After FE5, Shouzou Kaga, the creator of Fire Emblem, left Nintendo to found his own company. He decided to pick up right where he left off with Fire Emblem Saga, a game with literally the same setting and characters as Fire Emblem. Nintendo said excuse me WTF, and took him to court. Interestingly, while the courts forced him to remove all explicit references to Fire Emblem, they did not find him guilty of copyright infringement, establishing a precedent allowing independent creators to make spiritual successors to their former works even if the IP was now owned by their former employer.

So that is how we got TearRing Saga: Yutona Heroes Chronicle for the PlayStation in 2001. It is a terrible game that would have made a pretty good novel.

If you’ve ever played a Fire Emblem game and thought, “You know what this needs? More RNG and opaque mechanics,” this is the game for you. Stat growths are way lower than in FE, making character growth wildly inconsistent; bosses have ludicrously high dodge rates; enemies are so powerful (including a recurring enemy type that ignores defense) that dodge tanking becomes a necessity; critical hits are even more devastating (they only do double damage but apply the multiplier before defense reduction); and random-activation skills are everywhere. This on top of oodles of optional objectives that are barely hinted at when they’re hinted at all — I started following a guide religiously after discovering I missed an entire character in the second map because I didn’t realize villages had unique events when visited by specific characters, and it’s a good thing I did because the game is full of crap like that. (Even with the guide I failed to finish the Leteena quest because it forgot to include the final prerequisite.)

Additionally, the game moves like molasses. I don’t know if the SNES games were like this, but coming off the super-snappy GBA games it’s extremely noticeable. Characters walk slower, animations take ages to resolve, and there are weirdly long delays when opening menus or message boxes. To compound this, characters have on average 1 point less of movement than in FE, which sounds minor but you really feel it, especially when the game loves to throw difficult terrain at you and forces mounted units to dismount indoors. Moving your army across the map takes ages, doubly so if an objective requires a specific character. (Shout out to all the maps with treasure chests in the middle of swamps that slow your movement to 1 tile/turn, what a great design choice that was!)

The game doesn’t even use the presentation power of the PSX to make up for it — everything is sprites, yet the battle animations are all incredibly stiff, simple, and sterile, giving us the worst of all worlds. This is baffling to me when The Binding Blade, released just one year later on a weaker console, had such fluid and expressive animations. (Also yes, this medieval fantasy game has tanks for some reason.)

It’s also exhausting to play this old fossil without the QoL improvements of later games. The combat preview doesn’t show you your final damage or whether you double, so you have to do math every time to make sure your character won’t die (not that the game tells you what the doubling threshold is anywhere, I had to look that up on the wiki). Inventory management is way more of a hassle than it needs to be, as there’s no clean listing of all items in your army — if you want to move an item, you need to track down who has it, move it to the supply convoy, then move it back onto the character you want. (You also can’t use items on the preparation screen, you have to remember to use stat boosters and such in the middle of a pitched battle.) Most egregiously, there’s no way to view all enemy attack ranges at once, which I know wasn’t a thing in the GBA games either (fortunately there’s a hack to add it in), but come on, seriously? We’re in the 64-bit era and you can’t code that? This accomplishes nothing but wasting the player’s time, both by forcing them to anxiously double-check every attack range individually and by forcing resets when you lose a character because there’s one enemy you forgot to check and they sniped your healer.

The whole thing really feels like Kaga just wanted to make an SNES game again, and stubbornly refused to update any mechanics for the times. The result is that the game is more tedious than fun most of the time.

The story, though, is surprisingly good. It’s far better than any of the GBA games and I’d even allow it to sit at the same table as my beloved Radiant Dawn. It’s a genuinely complex political plot featuring the competing interests of six different nations, and even the obligatory evil cult has a surprising amount of nuance. There are frequent “meanwhile” scenes showing us the perspective of villains and other parties to establish the reasons for their actions, and that most are opposing the heroes under duress or misinformation. There are few villains who are just cackling evil, and all of them are minor obstacles even the main villains are disgusted by.

Unfortunately, I think they did this too well, because the villains honestly end up more sympathetic than the heroes.

Let’s back up a bit to give you details. The story begins with us in control of Runan, the son of a duke who died trying to hold off the invasion of the evil empire. He’s forced to run from his homeland with his tail between his legs to beg aid from an island nation; a pretty similar setup to FE1. Once he gets this aid he begins his crusade to liberate his homeland, but along the way we discover the empire isn’t as evil as they appear. The emperor is being manipulated by an evil witch planted by the cult, and though his sons are good people who oppose the war, they’re forced to do their father’s bidding (very similar to the Black Fangs in FE7, but done better). We repeatedly see tension between the old guard, who are honorable soldiers who care for their men, and the callous cult schemers who are coercing them by holding their families hostage. This comes to a head when the empire’s lost prince, Sennet, returns to say enough is enough and starts a rebellion to liberate the empire from the cult.

This happens when Runan has already reclaimed his home duchy and at the doorstep of reclaiming his kingdom’s capital. Sennet sends a messenger to tell him there’s no longer any reason to fight, because once he takes the throne he’ll dissolve the empire and return everyone’s land peacefully. Runan’s response is, “I believe you, but I don’t want to wait a few weeks, I want to reconquer my kingdom now.” So he kills Sennet’s uncle and all the troops stationed to protect the city (who are so loyal to their general they stay behind to get mowed down like wheat even though they were ordered to leave for exactly this reason), none of whom had to die.

