Fire Emblem Gaiden

Nickname: Hipster Emblem

                         Obvious statement in 3….2….1… Gaiden is a really old game. The reason why I bring this up is because most of Gaiden’s flaws stem from the fact that it’s really, really old. I can already see some people giving it a pass for being retro which I totally get but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. More importantly, there are flaws in Gaiden that result from its design choices that I’ll get into later on in this review. In case you’re wondering why I’m nicknaming this game “Hipster Emblem” it’s because virtually nobody’s played it and this game has gotten some positive attention from people who have. I am not one of those people. Despite the negativity in my Awakening review, I actually dislike Gaiden more for reasons that I’m about to explain.

               Story & Characters: I’m grouping these two categories together because there isn’t much to write about here. It’s an old-school Nintendo game, so temper your expectations accordingly. The characters barely have a few lines and none of them say much, if anything about the character’s personalities. Support conversations haven’t been invented yet either so take that into consideration to.

                       The plot is pretty bare bones. Alm’s country of Sofia has been taken over by the country of Rigel prior to the start of the game’s story. Alm decides that enough is enough so he decides to lead a revolt. Meanwhile Celica also plans to start revolting against Rigel as well. That’s about all there is to the story. The only potentially spoiler in this game revolves around a character named Rudolf. Other than that it’s pretty basic and “bare-bones”. I guess the good news is that you really can’t poke holes in its story, but then again that’s because there really isn’t a story to poke holes into in the first place. Moving on….

                         Soundtrack: This game’s soundtrack is surprisingly catchy for an 8 bit game. The track at Mila’s Shrine (see video below) is one of those tracks that’ll get stuck in your head forever. Well, at least it does for me. I mean this in a good way since I happen to like it. The other tracks are basic. The game makes the most out of its technology and there are a few good tunes in here.

                   Gameplay: And here comes the main crux of the review. Mechanically speaking Gaiden is unique in comparison to other Fire Emblem games. Some of those unique mechanics work in Gaiden’s favor, others don’t. Before we begin, let’s give Gaiden credit where credit is due. Gaiden invented several mechanics that have been reused at least once in future installments of the game.

• The World Map (brought back in Sacred Stones and Awakening)

• Third Tiers (brought back in Radiant Dawn)

• Removal of weapon durability (Fates recently brought that back although Fates added its own strategy to the mix which in my opinion improved the strategy overall)

• Branched Promotion (Brought back in Sacred Stones)

                        I should also point out most of the monsters that you see in Sacred Stones were originally in Gaiden first. Sacred Stones did add a couple of monsters of their own, but most of them are originally from Gaiden. The following is a list of positives and negatives that I’ve come up with:

Positives

• The Angel Ring: There’s an item that automatically amps your luck to 40 (the caps in this game go to 40) in addition to doubling level-ups essentially allowing level-ups to become + 2’s. It’s sweet.

• Magic is “learned” rather than bought. When a spellcaster gets to a certain level they “learn” a different spell. Every mage is a little bit different too so it makes the game unique.

• Archers have legitimate 1 range. On average they’ll have 1 - 3 range and if you equip a Steel or Silver bow they get 1 - 5 range. Granted, bows have low accuracy by Gaiden standards, but who cares? Bows have freaking 1 range.

• Promotion does not require an item. Instead you go to a certain spot on the map. I wish that Sacred Stones and Awakening did something like that.

• Alm and Celica’s armies are split for 99 % of the game and yet because of the way that the World Map is set up, from Part 3 onward you get to control both armies without having to worry about screwing the availability of one army over the other.

Negatives

                  

•    This game gets my vote for “Worst Map Design of the Series”. Every map is a big, blank empty space. Terrain usually doesn’t add to the strategy of the map (or if it does it only causes the player to play unnecessarily slow), enemies are not placed well (usually they’re clumped together and there’s nothing to suggest that there was any thought behind their placement) and most of the time armies consist of a single kind of unit. Sometimes you get more variety but generally speaking there isn’t a lot of variety to begin with. There are no villages to rescue or treasure chests to go after either. The way this game sets it up is that after you beat certain spots on the map you get to explore the “villages” and open the chests that way. I can’t think of a single anti-turtling measure that’s implemented in any of the levels in this game so feel free to take your sweet time beating them.

