Marm: The Dawn Brigade tells one of Fire Emblem’s most compelling stories, arguably. What happens after the tyrant is deposed? It’s our first time taking the perspective of the occupied citizens of a country, and our first time taking the side of the defeated Enemy, with a capital E. It’s an important story to tell: there are still people there, and they’re going to be treated just as terribly as the occupied Crimeans of the previous game. Can you call your heroes just, then? Can you call them good? Maybe you can still do that, but you can’t call them flawless. Micaiah’s side serves the purpose of showing there is no blameless side in war.
Gameplay-wise, the Dawn Brigade offers some of the most fun challenges in the series, partly owing to the fact that they’re woefully underpowered compared to the rest of the cast. It is well-woven into the narrative, too-- You play as a bunch of scrap fighters vying for freedom. Most of your squad isn’t even properly trained in combat. Nolan’s a merchant, Micaiah’s a fortune teller, Leonardo and Edward are just a couple street urchins with a strong sense of justice. Even Sothe. This last one might have experience in war, more so than most, but he’s still just a thief; he’s not meant to be a combat unit, and he’s definitely not an officer or a tactician or anything of the sort.
As hard as the river chapter, the laguz brigands chapter or the defend chapters against the GMs are, they offer some of the most compelling challenges in FE.
Braden: The role the Dawn Brigade plays is a great one, just as Marm said. I do agree though that lack of real support conversations in the game hurt the newly introduced characters (although some of this is remedied in the Tellius Recollection books, where Edward, Leonardo, and Nolan all get some established backstory). Beyond that, I also agree with Marm on how fun it is to be challenged during the DB chapters, I just think that they needed some more playtime to catch up to the rest of the cast by the time Part 4 rolls around.
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Criticism: Haar trivializes the whole game
Marm: First, while Haar has amazing availability for Radiant Dawn, he’s still unavailable on half the maps you play. Technicality aside, the point is that Haar is overpowered. That’s not exactly wrong, but it’s not exactly right, either. We, the fire emblem fandom, are well aware of just how powerful the man is, and through us that knowledge has spread. Knowingly, most of us will invest a lot of early part 2 exp into Haar to really maximize his efficiency and make the harder part 2 and part 3 maps easier, to say nothing of part 4 onwards. Some people will even have him and Lucia promoted to tier 3 by the end of Part 2 by really abusing their exp intake.
We need to remind ourselves that that is not how most players play.
The average player, who isn’t as invested into the series as we are, or who is playing the game for the first time, will not have foresight into the rest of the game. Haar remains a powerful unit, but without that prior knowledge, it’s hard for him to become the gamebreaking unit that he possibly can be.
And even if he is, I posit that that is not a bad thing. Numerous fire emblem games have characters that are overpowered and make challenge and ltc runs dramatically easier. Think along the lines of Seth from Sacred Stones or Sigurd in FE4 part 1. All of them trivialize the difficulty of their games when put into the hands of seasoned players who’ve done a prior playthrough. In a way, learning to maximize their battle prowess and make the game faster and easier is the reward you get for returning to the game another time.
Grant: Having an OP juggernaut is not a problem unique to Radiant Dawn. Every Fire Emblem game in the franchise has at least one, if not several. If you’re going to criticize Radiant Dawn for this you should at least be consistent and criticize every game since they all do it. This is why I devoted an entire post to this subject 3 years ago in my “10 Tips to Improve the Series” list:
http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2015/11/ten-tips-to-improve-fire-emblem-5.html
It’s a problem with the franchise, not just one particular game. While I’m on the topic of pointing out patterns I’ve noticed something about the Fire Emblem fandom as a whole: When it comes to criticizing balance we tend to criticize balancing issues in games we don’t like while turning a blind eye for the games that we do like. Most of the people who criticize Haar being OP in Radiant Dawn generally don’t criticize Sacred Stones where Seth’s dominance is a much bigger problem or Sigurd dominating Holy War or Marcus dominating FE 7.
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Criticism: You can 1 turn Part 2 Endgame: Elincia’s Gambit.
Grant: On the one hand it’s true that you can 1 turn Elincia’s Gambit. I agree with the criticism that this map is poorly designed. If I were doing a map design series on Radiant Dawn and came to this map I would rate it as a “fail”. So why am I bothering to type something about it in a Radiant Dawn “Defense Against the Dark Arts Criticisms” post? Well Elincia’s Gambit is poorly designed but the hate against it feels disproportionate to the amount of suckage it provides.
For starters I wouldn’t even rate Elincia’s Gambit in a “Top 10 Worst Designed Maps” list. Yes it sucks and can be easily trivialized, but it’s FAR from the worst map designed in the series thus far. One point that my Map Design Ratings series brought into focus was that no Fire Emblem game has perfect map design across the board. Every Fire Emblem game, including Thracia 776 (the game with the best map design in the series), has at least a few poorly designed maps. Here’s a small, non-comprehensive list of maps that in my opinion are more poorly designed than Elincia’s Gambit:
Phantom Ship (Ephraim Route in Sacred Stones): This map has Fog of War, which means that it actively holds information back from the player. Space is so limited that unit positioning hardly matters and waiting for unknown flying enemies to pop up out of nowhere is really bad design. At least Elincia’s Gambit can be finished quickly.
Anri’s Way (Fire Emblem 3 Book 2, Chapter 11): Oh boy! A desert map with large chunks of empty space that serves no purpose. Did I also mention that it has super weak enemies too? Terrific! But wait, there’s more! How could we forget that tedious desert gimmick that over incentivizes fliers and becomes a slog for most infantry units?
