn it into video. (Also forgot to mention but Tsujiyoko and Tanaka made a straight dootin’ ost)

FE1 Inventory management tips https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/ik7j40/how_to_make_the_fe1_inventory_as_painless_as/

Also go read this
http://shaym.in/fe1/lp.html