•       Another major downside for Gaiden is the fact that every single objective is “Rout enemy”. Think Birthright, but worse. At least Birthright lets you kill enemy bosses from time to time.
• Healers don’t gain experience from healing. They either have to be attacked, or they have to attack. Not only that, but they lose HP from healing too. Sure they’re equipped with Nosferatu which wouldn’t be so bad until you realize that Nosferatu has 50 base accuracy in a game whose RNG is likely to screw you over.

• From a personal experience perspective this game’s RNG is on par with Fates, maybe even worse, in terms of how many times I’ve gotten screwed over by it.

• Alm’s promotion is easy to miss. If you miss it, you cannot go back and try to get it which essentially makes the endgame unbeatable.  Good luck trying to beat the end of Gaiden with an unpromoted Alm.
  
  
  
  
  

                           This game has two annoying superlatives going against it: “Lowest experience gains in the series” and “lowest growth totals in the series”. Leveling up in this game feels like a slow and painful process. It seems way easier to get units to promote to Level 20 in future games than it does to get these guys to Level 7 (which is the level where most of the cast promotes). Generally speaking you’re not getting much experience unless you kill and even then you’re still not getting THAT much experience.

                          So it takes the player a long period of time to level up and then you’re treated to a + 2 or below. The average growth for non-HP and Resistance stats is 20 %. For HP its 40 % and most of the cast won’t have Resistance.

• It’s possible for enemies to make the first move rather than the player. Usually this is only a minor nuisance, but there are levels where witches can warp themselves onto any part of the map which means that it’s possible for them to sneak up on your weaker units and wreck them without the player being able to do anything.

• Magic requires an HP cost every time a mage uses it which makes mages even bigger class cannons.

• There are no playable axe users in the game. This is odd because Fire Emblem 1 had plenty of those so why the change?

• The Lost Woods: Once the player draws closer to the endgame there’s this confusing and poorly designed part of the map in Celica’s route titled ‘The Lost Woods’. It’s a frustrating maze that you have to navigate out of. Bytheway, the game doesn’t do a very good job of giving hints or clues about where you are so it’s easy to be stuck in a perpetual loop. This is also where you go to promote Alm and like I said before it’s pretty easy to miss. My advice is to use this map from serenesforest.net (http://serenesforest.net/gaiden/other/lost-woods-map/) when playing through that part of the game. 
  
  
  
  
  

• There’s also another annoying part where Alm gets stuck in one spot on the map and Alm cannot be freed until Celica frees him via an event on her side of the map. Meanwhile Alm and co basically fight against random monsters that start at the opposite end of the map. Did I mention how annoying it is waiting for these monsters to come to you while you have little space to maneuver around? Yeah it gets old (you could solve the problem with the Deer spell though, but then again Deer is broken as heck)

• Annoying End-game part # 3: Celica’s army gets trapped by the penultimate boss and Alm has to navigate an annoying maze while Celica’s party continuously loses HP. It takes forever too without consulting a guide on the Internet.

                           

Overall Summation: In addition to being clunky and outdated Gaiden has a huge number of glaring flaws in its mechanics. I tried to the play the game again recently but got so bored that I ultimately dropped it. This is why I think Gaiden should get remade. Throw in a support system, an actual plot and update the mechanics and I think you’ve got the makings for a good game. Yes I know Gaiden is old but it has not aged well and even then some of its new mechanics can be a cause of frustration.

My Least Favorite Fire Emblem Games: Fire Emblem 1 / Fire Emblem 3 Book 1 / Shadow Dragon

                        

                     Three of the four of my least favorite Fire Emblem games. I’ve already reviewed Revelations so I won’t review it again. If you didn’t read those reviews you can read them here:

• The Introduction: http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2016/07/my-revelations-review-part-1.html

• The Story and the Characters: http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2016/07/my-revelation-review-part-2-story-and.html

• The Gameplay: http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2016/07/my-revelation-review-part-3-gameplay.html

• My Final Thoughts on the Game: http://thecrusadergrant.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-epilogue-my-final-thoughts-about-3.html

                         So yeah I’m not the biggest fan of Revelation. In fact I dislike Revelation about as much as I dislike Fire Emblem 1, Fire Emblem 3 Book 1 and Shadow Dragon. Why do I dislike the other three games so much? Well you’re about to find out.

