And now I'm left wondering how this became a franchise. Fire Emblem: The Shadow Dragon and Blade of Light is a mesh of interesting ideas, hardware limitations, and dev fumbles. The game is playable in the early levels, but when the levels become more difficult and more complicated strategy becomes necessary, FE1 becomes a tedious slog to get through.
For those not in the know, Fire Emblem is a Turn-Based Strategy RPG. You move your Units around the map in turns like you were playing Chess, except you get to move all your Units in one turn, because the maps are actual levels with terrain like trees, open fields, rivers, cliffs, forts, villages, and more. It would be unbelievably cumbersome and unreasonable if you only got to move one. Besides which, you are often asked to move to the sides instead of straight forward. Sometimes, you need to split up your Units into two teams to move around a big obstacle in the middle of the map.
Placement is the key for your Units when they clash with enemy Units. The enemy Units will be as varied in skill, class, and power as your Units. A lightly armored sword-user can be one-shotted by a horseback knight with a lance, and death is PERMANENT in Fire Emblem. Also, like in most RPGs, your Mage characters are squishy and are liable to get squished if a big man with an ax hits them hard enough. So, you need to put one of your big men with an ax between your Mages and the enemy's big man with an ax. Actually, you probably just need a form a protective line in front of your Mages if you want to have literal FIRE power and Healing.
Now, all this sounds like standard fare on the surface, but... Hoo boy, when the bullshit starts, it never ends. Let's get the finer point of the game mentioned first, though. First, all the base beginnings of the Fire Emblem formula are all here. Series veterans will all know what it is already since I highly doubt this game will be the first one in the series anyone actually plays in 2023. You spend the entire game as a small army fighting overwhelming odds. Gameplay is done on a grid in turn-based combat phases. You get job classes, EXP. to gain levels and stats, a lot of fun weapons, some decent map design, tough difficulty curves, terrain bonuses (if you put a Unit on a tree, they're harder to hit), and all in all you will get the Fire Emblem experience when you play this game.
The other good thing is the plot, though you won't see most of it unless you look it up online, because this game is garbage at telling you what is going on. When I first turned on the game, I had assumed that the main character, Prince Marth was just answering various distress calls from the neighboring kingdoms who somehow all got invaded at the same time, because the game itself neglects to tell you that the entire continent is actually being occupied by an enemy force and that Marth is actually a banished prince who got driven from him homeland and has been secretly living in the country of his fiancé, Caeda ("Sheeda"). So, his answer to the calls for help from his kingdom's former allies are literally him taking what little manpower he has to go fight a full-scale coup to free the entire continent from The Evil OverlordsTM who worship an evil demon dragon godTM.
Subsequent Fire Emblem games would get a lot better about presenting their stories, but for this first one, if you go in without prereading the story, it'll look like you're just going from map to map to fight generic baddies who have taken over a stronghold and are holding the royal family of the region hostage. Rinse and repeat until you kill The Evil OverlordTM and the evil demon dragon godTM. There is no world map for an avatar to cross, no mid-chapter party prep, no conversations between the characters outside of the bare minimum, no plot twists, nothing. Thanks to hardware limitations of the time, all you get are tiny bits at the beginning of each chapter, with maybe a small bit at the end of each chapter once you win. That's it. This isn't to say the plot itself is bad, far from it, it's just.... not there, unless you read the instruction manual or Wikipedia. Today, instruction manuals are ignored enough that no one bothers putting the stories of their games in them anymore, so it seems odd for Nintendo not to make some of concession like putting the manual's story on the Menu Screen or something.
Which brings us to how tediously awful the gameplay is. Outside of the bare bones basics of the Fire Emblem formula, this thing is a real slog. Firstly, it's slow. They know this, too, which is why Nintendo included a quality-of-life upgrade on the Switch port which makes the game run at 2x. This is unfortunately botched, however, and does nothing more than double the throttle while playing. This speeds up the gameplay, but makes the already terrible music so obnoxiously bad that you'll have to play the game muted to avoid ear bleedage.
Even for seasoned FE vets, the game is a mess to figure out. Every single thing is done on the map where the main gameplay happens. No, you are not prepping your characters between levels. You will be doing your item and weapon shopping, promoting, stat boosts, and various other things while you're also trying to not get killed by enemy Units. The important thing to remember about Fire Emblem is that by the time it came to American shores because of Super Smash Bros. Melee, Japan already had six of these games. So, America got on FE7 (Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade) first. By then, all the kinks were worked out. This game however was so bad Japan only ever brought the DS remake of it to American shores until they could plunk the original on the Switch for six bucks.
And I mean it when I say nothing is actually explained to the player (as was the norm at the time), meaning unless you're a seasoned Fire Emblem veteran you'll be completely lost. There are no mid-map party screens to use items or promote people. There are no support conversations. There is no explanation of game mechanics. There is no selling items. Item trading is all one way. Inventory space is 4 items per character. There is no telling what a Vulnerary does until you use one. There is no telling what certain weapons do, which characters can use them, or what weapon levels are required to use higher class weapons. Outside of houses on the map to visit, nothing is explained. You're thrown right in and basically thrown to the wolves with no training.
Oh, and there is no shared inventory. If you need to get items and weapons out of storage, you HAVE to send a character to a shop somewhere on the map to get it out, and the character can pick up four of those items out of storage. Then that character has to act as an Amazon delivery drone, get across the map without dying, and then personally deliver the items to the characters that need them. Then your designated "item deliverer" has to do it again. And again. And again.
Or you can just make all your characters congregate at the shop like it's a glorified check-out counter at the grocery store. You will weep.
As for what you actually do, that's easy enough to figure out. On every map, you kill the enemy, put Marth on whatever the winning tile is on the map, and use the special command. To do that, you fight in turn-based phases. You'll recruit allies as you move along, build an army, and eventually you pick the 15 best characters and smash the final maps. I beat the game mainly by using all the units that fly or ride a horse, with a token archer, mage, thief, and healer to keep any situation manageable. The fun part of any Fire Emblem is the actual fights, and while the base formula is there, fighting in this game is basically awful. Unit growths are total nonsense compared to future games in the series. You see, you don't grow in set ways. Which stats your character gets to grow each level up is randomized, so some level growths will be really good, and some kinda lousy. They had not figured out how to balance this yet as of the first game, so I hope the gods of chance aren't against you in your walkthrough.
This game also looks terrible. I say this as someone who does not get riled by graphics. This game looked like a mess even compared to other games released in 1990, and reviewers in Japan said as much. Shouzou Kaga, the director of the original, remarked in an interview that the game was given very harsh criticism back then because the game explained nothing to the people playing it and had terrible graphics. It was so panned, in fact, that without player word of mouth giving this cult classic status and Famitsu giving it a good score, there might be no Fire Emblem series. That's how awful this game actually is.
I'm hoping the second game is better.
So, my final score: 3/10. Not recommended.
