Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones - Chapter 17
It’s not that I don’t like a challenge. In fact, my college buddy and I once challenged ourselves to take our Physics final with a handicap. We had done so well up to that point that we only had to get a 30 on the exam to get an A for the course. So we partied all night on the eve of the exam and took the test as zombies. So as you can see, I do like to increase my challenge when I can afford to. It’s just that I don’t want an unnecessarily difficult challenge if it involves some sort of opportunity cost.
For example, after the fifth time of almost squeaking through a battle with all my units still breathing, I don’t have much interest in making the battle any harder on myself. And since the game provides mechanisms by which I can ease this challenge, I’m going to take advantage of them. I’m not even talking about invincibility cheat codes here, I’m just talking about leveling up. As you can see by the title of this review and that of last week’s, I haven’t advanced much farther in the past seven days. I’ve spent a lot of time in the towns overrun by monsters and the Tower of Valni working on building up my weak characters so they can provide me with some value in the main battles. I’m knocking my Interest rating down a notch for the first time because, while it’s more fun than getting beat up all the time, knowing that I need to level up doesn’t provide a ton of enticement to sit down and dig into the game.
Even after I’ve notched all of my characters up five levels and marched into battle armed to the teeth, I’m still likely to fight most battles at least twice. This may be due to me being new to strategy games or just anxious to move forward, but I prefer to think of it is because of a somewhat frustrating gameplay mechanism whereby, unless I’m close enough to attack a unit on a given turn, I cannot determine how much damage a given enemy unit will do to my unit. I suppose I could figure out just how all of the factors are calculated, but then the game really would cross the line into tedious work. As a result, if I move into an enemy unit’s range without being able to attack him or her, I can be caught off guard by a particularly tough unit on the enemy’s turn. Sigh. Off, on, restart chapter with newfound wisdom. I understand why they don’t allow you to pause mid-battle and restart from that spot more than one time, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
I have been rewarded for my insistence that every unit make it through every battle: recently the story took a huge twist around one of my secondary characters, and if he hadn’t been there, I would have missed it. Even though it’s taken me quite a while, I’ve kept my characters alive and now feel a paternal bond with them. So what if the apartment is a mess and the garbage is overflowing?
Fairly early in the game I did have to say goodbye to one of my characters: the story branched and I had to determine whose quest I wanted to follow. That character I didn’t choose went off to fight the war on a different front. Now the storyline has merged again and, while he’s given me a synopsis of his accomplishments, I know that there is a lot more depth to his story, more characters to encounter, and, most importantly, more challenging battles to win. You think I don’t feel left out of that action? You bet I do, and I can almost guarantee that this game will get at least one more play when I’m finished so I can see that quest as well.
Plus, the more I play, the more I learn. Check out this list of vocabulary words from the script: ken, tantamount, sundered, subjugated, farce, crags, and naught. Not impressive enough? How about malefic? Miasma? This game is like Prego: “They’re in there.” I have never played a game that had me querying Merriam-Webster, and now I’m sure to be the hit of every party with my references to all things malefic. How’s that for a bonus?
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29. June 2005 at 15:10
Thanks for the honest review. I’ve heard great things about the game but what you mentioned about the plot here makes me really want to play it.
My one concern about it, though, is something that you mentioned about the battles getting a little frustrating. It reminds me a lot of the later missions in Advance Wars, a game that I have a ton of respect for and really enjoyed for the most part, but–and maybe I’m just not that good at the game–I felt like there was only one possible solution to some of the later missions. I eventually found myself putting forth tremendous mental effort just to make a single move, which eventually got to be tiring rather than fun. Granted, I was always aiming for the ‘A’ rating, and it looks like the equivalent in Fire Emblem would be playing without losing many characters.
But maybe Nintendo intended these games to be played through multiple times? That is, instead of playing it once but playing each level through multiple times until you do it perfectly, I wonder what it would be like to play through it once, get one ending, and then play through the whole thing all over again, the next time improving your gameplay a little more from the last time, and getting a different story each time? For instance, maybe if that secondary character of yours had died, the game would’ve taken a completely different (but equally interesting) twist? Some of my favorite fantasy sagas have their best moments at the times critical characters die (and the events that transpire because of this), so it would be cool to see a game like Fire Emblem work that way too… Do you think the game takes away important things from the story as a sort of penalty for losing a character, or does it alter the story into something that’s different but equally interesting?
Anyhow, just some random, rambling thoughts. It sounds like a fantastic game.
30. June 2005 at 15:42
Abul,
Thanks for your comment.
One thing I’ve only hinted at in my reviews that I should maybe make more explcit is that I’m a bit of a completist and I also tend to feel responsible for the characters. If the game gives me a weak fighter, I feel responsible for including him or her in battles and building them up to be strong. So I probably make things more difficult on myself than I need to since I’m often going into battle with some weaker units. The benefit of that approach, though, is that after a while my weaker units become my stronger units and everybody’s a stud.
I’m not sure if the plot would be different if a character died, but that’s an interesting thought that I might use to write a follow-up review on the game after I’ve beaten it. Once I’ve proven that I can beat the game using the weaker characters, I’ll feel freer to plow through with strong characters and leave some by the wayside. This is purely conjecture, but given the nature of this plot twist, I still think it would have been revealed, just without any dialogue between the characters involved (since one was dead).
On a related side note, I once lost a character at the end of the battle, but plowed through anyway. I didn’t save because I wanted to come back and win again with everybody alive, but I just wanted to know what happened next and I was really close, so I just played a little longer. Anyway, the interesting part is that the character who died was in the subsequent story! I think the game explains this by saying that if a “character loses all of his or her hit points, he or she will never fight at your side again.” I.e., it’s not like they die, but they’re just injured or scared so badly that they won’t fight again. So I guess it’s possible that the storyline doesn’t change one bit if a character “dies.”
Interesting thoughts.
Scott