Fire Emblem was what I considered as my biggest gamble of 2003. In recent years, I've bought one game with extra money that I normally wouldn't buy. In 2002, Star Fox Adventures was the gamble, and it was one that did not pay off, as I never got into that game. In 2003, I decided to buy this Gameboy Advance strategy game with lots of RPG elements (which I don't consider a RPG, though it's got many parallels to a RPG). I wasn't aware that I was jumping aboard one of the strangest roller-coaster rides of a video game I had ever experienced.

You are some strategist character who appears sparingly. People talk to you and say good things about you, but you rarely appear. You start off by meeting an attractive girl with long green hair and big boots named Lyn (come on, you expect me to forget this?). Then you cruise through several battles that are incredibly simple, as they are no more than tutorials, before getting into the real game.

How does the game work? You move around your characters like pieces on a chessboard, with each
having a certain amount of squares that he or she can move. Then, after that character moves, you can choose for them to do something (attack, use an item, stay, etc). After all your characters move, all of your
opponents' characters move. Your goal is to complete some sort of task, usually defeating a boss, and that
usually means defeating all the enemies before him or her (most of the time, at least). Sometimes you have
to have some characters attack while others defend something, while other times you have to have some
characters unlock doors and go to certain places, and still other times you have to have a certain character
talk to someone during the battle. There are many possibilities, especially when you gain more and more
characters. It seems confusing when you read the instruction manual for the first time, especially if you've never played a strategy game before (as I hadn't), but in practice, the game isn't really that hard to learn.

This Review is rated on a scale of 0-4 stars. Of course 4 stars is a significantly better rating than 0 stars, as I'm sure you know by now.

Graphics: *

Well. the graphics don't matter. The fact of the matter is, the graphics are pretty much horrible, but since they're as useless as the symbols used to represent different chess pieces, it's insignificant. I give one star for the illustrations of characters given at certain points in the game, during the story.

Sound: ****

Any game with that brilliant tune heard in Super Smash Bros. Melee can't be that bad in the music category.
Not only does this game have that tune (broken up into two parts), but it has many other good tunes, and they are used in practically perfect situations. I haven't heard music used so well in a mainly one-player game for a long time. This is about as good as it gets in the music category when it comes to video games.
 

Most of the time you see the difficulty section in this position in the Review. Starting with this Review, I am moving the characters, story, and controls sections above the difficulty, as I find the difficulty to be more connected with the gameplay, while the characters are relatively unimportant, the story isn't majorly important (in most cases), and the controls in games such as these aren't that important (but in some games, they are really important, so that section remains next to the difficulty section and not too far from the gameplay section).

Characters: ****

For one of the few times in recent memory, a game actually has put together an excellent lineup of
characters, with all sorts of personalities. They not only add a lot to the story, but they add a lot to the
gameplay with their different styles of attacking and moving. These characters come from all sorts of
backgrounds. I think they were really well thought out. Don't let those GameFAQs posters tell you that you can't like certain characters. Then again, don't let those GameFAQs posters tell you anything.

Story: **½

The story is a pretty interesting one, with all sorts of plot twists and the like. The enemies are more cruel than they are stupid, which is a refreshing change from the idiot bosses found in Mario games and the nice, kind gym leaders in Pokemon games (though no enemy in this game is as evil as Final Fantasy X'sSeymour, maybe my most hated enemy ever). This category ties into the characters a lot, as the characters of course make the story. Why doesn't it get four stars too? Two reasons. It can be hard to follow at times, or at least to remember. Also, it's annoying to have to watch the whole long story when you don't feel like sitting through the whole thing. Maybe that's why I missed some of the story, but I wanted to play the game, not just sit through the whole story (and it isn't quite as thrilling or as spectacular to watch as the story in Final Fantasy X).

Controls: ****

Uh, if you can't figure out these controls, you need to stop playing video games. Actually, it's probably
harder for you to control your computer than it is to control this game, so if you can view this Review right now, you can easily control this game. The easy controls do not really add anything to the gameplay. I mean, they'd better be easy, considering it's just choosing stuff from menus and picking which character to use at the current moment.

Difficulty: ***½

There's a real problem with this game, and it has to do with turning what may have been one of the greatest
games ever into... well, not the greatest. How? No, it isn't difficult in the typical way, which is the game
being difficult in general. It actually has to do with making you be concerned with winning battles perfectly
instead of merely winning them. While this is not a RPG, it does have many parallels to RPGs, so I will
compare it to the way RPGs work. If a character gets knocked out in a RPG, in most cases it's only temporary. This way, you can be aggressive if you wish, and take chances. You also don't have to worry
about making one mistake and having your best character killed. That is precisely what Fire Emblem does wrong.

While it is enough of a challenge trying to figure out how to win the battle, it's even more of one to try to
keep every character alive, because if one dies, that character is gone for good- for the rest of the battles in the story. So say you make a mistake and move a powerful character in the range of a powerful enemy, and he or she gets killed by one powerful stroke. Can you still try to win the battle with the rest of your team? Yes, but if you do, that character can no longer help you out for the rest of the story. That could put you behind big time, as this character may be a big reason why you win battles or survive, but now they're gone for good. Imagine in Pokemon, you raise your Starmie to a high level, have it beat all sorts of characters, but then it loses in a big battle, and you can't use it again- in any battle, for the rest of the game. That's ridiculous. Sure, you may say that you should be leveling up all your characters evenly, but let's face it- some characters are more powerful than others, even at the same level.