                    Story: The first point I’d like to bring up is the story because it’s basically the same in all three games. “The plot goeth thusly” (to borrow a term from Sursum Ursa): Marth’s home country of Altea gets screwed over by its former allies causing Marth and a few knights to flee to the Island Kingdom of Talys. After time transpires Marth and co. decide to set out and defeat the evil Dolhr Empire. For the rest of the game Marth and co. gallivant through the continent wiping the floor with the blood of their enemies until they defeat the Big Bad Dragon Medeus and restore peace to the continent of Archanea. 

                         I remember first reading Marth’s trophy in Melee and thinking that the plot of his game sounded so cool. You’re this super cool swordsman prince wrecking an entire continent overthrowing an Empire after your country got wrecked. It sounded exactly like my cup of tea. Then I actually played his games and I got so bored really fast. The execution feels very lackluster in general. In Fire Emblem 1 / Fire Emblem 3 Book 1 you start out in the Island Kingdom of Talys and the destruction of Altea is explained with text. In fact, the only time you actually get to see any evidence of Altea getting destroyed is in the prologue chapters of Shadow Dragon. This is something that I appreciated about Shadow Dragon (yeah I played on Normal mode just so I could blitz through the game and get it over with).

                           What I find boring about this game’s plot is that there’s no feeling of stakes or tension in the narrative at all.  There are no plot twists or interesting revelations to keep us interested. It’s just Marth and co. wrecking the Dolhr Empire and that’s really all there is to it. You could argue that other games like Fire Emblem 6 or the second generation of FE 4 do this too, but they usually find a more interesting way to do this (usually it’s because they have better characters, at least FE 4 does) so as a result it doesn’t feel stale. Here none of that happens. There isn’t enough to rant and rave about like there is for Fates, but at the same time there’s nothing to love either. It’s just a boring, predictable march to the player’s inevitable victory. I can’t call this plot awful the way I can for Awakening and Fates, but I can’t call it good either.

    Final Summation: “The story is bland and totally forgettable but there are worse stories in the series. I can’t think of any major plot holes in the story, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they existed. It’s a little too straightforward and overly simplistic to be considered good though and it certainly doesn’t measure up to the better stories presented in the later games.”

Characters: Wait a second, this game has characters in it? All I saw were a bunch of rocks. That’s the biggest flaw of these games: There are no interesting characters at all. Most of the cast barely have any speaking lines and you don’t really get to know anything about them. They often join the player because….reasons. At least the characters in Awakening and Fates have quirks or something to remember them by. What do these characters have going for them?

                      To be fair Shadow Dragon did give Marth some good lines of dialogue throughout the game. Shadow Dragon did have the best characterized Marth in the series. I also recall a recruiting conversation between Caeda and Roger that was pretty funny. Okay, I’ll admit that Caeda’s characterization is decent too. The explanation that’s given for Medeus’s actions (i.e. getting revenge on humans for the crap that Manaketes received at their hands in the past) sounds good on paper but unfortunately we never see anything happen to make us sympathize with him. Plus it doesn’t work as a good reason to enslave an entire race. Gharnef is mostly forgettable (except for his character design which is freaky) and in my opinion Nergal and Manfroy are better executed versions of the “dark wizard who manipulates the crap out of everything and everyone” since they actually get to accomplish stuff onscreen.

                            Unfortunately Marth and Caeda are about the only characters that get any personality at all while the rest of the cast is boring, bland and forgettable. Heck, there’s a part of me that prefers the cast in Awakening since at least those characters had memorable personalities. This game doesn’t even give you that. Shadow Dragon would have benefited from the existence of support conversations. As for Fire Emblem 1 / Fire Emblem 3 Book 1: These characters may as well not exist. They have next to no lines of dialogue so there’s nothing about their characters that stands out. 

