Fire Emblem: Ankoku Ryū to Hikari no Tsurugi, also known as Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light in English is a tactical role-playing game developed by Japanese company Intelligent Systems. The game itself has undergone series of upgrade to its features, and update to its version, with its first version released in 1990.
Game Introduction
The game is set in the fictional continent of Archanea, with a wonderful storyline involving Marth the Prince of Altea on a quest to reclaim his throne from the sorcerer Gharnf who serves the boss and dark master Medeus.
Game Features
The game has multiple settings with most of the battles and adventures the climax of each scenery.
The features of this game are numerous due to the wide area of territories utilized for the game outlay.
- Black Battleground
- Nice interface
- Stats Menu
- Cursor movement
- Character Shuffle
- Awesome Battle Experience
These features provided by the game are quite incredible for an NES game of its time. Its capability to navigate on the battlefield is also one of the unique features of the Fire Emblem.
Game Description
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is one of the best tactical role-playing game where players take on the role of characters like Marth the Prince with the thrill of warring against the sorcerer. You also gets to make alliance with Grust and their growing army during their campaign across the continent of Archanea.
The bosses have their own armies with which Marth and Grust forming new alliances with neighboring kingdoms war for dominance in the Kingdom.
The game progresses in a linear fashion, with maps being unlocked and played as dictated by the storyline; with a complete storyline, the game experience is all the more consistent in watering the mouths of the fans.
Using the same basic engine as the Famicom Wars games, the interface of Fire Emblem looks and feels a bit odd, but it is generally bloody with every kill of the enemy giving a boost to the points scored. There are no visible indication on how far a unit can move, and because of this, you will need to pull up some menus to look at statistics instead of them popping up when units are highlighted, this comes as a shortcoming in the game.
Sadly, the characters shuffle slowly around the map which does not meet up to the expectation of players; like me when I am being deployed or deploying troops in general. I find the cursor movement and the character shuffle to be the most constraining experience when I play the game, but this might not be the same for you as you may find this very characteristics to be awesome.
The ground beneath Marth and his men is another issue, it often remains green even when stepping on other terrain like water.
The lack of spontaneity in the switching of scenes in the gaming experience is what I believe should be worked on in latter versions. The battle backgrounds are stark black which I myself find cool, the combatants are relatively well animated for a NES game but they’re a bit slow and boring.
Game Conclusion
The battlefield of this game is worth engaging on for an NES game. Despite all the shortcomings in the general description of the game, the experience of moving along the corridors of the storyline is worth it. You just need to play this game and participate in the experience of multitude of players in the game.
