Remember when I said December would be dead if Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t pan out? Well, welcome to the darkest timeline. Nothing else has panned out thus far, either, so I guess there’s nothing left to do but to tread water with Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light and pray for something interesting to happen. You know, like for a certain game developer to be hit by an asteroid and explode. And then for the charred remains to defy physics and explode again for good measure. That would be just swell.

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Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, chapter 4

Aw, it’s the Fire Emblem series’ first unit selection screen!

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light may be an uninteresting slog, unlike many of the series’ later entries, but I’ve loved the Fire Emblem series for so long that seeing its very first unit selection screen feels a bit like looking back into your own genealogy. “Ah, so that’s where my friendliness came from. It’s nice to know that great-grandpop also liked to recruit enemy soldiers into his ranks until he had to start picking and choosing his besties.” It’s basic, and I’d love the option to transfer items to contributing soldiers before benching units forever and ever, but I suppose it gets the job done well enough.

A boss with a ridersbane means horses need to keep their distance

One of the villagers mentions that this map’s boss has a Ridersbane equipped, which means that he deals bonus damage to units who are mounted on horseback. It’s kind of a dick move to throw you into a large map where the mounted units most effective at moving across the empty space can’t be used at the end.

Recruiting Matthis with Lena

You have to play kind of slow and steady, though, because you can recruit a mounted unit who rushes at your group using Lena. Throwing your healer into a group of mounted enemies is a bad idea under even the best of circumstances. It’s important to have a wall of units nearby to finish off the remaining enemies.

Recruiting Merric by having Marth visit a village

We get our first magic-user in chapter 4 of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, and while recruiting Merric is as easy as sending Marth up to a village near the boss encounter, it’s made tricky by a thief who crosses the water (which is apparently something thieves can do—it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, either). I’m not 100% on this, but their movement suggests that thieves can destroy cities like pirates do, so I ended up using one of Lena’s Warp staff charges to send Caeda up to squat on that tile and keep it safe until Marth could get up there. It might have been fine, but I’m taking no chances.

Full video of chapter 4

Here’s a fun official-Nintendo-emulation thing to consider: if you load an earlier point, there are no mechanisms in place to return to where you were. That’s bog-standard emulation stuff, but a little more flexibility here would have been nice. I’m not 100% sure why I loaded a save state from the end of chapter 3 (I recorded the video almost a week ago but suspect that I was trying to get back to the unit selection screen; you can’t use the turn rewind feature to access it and change your characters if you selected poorly), but doing so overwrote my save file, forcing me to beat chapter 3’s boss again. Not great.

The strategy here is pretty simple. Mounted units take care of the northern enemies, while everyone else marches west. Eventually, the western forces meet resistance, and Matthis isn’t far behind, hence keeping Lena with that group. The bridge is the next chokepoint, but if you can beat the mounted unit with a hammer, you can move your units into the archers’ faces and finish them off easily enough. Then it’s a straight shot to the castle and map boss. The boss here is squishy and can’t respond to ranged attacks, so magic and arrows will finish him off pretty quickly. He even died before I could use him to farm experience.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, chapter 5

I remember reading that Hardin becomes the villain in the never-translated sequel

This guy Hardin is a knight (I guess?) protecting Princess Nyna, whose home is occupied by enemy soldiers (again, I guess; clarity isn’t something that these early-Nintendo games were big on). However, Fire Emblem 3 was a remake of this game with a sequel attached to it, and in the sequel, Hardin becomes an evil king. That would have been cool to see. This additional story exists only in Fire Emblem 3 and second-half remake Fire Emblem 12, neither of which have ever been officially translated. This is why Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light is such a middle finger: this game could already be played through in English in the DS Shadow Dragon remake. Under the half-lie pretense of making a never-before-translated game available to everyone, the story’s yet-untranslated continuation was ignored. It’s just so dumb.

A reminder that thieves might become useful soon

Thieves in Fire Emblem games are traditionally weak (with one or two minor exceptions) but capable of opening doors and chests without keys. I’m not sure that they function the same way in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light because Julian has a “Master Key” item that has to be used to open doors, but they can apparently open chests without an item. Anyway, a random villager mentions that we’ll need a thief when we go into the castle in the next map if we want to open the treasure chests inside.

