(This is the 66th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
The Fire Emblem series returns with its second ever game, Fire Emblem Gaiden, which released on March 14, 1992 exclusively in Japan for the Famicom. Unfortunately, well over a year after the release of the Super Famicom, Intelligent Systems did not decide to bring the series to the fourth generation console quite yet. The game's director is Shouzou Kaga, who would direct Fire Emblem games until 1999.
This game sold over 320.000 units as of 2002. I got a Famitsu score of 28/40, which is indicating that this game is a solid entry, though it is seen as a black sheep in the Fire Emblem series similarly to Zelda II and Castlevania II are looked at for their respective series. The game changes some things up from the original, of which I found some to be positives and some to be detrimental to the strategy aspect of the game, but overall I can't say I was overly negative on them due to the QoL improvements included.
The game received a remake for the Nintendo 3DS in 2017 called Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
This game features dual characters, including a female one. There are maybe 2 or 3 games per year for this challenge so far where protagonists are female, which is why I mention it as something pretty unique. The protagonists are called Alm and Celica. The game has five chapters. The first is a chapter introducing Alm's side of the story, the second is for Celica and the other three include both Alm's and Celica's path once per chapter.
Alm and Celica were separated during their childhood and meet during the end of Chapter 2, where a disagreement in course of action makes them go their separate ways. The disagreement is regarding the events forming this game's story. The story plays in two kingdoms, Rigel and Zofia. Zofia Castle's king is killed and the kingdom is taken over by general Desaix, which prompts a character called Lukas to ask Alm's uncle Mycen to guide the liberation army. Mycen declines, so Alm goes in his stead to liberate Zofia and save the continent of Valentia.
Meanwhile, Celica seeks to find out what happened to the deity Mila, whose blessings helped crops to grow on earth. Since her disappearance, crops stopped growing, and after three years, Celica had enough.
So Celica's journey of discovery and Alm's journey of liberation happen alongside one another and intertwine at certain points. The story is told through a bit of dialogue here and there like in the original, but it overall simply boils down to the names of kingdoms and rulers mentioned a bunch of times, protagonists promising to save people and antagonists promising to make them pay for it. The game does the, for the time, unique thing of telling a story from a dual perspective, rather than telling a unique story. Games at the time wouldn't and couldn't spend much time on story vs gameplay, so in that sense a dual perspective might be ahead of its time, in that it doesn't really work that well. You have a hard time getting to know a single protagonist in a game, let alone two.
Then there is the issue of pacing and time allocation. In Final Fantasy IV for example, I'd say about 30% of the time is spent with dialogue, "cut scenes" and general enemy-less exploration. This is almost required because the combat itself is not varied enough to offer you an enjoyable time without it feeling incredibly repetitive. Now mind you, I'm looking at this from a (young) adult's perspective, not a child's perspective, who wouldn't mind mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again, and who's perspectives therefore are not a benchmark for quality. Meanwhile, Fire Emblem Gaiden will take you 30-40 hours to beat and gets very repetitive even after a few hours. I'll go over that in the other segments of this review, but know that you don't get 30% of story rewards. You're lucky if it's in the 5-10% range.
Without this sort of reward consistently, this game becomes a slog to play through and the story suffers from it as a result. More dialogue and fewer stages would definitely not have hurt this game.
GAMEPLAY | 10/20
Fire Emblem Gaiden plays similarly to the original, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. This is a turn-based strategy RPG with battles playing out on grid-based small maps. Each unit has specific stats like POWER, which is the value for damage output, DEFENSE, which controlls the amount of damage taken, SPEED, which determines how many steps a unit can take and a few more. Units also either have classes assigned to them, which seem to all be the same as in the original, OR they start as villagers for example and can then be upgraded a class after they level up. Unlike the original, where specific items had to be given to units for them to be promoted to a new class, here, you have to approach some sort of blessing fountain in one of the few caves you will find from time to time.
There are a couple of other changes in this game as well. In the original, to buy new items, you would have to move your units to a store on a battle map and have them purchase whatever they needed. For this, you either needed to clear out the map first to do it without being disrupted, or you would need to take this unit out of battle for the time being. Either way, it was annoying and just added a lot of additional turns to each battle/chapter. Here, items can easily be given to and swapped between units before and after every battle thanks to an overworld screen that is new here.