                    Overall Summation: “Two of these games don’t even bother to try giving any of these characters a personality. Shadow Dragon tries and usually fails for the most part. It does have some good lines here and there but overall most of the cast is forgettable."

                      Gameplay: Fire Emblem 1 is about as simple and as basic as it gets. The game is not very difficult at all and Marth’s rapier breaks it hard. I do like the fact that stat boosters can boost a significant percentage of a unit’s stats.

                                         Fire Emblem 3 Book 1 has...dismounting? Oh and it cut a few chapters. Yeah it didn’t really add very much did it?

                                         Shadow Dragon is by far the best of these games in this department. It’s the most challenging of the three, it actually has a weapon triangle, it’s easy to check your enemy's’ movement range (you can’t even do that in Fire Emblem 1) and you can actually see where your characters are going. Unfortunately Shadow Dragon invented the broken system of forging that ended up breaking the game really hard. I’m also not a fan of reclassing as well since it does take away from the uniqueness of the cast. Shadow Dragon feels like a step backward from the Tellius games and frankly the game does feel a little too “bare bones” for my tastes.

                                   One more point: The infamous gaiden chapters. Personally I think the intent behind these was for the game to give the player back-up characters instead of requiring the player to kill off the cast. Obviously this didn’t work out and yeah I agree that these requirements are stupid, but I can at least understand the intent behind them, even if this wasn’t executed properly.  

               Overall Summation: “Way too bare bones to be enjoyable. Shadow Dragon didn’t do enough to modernize the game making it feel like a 90’s game in a DS skin while Fire Emblem 1 and Fire Emblem 3 Book 1 have aged like milk. They feel clunky and outdated and don’t offer anything that Shadow Dragon cannot give you.”

                                 

                                Soundtrack: These games have a soundtrack? I honestly only remember one track and it’s nothing special at all. At least the soundtrack in Fates was memorable, even if it gets more love and praise than it deserves.

                             Graphics : The NES / SNES portraits and sprites are not very good. The ones in Shadow Dragon are minimally better and don’t hold up very well. Honestly I like the Super Nintendo sprites better than the DS ones. The graphics in all 3 games suck as far as I’m concerned.

                       Overall thoughts: I refuse to play any of these games again. They’re all just so boring. The plot is bland, the characters are forgettable and shallow, and the gameplay is way too bare bones in contrast to what some of the other installments have to offer. Shadow Dragon is clearly the best of the three and if you hated Shadow Dragon you probably wouldn’t like Fire Emblem 1 or Fire Emblem 3 Book 1. 

                              DRP said it best about Shadow Dragon: “Int Systems did what they wanted to do, but they didn’t do what should have been done.” If Shadow Dragon were more like Fire Emblem 12 then I would like the game a lot more, but as it stands, Shadow Dragon is a waste and the fact that I of all people got bored playing these three games is a testament to their overall lack of quality. 

Favorite Fire Emblem Games Table of Contents

                               LOVE Tier

• Fire Emblem 4 - Genealogy of the Holy War

• Fire Emblem 9 - Path of Radiance

•  Fire Emblem 5 - Thracia 776  

                                Highly Enjoy Tier

• Fire Emblem 10 - Radiant Dawn 

• Fire Emblem 12 - New Mystery of the Emblem

                                         Not Bad Tier

• Fire Emblem 7 - Blazing Sword

• Fire Emblem 6 - Binding Blade

• Fire Emblem 8 - Sacred Stones 

• Fire Emblem 3 Book 2 - Mystery of the Emblem

                                            Heavily Flawed Tier

• Fire Emblem: Awakening  

                                                  Do Not Like Tier

• Fire Emblem 2 - Gaiden

• Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest

• Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

                              Will Never Play Again For Any Reason At All Tier

• Fire Emblem 1 / Fire Emblem 3 Book 1 / Shadow Dragon / Revelations 

                      

Should future Fire Emblem games have higher growths?

