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> Results: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
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Fire Emblem for Game Boy Advance is one of those games that helps define a system. It featured stellar strategy gameplay mixed with a fair bit of role-playing, great graphics, a superb musical score and even a great story. It was a game with plenty of character that went far beyond the norm to supply gamers with something polished and exciting in every way. Since that was the first iteration of this long running Japanese series to appear in the US, it makes Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance the first entry in this series to appear on a home console here in the States as well, despite there being Super Nintendo iterations that never made their way here. With that move to consoles comes a 3D game engine and some new additions to the already great gameplay.
The 3D graphics are really the biggest change to the game from the Game Boy entries. It's a very different look for this series that has always excelled in hand drawn graphical brilliance. The 3D is not as pretty as the 2D artwork in the Game Boy games, but these are still some great looking characters and animated effects. Between battles, all the story scenes are still rendered with hand drawn character portraits. These are still created in the top quality art that has characterized the series up to now. The story itself is one of a princess and some mercenaries and a boy coming of age. It's not thing spectacular, but it does provide a great setting for fantasy strategy gameplay. Gameplay is turn-based and requires a lot of careful thought during each turn. Moving characters to use their abilities to the maximum is always crucial to your success. If a character's life points run out, they're dead and gone never to return. This puts a premium on tactical thinking and forces the player to exercise cautious aggression. It's here that Fire Emblem in any form can be boiled down to "those who get it" and "those who don't". The game is designed such that minimal character losses will still allow you to finish the game. If you lose too many of your people, or you the main character dies, then you will have to replay the mission. This doesn't happen very often, though. Only if you expose your main character to constant peril will you find yourself replaying sections of the game. If you take an aggressive yet conservative approach where you never leave anyone vulnerable for too long, you will blaze through to the end of the game, driven by the story and the awesome strategic challenges. If you insist on having everyone survive to the end, then you will frustrate yourself unnecessarily and become angry with the game design. It's a hard thing for people to accept character death, having been trained by nearly every game before Fire Emblem to have to keep everyone and everything alive except the bad guys. You have to break with tradition to understand the awesome appeal of a game with real consequences.  If you accept perma-death as a feature and not a problem, then this game will top your favorites for it delicious stew of meaningful tactical decisions. You know you have to beat the big, bad guy at the end of some maps, but picking who will do it and how is a lot of the fun! As characters level up, they become more powerful. Taking the ones that are the weakest and making them the strongest absolutely has its rewards. The characters that start out strong actually progress much slower so that the ones you nurture eventually eclipse them by a huge amount later on. There are other neat features such as the support system which causes special side conversations to occur when characters fight alongside each other during missions. This also provides a bonus to those characters that is worth the extra effort to position them accordingly. However, you can skip it entirely if you prefer. New weapons and items provide all sorts of bonuses and changes to the base concept where swords beat axes, axes beat lances and lances beat swords. The game never lets up when it comes to providing you with superb tactical gameplay. The biggest problem with all of this is that it really is very similar to what's come before in the two Game Boy Advance Fire Emblem games. If you haven't played either of those, this one will probably be a revelation. Certainly it's not like anything else available anywhere else. However, if you slaved over every support conversation and played all the permutations of the missions in the prior games, then you're going to see this as more of the same. That's still some of the best more of the same money can buy so it's really hard to find fault with Nintendo bringing the best Game Boy Advance has to offer onto their home console. The 3D graphics slow down the battles a little bit because the attacks execute slower than they do in 2D on the handhelds, and they're maybe a little less impressive, but overall this is one game that no self-respecting strategy fan should be without. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is a great option for people looking for something a little more cerebral and a little less twitchy.  
This game is a marvelous way to show people how a Teen rated game can be far more adult than anything rated Mature. People die in this game, and they do it in a way that's mostly realistic and sometimes followed by callous remarks and even real grief. The story is intelligent and seriously divulged through well-written text. In some ways, it's even more a game for adults than something like the silly posturing in a Dead or Alive game. It fits squarely into the Teen rating it receives and even though younger kids could watch it and even play it, the text is sometimes brutally honest about death, anger and evil. It's great to find a game that doesn't need angsty, poorly clothed women to be more mature.
The battles are nicely suited to teens from a difficulty standpoint too. The interface is easy to grasp and the simplicity of moving and attacking makes it no problem to get into playing right out of the box. Teens and adults will love digging into the nuances of the gameplay and they will enjoy the story too. Only Fire Emblem fans are going to find anything to complain about and most of them will just be concerned that they're getting another game that's too similar to the ones that came before. This review edited by Dave Long Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "Fire Emblem" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance |
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