Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones

Anyone into turn based strategy? No? What a shame, that's a great genre. Fire Emblem and Advance Wars are the two flagship games. I haven't played Advanced wars, but FE is darned good. Difficult, but not overly so, and tense, FE is a excellent game.

The graphics are OK on the battle map, but the unit portraits are excellent. The battle animations are also fantastic. There's a nice old school feel.

The music is good enough, not horrible, not awesome. I'd just be careful listening to my own songs, because the mix of cKy, and other hard rock, metal bands tends to get me too pumped up, and once that happens I make hasty decisions resulting in the deaths of my units.

Strategy is key, and if you screw up, whoever died is dead. Forever. There's no way whatsoever to bring them back short of restarting the battle. Being successful is a mixture of careful placement, using everything at your disposal, and calculated risks. One weakness I found in the game was after a while, the game degenerated into "Send Seth into the heart of the enemy army and watch him kill everyone single handedly." This is not a huge flaw, as that strategy is soon rendered ineffective, but you can get by for a couple of missions. I was disappointed by the enemy AI, as at first it seems brutally smart, and for the most part it is. But, soon you'll realize that it's programmed to attack the weakest units, which means that an enemy soldier will run through your battle lines to kill some civilians cowering behind your troops. Still, for the most part the AI will kick your pasty ass over and over again. (That's on normal, if you really want pain, play it on Hard.) To further complicate matters, in most missions there are extra objectives that you don't have to accomplish, but they are almost always worth your time. You may recruit an enemy unit (Amelia was the hardest, mere words cannot express how tedious that was.), or race thieves to treasure chests filled with useful stuff.

The characters are well done, as their personalities are brought out by events and random support conversations. Oh, that's another issue I have. The support conversations are completely random. If two compatible units are close enough that might, just might want to talk. Those conversations are too random, and insanely difficult to make work. Oh well. You do tend to get attached to your troops, which makes it worse when they die.

The missions themselves are well done, some are covered in fog, making to difficult to see, others you try to hold out against impossible odds arrayed before you. They are all good, all 23 of them. Environments vary immensely, everything to open fields, inside forts and castles to ships. There are also a random amount of skirmishes scattered about the map, you can fight in those and level up your units. Also, there are 2 dungeons, both of which are difficult but rewarding.

Beware, some units and weapons are super good against some enemy types, or weapon types, and awful against others. Beware.

Multiplayer is OK, pretty much a straight-up slugfest. You can also play it against a computer, if you're bored and by yourself.

All in all, Fire Emblem is a great game. I didn't know I would like it as much as I did. Give Fire Emblem a whirl, you probably won't be disappointed.

5 star(s) out of 5

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