Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - Epilogue - Final Play

Well, that’s that. I’ve saved the world. I was able to pound my way through the final chapters with relative ease due to my insistence that I build up my team on all levels. For the final battles I was then able to choose an entire battalion of stud units and bring a world of hurt to the enemy lines crazy enough to stand in my way. And even in light of said ease, I am completely exhausted.

Over the last week or so I found the attraction to spend more time with Path of Radiance to be dwindling. From time to time I popped in games that were less heady and more lighthearted…games where I could get in a quick play session or two without it taking over my day. Things were getting too serious too fast, and I just needed a couple of no-strings-attached flings. I fully enjoyed PoR this play session, it just felt like it finally started to show a bit of weakness, crumbling somewhat under its own massiveness. Many of these final “easy” battles still took two to three hours to complete, and the story alternated between verbose repetitiveness and the introduction of new ideas that were neither introduced into the rest of the story well, nor wrapped up in a fulfilling manner.

I’m picking nits, though, and defining this play session as my “worst” is like praising with faint damnation. I’m sure Yankees fans have a “worst” World Series win, but I bet all 26 of them are still pretty sweet. As you know from my previous play ratings, this has been a terrific game, and, up until the last five chapters or so, I was incredibly impressed by how well it managed to maintain my interest in a diversity of narrative threads and then, as I progressed, bring them all together into a unifying story. It’s an impressive feat and could serve as a model for how to tell a story in a game. In addition, I would like to ask all the game script writers out there to please include more delicious dialogue like, “Your corpse will be the sustenance that feeds my hunger for fame.” Mmm, tangy.

You know, sometimes I find myself immersed so deeply in my hobbies that I encounter a large amount of blandness. It’s natural, I suppose, that the more time one spends on an activity, the more you’re going to dig into the mediocre and sometimes lousy parts of the quality spectrum. For example, the more baseball I watch, the more likely I am to see a stretch of pitchers who can’t find the strike zone, and the more time I spend gaming, the more likely I am to pick up an average game every once in a while. However, I always do find something that reminds me of why I’m invested in the first place. In baseball, it may be a no-hitter, a game-ending home run, or an incredible fielding play that exceeds my previously imagined limits of human athleticism. In gaming, it may be a video game that is well-produced from top to bottom and offers a superior gaming experience. PoR filled that role for me over the past month. It reminded me why I love gaming. There has been a fair amount of kvetching lately about the lack of Gamecube software hitting the shelves in the near future. Personally, I wouldn’t need much volume of games if all of them were as good as PoR. Every game should be this good.