In fairness, the enemy general is an idiot too, because he refuses Runan’s offer of surrender even though he hates the empire and agrees Runan should have the kingdom back, because… I genuinely don’t know. In an earlier scene he says he doesn’t want Runan to have too much leverage going into the peace negotiations… which is worth getting himself and all his soldiers killed? I don’t know if the fan translation failed to convey something or if it was always this incoherent, but it seemed really contrived to me.

The end result is that I found the empire characters way more compelling and heroic than Runan, not helped by Runan having the personality of cardboard. He’s basically just Marth again, but with even less emotional range. Sennet even has his own party of cool allies, giving the sense that he’s the hero of another, more interesting story that we only get to see snippets of. I have no idea why they didn’t make him playable.

Because there are in fact two playable characters in the vein of Gaiden. I haven’t mentioned the other one because he’s irrelevant to the plot and mostly just runs around doing fetch quests, because that was such a better use of screentime than seeing what Sennet was up to. I do actually like Runan’s BFF Holmes; he reminds me of both Hector and Ike in that he deliberately goes against heroic personality tropes in that he’s coarse, rude, and irreverent, but that also makes him funny and relatable amidst all these stuffy nobles. It’s just a shame he doesn’t actually do anything. I’d have much rather preferred him as a soldier in Runan’s army while Sennet got to be the other playable character.

Overall, I think the story really suffered from being a video game, especially because it feels like they tried to cram in way more plot than they had space for. There is so much stuff happening constantly in this web of tangled political intrigue, but I could barely follow it. You’re expected to remember the ethnicities and affiliations of many characters when there are six countries in play, plus tangled family webs of kids whose bloodline is extremely important but who were raised by adoptive parents who themselves have ties to other aristocracy. This game desperately needed a character codex like Radiant Dawn so you could remind yourself who was related to who.

I think the story also suffers from starting in medias res. We begin after Runan and Holmes have fled their home to an unrelated country, and only get the barest of exposition about what happened. They proceed to start talking about the six kingdoms and the complex political interplay between them as if we’re supposed to be familiar with it, but we don’t get proper exposition on the world until well into the midgame, where it’s dropped on us all at once. If we had gotten to see the destruction of Nolzeria and the fall of Reeve, that would have given us a much better understanding of the situation. (It would have also have made the player and characters share the same emotional response upon their return to those locations, instead of feeling weirdly disconnected from the characters weeping with joy because the player only heard about these places in the abstract.)

I don’t know how much of this is on Kaga himself and how much was the lawsuit forcing a messy rewrite — it’s likely that if it was allowed to be set in the Fire Emblem universe, these would be elements from past games we were already familiar with, reducing the need for exposition. But the fact remains it’s an issue. The story deserved to be a novel, where it could have had the time and space to adequately explore all its political conflicts (and make Sennet an actual protagonist).

Now, as for the real villains. Once again it’s an evil cult trying to summon an evil dragon with the blood of sacrificial maidens, because Kaga only knows how to do one plot. What sets them apart this time is that they have nuanced motivations that make them feel like real people. The problem is that their nuanced motivation is that they’re genocide victims. Indigenous genocide victims, just to make this even more awkward. See, they were the original inhabitants of the continent, then colonists came from across the eastern sea, drove them to the fringes of the land, and put the survivors in concentration camps. But they want revenge for this, so they’re evil. Erm.

They are portrayed sympathetically — I actually find this eleventh-hour motive rant from the ~sexy evil witch~ very poignant and humanizing of a character archetype who so rarely is — but at the end of the day, they’re still the ones in the wrong who you’re justified in killing.

As I review more and more works, it’s become striking to me how disturbingly common this plot is, in both Japanese and Western media. Stories love to make their villains sympathetic by revealing they’re genocide victims, but it’s a shallow sympathy — they’re still misguided, or wrong, or Go Too Far. They’re never the protagonists — we never get a story that’s about someone in that position operating under these impossible pressures. They’re always an Other for the privileged oppressor protagonist to look at and say, well it’s tragic and I’m sorry that happened to you, but you still have to die.

I wonder if this is an expression of oppressor guilt? With the rise of the internet people become more aware of the ugly truths behind the historical narratives they’ve been told, and it becomes a necessity to grapple with the reality of past genocides and atrocities. The victims can’t be silenced as easily anymore, so they’re getting louder and bolder and harder to ignore. So is this some kind of absolution ritual? See, I acknowledged you were wronged and it was bad, so can you shut up and stop being inconvenient for me? Or is it a way to repackage genocidal rhetoric in a way that’s more palatable to the enlightened centrists of today? Yes, genocide is wrong, but really it’s their own fault for Going Too Far, they brought our retribution upon themselves.

Sigh.

The game is worse on women, also. It’s pretty good for a while, with the MacGuffin Girls able to transform into awesome unbeatable dragons, but then the MacGuffin Girls all get kidnapped and give their power to their boyfriends because they know who’s really important here. (We get exactly one subversion of this, with one of the MacGuffin Girls freeing herself and joining you for the final battle, which I appreciated but she’s the only one.) The romance between Holmes and Katri is also awful and just comes out of nowhere — he’s never anything but rude and belittling towards her, to the point of frequently making her cry, but she inexplicably falls in deep, passionate love with him because she recognizes he’s a good person ~deep down~. Remember girls, men only bully you because they love you!

Additionally, in order to get a dancer in this game you have to let human traffickers kidnap a teenage girl and teach her to be a stripper. I wish I was making this up. Later, the same pimp tries to kidnap an even younger girl, but don’t worry, she’s immediately rescued by her boyfriend, who just subjects the pimp to comedic slapstick violence instead of murdering him, so he presumably continues kidnapping girls five seconds later. And oh yes, the artists took the time to draw the underage girl in her stripper outfit just for that scene. Sexual exploitation of young girls, so funny!