Product Description

Medeus, the king of the dragonkin, has been revived and is forming an alliance with a fearsome sorcerer named Gharnef. Together, they threaten to the throw the entire continent of Archanea back to an age of chaos and war. Now, it’s up to young Prince Marth and his small band of loyal followers to rise up and rally all those left in the land to make one last desperate push to free Archanea from the tyranny of the Shadow Dragon. Fire Emblem returns to its roots with a total overhaul of an NES classic never before released in America! New features include touch screen controls, multiple save options, and easy-to-follow tutorial chapters that shed new light on Marth's story. New players can jump into the action, even if they've never played a Fire Emblem game before. Take the battle online and clash with players around the world over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection! You can also borrow units to use in your army, talk with friends using the built-in Nintendo DS microphone, and even buy rare and powerful items from the Online Shop using in-game currency. You are the general! Shape your army to suit your strategy by selecting from dozens of characters with unique spells and abilities. But guide your army wisely, because if a character falls on the battlefield, he's lost forever!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1509 in Video Games
• Brand: Nintendo
• Model: NTR P YFEE
• Published on: 2009-02
• Released on: 2009-02-16
• ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .61" h x 5.44" w x 5.73" l, .25 pounds

Features

• Easy-to-follow tutorial chapters
• Take the battle online and clash with players around the world
• Choose from dozens of characters with unique spells and abilities
• "Fire Emblem" returns to its roots with a total overhaul of an NES classic never before released in America
• Touch-screen controls and multiple save options

Amazon.com Product Description
Fire Emblem returns to its roots with a total overhaul of an NES™ classic never before released in America. New features include touch-screen controls, multiple save options and easy-to-follow tutorial chapters that shed new light on Marth's story. New players can jump into the action, even if they've never played a Fire Emblem game before.

Take the battle online and clash with players around the world over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. You can also borrow units to use in your army, talk with friends using the built-in Nintendo DS microphone and even buy rare and powerful items from the Online Shop using in-game currency.

You are the general: Shape your army to suit your strategy by selecting from dozens of characters with unique spells and abilities. But guide your army wisely, because if a character falls on the battlefield, he's lost forever.

Game storyline: Medeus, the king of the dragonkin, has been revived and is forming an alliance with a fearsome sorcerer named Gharnef. Together, they threaten to the throw the entire continent of Archanea back to an age of chaos and war. Now, it's up to young Prince Marth and his small band of loyal followers to rise up and rally all those left in the land to make one last desperate push to free Archanea from the tyranny of the Shadow Dragon.

How to progress through the game: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy setting. Players alternate turns with opponents, moving their pieces (units) and attacking enemy units on the battlefield. There are dozens of units and different weapons and magic spells, each with its own strategic benefits-high-flying Pegasus knights move effortlessly over varied terrain, fast-moving mounted cavaliers can use swords and lances, unarmed curates use healing staves to mend the wounds of other units and so on.

Characters: Many groups play a part in a story but undoubtedly the story's protagonist, Prince Marth, will be the focus for most. Marth has been featured in the Super Smash Bros. series and has been extremely popular within those games, but this is his first time starring in a Fire Emblem game in the United States. At Marth's side is a support of fearless fighters, including the brave Caeda, a princess of the Talys kingdom. Other major characters include the evil sorcerer Gharnef and the sole surviving descendant of the royal House Archanea, Princess Nyna.

Special Features:

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is the first to offer players a chance to test their skills against other players in combat. Using your broadband connection, Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and wireless play modes, players are able to send units they've trained into battle against those of another player. Collect optional cards to give your team a unique tactical bonus that can help you clench victory. During Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection matches, friends can talk to each other using the built-in Nintendo DS microphone.

Touch-screen controls, multiple save options and an easy-to-follow tutorial allow novice players to jump into the action, even if they've never played a Fire Emblem game before.

Borrow units wirelessly or through Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and use them in your own battles with the Loan Unit feature.

Six levels of difficulty ensure that even seasoned players can find a challenge in this new entry into the Fire Emblem series.

Purchase rare and powerful items using the gold you've acquired during your single-player campaign with the Online Shop feature. You never know what items you might come across, because new items rotate in and out of the armory on a daily basis.

