After The Sacred Stones, Fire Emblem returned to home consoles and made the jump to 3D. At this point, after the mediocrity of the previous games, my expectations were at rock bottom, and I was even more pessimistic about this 3D entry, knowing that was so often where franchises went wrong.

So I was completely unprepared for how good these games would be.

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (GameCube)

This is definitely the weaker of the two, but it’s worth playing for how expertly it sets up the sequel. See, unlike with FE1 & FE3, this time the developers were able to use an arcane sorcery known as planning in advance, so the two games actually feel like parts of a greater whole.

Like the GBA games this is a reboot set in a new universe, this time the continent of Tellius. The continent is split into three major countries: the peaceful kingdom of Crimea (no relation), the warlike kingdom of Daein, and the massive Begnion empire. On the edges of this triad live the laguz (furries), who try to avoid humans due to bad blood between the two races. Daein invades Crimea, kills its king, and forces its princess to flee to a neighboring kingdom to prepare her counterattack; standard FE plot.

The difference is that, for once, the royal is not the protagonist. The protagonist is Ike, a commoner working with a band of mercenaries. Now, I had zero trust at this point so I cynically waited for him to be revealed as a secret prince like Alm… but he isn’t! He really isn’t! For once, we get to play as a commoner who actually is one. What a novel concept!

(Since I know fans are going to bring it up: Yes, technically he turns out to have noble heritage. The difference is that he never uses it; he lives the entire series as a commoner. His dad’s pedigree never matters to the story or affords him any societal benefit, unlike Alm.)

The writers even play a joke on this: Ike is promoted to the standard Lord class halfway through the game when the princess literally knights him, but it’s done purely to appease the snooty nobles who refuse to take orders from a commoner. At the end of the game he flips everyone off and renounces his peerage to live as a commoner again, which is such a power move. Respect.

Ike himself is a really likeable character. He’s catty and irreverent like Hector, but also sensitive and good-hearted like Marth. The integration of these two qualities makes him feel like a well-rounded and realistic person. He’s also I think the most genuinely heroic protagonist so far, repeatedly showing a willingness to stand by his principles and do what’s right, even if it’s inconvenient to him and those in power. This is the first time since Three Houses I found a hero who genuinely compelled me to root for them.

This is also the first time in the series where the final boss is not a spooky demon man! He unfortunately does have about the same personality as one, but we still, finally, have a plot willing to lay blame at the fault of human evil rather than saying it was a demon’s fault. I’ll take it. Also, while he is pretty shallow, he’s so over-the-top evil I kind of find it endearing. He has a similar brutal honesty and contempt towards nobility as Ike, and there is an absolutely beautiful scene of him verbally eviscerating his “noble” subordinate for continuing to follow his horrific orders out of sheer blind loyalty to his country. He’s a fun villain!

Additionally, there is a racism subplot that was handled… not perfectly, but far better than in most fantasy stories. I was continually expecting the other shoe to drop with a plot about how the laguz need to learn reverse racism is just as bad… but it never happened! The story is solidly and unflinchingly on the laguz side. Ike immediately takes an anti-racist stance and actually commits to it, forcefully shutting down other characters who try to use slurs. Jill’s supports with Lethe are entirely one-sided: Jill is the one who’s wrong and needs to listen, not Lethe. The proud Sanaki recognizes that the only moral response to Reyson is to wholly and unconditionally apologize, with no attempts to deflect blame or make excuses. It shocked me how much more empathetic this 2005 game was than even some stories today.

…But whyyyy did they have to include that line about laguz being the oppressors a bajillion years ago. It’s never even mentioned again, not even in the sequel. You don’t need to “justify” your racism, fantasy authors, I promise your characters can just be racist and it won’t be a plot hole!

There is also, of course, the elephant in the room that they’re using animal people as a stand-in for racial minorities that were historically dehumanized, which is, shall we say, problematic. There are of course no dark-skinned characters in sight, except for…

 

…Yeah, it was the 00’s.