                                      Something else that I see people bring up from time to time is the idea that the growths in Awakening were “too high” and that lower growths equate to a better game. Does it though? I’ll let you decide here are the arguments:

Pro Higher Growths

• Higher growths mean that level-ups are more predictable. If they’re more predictable then it will be easier for the developers to design around that.

• Higher growths make the game less RNG reliant. You’re also less likely to get stat screwed.

• Here’s a quote that makes a good argument: “Higher growth rates help shorten the long period where the starting Promoted unit(Frederick) dramatically outclasses the unpromoted ones because their higher EXP rate and now high growths shortens the average catch up time and prevents characters from being on the brink of uselessness based on stats that rise on average every 3,4 or 5 levels. Lower growths and then you get a Seth/FE7 Marcus situation.” (Source: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/643003-fire-emblem-awakening/65337974?page=1)

Pro Lower Growths

• Higher growths make it too easy for certain characters to snowball into little death machines. Lower growths prevent this.

• Lower growths make a good level-up actually rewarding. If every level-up is great, then none of them are.

Fire Emblem Thought Piece: Uniform Stat Caps: to be or not to be?

              I’ve heard some people throughout different Fire Emblem forums claim that having higher stat caps is a bad thing and that the solution is to return to return to the “good ole days” where stat caps were at 20. I’d like to make a discussion topic out of that. Should stat caps be uniform (i.e all 20’s) or should they be more varied. What I’d like to do is list the pro’s and con’s of each argument:

Pro 20 Caps

• Different caps leads to a major imbalance in the game. Some classes won’t have very good caps and will therefore get screwed.

• Caps of 20 reduce stat inflation.

Pro Different Caps

• Different caps equate to unit variety. Pegasus Knights can have higher speed caps and lower strength stats. Likewise Armor Knights can have high defense caps and low speed caps.

• There is something wrong with the idea that Pegasus Knights can have access to the kin of defense that Armor Knights can have. The two most famous games with uniform stat caps also have growth boosting (FE 3 Book 2 and FE 5) which means that it’s possible to have a Pegasus Knight with capped defense, speed and other stats.

I’m sure I’m probably missing some possible arguments for either side, but this was never meant to be a comprehensive list of all the possible arguments that could be made. I look forward to seeing what side you stand on and what arguments you’ll be making.

The Epilogue - My Final Thoughts about the 3 Fates Games

                                      Not going to lie, Revelation sucks. It deserves the criticisms that it gets and frankly I don’t plan on playing this game ever again. There’s nothing in it for me that would make me want to come back to it. I gave it an F in every category and I don’t think I’m being too harsh either.

                                    Instead of bashing this game some more I’d prefer to get a few things off my chest about these games:

• I find it rather odd (to put it as nicely as I can) that the people who say that Conquest has the best map design in the series are often people who have never played Thracia 776 or Fire Emblem 12, a.k.a the 2 games in the series that have superior map design to that game. I’m also currently debating whether or not Binding Blade’s map design is better than Conquest’s. The point here is that Conquest’s map design gets overpraised and someone needs to counteract this undeserved hype. It’s even more depressing when a person HAS played Thracia and 12 and still thinks that Conquest has “mindblowing” game design. For shame people. For shame.

• The music is also overpraised as well. I find Holy War and the Tellius games to have superior soundtracks and musical scores to this game (and frankly FE 12 has an underrated soundtrack that deserves more love than it gets). Azura’s song gets overplayed way too freaking much and it’s gotten to the point where I’m annoyed whenever I hear it in the game (which is why I usually turn the volume off). While Fates has an above average soundtrack it certainly is not worthy of the hype it gets here either. I remember one fan of the soundtrack saying “Well you can’t deny that this game has a rocking soundtrack”.  Actually I can and I just did. Trust me, there are plenty of other games Fire Emblem or not that have superior scores to this one.

• This game has one of the worst RNG’s in Fire Emblem history. When a character frequently misses at 80 % or higher or when critical hits start flying at single digit percentages on a regular basis I think it raises some major red flags that something terribly wrong happened here. RNG’s like this make games less strategic, not more. The less of a presence an RNG has on a game the more strategic it becomes (FE 12 says hi).