Play through the events that brought Marth to the beginning of his quest through a new set of prologue chapters that were specially added to the game for its Nintendo DS release.

Customer Reviews

Love, Love, Hate, Love, Love.
I purchased this Fire Emblem game the day it came out, being very excited about this release. I have all the American released games (7-11). The first six games were only released in Japan, this game, "Shadow Dragon" is a updated version of the first japanese game.

Here is a list of my loves and one hate for this game:

LOVE: Simple story, not hours of "info" conversations to read like in the console versions of Fire Emblem.

LOVE: Items can be combined before starting chapters. (for example taking 8 steel axe uses and 12 steel axe uses can be merged to make 20 steel axe uses as one item). This can be done with weapons, staves, staffs, etc. It is a really nice tweak that the developers made for this game. Before I would always sell off weapons that were getting low on uses. Great improvement over previous versions of the game.

HATE: Save feature only at two spots per chapter. Players were abusing this function in the last game Radiant Dawn (#10). There is a random number generator for stat level-ups that was being exploited due to the save feature. The intended purpose was that you could save at any point in the game and reset if one of your characters died. This was so you would not have to start from the beginning of a chapter and waste two hours that some chapters would take. In Radiant Dawn this was needed because it was more difficult even on "normal mode", as the enemies had more hit damage and would critical more often. Radiant Dawn's save feature was better than Shadow Dragon's limited saves of two per chapter.

LOVE: Arenas. One of your guys vs one enemy who fight to the death. You may continue to fight as long as you have hit points, but if you die in the arena you lose the character for good. You win a money wager plus about 30 experience point per challenge if you survive. It is a nice way to level-up certain characters, but most 1st tier characters are not strong enough for more than one challenge per turn. I imagine this is why the Radiant Dawn save feature was taken out of Shadow Dragon.

LOVE: Characters dead for good, and being okay with that. SPOILERS: In previous Fire Emblem games I never wanted any characters to die, if they did it was a instant restart. Yet at endgame you only could use about 15 characters in that chapter, while having 60 to choose from. In Shadow Dragon, when one of your people die all their items go back to the convoy. Great addition Intelligent Systems! In real life you wouldn't just leave the guy's sword on the battlefield if he died, you would take it with you. So in this Fire Emblem you don't have to reset just to avoid losing your items. SPOILERS AGAIN: Plus the game rewards you for letting some of your characters permanently die. I won't go into the details of this, but it is a neat incentive.

All together this is a really nice game. I still prefer the console games (#9&10) over Shadow Dragon, but I like it much better than the game boy games (#7&8) because of the new features stated above. Even the Shadow Dragon save feature is a improvement over the game boy game which had none during chapters. In a future version I would prefer a once-per-turn limit for the battle saves and no saves during arena fights.

I have not had any online experience with Shadow Dragon, but apparently you can fight another player with five of your characters, use various cards for gameplay, and purchase items from an online store.

I am happy with Shadow Dragon for the DS as I will no doubt go back and play this game again and again with a different cast of people. So the many hours of playing was well worth the cost for me. Thanks.

Another top-notch Fire Emblem game, but with a unique focus
This latest in the challenging and even generally unforgiving Fire Emblem games maintains the overall excellence of this strategy series. Some of the unique attributes of this remake of the first Fire Emblem may be off-putting at first, while others one may find surprisingly favorable.

Cosmetic changes are noticed immediately. The new art style has not been well received--nor is it here--but the 3D animation is pleasing (if basic) and the interface well attuned to the dual screen format.

Gameplay in this iteration backs off some things one may have gotten used to specifically in the GBA incarnations of the FE series. Full support conversations are not in evidence, and those who liked the variety of towers/ruins and random map availability in Sacred Stones will be disappointed.

One thing that many are taken aback by is this game's unique take on the infamous Fire Emblem permanent death scheme. Here the focus for access to "gaiden" chapters is on actually losing characters. Many FE fans in past games refuse to let any character die. But in this game, you will miss many experience-granting stages and some interesting characters if you don't let those who expire...stay expired (rather than restarting).

