Greg Kasavin Executive Editor

Now Playing: Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga (GBA), Fire Emblem (GBA), Beyond Good and Evil (PC), Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (PS2), .hack Part 4: Quarantine (PS2)

Paying Tribute to Fire Emblem

For what it's worth, Fire Emblem for the Game Boy Advance is easily one of my personal top five games of 2003. To better qualify that: I played a whole bunch of games last year. Over the holidays, practically all I did was play Fire Emblem. Consider this as an attempt to justify my behavior.

Fire Emblem may not be the perfect game for everybody, but it's the perfect game for me.

You may not have heard of Fire Emblem, since it was released quietly amidst the 2003 holiday rush. It's a fantasy-themed, strategic role-playing game in which you guide a trio of main characters and their many companions through a series of challenging, turn-based battles (each staged as a "chapter") on an epic journey. But that's not all. As far as I'm concerned, this game is a textbook case of excellent game design.

When something is referred to as a "textbook case," you might figure it's typical in some way. It's standard. It's "by the book." But good textbooks don't use obvious examples; they use complex examples to demonstrate specific principles. To that end, the designers of Fire Emblem clearly and consciously took some serious risks in designing their game. I believe the greatest games are the ones that take risks such as these. The result is something that won't appeal to everybody (why should it have to?) and might even frustrate some of those who'd otherwise like the game, but for a certain subset of the game's audience--including me--it makes for an incredibly worthwhile, even moving, experience.

The game's focus is on tactical combat, but it has long-term, strategic depth. Early on, you can rely on your powerhouses, but if you go out of your way to strengthen your weaker characters, they'll become the strongest of all by the end of the game.

At its core, Fire Emblem is a pretty straightforward strategic role-playing game. You exchange turns with your opponent by moving about a dozen of your units into position. Then you attempt to eliminate your enemies by using weapons, which include swords, spears, axes, and bows, that are wielded by character classes such as cavaliers, mercenaries, knights, mages, archers, and clerics. A few complexities, such as physically larger characters' abilities to "rescue" other units from the field, the rock-paper-scissors-style relationship between swords, spears, and axes, the effects of different terrain, and the fact that weapons break after extended use, help make the core gameplay of Fire Emblem interesting. A great variety of excellent combat animations also makes the battles fun to watch, and after you've seen them all 20-odd hours later, you can turn them off to speed things up. While the core gameplay is what makes the game challenging and entertaining, it's not what makes the game itself so great.

One of Fire Emblem's risky design elements is that it expects you to care about its cast of characters. Each chapter of the game is bookended by some rather lengthy exchanges of dialogue (carefully and expertly translated from the original Japanese), which ultimately do a good job of both establishing the game's characters and explaining the game's rather intricate plot. The occasional use of full-screen still images punctuates some of the key points in the story, but apart from that, you'll be looking at the same talking heads during all the cutscenes. Interestingly, though the cutscenes do sometimes include action in them (and not just dialogue), the game conveys this mostly just by moving the character portraits around the screen. It's almost like a puppet show, and it's certainly not the most cinematic storytelling technique in a game--but it works. And this simple storytelling style is what allows Fire Emblem to have such an epic story in the first place.

Just as you'll meet a new ally in most every chapter of Fire Emblem, you'll also face a unique adversary.

Though there isn't much in the way of animation during the game's cutscenes, each of the major characters in the game--both enemies and allies--is represented by a unique portrait and a unique textual profile. The anime-style portraits are done up in a very consistent style, and, along with the descriptive text for each character, they're like self-contained exposition. You get a great sense of each character just by looking at him or her and reading a sentence or two about him or her.

On top of that, one of the game's peripheral elements is an intricate web of inter-character relationships. Basically, the designers of the game plotted out a surprisingly complex narrative in which none of the dozens of different characters exists in a vacuum. For instance, one of the characters who may join you later on in the game happens to be the assassin of the lover of one of the other characters who's already a member of your party. Want to see them have it out and settle the score? You can. There are hundreds of unique little interpersonal conversations that may occur over the course of the game, depending on how and whether you pair up certain characters. You'll never be able to see them all by playing through the game just once, twice, or even three times.

Obvious care and attention went into Fire Emblem's story and characters. But the riskiest aspect of the game is the way in which it happily kills off its main characters. Or rather, the way in which it puts you in direct control of their fates. Obviously, the game has a structured narrative, and as such, you do need to keep the three main characters alive. But apart from them, should any of the supporting characters lose all their health points during a mission, they're gone for good, forever. There are no magical resurrection scrolls or potions in this game, so an unlucky critical hit from an opponent can knock your mightiest paladin or most experienced general out of the battle permanently. The only way to change this is to restart the chapter from scratch. In the game's epilogue, you'll learn that your fallen characters either died on the battlefield or left the company due to their grievous wounds. For all the survivors, you get a nice wrap-up of whatever happened to them.

Fire Emblem's style of storytelling is closer to the experience you get from reading a novel rather than the one you get from playing a typical game.

I liked Fire Emblem's characters from the start, and in the first two-thirds of the game, I didn't accept any casualties. Then it got tougher, and I had more characters than I needed. So I grudgingly took a few losses in the name of progress. However, the game's epilogue really hit me hard. I wanted to know what might have happened had these characters survived. Sure, it's all just fiction, but in a way, I did feel responsible for the deaths of some of these imaginary characters.

Upon finishing Fire Emblem, I also discovered that it presented me with the option to start the game all over again, only this time from the perspective of a different character. The focus of the story becomes slightly different, a few scenarios are changed or introduced, and the experience is just as rewarding as it is the first time. This second time around, however, I vowed to keep each and every one of my companions out of harm's way. And that's just what I did.

I finished Fire Emblem on the same day that I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in the theater. Both are works of fantasy-themed fiction, and both tell epic stories. The difference is, in the case of Fire Emblem, it was entirely up to me as to who lived and who died. Some remarkably surprising victories and some terribly disappointing defeats occurred as a consequence of my actions during the 20 hours I spent playing through the game for the first time, and that experience is mine alone. I can't easily justify the designers' decision to include such a punitive character death system in Fire Emblem, but I realize that this is a big part of the reason why I like the game as much as I do, and it's also why I've spent so much time playing and replaying it.