Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light: Fun for Fans, Abysmal to Newcomers

July 31st, 2021

On April 20th, 1990, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light (or as I’ll be referring to it: Fire Emblem 1) was released on the NES not to the world, but in Japan only. Being considered the first tactical RPG, it involves the player controlling a number of units in an army across several chapters. While the game got a remake for the Nintendo DS, it wasn’t until the series’ 30th anniversary that the original version got officially localized in English on the Nintendo Switch…for around four months.

Now unavailable permanently (lest you do the unthinkable and hack your console or emulate), Nintendo’s removal of the game on March 31st to coincide with the end of their fiscal year both makes sense and is incredibly frustrating. It bolstered sales since many felt pressured to buy immediately, but comes across as rather scummy to those wishing to experience it later. And now, despite it being much cheaper than any of the recent titles at $6, is it even a good entrypoint?

As someone who started their Fire Emblem journey with this game, I can say with absolute confidence:

NO!

I enjoyed the game.

I respect the game.

I appreciate the game’s developers for starting such an incredible franchise.

But it’s not worth the pain to begin here.

You play as Marth in the fantasy continent of Archanea, a young prince thrusted out of his kingdom thanks to the evil Earth Dragon Medeus. After biding his time for years, Marth and his friends form a ragtag army to reclaim the throne, stop Medeus from razing the planet with his dragon army, and recruit plenty of people along the way. Marth also inherits a sacred treasure, the Fire Emblem, rather early on, but to be perfectly honest its presence is borderline nonexistent. Every unit can die permanently other than Marth, whose death will result in a game over, so careful planning and long-term thinking is critical.

While there are a number of pit stops made at neighboring kingdoms with their own subplots, the dialogue is rather minimal and mostly serves to contextualize the set pieces.

At most you’ll get an introductory cutscene at the start of the battle, something to wrap up the map, a conversation when recruiting someone, and a boss quote once you reach them. When the writers are allowed to flex their creative muscles, the dialogue has a lot of charm to it and makes most of the characters stand out from one another.

Iconic features like mid-battle support conversations wouldn’t be introduced until Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade roughly 12 years later. And due to the game’s perma-death system, only select non-playable characters and Marth will speak (plus those you haven’t yet recruited). While this is sort-of cool for immersion and allows players to imagine their own tale, it also really highlights the hardware limitations holding the game back.

Tutorials are minimal, explaining the basic mechanics through an intro cutscene and optional hint houses. They get the job done, but also barely help at easing those new to the game into it.

And what’s worse is that before attacking an opponent, you have no idea what the accuracy, crit rate, and even damage will be, leading to very dicey scenarios that could swiftly go south. It’s easy to pick up on things over time, but by that point you’re likely deep into the game and already have a rather bruised army. To give a quick explanation of the weapons:

• Swords have high accuracy but average power.
• Lances have greater power at the expense of being less accurate.
• Axes, while they can dish out a lot of damage, have the lowest hit rates.
• Bows shred through flying units and are great for cheesing that one unit you hate.
• Magic shreds through almost everything. Except for the Curate class, who are borderline useless thanks to them gaining experience by…taking damage. Not using support magic.
• Dragonstones make for better tanks than the Knight and General classes — which were made to take loads of damage — thanks to the drastic defense boost.
• Ballistician ammo sure does exist.

They’re not hard to figure out, but learning how to effectively use them can lead to some…unfortunate strategies.

Speaking of unfortunate, the pacing! I dislike it. A lot. I know I’m a bit spoiled thanks to modern games being very snappy, but it’s sluggish even when using the newly added 2x speed option without animations on. To try and put the game’s slowness into perspective, moving your cursor in the DS remake Shadow Dragon is roughly 6x faster compared to in FE1’s default speed. After playing more recent games and going back, it is ungodly. To make things worse, it speeds up the music, too! And the soundtrack is actually one of my favorites from the 8-bit era!

While it is mildly entertaining to hear the final map theme go from a slow, ambient track to EDM, the majority of the songs and sound effects are horribly high-pitched. So while speeding up the game makes the pacing significantly better, it’s at the cost of pretty much having to keep the game muted, which is an annoying issue they probably could have fixed.

Other enhancements include a single save state (referred to by the game as a bookmark) that can be taken at any time. Three or more would’ve been preferable, but having a save state at all is a huge upgrade for what can be a ruthless game. The same goes for its turn rewind feature, where you can swiftly roll back to undo a turn that may have been a grave mistake.

Even still, that doesn’t change the fact that the balancing is very loose and all over the place. In total there are 52 obtainable units, with a maximum of 51 because of one recruitment being a “choose one or the other” scenario. That in conjunction with the 22 available classes allows for a lot of breathing room and experimentation, especially for repeated playthroughs when you know what you’re doing.

Thanks to more hidden gameplay elements like growth rates and stat boosters found in the secret shop, you can customize your army to an extensive degree by the latter chapters. Almost too much, since knowing how to avoid consequences in the early parts of the game will have a snowball effect of your army becoming nearly untouchable by everyone except bosses. While power-tripping on repeated playthroughs can be fun, it also makes the entire experience a bit too easy for what’s still a slow game. But what if you don’t know what you’re doing? What if this is your first Fire Emblem — or even tactical RPG?

With so many options readily available at the start, the game feels somewhat overwhelming for the first few chapters. And while it won’t take too long to get acquainted with the mechanics, it’s very likely that a person’s initial playthrough will be rather rough unless they protect their early units with their lives or religiously check a guide. Losing old units and having to hastily grind up new ones is a very bad strategy that’ll be the exact opposite of overpowered. Barely scraping by adds up slowly at first, with the consequences being exponentially worse in the final battle against Medeus. How do I know this?

Fire Emblem 1 is a very hard sell to a newcomer, even with the added enhancements on the Switch re-release. A common rule in the Fire Emblem community is to start with one of the 3DS entries (I recommend Echoes!) or Three Houses, and work backwards from there. The game can be fun, but not knowing what you’re doing makes it far harder to recommend unless you really like Fire Emblem and want to reflect on its history. And to be honest? Even with the $6 price tag, you’d likely be better off trying another game first and then later testing your patience here. Or heck, Shadow Dragon DS is fully available on the Wii U eShop for $10! That version has its own quirks, but at least has solid tutorials and is more accessible. I strongly suggest trying out Fire Emblem for yourself, but please don’t start with this one like me.

All images used in this review are screenshots from Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light by Nintendo.