Wendell recruited himself into Marth’s army

The first thing that I’ve been doing at the start of each map is to check enemy units and look for any with names. Sometimes, a name means nothing and they’re merely a boss character. Other times, though, it’s a sign that they’re a recruitable character, and that’s the case with Wendell. I had no idea who I was supposed to talk to this guy with, but he didn’t attack anyone, and that was enough for me to leave him alone. I guess that you aren’t supposed to talk to him with anyone, because while no talk icon appears when moving next to him with Marth, Wendell will seek him out on the enemy’s turn and recruit himself into the army. Now we have two magic-users (though only Wendell on this map because I forgot Merric).

Full video of chapter 5

Hardin and some of his buddies start the map as allies, but all of my efforts to send their small, inexperienced soldiers into danger went about as badly as expected. I had far more success moving all of my units up, using the bridges as a chokepoint to thin the enemy numbers, and then slowly advancing to the castle. It wasn’t pretty thanks to some terrible hit chances and a number of hard-hitting enemies who didn’t mesh well with units who only had a few HP left, but you know. Save states. I don’t care if it’s technically cheating; this game sucks and elaborate strategies make little difference to the outcome.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, chapter 6

Enemy thieves seem to function differently than in later games

Like so much about Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, enemy thieves function a little differently than I’m used to. They run around levels stealing items from chests, as expected, but defeating them doesn’t result in them dropping whatever item they looted from chests. I’m unsure whether you have to use your own thief to steal it back or if anything stolen by an enemy is simply gone forever. Another thing that caught me a little off-guard was their tendency to steal something and then stand around. Newer games program them to escape from the level once they’ve stolen (or stolen enough), but including something like that probably wouldn’t make sense if you can’t recover the items anyway.

Recruiting Rickard with Julian

A new concern I have about the gameplay revolves around recruitment. If I’m leaving half of the roster behind every time I enter a map and the only way to know how to recruit named units is to experiment with moving characters next to them, how am I supposed to know who to bring at any given point? I mean, if I had brought Wrys along instead of Lena in chapter 4, I wouldn’t have been able to recruit her brother at all. It’s a clunky system that all but requires using a guide, which I’m refusing to do. For all I know, I may have already killed a recruitable character. It’ll be interesting to check that after I finish.

Anyway, Julian opens a locked door and speaks to an enemy thief unit to recruit them. This is Rickard, an old thieving pal of his with even worse stats. Since there’s no obvious way to level up weak thieving units, I can’t picture using an even weaker thief unless a later stage ends up being filled to the brim with chests.

Well, at least Lena ended up with a Physic staff for long-range healing

My units only got to a couple of chests before enemy thieves because rushing ahead seemed like a bad idea. Not being able to see/plan around enemy ranges is throwing a serious wrench into my decision-making. Still, one chest contained lots of money, while another had a Physic staff. I’m assuming that this functions similarly to Physics staves in later games and allows its wielder to heal HP from a distance. That would come in handy considering that Lena’s movement range is pathetic and makes her difficult to use.

Full video of chapter 6

I forgot to bring Julian along at first. It would have been smarter to reset the game and load the save, but I opted instead to go back to the final turn of the last map. Ugh. I hate this single save state so much. Other than that, the strategy is very simple: Julian goes right to unlock the door (along with other units because I didn’t know who was required to recruit Rickard ahead of time), and everyone else goes west. Merric and Wendell wreck the armored units with help from axe-user Barst and his equipped Hammer, Ogma and Navarre detour north to wreck some mounted units with help from Ridersbane-wielding Abel, and Caeda participates wherever she can for extra experience. This is another map with a boss who stays in place and is helpless against archers and magic-users, but be aware that he hits significantly harder than expected.

Oh, and I started to feel dirty using Hardin knowing that he eventually becomes an evil king, so I had him trade his steel sword to Caeda and will sideline him in the future. Good luck conquering as a level 6 unit!

Wait, the Fire Emblem allows Marth to open chests? That’s weird.

One of the more cringe-inducing elements of later Fire Emblem games is their tendency to go, “oh, by the way, this important item you’ve been looking for is also known as the Fire Emblem.” I can’t reasonably be bothered by the first game doing this, though, because complaining that a game is named after something in it would be stupid. This is one of the very, very, very, very, very rare examples of something that Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light does better than later games. Very, very, very rare.

If Princess Nyna’s description of the Fire Emblem is any indication, having it in Marth’s possession should allow him to open chests. That’s one more reason we’re probably never going to need Rickard.

A Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light Let’s Play, Chapters 4 & 5 & 6 first appeared on Killa Penguin