An overrated game that is enjoyable for Fire Emblem fans, but it turned out to be mediocre.
The game is a remake of the first Fire Emblem game ever made: Fire Emblem: Ankoku Ryū to Hikari no Tsurugi, launched for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
Even being a remake instead of a port and being titled Fire Emblem 11, Nintendo failed to give it the same edge as the predecessors that made the series famous through America and Europe, ending itself as a mediocre game.
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- Storyline & Character development
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-The story is a generic old-school story, villain try to takes over your kingdom, powerless you flee like a coward to gather allies and power and strike back at the villiain home while it fails to kill you while you're weak.
-The game has a severe lack of character development and interest. Your party only have two or three that has significant participation in the story. You get a lot of expendable characters with practically no story or personality and most only say one line in the entire game, most of the times when they join your team.
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Gameplay elements and features
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- This is a tactical strategy turn based role-playing. Both you and your enemy have phases, on your phase you can move your units and attack the enemies, when you have done all your commands, you end your turn, then the enemy will do the same. In order to attack an enemy, you need to have a weapon equipped, and those weapons have a certain number of times that you can use before they break, because of this, the characters will sometimes need some spare weapons because they can't fight unharmed.
- The game has a interesting triangle weapon system which features swords, axes and spears. It's a rock-scissor-paper system in that axes win against spears, spears win against swords and swords win against axes. If in a combat, it happens that one has a advantage weapon against the adversary, this person will get positive bonuses in accuracy, while the enemy will get a negative bonus for accuracy, but unlike the predecessors, the bonus was reduced this time. Now the weapon triangle, even being helpful for the advantaged side, doesn't play a crucial role anymore.
- Other types of attacks includes ranged attacks with bows or certain weapons, such as javelins and magical attacks.
- Another interesting feature is the class swap, you basically can change the classes of any character, such as knight to priest. The only exceptions that you can't change are the lord and the thief. Even being helpful sometimes, you probably won't need it much, because of the huge amount of cannon fodder that you will find.
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Graphics and presentation
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- The graphics aren't among the best, the 3d look of the game gave it a strange feel, but they are not bad and the battle animations runs quite smoothly.
- The game presents a inteface similar of a medieval, old-school game. Old gamers will not have reasons to complain and New games might find the quite easy to use interface comfortable.
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Sound and music
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Not bad at all, not remarkable either.
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Game difficulty
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- Overall the game is quite easy, but for players looking for a challenge, the game gives you an option to choose among five levels of hard difficulties. The latest level is insanely hard, and might require several tries and every careful planning and luck to be beaten.
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Replay value
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Non-existant, the only reason that might make you play again is to try a harder difficulty.
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Reviewer recomendation and final comments
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I recommend to at least rent it first. Being from the great and famous series of Fire Emblem is causing this game to get overhyped and overrated easily, it fails to keep at the same step of his predecessors, but it might be an enjoyable game if you've been a fan to the series, not really mind-blowing, but somewhat fun. In all the means, be careful, this game can cause some disappointment.