Another change is weapon degradation. In the original, iron swords for example would have 18 (?) hits in them before breaking. Here, no weapon that I found could never break, and from what I've read, only special weapons have limited uses assigned to them. The optimist would call this a QoL feature, the pessimist would say this reduces the strategic element of this feature.
Regarding the overworld screen, I don't particularly like it. On paper, it's a great addition, and the QoL improvements that come with it are appreciated. But what this overworld allowed the game designers to do is to make it optional to go back to areas you've been in before. And optional in the early 90s meant mandatory grinding based on my understanding. For example, there are caves you enter where you beat a group of enemies, which allows you to bless a unit with health/power/defense/speed buffs. You can enter a cave, beat the enemies and choose a unit to buff as many times as you want. I did not do this more than once after initially going through those caves.
At the beginning of Chapter 3 then, I went into battle and was met with a couple dozen enemies, most of which were strong Knights. The game gave me 5 or 6 units up to this point, and I had lost one prior. With the one's I had, it didn't matter what I did, I got demolished every time. I assume I had to grind those caves? Because there was literally nothing else to do. But here is my issue: Why is grinding included in a strategy game? Give me the same tools you give everyone else and let my decisions impact the outcome. Don't make me sit there for 10 hours and watch as the slowest battle animations of all time play out hundred times per battle. In fact, watching animations will easily be 70-80% of what you do in this game.
These difficulty spikes / grind necessitating encounters are in general demonstrative of two of the game's issues in gameplay. I discussed the grind part already, but the difficulty spikes coming in right after you breezed through the previous hours is also very annoying. This issue is only exacerbated by the fact that the map design in this game is really poor, at least for the first 7 hours I played. First, there is barely anywhere to go. A lot of maps include one staircase or bridge that you and the enemies can approach each other, which makes for awkward back-and-forths. A lot of maps also include enemies positioned in two or three locations, while you often start at the bottom right corner. Generally speaking, you move once and the enemies are already right next to you from at least two directions, and all of this just reduces the impact that strategy can make in this game. Add in that the game is very much RNG-dependent (I just love games where over half of the attacks during the first few hours miss) and you certainly got a turn-based fighting game, but limited strategy and even more limited RPG elements to make the title worthy of the genre it places itself in.
Overall, I felt like the original was definitely more enjoyable than this, despite some time-wasting shenanigans included there (stores in battle maps) that were fixed here. Overall, this game just feels bloated with not much to show for it, and I can't say it aged well in terms of gameplay. Hopefully, the move to the SNES in 1994 rectifies a lot of this.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting. The sound design is typical for the NES, though of course very grounded compared to platformer type NES games, so I can't say it played any factor here, neither positive nor negative. The soundtrack, based on the time I've played, sounded generally OK but not all that impressive. Listening the OST, I did find a few tracks that I actually think sound pretty good. In the original, my favorite track had been 'Trouble', the opening theme for each chapter. Here, I can recommend giving 'The Slumbering Labyrinth' a listen. Apart from that, battle and chapter themes sound fine but uninspired, and some tracks sound like they've been copied from other games from this time period, though I can't name which exactly. 'The Fiends Rapture' and 'Warring Powers' for example I definitely heard somewhere else before.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
It's 1992 and the SNES has existed for about a year and a half now. This game is of course for the NES and at this point, graphically behind now, and it's noticeable both because I played games like Contra III, Super Castlevania IV and A Link to the Past very recently, but also because a game like Bucky O'Hare for the NES also is graphically much more impressive through diversity in environments and attention to detail. This game places you in plain grass fields and you enter battle mode with a simple black background. It's nice to see sprite animations while units simply stand around I suppose, but environments constantly looking the same and lacking both detail and color does not make for a great sight graphically at this point.
Then again, I had similar complaints for the original already. Just like I said for the sake of both story and gameplay, reducing the length of the game would have probably impacted graphics positively as well, as some memory space would have been saved up to use more than the handful of assets present here (I'm being facetious).
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 6/10
There are some things I liked atmospherically. Some characters apart from the main protagonists actually have a bit of personality, they say their final words whenever they fall in battle and there are some nice story scenes, like the first meeting between Alm and Celica. It also helps that there is an overworld where we can see the locations of the kingdoms. Atmosphere and immersion didn't receive heavy considerations here of course, but it's more than I expected.
