It’s December 4th, and that means that Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Nintendo’s thoughtlessly low-effort method of celebrating the series’ 30th anniversary, has now released. I played a little of it at 1 AM before I went to bed last night/morning/whatever, and doing so killed me a little inside. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light is bad. However, since it’s only going to be purchasable until the end of March 2021, I figured that my Christmas gift to everyone would be to spread the pain and play through the whole thing in a let’s play format. And as a bonus, chronicling Nintendo’s laziness on the anniversary of one of their major franchises—disagree if you want, but the roster of the most recent Smash Bros speaks for itself—before the evidence disappears feels like a good deed. And a moral imperative.
If you’ve played Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon on the Nintendo DS and felt like its story was a little too straightforward and vanilla, that’s because it’s a remake of this game. This is the very first Fire Emblem game ever made, and while I finished the remake on the DS, I’ve never played through this original version. I’ve tried emulating the early Fire Emblem games (basically, everything prior to Fire Emblem 4, which is where the series first began to carve out its identity) and noped out each time. Again, bad.
I don’t remember much of Shadow Dragon on the DS because it was forgettable among the few officially-translated games in the series when I played it (which was before Awakening had come out, back when us old-timers would stalk game shops looking for GBA/DS copies of the rare few games to be released into English), but one thing I do remember is that it begins with Princess Caeda, Marth’s eventual love interest, asking him to save her father from attacking pirates. I’m not sure how bandits became such a series staple in early levels, but they fit like a glove and fill me with great joy whenever I see them arrive to a level.
Jagen is your strongest starting unit, and another commonality between games is named for him: Jagen characters. Never use characters who start strong in Fire Emblem games. There are exceptions like Titania in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, but for the most part, units who start out strong have terrible growth rates, and pumping experience into them will eventually backfire by leaving you with one unit who can’t keep up and others who haven’t leveled up enough to be useful in a pinch.
Before I get into the level itself, let’s talk about the emulation features Nintendo has included. You get a save state (and from the looks of it, just that one save state, making the plural “save states” mentioned on the game’s store page incredibly misleading), two speedup features that can speed up everything on the enemy’s turn or at all times, and a turn rewind feature that can skip to the beginning of an earlier turn.
That’s not nothing, but it’s certainly nothing-adjacent. The emulator speedup changes the pitch of the music, for one thing, turning the NES instrumentation into a piercing salvo of brain-scratching high notes. Not all emulators do that. And the save state? I had more functionality in the emulators I was using while getting into Fire Emblem in the first place 16 years ago. Think of all of the things that could have been added into this game but weren’t! Modern arrangements of the soundtrack would have been nice. Backgrounds during combat, too. They could have even gone for broke, dipped into whatever voice acting talent they found for Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and included voice acting for all of the dialog. Or barring that, they could have added an emulated version of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon for extra value.
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light is aggressively low-effort. It’s possible to make such a bad effort celebrating an anniversary that the end result is worse than if you had simply forgotten it.
Now that I’ve disclosed all of my existing complaints, it’s time to find new ones. For example, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light existed prior to the invention of the weapon triangle, visible movement ranges, and the combat forecast. Basically, it’s a strategy game where you don’t have enough information to strategize. I’m going to be feeling my way through this one and abusing the save state.
The goal of the first level is to get Marth to the castle on the left side of the screen, but getting him to the other villages is also important because they give him money and a healer character named Wrys who looks just enough like Michael Chiklis to mess with me. Both will probably come in handy later.
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light is awful. This is absolutely the game 2020 deserves.
A Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light Let’s Play, Chapter 1: Everything sucks first appeared on Killa Penguin