• These games have the worst world building in the history of the series. They also fail on a storytelling level. In fact, Conquest and Revelation are some of the worst told stories in the series, with Birthright being only “meh” instead of actually good. These games had 3 chances to excel and they’re some of the worst examples of storytelling this series has to produce? That’s not looking too good here folks. How do you fail harder than Awakening in this category? That’s almost a feat in and of itself.

• The weapon debuffs effect is more strategic than the previous weapon system but it’s got its fair share of flaws. A forged Iron Sword is vastly superior to a Steel and Silver Sword, which begs the question of why forging even exists in a game where durability does not. Hidden Weapons need to be nerfed. Consistent 1 - 2 range in a game where that’s normally punished seems contradictory to me. It also doesn’t help that the debuffs at times appear to be too much and the fact that they recover by 1 per turn just makes them all the more powerful. I love the idea behind them and I hope that they return in future games, but they need to be tweaked. Magic also comes across as really underwhelming in this game too. Higher level weapons are pretty much not worth it either. The Regalia in this game are trash especially in comparison to the Regalia of the past and Brave Weapons got a massive nerf.

• I’m also not a fan of how certain classes have nerfed weapon ranks. It makes Brave Weapons and Regalia not worth attaining considering the huge drawbacks that come from both weapons in addition to the fact that only a tiny percent of the cast will actually be able to use them. Rather than make the player think about which class they want to get it just turns Regalia weapons into a whole lot of extra money. Don’t forget that the best characters of both countries generally tend to have powerful prf rank weapons that tend to eliminate the need for other weapons and it makes one wonder why the designers even bothered to create the Regalia in the first place.

• The Entrap staff and Lunge are really stupid ideas. The Seal skills and the Enfeeble staff need some serious nerfing as well.

• I think this game’s version of Dual Guard and Dual Strike is still too OP. Is there ever a reason why you’d use neither of them? They both give such great bonuses that I can’t think of a reason why. Dual Strikes make killing things way easier and Dual Guards encourage stat stacking. Plus in my opinion enemies tend to Dual Strike so often that it feels like the player has to Dual Guard just to survive. Most characters can’t survive 2 Dual Strikes which is a mistake in my opinion.

• Dragon Vein as whole is a totally botched concept, much like the premise of Fates. It sounds really awesome at first until you see how it’s put into action and then all of a sudden it seems extremely gimmicky with very few of them actually having a legitimate impact on whatever level you’re playing. Dragon Vein needs to go. I.S. instead needs to focus on good map design, a variety of map objectives and good enemy unit placement. Conquest is proof that they are capable of producing these.

                           As I’ve stated before, we need to quit comparing this game to Awakening. Just because Fates does a few things better than Awakening doesn’t mean that it’s a good game on it’s own merits. Fates really is Awakening 2.0 for better or for worse. Personally I find these games to be towards the bottom of my favorites list because their flaws are numerous and their positives are lacking. This game exacerbated some of Awakening’s flaws and while there are some cool gameplay ideas to be found in these games I do think that Fates is proof that the future of the series is bleak from an analytical standpoint. At this point if I want a game that I will like, I cannot expect Intelligent Systems to create it. Instead, I’m going to have to create my own game which is exactly what I’m trying to do.

                    I’m working on a game title Fire Emblem: The Dark Crusade. It’s about a young war hero named Valayan who along with a group of his buddies are fighting against human trafficking. I’ve been working on the script now for over a year and I’ve already decided to bring back the following:

• Fatigue
• Capture
• Branched Promotion
• Third tiers
• Radiant Dawn’s terrain elevation system
• The Magic Trinity
• Promotion without a promotion item
• Actual quality supports

                ^ Keep in mind that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to my game then that but at least that should give you an idea of what it’s gameplay would be like. I’d hope to make it either for the PC or whatever current generation home console Nintendo created. If you’re interested in more details feel free to personal message me. DRP’s been acting as my editor and he’s been enjoying my story and characters so far and that’s given me a lot of hope. The story is in its first draft stages so there are plenty of flaws to be sure, but I believe that I can create a quality Fire Emblem on par with Holy War and the Tellius games.