CONTENT | 4/10
The game has 30 to 40 hours of content. What good does it do the player however if it is mostly the same stuff, and when 25 of those 30 hours includes looking at battle animations that play out slowly? There should have been fewer levels, quicker animations and a bit more story to strike a better balance like Final Fantasy IV managed recently.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
There are maybe 10 stages per protagonist per chapter, and a few towns and caves you can also visit to get distracted from the main path. In Chapter 2, there is also an optional dragon you can fight, and that dragon plus all bosses drop special items you can equip your units with. Unfortunately, the map design in this game I found to be very poor and restricting, strategic elements felt like they were less relevant at times as a result and I really don't understand why the game expects me to go backwards and grind in a strategy game. I can't explain any other way how the first stage of Chapter 3 destroyed me otherwise, as I had taken the correct path and had every unit but one alive at that point. In general, random difficulty spikes are additional proof that balance is not great in this game's design.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
A strategy RPG has a lot of potential, and the Fire Emblem is obviously pretty popular in modern times. In this game, you have a situation where 1) there already was an original game which did nearly everything that this game does, 2) you have little innovation and not all of it is good and 3) you don't even make the jump to the next gen of consoles, even though it come out 1.5 years ago at this point. The game feels like the devs just at one point said "why AREN'T we working on an SNES game again? Ah you know what, just quickly make a few dozen stages and let's ship this, so we can start on the next one". Future entries in the series have a lot more potential here, but this one doesn't reach it.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
I doubt many people these days would be interested in playing this game again after beating it the first time. Strategy games usually should have a bit more replayability than this game has to offer though, as battles usually can be fought in different ways. Here, at least for the first 7 hours, it didn't feel like you could change up much because the map restricts you so much. And considering that most of the time spent is watching animations play out, I can't imagine many people want to go through that again.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 50/100
Not great. There is a remake for this game, as mentioned, so if you want to experience the story (but in much more detail) and experience how the gameplay looked like (more or less) just go for that I would say. There wasn't really anything here that was memorable, and the most positive thing I could say is that it's clear that the mix of genres this game is going for has potential that is not being realized here. The next game comes out for the SNES, so I have higher hopes there.
The Fire Emblem series returns with its second ever game, Fire Emblem Gaiden, which released on March 14, 1992 exclusively in Japan for the Famicom. Unfortunately, well over a year after the release of the Super Famicom, Intelligent Systems did not decide to bring the series to the fourth generation console quite yet. The game's director is Shouzou Kaga, who would direct Fire Emblem games until 1999.
This game sold over 320.000 units as of 2002. I got a Famitsu score of 28/40, which is indicating that this game is a solid entry, though it is seen as a black sheep in the Fire Emblem series similarly to Zelda II and Castlevania II are looked at for their respective series. The game changes some things up from the original, of which I found some to be positives and some to be detrimental to the strategy aspect of the game, but overall I can't say I was overly negative on them due to the QoL improvements included.
The game received a remake for the Nintendo 3DS in 2017 called Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
This game features dual characters, including a female one. There are maybe 2 or 3 games per year for this challenge so far where protagonists are female, which is why I mention it as something pretty unique. The protagonists are called Alm and Celica. The game has five chapters. The first is a chapter introducing Alm's side of the story, the second is for Celica and the other three include both Alm's and Celica's path once per chapter.
Alm and Celica were separated during their childhood and meet during the end of Chapter 2, where a disagreement in course of action makes them go their separate ways. The disagreement is regarding the events forming this game's story. The story plays in two kingdoms, Rigel and Zofia. Zofia Castle's king is killed and the kingdom is taken over by general Desaix, which prompts a character called Lukas to ask Alm's uncle Mycen to guide the liberation army. Mycen declines, so Alm goes in his stead to liberate Zofia and save the continent of Valentia.
Meanwhile, Celica seeks to find out what happened to the deity Mila, whose blessings helped crops to grow on earth. Since her disappearance, crops stopped growing, and after three years, Celica had enough.
So Celica's journey of discovery and Alm's journey of liberation happen alongside one another and intertwine at certain points. The story is told through a bit of dialogue here and there like in the original, but it overall simply boils down to the names of kingdoms and rulers mentioned a bunch of times, protagonists promising to save people and antagonists promising to make them pay for it. The game does the, for the time, unique thing of telling a story from a dual perspective, rather than telling a unique story. Games at the time wouldn't and couldn't spend much time on story vs gameplay, so in that sense a dual perspective might be ahead of its time, in that it doesn't really work that well. You have a hard time getting to know a single protagonist in a game, let alone two.