Other than that, this is probably the best the series has done on character so far. Though there are still several filler characters with one-note personalities, I actually did remember and care about a majority of the cast this time. A big part of this is likely because they overhauled the way supports work: Instead of building supports by grinding within a map, you get support points for every map where you deploy compatible characters. This has the interesting effect that supports can actually reference the main plot, because it’s literally impossible to get them until you’ve passed a certain point in the game.

This allows character development in the main plot to inform development in the support plots, and even vice-versa. There is an incredibly ballsy reversal of the “talk to recruit enemies” mechanic late in the game, where if you let a certain unit talk to her father, she will actually defect to his side instead of the other way around… unless she’s reached max support with a certain character, in which case she will remain on your side because she has an equally strong bond to give her strength. It’s an incredibly powerful integration between the choices the player has made developing their units’ relationships and the main plot that gives everything so much more emotional weight.

Unfortunately, they still keep the draconian limit of 5 support scenes per character, which does suck… but they actually do something to mitigate that, too! The preparation screen now lets you view side scenes between characters unrelated to their support chains and instead directly related to the current map. These scenes provide bonus items, new characters, and even useful gameplay tips (including hints on who you should deploy to recruit upcoming characters), but all of it is completely diegetic and in-character, giving us even more delicious characterization tidbits that give characters spotlights even if you’re not using them. There are even some that are entirely just for story, which I love because it shows both how much the developers enjoyed writing these characters, and their faith that the player would want to read them even without the carrot of a tangible reward.

Deaths also affect the story! If certain characters die, characters relevant to them will have changed dialogue in supports and even some main story scenes. To my knowledge, the series never did this before now. I can understand why — having written my own RPG with story-altering choices, it’s a huge amount of work to write all those alternate versions — but I’m really glad they finally did something that should have been a feature of the series from the start. Once again, this makes player choice feel impactful and the characters like real people who react to events.

Unfortunately, this stellar writing… did not have the presentation it deserved. Though I like the portraits, costumes, and art direction overall, the animations are… really, really bad. Everyone moves incredibly stiffly and awkwardly like the puppets they are, and the pre-combat beat where the characters stand facing each other now just looks incredibly silly and awkward with the more realistic graphics. As usual, the jump from pixels to polygons ended up making things look worse, not better. I quickly turned battle animations off and never looked back. (Even this didn’t help much, because characters still have simplified on-map attack animations, rather than just bonking each other like in the GBA games. If I turn off animations that means I don’t want animations, game!)

The designers also chose to add voice acting along with the 3D (of course), and the English VAs are terrible (of course). To make matters even worse there are no subtitles, which is just inexcusable for a game published in 2005.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to find the artists didn’t use 3D as an excuse to get creepy as I feared. The two women on the left are pretty much the only ones who show a significant amount of skin, and most of it’s leg, which isn’t shown in their dialogue portraits. The woman on the right is canonically supposed to be sexy and seductive, and you can see she’s dressed in multiple layers that don’t even show off her boobs. In general, the costume design felt refreshingly… normal? Even when characters dressed “sexy”, their outfits still looked like clothes real people would wear outside of porn. It doesn’t break willing suspension of disbelief the way it does when supposed warriors are running around in thongs and lingerie.

Also look, no boob plate! Women get to wear actual armor!

There aren’t any dragon lolis, either. The dragon girl looks and acts like an adult this time. Imagine that!

If anything I’d say the men are more sexualized, for once! The laguz men love to dress in bulging, skintight vests when they don’t eschew shirts altogether, and we also get a late-game berserker who’s too manly for shirts (the better to show off his washboard abs). Even here, though, they once again dressed them sexy without dressing them like porn stars. Their designs provide fanservice without compromising the characters or the tone of the work. It can be done, folks!

(Unsurprisingly, the artist was a woman.)

