Despite its somewhat dull story, Fire Emblem serves up a compelling adventure well worth your time and your money.
The game play of Fire Emblem isn't entirely RPG, they add in strategy elements into the game play. The games map is made out like a grid. When you place the square cursor over a character you press the A button and suddenly around the character you choose the squares change colors. To a certain range that is, blue is how far a character can move, while red/orange shows how far they can attack. Now, each character can uses certain kind of weapon. Your melee class's can use spears, axes, or swords while casters use either anima, dark, or light magic. Now this sounds a little boring but now is where the real strategy game play comes into play. The game relies on a triangle of weapons, swords beats axes while axes beat spears and spears beats sword. A similar principal is applied to spells. When you’re about to engage in one of these battles, two characters will unfold on the screen, one hitting the other. Which leaves for some tense moments. The game just doesn't rely on the weapon triangle however since the game is made up of class's. Take fighters for example: these stout warriors can only use axes, so matching them up against knight who can only use lances would be the wise decision. Now while this sounds like just a plain strategy game your characters level up with each fight they go through, or if they cast a healing spells, etc. etc. Once a character earns 100 exp points they level up earning important vital stat points. Once a character reaches 20 they stop leveling, but don't fear, items in the game allow them to change into newer and more improved classes. There’s plenty of variety you can have your characters choose from so picking them is entirely up to you. The biggest and probably the best factor this game throws in is a feature that, once a character dies, can never come back. The only way to keep the character is starting the mission all over again. While it may turn off some people it’s a factor that lets you have an attachment between some characters.
The graphics for the most part at some times looked decent but at other times looked pretty unimpressive. I'll explain what I mean. While on the map looking at all of your characters and looking at enemy units looks rather unimpressive. You just get the feeling it can look a bit better. However when the battles between characters unfold the models look very impressive, especially when critical hits occur.
The sound value was all right but it was nothing spectacular. The sound effects with the swords, axes, and spears hitting was decent enough but the spell effects just got on my nerves. Some were high pitched while others didn't produce very dramatic sounds. Most of the time I just listened to music instead of the game. Since playing the game doesn't rely too much on listening, you'll probably be playing the game with the sound off.
The value is one of the best portions of the entire game. The GBA game can give you at least 20+ hours of game time and at least 3 playthroughs. So for 30 bucks, it’s well worth the money out of your pocket. As for my Reviewer's tilt, the game controls were well tuned and the game shouldn't take to long to master. They provide in game tutorials to help you quickly master the game, so no worries if you’re new.
Fire Emblem Sacred Stones was an interesting GBA game that’s sure to please RPG fans and people who aren't interested in that genre of gaming. And if your dragged into taking a long road trip, Fire Emblem will surely pass the time away.