Then there is the issue of pacing and time allocation. In Final Fantasy IV for example, I'd say about 30% of the time is spent with dialogue, "cut scenes" and general enemy-less exploration. This is almost required because the combat itself is not varied enough to offer you an enjoyable time without it feeling incredibly repetitive. Now mind you, I'm looking at this from a (young) adult's perspective, not a child's perspective, who wouldn't mind mindlessly doing the same thing over and over again, and who's perspectives therefore are not a benchmark for quality. Meanwhile, Fire Emblem Gaiden will take you 30-40 hours to beat and gets very repetitive even after a few hours. I'll go over that in the other segments of this review, but know that you don't get 30% of story rewards. You're lucky if it's in the 5-10% range.
Without this sort of reward consistently, this game becomes a slog to play through and the story suffers from it as a result. More dialogue and fewer stages would definitely not have hurt this game.
GAMEPLAY | 10/20
Fire Emblem Gaiden plays similarly to the original, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. This is a turn-based strategy RPG with battles playing out on grid-based small maps. Each unit has specific stats like POWER, which is the value for damage output, DEFENSE, which controlls the amount of damage taken, SPEED, which determines how many steps a unit can take and a few more. Units also either have classes assigned to them, which seem to all be the same as in the original, OR they start as villagers for example and can then be upgraded a class after they level up. Unlike the original, where specific items had to be given to units for them to be promoted to a new class, here, you have to approach some sort of blessing fountain in one of the few caves you will find from time to time.
There are a couple of other changes in this game as well. In the original, to buy new items, you would have to move your units to a store on a battle map and have them purchase whatever they needed. For this, you either needed to clear out the map first to do it without being disrupted, or you would need to take this unit out of battle for the time being. Either way, it was annoying and just added a lot of additional turns to each battle/chapter. Here, items can easily be given to and swapped between units before and after every battle thanks to an overworld screen that is new here.
Another change is weapon degradation. In the original, iron swords for example would have 18 (?) hits in them before breaking. Here, no weapon that I found could never break, and from what I've read, only special weapons have limited uses assigned to them. The optimist would call this a QoL feature, the pessimist would say this reduces the strategic element of this feature.
Regarding the overworld screen, I don't particularly like it. On paper, it's a great addition, and the QoL improvements that come with it are appreciated. But what this overworld allowed the game designers to do is to make it optional to go back to areas you've been in before. And optional in the early 90s meant mandatory grinding based on my understanding. For example, there are caves you enter where you beat a group of enemies, which allows you to bless a unit with health/power/defense/speed buffs. You can enter a cave, beat the enemies and choose a unit to buff as many times as you want. I did not do this more than once after initially going through those caves.
At the beginning of Chapter 3 then, I went into battle and was met with a couple dozen enemies, most of which were strong Knights. The game gave me 5 or 6 units up to this point, and I had lost one prior. With the one's I had, it didn't matter what I did, I got demolished every time. I assume I had to grind those caves? Because there was literally nothing else to do. But here is my issue: Why is grinding included in a strategy game? Give me the same tools you give everyone else and let my decisions impact the outcome. Don't make me sit there for 10 hours and watch as the slowest battle animations of all time play out hundred times per battle. In fact, watching animations will easily be 70-80% of what you do in this game.
These difficulty spikes / grind necessitating encounters are in general demonstrative of two of the game's issues in gameplay. I discussed the grind part already, but the difficulty spikes coming in right after you breezed through the previous hours is also very annoying. This issue is only exacerbated by the fact that the map design in this game is really poor, at least for the first 7 hours I played. First, there is barely anywhere to go. A lot of maps include one staircase or bridge that you and the enemies can approach each other, which makes for awkward back-and-forths. A lot of maps also include enemies positioned in two or three locations, while you often start at the bottom right corner. Generally speaking, you move once and the enemies are already right next to you from at least two directions, and all of this just reduces the impact that strategy can make in this game. Add in that the game is very much RNG-dependent (I just love games where over half of the attacks during the first few hours miss) and you certainly got a turn-based fighting game, but limited strategy and even more limited RPG elements to make the title worthy of the genre it places itself in.
