Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones

Over the last few months I played the second Fire Emblem game for the US. It took a long time and I feel the need to unload my thoughts.

Quick summary of the series if you’re not familiar with it and for some reason care: it plays kind of like a board game, in that you have a bunch of units with various abilities (sword, lance, bow, magic, etc.) as well as strengths and weaknesses. On your turn, you move some or all of your units, and then the enemy units get a turn. Your characters improve in stats and abilities as you use them, but you can only bring a certain number into each chapter, so you have to pick which ones to focus on. There are so many enemies in each chapter, and you want the experience points from fighting them to go to the units you plan to rely on later. Another key element is that if you lose a unit in battle and don’t restart the chapter, that unit is permanently gone. (I make it a point to not lose any units, on principle.)

I normally don’t like turn-based stuff, but because it doesn’t make a pretense of being some kind of action or adventure game, I think it works. (I even turn off the battle animations so it really is like moving pieces over the terrain.)

I actually started the game years ago while on vacation and got to the part where the main characters’ paths split and you choose one. At this point, you have access to various monster battles in-between levels, where you can level your units up. I don’t like this – it makes it too easy and undermines the importance of focusing on the right set of units in the main chapters. Plus I didn’t have a lot of time after the vacation ended, so I stopped playing.

When I picked it up again (and started from scratch), I decided to just ignore all of those side quest things and play the game like its predecessor. I was a bit worried that it would get overly difficult, since the game clearly intended you to level people up on the side, but I gave it a shot. I definitely did make it harder on myself than it otherwise would have been. Besides insisting on not continuing until I beat a chapter without losing any units or civilian “neutral” characters, I also stuck with characters I got early on, ignoring stronger characters that came along later and could have superseded them. (After all the work to build the early characters up, it would have been unsatisfying to stop using them.)

Over all I liked it. In hindsight, I don’t think that ignoring the bonus stages made the game overly difficult, although it does make it impossible to use some of the characters that start out weak and come in late in the game. On hard mode, it might end up being impossible anyway without bonus stages.

In the previous game, my favorite character was Canas, the only dark magic user that can join your team. (Not “dark” in the “evil” sense.) In this game, you don’t get any dark magic users until pretty late (on Eirika’s path), and by that time I was already invested in a light and anima (nature) magic user. So I didn’t use that new guy. Until I got stuck in this one level and realized that I could upgrade him to a summoner. I still almost never let him fight, but on each turn I could summon a weak monster that I could control. I didn’t let the monster fight either, but by putting it out in front, it could take a hit that would normally have damaged one of my units. That made me feel clever.

The strategy aspect was very satisfying. Even when I made dumb mistakes that I should have avoided, like moving forward into a crowded mass of enemies in order to clear them out rather than holding my ground in a narrow passage where they could only come at me a few at time. It’s also satisfying to take weak characters and make them into something useful.

The story, on the other hand, was lame, and like the previous game I pretty much ignored it. Fortunately, it doesn’t really have any bearing on the game.

So in general, it was pretty cool, and eventually I’ll probably go back and play through the levels on Ephraim’s path. It’s not cool enough to make me want to play the whole series, though. I guess a little Fire Emblem goes a long way.