Fire Emblem - Radiant Dawn (Nintendo Wii)

Written by devilman on 29/08/2009  –  Filed under: Reviews

Tags: fire emblem, nintendo, RPG, turn based, wii

I should start this review by pointing out that this is my first Fire Emblem game. I’ve been aware of the previous ones, but never got round to them. So, don’t expect stuff like ‘Ike’s hair is the wrong shade of blue’ and ‘why isn’t that Bobbins character in this one? His blancmange of fire attack was the best!’. In fact, the only characters I know are Roy & Marth from their appearance in Super Smash Bros Melee and they aren’t in this one so that was a waste of a sentence.

Anyway, onto the review; turn-based games like Fire Emblem are as old as the (square or hexagonal) hills and I picked this up to relive the old Shining Force days on the Mega Drive. So, what does Radiant Dawn do differently to all the others? Well, not a lot to be honest - it’s numerous set-piece maps, terrain, combat, ranged combat, magic - ticking all the usual boxes for a turn-based RPG.

In between battles are where the more detailed RPG elements come into play such as weapon/item management, skills, XP allocating and character shuffling. When you first start out, this is kept to a minimum as your party starts out small and grows through the story so it’s not overly-bewildering to a novice.

If this screenshot hasn't sent you running away screaming, then Fire Emblem may be for you.

After the first few battles, you’ll quickly notice how brutal the game can be; the AI does a pretty good job of targeting your weakest character to get a cheap kill and for a good chunk of the first chapter, if any of your characters die in battle, then it’s game over. So, expect to see some of the battles a good few times. In fact, of the four chapters in the game, some of the Chapter 1 battles are the hardest, which is frankly bizarre.

The difficulty of some of the battles nearly kills the game’s attraction stone dead. When you first start out, you’ll be gung-ho, storming storming after the enemy - at which point, you’ll probably trigger some reinforcements who appear out of nowhere to pick off a vital character and it’s game over.

Learning from this, you’ll then be far more wary, inching across the maps, keeping your weak characters at the back, out of the way.. only for the reinforcements to then appear from behind you and it’s game over again. On a few levels towards the end, the enemy even teleports their reinforcements into your starting position. Utterly maddening stuff.

The sheer number of reinforcements on some levels result in the game becoming more of a memory test, knowing what to expect and when, which is hardly tactical role-playing - more like acting out your part in a scripted battle. Fluff your lines and you’ll be restarting the battle before you know it.

Also, the characters under your control vary throughout the game; for instance, at the end of the first chapter, you’ll switch to a different part of the story, not seeing the original lot until Chapter 3. I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but if you’ve not done particularly well through the first chapter, you won’t realise that your characters aren’t up to scratch until midway through Chapter 3 where you’ll get slaughtered. This kind of thing resulted in me restarting the whole game three times to try and improve on my characters so they’d be up to the harder battles, but all the stuff in between ended up being wasted hours.

If you can overcome the frustrating and unbalanced difficulty, there isa great game in there. It’s rewarding when a battle goes just as you planned and it can lead to a bumper amount of bonus XP to award your characters before the next battle. The story itself is pretty good, if a bit drawn out. There are dozens of cut-scenes and a handful of beautifully rendered FMV scenes.

Although Radiant Dawn is a Wii game, you do get the impression that it’s little more than a Gamecube game - the controls don’t make any use of the Wii Remote/Nunchuk functions (in this case, it’s a good thing - shoehorning that kind of functionality in would’ve killed it off for me) and the graphics and sound are nothing out of the ordinary. The music in particular is inoffensive but utterly unmemorable.

Despite me enjoying the game (even despite it taking four attempts to complete and a lot of swearing under the breath), it would be difficult for me to recommend Radiant Dawn to the casual RPG fan but if you can find it at the right price, it’s well worth a look and if you want to be led to the slaughter gently, there’s always Easy mode…

A turn-based RPG for psychics or the patient