Overall, I felt like the original was definitely more enjoyable than this, despite some time-wasting shenanigans included there (stores in battle maps) that were fixed here. Overall, this game just feels bloated with not much to show for it, and I can't say it aged well in terms of gameplay. Hopefully, the move to the SNES in 1994 rectifies a lot of this.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting. The sound design is typical for the NES, though of course very grounded compared to platformer type NES games, so I can't say it played any factor here, neither positive nor negative. The soundtrack, based on the time I've played, sounded generally OK but not all that impressive. Listening the OST, I did find a few tracks that I actually think sound pretty good. In the original, my favorite track had been 'Trouble', the opening theme for each chapter. Here, I can recommend giving 'The Slumbering Labyrinth' a listen. Apart from that, battle and chapter themes sound fine but uninspired, and some tracks sound like they've been copied from other games from this time period, though I can't name which exactly. 'The Fiends Rapture' and 'Warring Powers' for example I definitely heard somewhere else before.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
It's 1992 and the SNES has existed for about a year and a half now. This game is of course for the NES and at this point, graphically behind now, and it's noticeable both because I played games like Contra III, Super Castlevania IV and A Link to the Past very recently, but also because a game like Bucky O'Hare for the NES also is graphically much more impressive through diversity in environments and attention to detail. This game places you in plain grass fields and you enter battle mode with a simple black background. It's nice to see sprite animations while units simply stand around I suppose, but environments constantly looking the same and lacking both detail and color does not make for a great sight graphically at this point.
Then again, I had similar complaints for the original already. Just like I said for the sake of both story and gameplay, reducing the length of the game would have probably impacted graphics positively as well, as some memory space would have been saved up to use more than the handful of assets present here (I'm being facetious).
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 6/10
There are some things I liked atmospherically. Some characters apart from the main protagonists actually have a bit of personality, they say their final words whenever they fall in battle and there are some nice story scenes, like the first meeting between Alm and Celica. It also helps that there is an overworld where we can see the locations of the kingdoms. Atmosphere and immersion didn't receive heavy considerations here of course, but it's more than I expected.
CONTENT | 4/10
The game has 30 to 40 hours of content. What good does it do the player however if it is mostly the same stuff, and when 25 of those 30 hours includes looking at battle animations that play out slowly? There should have been fewer levels, quicker animations and a bit more story to strike a better balance like Final Fantasy IV managed recently.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 4/10
There are maybe 10 stages per protagonist per chapter, and a few towns and caves you can also visit to get distracted from the main path. In Chapter 2, there is also an optional dragon you can fight, and that dragon plus all bosses drop special items you can equip your units with. Unfortunately, the map design in this game I found to be very poor and restricting, strategic elements felt like they were less relevant at times as a result and I really don't understand why the game expects me to go backwards and grind in a strategy game. I can't explain any other way how the first stage of Chapter 3 destroyed me otherwise, as I had taken the correct path and had every unit but one alive at that point. In general, random difficulty spikes are additional proof that balance is not great in this game's design.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
A strategy RPG has a lot of potential, and the Fire Emblem is obviously pretty popular in modern times. In this game, you have a situation where 1) there already was an original game which did nearly everything that this game does, 2) you have little innovation and not all of it is good and 3) you don't even make the jump to the next gen of consoles, even though it come out 1.5 years ago at this point. The game feels like the devs just at one point said "why AREN'T we working on an SNES game again? Ah you know what, just quickly make a few dozen stages and let's ship this, so we can start on the next one". Future entries in the series have a lot more potential here, but this one doesn't reach it.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
I doubt many people these days would be interested in playing this game again after beating it the first time. Strategy games usually should have a bit more replayability than this game has to offer though, as battles usually can be fought in different ways. Here, at least for the first 7 hours, it didn't feel like you could change up much because the map restricts you so much. And considering that most of the time spent is watching animations play out, I can't imagine many people want to go through that again.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 50/100
Not great. There is a remake for this game, as mentioned, so if you want to experience the story (but in much more detail) and experience how the gameplay looked like (more or less) just go for that I would say. There wasn't really anything here that was memorable, and the most positive thing I could say is that it's clear that the mix of genres this game is going for has potential that is not being realized here. The next game comes out for the SNES, so I have higher hopes there.