This year, we’re looking back at the Fire Emblem series, including many of the games that were never released in the west. Although there’s no better place to start than at the beginning, my first exposure to Fire Emblem, like many fans of the series, was playing as Marth in Super Smash Bros. Melee rather than the Japan-only game he originated from. Fast forward about 20 years and Nintendo finally released a translated version of that very game: the series’ first entry, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light. While the game had been remade on the Nintendo DS, this was the first time western fans could play the original Famicom game.
Despite its age, Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light still feels familiar coming from modern entries in the series. The grid-based strategy combat system works well here as you take a small, weak army, and build it up into a force strong enough to beat back powerful villains and the forces of darkness. Even the classes and items are largely the same as those in the modern games, with a few exceptions. These timeless core gameplay elements ensure that Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light plays and controls well for its entire duration.
Where Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light shows its age is in the lack of quality of life features that were added in later series entries. The first thing I noticed when I started playing was that there’s no move range indicator when selecting a unit, so it’s difficult to visualize your movement options without manually counting out squares. This goes for enemies, too. You’ll spend a lot of time checking enemy stats and counting tiles to figure out where it’s safe to place your units because there’s no visual indicator.
Similarly, Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light has no combat preview. You can always look at the stats and do the math before every battle, but if you want to play the game at even a moderate pace, you’ll be making some attacks without knowing exact hit rates or damage. Ultimately, players have all the information they need to make decisions, but it’s presented in a very clunky way. Players who aren’t familiar with the math behind the game’s combat system will have a particularly hard time making good plans.
While the core gameplay has much of the depth one expects from a strategy RPG, many of the maps in Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light don’t provide opportunities for multiple strategies. The first half of the game is loaded with maps that amount to single paths with a handful of chokepoints. These maps practically solve themselves. You stick your best couple units in one of the chokepoints and wait while every enemy on the map funnels into them. Many of these maps just don’t have enough elements for there to be more than one or two viable strategies.
The maps start to get more complicated in the middle of the game, which can be a mixed bag. The best maps have multiple objectives and force you to think hard if you want to accomplish all of them while keeping everyone in your army alive. My favorite map involves an assault on a castle, which includes treasure, a pair of recruitable characters, and a throne to seize. All of these objectives are in different parts of the map, and some are time sensitive. Maps like this challenge the player to think of the best way to split up their army so it can contend with enemies in a few different locations.
The best part of the more complex maps is that some of the objectives are optional. Players who can’t think of the perfect strategy, or who get frustrated with a map, can just ignore some of the optional objectives. This way, players can curate how difficult the map is, and those who go the more challenging direction are rewarded with gold or items.
Unfortunately, some of the more complex maps sport certain mechanics that can make them a little frustrating. The most annoying feature in the game is enemy reinforcements. In all of the late game maps, more enemies will start spawning after a few turns. This is a normal feature in strategy RPGs, but what makes it frustrating in Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light is that there is often no way to tell when the reinforcements will come or where they will come from, and they move immediately after they spawn.
The result of the reinforcement system is that at some point in your playthrough a new enemy will spawn and kill a character you thought was safe, and there’s often no way you could have predicted it. It feels terrible when this happens because once a unit dies there’s no way to replace them. For players like me, that means resetting anytime you get unlucky with enemy reinforcements. Fortunately, the Nintendo Switch version of Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light does include save states and turn rewind, which can ease some of these frustrations.
While many of the maps in Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light can be tedious or feel unfair, the game does provide a way to effectively skip past maps you don’t like. Early in the game, you receive a Warp staff, which allows you to teleport a unit anywhere on the map. You can skip through most maps by warping a character directly to the boss. While I appreciate that the Warp staff enables you to avoid some of the game’s more frustrating maps, it’s unfortunate that I felt compelled to use it more than a couple times because playing some maps as intended just wasn’t fun.
Overall, the gameplay of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light is fun for the half of the maps that are good, and frustrating or boring for the others. That said, there is more to the game than just its gameplay. Despite originally releasing in 1990, the game’s pixel art has aged fairly well. It’s not a visually stunning game, but the art is distinct and clear. I even think the pixel character portraits are charming. Additionally, I love the 2D sprite-based combat animations that are often a little more bombastic compared to the more grounded 3D animations in recent series entries.
The game’s sound and music has not aged as well as the art. You’ll be listening to the same few songs looping for most of the game. Additionally, if you use the Switch version’s turbo feature, the music speeds up too, which can make it painful to listen to.
One element of the game that surprised me was the story. Knowing it was a Famicom title, I expected a bare-bones affair. In contrast, Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light offers a complete narrative told through dialogue at the end of every map. While the story isn’t especially complex, it is serviceable and provides a reason to care about Marth beyond that it’s game over if he dies. The only disappointing aspect of the story is that there is almost no characterization for any army member besides Marth. I wasn’t expecting everyone to have a lot of text devoted to them, but it would have been nice if the more interesting ones at least got a line or two in the story.
On the whole, Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light still plays fine today, but it can be very clunky, and some of its more frustrating maps will be turnoffs for a lot of players. Additionally, given that there is a remake that fixes many issues from the original and expands on the story, it is difficult to recommend Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light to anyone who isn’t primarily interested in it as a history lesson.
