When I went to check Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light‘s store page while writing the first part of this let’s play (I think it was when I was making sure that the store page was misleadingly advertising a plurality of save states), I noticed that it mentioned the existence of 20 chapters. That means that doing one of these per day would take 20 days, and even more than that whenever I skip a day due to time constraints. So! From now on, I’ll be covering multiple chapters per post, presumably until my sanity has chipped away enough that I’m condensing 4-5 hour-long maps into a single post to speed things up.

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Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, chapter 2

Automatically recruiting Ogma and a bunch of dudes with axes

Chapter 2 of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light begins with Ogma and several axe-users joining the party. All of them look virtually identical, and since each character’s items are hidden behind the game’s clumsy menu system, it’s easy to confuse units of the same type. Basically, the only characters right now who I can identify at a glance are Draug (my defensive unit with heavy armor and slow speed), Caeda (my speedy flying unit who’s currently very squishy), Marth (our token royal whose damage and defense are middling; he plays a lot like Eirika in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, so working off of the assumption that she was based on him, he’s likely to become similarly strong in later chapters), and Ogma (an all-purpose unit). Oh, and Jagen. But no one cares about Jagen because it’s best to ignore him forever.

Villagers sometimes offer you hints about how to recruit enemy characters like Darros

Later games are much clearer about which characters you need to use to recruit enemies. Recruitment in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light is haphazard, to put it mildly, though visiting houses with your characters can sometimes unearth useful information that helps to direct your efforts. In this case, a villager mentions that a pirate named Darros is looking to meet Marth, so that’s an easy recruitment. You still have to select enemy units one at a time to figure out which one is Darros (he’s in the top-right mob), but it’s better than nothing. Especially since I’m trying to avoid using a recruitment guide.

Apparently, early Fire Emblem games don’t give healers experience for healing

I don’t remember if Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia operated similarly to this game (because that was a faithful remake of an early game and one of the weirder games in the series because of it), but the vast majority of Fire Emblem games give healers experience for healing people. It makes sense—healers can’t attack, so allowing them to become better healers as they heal people gives them the ability to become stronger. No such luck in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light. For some reason, the only way to level up your healers is to let them get attacked by enemies. That might be reasonable if they were defensive beasts or could heal themselves, but no. My healers might remain at level 1 forever.

Princess Caeda is your go-to enemy recruiter in chapters 2 and 3

Marth can recruit Darros, but the real star of these early chapters is Caeda. Not only does her pegasus make moving around significantly easier (because unlike later games, the movement cursor in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light doesn’t allow you to hover over tiles you can’t walk on, so getting around water and other impassable tiles is extra clumsy), but she can recruit Castor in chapter 2 and a powerful character named Navarre in chapter 3. Good luck figuring this out without a save state.

Full video of chapter 2

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light‘s underlying rhythm is already beginning to become apparent, with each map beginning with 10-15 minutes of trying something out, then misjudging an enemy’s movement range or figuring out that they’re recruitable and rewinding back to an earlier point with the benefit of that knowledge. Chapter 2 is made up of two enemy groups, with Darros and some pirates at the top-right of the screen (so Marth should stay in that general area) and Castor and some strong pirates and archers being at the left of the screen (so Caeda should head in that direction while lagging behind a wall of melee units). Pirates can move across water, so using bridges to funnel them isn’t a viable option. Otherwise, this map is straightforward. Kill or recruit everyone, then take the castle.

There’s a town near the left side of the screen that pirates might be able to destroy if you dilly-dally, hence splitting into two groups. Someone in the town mentions that the cleric Lena left to help the poor and sick and gives the party 5,000 gold to save her. That’s a great deal because she joins the party automatically.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, chapter 3

Lena and some guy named Julian are automatically recruited at the start of chapter 3

Chapter 3 of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light opens with Lena being whisked away by a thief named Julian who has defected from the bandits to help her out. She refuses to leave until she’s found her Mend staff, and an important note is that her only staff is a Warp staff. That could be helpful later on, but since it’s probably safest to preserve its charges, she’s useless until we can find her a healing staff to use. Lena and Julian are controllable units right away and both begin the map at the top-right of the screen. A whole group of enemies, Navarre included, catch up to them almost immediately.

Caeda handles the recruitment of Navarre because she’s the life of the party

Since Navarre can only be recruited by Caeda, she should head toward the top-right of the screen and prepare to intercept him. You have to be careful about where you put her, though, because the group of enemies he’s with has an archer. Archers and pegasus knights don’t mix. I sent Draug with her as a backup in case Navarre couldn’t finish off most of his former allies (which he very much can thanks to his only weapon being a Killing Edge, but it might be close, depending on how many hits he fails to dodge).

Units can trade weapons, but it’s slightly clunkier than in later games

At first, I didn’t think that trading items between units could be done because the modern Fire Emblem games’ way of trading items didn’t work. In modern games, you move next to a unit and a “trade” option appears. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light has an extra step—you have to go into the item menu, select the item you want to trade, and then a trade option appears. I should have figured that out earlier because I vaguely remember Fire Emblem 4 functioning similarly to this, though most of my memories of that game are from a version with untranslated menus that make it difficult to recall specifics.

Hyman, the boss of chapter 3, drops a Mend staff that should come in handy later on

The unfortunately-named Hyman is chapter 3’s boss, and he drops the Mend staff that Lena was looking for. I’ll still have to give it to her since there doesn’t appear to be any between-chapter item management, but that should be a simple enough process now that I’ve figured out how to trade items between units.

Full video of chapter 3

Navarre’s position in the mountains makes it difficult to send units to him, and since I wasn’t sure who was needed to recruit him, I ended up losing a full 18 minutes of gameplay before starting over to try again. Once you know to send Caeda and a couple of damage-dealers to the top-right of the screen, chapter 3 of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light becomes very easy. Everyone else goes left, Marth stops by a village on the way and grabs a Devil Axe (which I then had him give to Darros), and then everyone loops up to clean out the remaining enemies and finish off the boss. This boss is actually surprisingly tough and requires a group effort to beat, though, owing largely to the frequency of missed attacks.

Modern Fire Emblem games lie about their percentages to better suit the psychology of what you expect those numbers to mean. For example, a 90% chance to hit that misses one out of every ten attacks doesn’t feel like 90%, so the behind-the-scenes percentage is higher. A 30% chance to hit feels unlikely, so the real percentage is much lower. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light doesn’t have percentages at all, but it’s from an era before this number-trickery existed, so a whole lot of attacks end up missing.

Anyway, I ended up buying a couple of Iron Swords for Caeda and Navarre (in the latter’s case, to help preserve his Killing Edge) as well as transferring Jagen’s weapons to Draug and Ogma. That should allow us to use him as a shield in a worst-case scenario without having to worry about his counterattacks finishing off enemies and taking experience away from other units. And now Draug has a Silver Lance.

A Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light Let’s Play, Chapters 2 & 3: Recruiting, yo first appeared on Killa Penguin