The gameplay is, alas, rather weak this time. It does a few neat things I’ll get into, but maps really tend to drag. You’re frequently pitted against quantity over quality in terms of enemies, resulting in your characters slowly wading through mobs that pose little thread and require little thought. There are still a few challenging stand-out maps (chapters 8, 17, and 22 come to mind), but for the most part the game is pretty meh. I don’t know how much the additional slowdown of having to watch animations even on “no animations” mode contributed to this, but it was definitely a factor.

The game adds a few new features and brings back a few old ones — namely, skills. (I’m told skills were actually introduced in FE4, but since I haven’t played it I can’t speak to how this system compares.) Skills are effectively attack bonuses, such as piercing defense, that have a random chance of triggering in combat based on your skill stat. I hate this because it makes the game even more dependent on RNG. Now there’s not just uncertainty in if a character will hit or crit, there’s additional uncertainty in if their skill will trigger. It doesn’t help that many skills are absolutely busted. Your paladins can potentially weather an entire army’s attacks if Sol (recover HP equal to damage inflicted) activates frequently enough; if it doesn’t, they’re dead! Critical hits had a similar effect in previous games, but I think skills are worse because they happen more often. They happen just often enough you feel like you can rely on them (and forces the designers to make assumptions to this effect), but of course you can’t, because they’re random.

This is, I feel I must reiterate, bad for a strategy game. I’m fine with the deterministic ones like Vantage and Wrath (Vantage in particular is very cool and gives you more options for how to interact with enemy phase), but the random ones actively make the game worse. I like the idea of adding more RPG elements and making characters more unique, but this was not a good way to do it.

(You also inexplicably can’t move skills — if you remove a skill from a character, it’s gone forever. This is such a baffling design choice I honestly have to wonder if it’s a bug, especially since they changed it in the sequel.)

The big new mechanic is laguz characters. Laguz are shapeshifters like manaketes, but work completely differently. Instead of transforming with an item, they build “transform points” over time and change to animal form when it’s full, gaining huge stat bonuses. They’re usually very strong, fast, or both, and their natural weapons don’t degrade. However, they have a major problem: They can’t attack in human form. This makes most laguz characters little more than gimmick characters, as they’ll spend most of the battle as sitting ducks who can’t contribute, and their animal forms just aren’t strong enough to make up for that. To make this even worse, they transform automatically, so you can’t even bank a full transform gauge if they’re away from combat. Midway through the game you get an equippable item that lets laguz stay transformed permanently, which does make them more usable, but you only get one.

This is a crying shame, because I love the laguz and I appreciate that they really tried to make them play differently than humans, but it just didn’t work. (It also rather contradicts the story, which claims laguz are fearsome warriors. No they’re not, after just a few attacks they get too tired to fight and then it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.)

The other addition is relatively minor, but interesting: Characters can now shove each other to push them one space. This sounds pretty useless but I was surprised how often I used it, especially since you can shove enemies too. It’s really handy for when you box characters into tight spaces where every tile matters, as well as pushing characters to safety if they’re right at the edge of an enemy’s range. If you line things up just right you can actually get a whole chain going to shove a character several spaces, significantly extending the range they can move. It’s such a simple and obvious mechanic I’m a little surprised it hadn’t been implemented earlier.

The really interesting thing, though, is the way this game implements optional objectives. Most maps will award you “bonus experience” you can freely allocate to your characters in-between missions for completing maps quickly and performing side objectives. Many of these side objectives actually involve not killing enemies, including one map where the boss hides behind literal hostages you have to shove out of the way if you don’t want to kill them (a cool use of the shove mechanic). This goes a ways towards solving the “nameless NPCs aren’t people” problem, and puts the ball in your court as to just how noble you’re actually willing to be. Unfortunately, I think they made these objectives a little too hard, as enemies are as stupidly suicidal as ever. Stop throwing yourselves on my blades, I’m trying to spare you!