Chapter 24x of Thracia 776: Super cheap warp tile gimmicks for the fail! Also, fog of war exists. Meanwhile enemy bishops warp enemies at you.
The Furry Genocide chapter from Conquest (aka Chapter 19): Super annoying gimmick that drags out the entire pace of the map in addition to enemies that punish weak units but don’t stand a chance against the player’s best units. Did someone say lowmanning? Oh and did I mention that a Beast Killer obliterates every unit on the map?
The sad thing is that I can keep on giving example after example of maps that suck way harder than Elincia’s Gambit. The point here is that it’s not worth the HUGE amounts of hate that I see it get. Heck, the desert map in Part 4 of Radiant Dawn is more poorly designed than Elincia’s Gambit. So in conclusion: Yes Elincia’s Gambit sucks, but it’s not the worst map by a long shot
Marm: In my opinion Elincia’s gambit is one of the best maps in the series. It doesn’t matter that you can 1 or 2 turn it-- this speaks to the ingenuity of the players, if anything. 1 turning with Haar requires significant investment in him, whilst 1 turning with Elincia requires the foresight of removing Mercy from her skillset.
To a larger extent, so many maps can be 1 or 2 turned in Fire Emblem in general, and no one ever calls those out. Warp skipping, dancing, flying and rescuing shenanigans, shove shenanigans in PoR.. I’ve done drafts and ltcs before. If your goal is to cheese FE, then you’ll cheese it. It’s inherent to the ingenuity of the series. (Notable exception to FE4, owing to its awfully large maps-- there’s a limit to what you can do). Is it a bad map for rewarding you for using the tools at your disposal? I think not. A player that wants to gain their exp or employ a safe defensive strategy will have a lot of fun in Elincia’s gambit.
Alan: Elincia’s Gambit is one of the most memorable maps for me in Radiant Dawn. As a dumb child, I spent about a week trying to clear it because I didn’t realize that Elincia was basically a War Goddess disguised as a support unit. Then, I saw that you can one turn it with Elincia and I was flabbergasted. Everything you do in order to do it seems like a violation of common sense - there are crossbowmen in range to shoot Elincia down, and they would if Ludveck weren’t so quick on the draw. It’s ridiculous.
That said, there are plenty of really nice items that you miss out on if you one turn the map. The nullify scroll, a silver greatlance, an energy drop, Olivi Grass, and a possible dracoshield can all be claimed on this map in one way or another. As such, playing this map casually can be a joy, but the LTC option that breaks the map is an option as well. It all depends on how you’re playing the map.
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Criticism: Laguz units who aren't Royals suck. Laguz Royals 2 OP Plox Nerf.
Marm: Laguz units are definitely an issue in this game, in that not only are they kind of awful in general, but even if you decide to use them, you’re limited to one or two owing to their over reliance on items like Olivi grass and laguz stones. Volug being half-shift-locked in part 1 really doesn’t help, either.
Still, raising laguz units and learning to abuse their exp gain by having them receive attacks and retaliate in human form is part of the fun. Granted, that’s really all there is to be said on this topic, since all of the regular laguz are overshadowed in the end by…
The laguz royals, which are what I’m actually aiming to defend in this post. See, the laguz royals are the end result of gameplay and story integration, in which we know for a fact, for we’ve been told numerous times by the point we even get Nailah, that Laguz societies let their most powerful warrior lead the tribe. It stands to reason, then, that all of these incredibly powerful characters, lore-wise, should be equally powerful gameplay-wise. How underwhelming would it be if you finally got your hands on Caineghis or Tibarn and it turned out that they sucked, or just performed about as well as your other units? No game could justify that, after the exposure they’ve given these characters.
Radiant Dawn’s endgame is designed to be a crowning moment of awesome for the saga. The point of it isn’t exactly to challenge you-- it’s there to gratify you. It is designed to let you indulge in using these nigh legendary characters, weapons and spells, the sort of retaliation one imagines is necessary if there is to be hope in defeating a Goddess championed by countless, oft-revived soldiers. It’s there to make you feel good for sticking with the games, and I for one believe it succeeds at it in part thanks to the inclusion of the royals. Because the one thing that would have really sucked is never seeing Caineghis battle. We needed to experience just how absolutely formidable he is. How Giffca’s claim that Ashnard was no threat to his king was no boast.
Alan: I’ve never really liked Laguz, but I’ve particularly never been a fan of how they work in RD. They’re either so weak they die while in human form or decently strong, but not earning any exp, in beast form. As such, I think they’re gimmicky and overall just not that good.
Laguz royals though. They’re mega rad. Some people might think “This game’s telling me that all the units I worked for to get here are worthless now,” but you can also think of it another way. If you made it this far, the game wants to ensure that you can see it through to the end. That’s why we usually get Gotohs in most games, but Radiant Dawn gives you SO MANY that it’s a little ridiculous. And I love it. The fact that the game talks up how strong the Laguz kings are and then they let you play with it the one time the game can reasonably find the excuse to put them all in your hands at the same time leads to a very empowering endgame romp.
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Criticism: Biorhythm Sucks
Grant: I haven’t noticed the effect that biorhythm has had on Radiant Dawn. I find the complaints of this to be wholly exaggerated. It really doesn’t affect much of the game, if at all.
Braden: Biorhythm is almost entirely insignificant. It definitely doesn’t have any reason to keep it around, but it doesn’t make the game unplayable to the extent that some people seem to exaggerate it to at times.
Alan: Biorhythm is kind of lame, but it’s not that big of a deal. The only times I can think of it actually being a pain is Hard Mode Part 1, where the Dawn Brigade kind of needs to be at their best at all times and stats aren’t high enough to make it less of a factor.
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