How does it work? Generally, by maintaining recruitment under a certain ceiling number of recruited characters, a side chapter will then become available. In practice, I became surprisingly open to this extreme compromise. And indeed I now prefer to keep the roster down to a few absolute favorite characters while recruiting these special characters and stages. The first one you can receive is indeed among my favorite recruits in the game.

Finally, one may have read that the game is easier than earlier Fire Emblems. Which on Normal difficulty is true to an extent, but only for veterans. In actuality, the five tiers of Hard difficulty available will challenge any veteran, regardless of dubious claims that the game is still too easy for them.

So, in essential terms, somehow in the mix of changes for better and worse, this latest Fire Emblem evens out to be yet another great entry to the series and one I enjoyed more than I expected to.

Newest Fire Emblem title disappoints
I've been a Fire Emblem fan for a few years, beginning with the second American GBA release, the Sacred Stones. Since then I've played every Fire Emblem game that has been released here in the U.S. While I knew from the outset that his game was a remake of the very first Fire Emblem, I bought it on the assumption that it would be updated to modern Fire Emblem quality. While improvements have been made, this game feels very dated and is a comparatively weak entry into the series.

The best thing about Fire Emblem, at least for me, is the characters. I enjoyed getting to know most of the characters in the Fire Emblem games through expository talking head "cut-scenes." These are completely missing from Shadow Dragon. Sure, there are the brief segments at the beginning of each level that outline what the goal is, and the occasional dialogue between the main character and a secondary one, but this feels tacked on and unimportant. You can skip every mission briefing and still know what you're supposed to do. But never do you feel close to the characters. And boy, are there a lot of them. At the beginning of the game you'll regularly get anywhere from two to five additional troops per level. They are given names and faces, but that's it. The game actually encourages you to let characters die, as special side missions become available to those who have under a certain amount of characters. The reward for these side missions? More characters. Also gone are support conversations, another fan favorite and way of getting to know the troops. As someone who liked getting to know individual troops in past Fire Emblem games, this is truly disappointing.

As for the actual battles, they are standard Fire Emblem fare, with turns alternating from you to the enemy, each moving and possibly attacking with one unit at a time. Common conventions to modern Fire Emblem games, like the ability to rescue units and the ability of mounted units to move after attacking are missing. Also, Marth, the main character, is the only one who can visit villages, where one often finds new recruits or gets rare items. This means that Marth is often far away from the action, missing the experience that he should be getting. Also, Marth never promotes to a second class. Instead, his level cap is simply double what other characters can reach. This underpowers Marth, but is remedied when he gets the best weapon in the game.

The battle graphics have been criticized as simply trying to include 3D graphics in a 2D game. And if you look at screenshots the graphics do look pretty bad. Fortunately, they look better in motion and I kind of liked the 3D animation. Unfortunately, the critical hit animations are far less entertaining than previous iterations have been, another favorite of mine that has been stripped from this game. That said, the game does make good use of both screens on the DS, and is very efficient in the way it presents data.

I've tried out the online multiplayer, and found it to be dominated by players who abuse the arena system, therefore making their units vastly more powerful than the average player's. If I were to take the time to do an entire playthrough with the sole purpose of making a super-team, I could probably get some enjoyment out of this mode, but I can't justify spending the twenty to thirty hours it would take to do this. The online shop, on the other hand, is kind of cool, but having to wait several days or weeks to find special items became tedious. After missing one of the days an item was available, I had to stop playing because I didn't want to advance the story without being able to promote a unit who had reached level 20.

BOTTOM LINE
This game is very disappointing, because the potential for greatness was so high. An online enabled, handheld Fire Emblem game practically had me salivating. But in choosing to simply update the first game in the series and not include even basic features from modern Fire Emblem games, Nintendo squandered the potential here. If you are a hard-core Fire Emblem fan, then this game deserves a play-through, if only to see where Marth of Super Smash Bros. Melee and Brawl got his start. If not, you'd be better off picking up Sacred Stones for GameBoy Advance or Path of Radiance for the GameCube, two games that are superior to Shadow Dragon in almost every way.