Returning to Old Fire Emblem Games Is a Cold, Harsh Dose of Reality

Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon

Lately, I’ve grown quite fond of buying old second-hand games without their original packaging, in order to enjoy the experience without having to fork out exorbitant costs for an illustrious “never played/fully packaged/vacuum sealed/dipped in holy water” so on, so forth.

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After scoring a cheap copy of Pokemon Conquest to appease my burgeoning samurai spirit, my next target was the sizeable backlog of Fire Emblem entries I hadn’t even been aware of during their initial run on the market.

The community is quite outspoken in a lot of ways, and there’s something of a gatekeeper attitude among some members. They’ll insist that the fandom be divided into everything preceding the mega-hit that was Awakening on the 3DS, and the games that came after it opened the floodgates.

Partly because it’s like being a fan of an indie band before they became big, their quiet little bandwagon now bursting with members.

Mostly, however it’s due to the fact that, aside from staples like Marth, Ike and Lyn, many of the heroes from yesteryear have been shoved aside in favor of the more marketable newcomers.

Lord, the things I could tell you about Corrin

I myself happened upon Fire Emblem a short while before its popularity boom, thanks to the 3DS Ambassador Program and its port of the GBA entry, Sacred Stones. For something I barely knew anything about, it ended up becoming my most played title of 2012.

One thing that stuck with me was how unforgiving it was in comparison to modern titles. In Three Houses on the Switch, you have a myriad of options to overcome your errors, the most prominent being the Divine Pulse — Fire Emblem’s equivalent to the schoolyard ‘make it so that didn’t happen’.

Fire Emblem Three Houses
If only we could Divine Pulse Lorenz from existence, too.

It’s certainly a far cry from my failings in Sacred Stones’ post-game Creature Campaign. I would sink hours at a time, venturing deep into the multilevel dungeons only for my mage to get felled at the last moment by a lousy skeleton archer who managed to crit.

“The rest… is up to you,” Artur choked, moments before I hit the reset button and flung the handheld across the room.

I haven’t touched a pre-Awakening Fire Emblem for several years, but now I had 2008’s Shadow Dragon in my grasp. As a remake of the very first title in the series, it married many of the classic concepts with conventions found in more modern entries.

It was time to stab some swains as Mar-Mar, and find out if I’d gotten too spoilt from my leisurely romps through Fodlan.

The most obvious adjustment to make is visually. The character models are sprite-based, but they animate smoothly, as if they’re alive, juxtaposed against more photorealistic backgrounds than I’m accustomed to.

It’s a little unnerving, to be honest, and it evokes the most curious memories of Dot and the Kangaroo.

More troubling is the early realization that this game really leans into the direness of its situation. In modern Fire Emblem titles, we’re having tea parties with our soldiers, perhaps even seducing them and lovingly stroking their cheek.

There will be no face rubbing in Shadow Dragon.

Within the first few missions, you must choose a unit to sacrifice in order for Marth to avoid capture. Because of this, there is no such thing as a perfect run. Either Cain, Abel, Frey, Jagen or Gaggles must die.

Fire Emblem
If they looked more like they did in the original game, I’d gladly let them all die.

These stakes seemed unfathomable. This was the prologue, and already it demanded a more heart-wrenching decision than in the last four Fire Emblem titles combined. I had only met these fine gentlemen, how could I condemn one of them to certain doom?

It’s easily the most intriguing plot beat I have ever seen in the series, and though I love it conceptually, it goes against everything ingrained in me after being conditioned to expect nothing less than an optimal result.

Do you make your decision based on aesthetics? Growth rates? A morbid team-building exercise? In the end I opted for Frey, the canonical choice and the only unit I was unfamiliar with, but that wouldn’t be the only loss suffered if I wanted to get as much out of this game as I could.

There’s another curious element of Shadow Dragon that sees certain units join your army only if you’ve suffered enough losses. In the case of Norne, the adorable archer who has no apparent value, she downright refuses to cooperate unless I exchange a life for hers.

And so Jagen the grizzled paladin would gallop valiantly into the teeth of his enemies, knowing fully well that he was about to die. This was not only because I positioned him directly upon the deadliest part of the map, but I also stripped him of his weapons prior to sending him out, so that they wouldn’t be wasted when he bit the dust.

Clearly, Shadow Dragon paints a much more grounded picture of the horrors of war than what we have seen lately. The newer games have a handful of scripted deaths, but they’re usually telegraphed in one way or another. Here, people die simply so that you can succeed.

Shadow Dragon is generous with its unit distribution, perhaps to a fault. Entire battalions will join you upon starting chapters, and other than the introductory dialogue when they join your cause, you don’t really learn much about them.

Support conversations are scarce, and the wealth of soldiers really creates a nameless, faceless army. They end up feeling like the dwarves in the Hobbit, overly plentiful and hard to discern from one another.

Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon
“Just remember, Nyna, if the world didn’t suck, we’d all fall off.”

Whether or not I was intentionally marching units towards disaster, I quickly learned that I had become far too reckless and foolhardy in my Fire Emblem tactics. Again, putting a unit in danger nowadays has about as much risk as wasting a rewind option, even if it’s the protagonist.

There were occasions where I would dabble with death in Three Houses, just to see how Byleth fared. One-hit KO from the Death Knight? Ha! That was amusing. Let’s undo that and move on, for we are nigh invincible.


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Author
Tony Cocking
A miserable little pile of secrets. Unabashed Nintendo stan, Resident Evil fancier and obscure anime enthusiast who insists everything is funnier when the rule of three is applied. Oh, and once I saw a blimp!