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (Wii)

This is where they really let loose. I was genuinely shocked by how thoroughly and effectively this game deconstructs both the series’ own formula and many fantasy tropes at large. Hey, remember how we left Daein under the control of the corrupt empire that only grudgingly helped us out? Well now they’ve become the oppressors, just like Soren told us they would, because it turns out empires are evil! Hey, remember how we made Elincia queen of Crimea? Well, turns out that when you raise your secret princess in a vault she has no idea how to run a country and all the nobles hate her. Hey, remember how we were totally going to fix racism by telling everyone to pretty please stop being mean to the laguz? Yeah, that didn’t work, because it turns out you can’t undo centuries of bigotry overnight. Whoops!

The story is also massively ambitious (possibly overambitious) in its scope: We follow not one, not two, but three protagonists with their own separate plotlines. The first arc follows not Ike but a new character, Micaiah, who fights to liberate Daein from Begnion occupation; the second arc follows Elincia and her unsurprising political troubles; and in the third arc we alternate between Ike and Micaiah as they fight on opposite sides of a world war. The massive cast of the previous game ends up split along these lines, with many of the Daein characters from Path of Radiance joining Micaiah’s resistance movement and ending up opposed to the Greil Mercenaries. There’s tension! Nuance! Poignancy as former friends are forced to fight!

There’s additionally an incredible use of gameplay/story integration with this: Characters with established relationships who end up on opposing sides refuse to attack one another. This isn’t always mutual, either; there are actually pairs where one character can attack but the other won’t retaliate. This is incredibly effective at humanizing and developing the characters by making their relationships have a real, tangible effect on how they fight. (Remember this, because later games won’t.)

It does still have a lot of issues of course, especially towards the end, but the story is actually so good that I don’t want to spoil it this time. Catch a YouTube playthrough if you can’t play it yourself, then come back.

First, I’ll be upfront: I don’t like Micaiah. I wanted to, but she just never coalesced into a likeable character. She has basically no personality and what little she does have is dizzyingly inconsistent and honestly paints her as a pretty terrible person. Just when it looks like we might get some honest interaction between her and Ike, she’s possessed in the final arc and then gets put in a separate team anyway, so that’s a dud. The way she turns on a dime from “I hate racism” to “If my king says it’s okay I will commit genocide” was baffling and idiotic. It’s even more inexplicable that she just goes along with “We’re working with Begnion now” moments after overthrowing the Begnion occupation. Sothe even points out the plot hole and character inconsistency, and… there’s no followup, she has no reason for behaving this way, she’s just ride-or-die for her king and has no will of her own. And then she marries her adoptive brother who she met when he was a preteen, because the incest kink is still going strong.

But what thoroughly soured me on her is her actions in chapter 3-12, which I find unforgivable. She knows they’re fighting on the wrong side of the war, but have to feign support so Lekhain doesn’t kill the hostages. Okay. Coming up with an elaborate plan to commit a war crime in order to kill an innocent child goes way, way beyond what was required to “feign support”. Lekhain did not give her this plan and he did not explicitly order her to assassinate Sanaki. She did not have to do this. She chose to kill tons of innocent soldiers by burning them to death so she could have a shot at killing a child. I genuinely do not understand how Sanaki can even look at her after that, let alone have a cutesy epilogue where they accept each other as sisters. Micaiah is a horrible person.

I honestly think Pelleas would have made a far more compelling protagonist, and I’m disappointed he just gets unceremoniously written out of the plot. He’s good-hearted, but weak, scared, and overwhelmed by the responsibility thrust on him. That’s great stuff for a heroic arc! The subplot between him and Almedha was genuinely poignant, too, and I love love love that we finally have an honest-to-God reverse Alm twist. See how you don’t need a secret prince to show divine right is a lie, it works just as well with a secret gutterblood?

But instead we get Ms. I Have No Principles But Committing War Crimes. Disappointing.

The blood pact was also just such a silly plot twist in general — I actually said, “Really?” when it was revealed. It’s so over-the-top and divorced from real politics that it’s hard to take seriously. It would have been much stronger for Daein to have an actual reason to oppose Ike, and the pieces are all there — we’re told Daein is extremely racist and also blames Ike for the occupation, so they already have a real motive. If Begnion had gone with carrot over stick, maybe using Ike as a scapegoat for their own crimes, that would have worked just as well. Instead it’s just, oh no, the good guys are forced to be evil because of spooky magic. Blah.