So, of course, there's the next thought you have. "Why not just save the game before making the mistake, you idiot? In that case, if you make a mistake and move a character into a bad spot, you can just start back up where you left off! What's the matter with you?" Uh... that's not an option. No, if you lose a character, you
have two choices:

A: Continue on, trying to win the battle, and risking later battles in the game being near-impossible due to
the lack of your best character.

B: Start the level over again- and at times, this could be a half-hour of battling you have to go through all over again.

Or, of course, there is a third choice, one which I eventually chose: stop playing the game, as it's
wasting your time, as it's taking an incredibly long amount of time to make progress in the game.

Originally, I did not find this to be much of a problem, even when fellow tourist and Fire Emblem player Lord Seth was telling me about it. Then I must have got to the point in the game where he found this annoying, and I found it to be just as big of a problem. Of course, over at GameFAQs, the fact that you can't save at any time and avoid having to start all over again like this is a GOOD thing. Why? Because it would be "too easy" if that were a feature. Of course, there are ways to disprove this:

A: It's not "too easy" in the first place. The game is enough of a challenge even if you could save at any
point in a level.

B: If you find it to be "too easy", then just don't save the game at any point (a point that Lord Seth made and I agree with).

C: Obviously if you find it fun to play the same half-hour or more of a level over and over again, doing the same exact things, you really have no life.

Now you may remark that even in Mario RPGs, you have to save at certain points, not just anywhere. True, but these are spaced in good fashion (most of the time), and usually before a boss. And your character is stronger than the average Fire Emblem character, and you also have revival items. There's no question that any RPG does this better than this strategy game does.

Why not four stars, after all this? Earlier levels in this game are so easy that I can't say that the whole game is extremely difficult (while in Super Mario Sunshine, for a cruel example, the second secret level in the game took me 1 ½ to 2 hours to complete). So they end up averaging out to about 3 ½ stars, though it's more like no stars of difficulty through Lyn's story, and four stars about halfway through Eliwood's story (I never got to Hector's story, as I was too frustrated to complete Eliwood's story).

Gameplay: ***½

And after all that bashing, you may be even more confused that the gameplay receives such a high rating, but it's all part of the roller-coaster ride that is Fire Emblem. While there is such frustration in the way the
whole dieing and no saving thing works, there is such fun in actually playing most of the battles. Thinking
of how you're going to fit the most attacks into your turn and who should attack who makes this game a lot
of fun. When I play a videogame during NFL games, you know it's got to be fun (though admittedly, I was able to watch football at the same time thanks to this being a GBA game). You may think that it's just like chess, and that may seem boring, but in reality it's a lot more fun than chess (partially due to the fact that chess can require TOO much thinking). This is also due to the fact that different characters have such different attacks, strengths, and weaknesses from each other. Mix in the fact that the levels you play in are so different from each other, and this game proves that strategy games can be more than just thinking.

Items: ***

The item selection is not bad. There are quite a few to choose from, which you can buy or get off opponents
at times, and they have strengths and weakness compared to each other, very much like the fire-grass-water relationship in Pokemon. This also goes for magic, which is also controlled by certain items (spell books and staffs, I think). Items wear out over time, so you can't just use the same unstoppable item over and over again. More items would be nice, which would have brought up this score considerably, as I figure that the selection of items in this game isn't as good as it could be.

Levels: ***

The levels are really interesting, with all sorts of mountains, walls, doors, and other things that make the gameplay more intriguing. I was quite impressed with the way the levels were designed. However, they
aren't perfect. They are confusing when it comes to hills, as it's hard to figure out whether you'll be able to cross over somewhere on your next turn or not, which sometimes leads to lost turns.

Replayability: ½

Sure, this is a deep game, but will you want to keep playing? When it only takes one mistake to potentially
ruin your game and thus force you to start over the level, and this takes away another half-hour or so of
your time, will you want to keep on doing this over and over again? A lot of you out there- okay, probably
all of you- have more will power to keep playing games that you get frustrated with, but my attitude is that if something is going to frustrate me and eat up a lot of my time with frustration, why waste my time with it? There are EA Sports games, Grand Theft Auto PS2 games, and N64 Mario sports games that I could be
playing instead, and I will play those much more fun games than one that will continually frustrate me.

Fun Factor!: **1/2

The roller-coaster ride continues. Although there is a lot of frustration in this game, it can be really fun. This is crazy: it's fortunate that this game is really fun at times, as that saves this game from a low score, but it's also unfortunate, in the sense that Fire Emblem's dieing/saving system stops itself from being potentially one of the greatest games ever.

OVERALL: **1/2

This is confusion week in CPF's Reviews. In the same week, the two games I review are games that get mixed Reviews, due to the fact that both excel greatly in some ways and fail miserably in others (Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga was the other game). When it comes to Fire Emblem, you may love it at times, and hate it at others. I loved this game for quite some time, then I started to hate it. It went from "Why would I buy that
game?" to "Surprise Game of 2003" to two and a half stars. Should you buy it? Yes, if you like strategy games, and maybe also if you like RPGs. It's one I'd price at $20 as a fair price to pay for this game.

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