Oh, and one more gripe: Zelgius’ motivation doesn’t make sense to me. He seems like a decent guy from what we see of him — he’s disgusted by the corrupt senators, offers single combat to spare the enemy army, and generally works to minimize casualties. Yet he orphaned a kid and tormented him for years just because… he wanted to have a good fight? I’m sorry, what? It doesn’t follow. We know from datamining that Zelgius was planned to be the Black Knight from the start, but I can’t help but wonder if his character or motivations were changed later and it created this weird disconnect.

…But that’s really all my complaints, I think. The Daein plot was a mess, but everything else was masterfully done. I love starting us off by forcing us to confront the consequences of our previous victory. I love Elincia trying so hard to do the right thing even in the face of opposition from people who, quite rightly, are still sore from the recent war. I love Ike being a complete race traitor and outright stating the laguz are in the right in their war against Begnion. I love that the oppressed group actively fight for their rights and aren’t condemned for it. I love the condemnation of neutrality in the face of atrocity, and the acknowledgement that though war is hell, some wars need to be fought.

I think what I love the most, though, is the motivation and backstory of the final villain. After the ridiculous 1000-year-old lolis of the previous games, I was really surprised to see a 1000-year-old character who genuinely felt his age. When I look at Lehran, I can absolutely believe that yes, this is a man who has seen civilizations rise and fall; this is a man who has suffered through more horrors than you can fathom; this is a man who believes the only solution is to wipe the slate clean because he has genuinely tried everything else. The writers took omnicide, the most cliched, hackneyed, and laughable of villain motivations, and seriously considered what it would take to drive someone to such an extreme. Despite the monstrousness of his plan, I still feel for him.

I particularly love what a cutting deconstruction it is of both the standard Fire Emblem plot and the very concept of a Big Bad. Every game so far goes like this: There was a terrible conflict 1000 years ago, the bad guy from back then is back again, we re-enact the myth and beat the bad guy again, and then all problems are solved forever. This time, the myth is a lie — the bad guy wasn’t actually a bad guy, all the details are wrong, and this is deliberate propaganda constructed to manipulate future generations and whitewash the victors’ actions. Not only that, the mythical heroes’ arrogance in believing they could solve all the world’s problems by slaying a spooky demon man directly causes the current conflict. After saving the world from shattering all at once, they watched that world crumble by inches instead, undone by the banal, simple evils that by the terms of their own victory they were powerless to stop. For once in this series, humans are the real monsters.

Unfortunately, once again the writing is underserved by the gameplay. Though they fixed many of the problems from Path of Radiance (skills can be freely swapped now, hallelujah), they barreled straight into new problems. The most egregious one is that this story structure of rotating between multiple armies works really, really badly when, unlike Gaiden, they’re all part of the same continuous plot. There’s such a long gap between the end of Act 1 and the Dawn Brigade’s return that by the time they do, they’re hopelessly outclassed by their opponents and can never really catch up. Maybe steamrolling everything with the Greil Mercenaries and bashing your head against a wall as the Dawn Brigade was the intended ludonarrative statement, but I don’t get the sense that it was. It’s also very awkward to have to keep track of multiple inventories across armies. This might have worked better if the Dawn Brigade had more maps in Act 3 to help them catch up, but they didn’t.

They also removed support conversations. Yes, really. Supports have been completely redone from a gameplay-first perspective: Each character can support with anyone, but can only have one support active at a time, and ranking up is just a choice made on the preparations screen instead of something related to a subplot. Everyone rightfully hated this. I understand that supports were difficult to balance, but sacrificing the story side completely was a terrible solution. At least we still have base conversations.

The other “why on Earth did you do this” problem is hidden items. I haven’t mentioned this because it’s previously been a minor mechanic, but previous games would sometimes award you items if you ended a character’s turn on particular tiles in desert maps, the idea being there were treasures hidden under the sands. This is annoying because you basically have to look up a guide to get them all, but at least they were restricted to one map.

In Radiant Dawn there are hidden items in every map, you’re given no indication where they are or even that they exist, and you’re not guaranteed to find them even with a thief (thanks to, that’s right, RNG). To make matters worse, many of them are extremely valuable items like stat boosters. My completionism compelled me to follow a guide religiously my whole playthrough, which is far from ideal.

Oh, and laguz suck even more now. Transformation now doubles their stats, which requires their human stats to be even worse. This includes speed, so they’re now getting doubled in addition to being made of tissue paper. But oh, they can retaliate in human form now! Still can’t attack, but they can retaliate! Not that it’ll do anything with their gimped strength and accuracy, but they technically can! (Weirdly, clerics can also retaliate with staves now, but they’re even more useless.) At least transformation items are a bit more plentiful now, but laguz are dead weight without them.

One thing I do like: They brought back a third promotion tier from Gaiden, and use it to keep legacy characters at the same power level they were in the previous game while still allowing for a full game’s worth of growth! It’s so neat and perfectly suited for a sequel. Unlike in FE3, returning characters start in their promoted classes instead of inexplicably resetting them to level 1 again. This has the bonus of making them truly feel like veterans and legends, especially next to the new characters who do start at baby levels. Every sequel game should do this, I approve.

Unfortunately, they chose to make third-tier classes wildly game-breaking and it makes the difficulty curve really weird. Instead of having to consume a rare item to learn a class’ capstone skill, they just get it automatically, and they now all do triple damage in addition to their other effects. (Except Astra, which now inflicts five hits at full damage.) This effectively means everyone can just kill their opponent outright at random, which is the epitome of my objection to random-activation skills. Who needs strategy when you auto-kill enemies a third of the time? (Fortunately the game doesn’t pit you against third-tier enemies until the endgame, but when they do, good luck. At least Ike gets a free Nihil on promotion, but for everyone else it’s touch-and-go.)

But I do have something positive to report: The presentation is actually good this time! Damage numbers are displayed in combat, skills are explicitly named when they trigger, and the battle animations are fantastic. I especially love the intro animations, which are unique for each class! Everyone looks way more natural, dynamic, and interesting, which fixes all my complaints about the animations in Path of Radiance. My favorites are the dodge animation for armor knights being a block (nothing else ever made any sense), and the intro animation for mounted classes being to charge in from offscreen; it’s a really effective way of showing us how the Canto skill works.

The music was also gorgeous — I particularly love the battle theme for the Greil Mercenaries. It’s surprisingly intense for a regular battle theme, but that fits their reputation as well as the high stakes at the time they appear.

Character design continues to be excellent, too. I’m ambivalent on the more realistic art style vs. PoR’s anime style — the laguz look much less cute now, for one thing — but the costuming still knocked it out of the park. Everyone’s outfits are beautiful, colorful, and distinctive, and women continue to have dignified outfits.

In fact, I actually have to complain about a male character being inappropriately sexualized! Incredible, I know. I said that in Path of Radiance even the “sexy” outfits still felt in-character rather than feeling like we dropped into a porn universe, but I can’t say the same about Strong Male Character here. Sothe should understand the point of armor is to protect your most vulnerable organs, not highlight them! I think the idea is that this is the same vest he wore in PoR and he’s now grown out of it, but how terrible of a sister/girlfriend is Micaiah that she can’t get him new armor??? Ludicrous, completely ruins the experience, #NotMySothe.

But in all seriousness, this was the best Fire Emblem so far (chronologically; we’ll get to Three Houses) and a very pleasant surprise. Play it! Play it twice for the secret NG+ content (because yes they’re still doing that, but this time it’s worth it I promise, I cried). Then savor it, because the next game is going to take that good energy and light it all on fire.