Fire Emblem has always seemed a little daunting to me, because, well, all strategy RPGs demand a pretty intense level of tactical thinking and attention to detail. Lots of stats to keep up with, movement and attack ranges to pay attention to, and rock-paper-scissors balance elements to keep in mind as you move your units around and try to best the enemy's forces. Casual gaming this is not.
Fire Emblem takes it all one step further, getting you attached to your units by giving them names and various levels of characterization--then punishing you severely if any of them die. Because once they die, they don't come back. Period. That goes for the powerful units you've leveled up over the course of numerous missions, as well as the story-related characters whose contributions to the game's tale of warring kingdoms and political intrigue you'll simply miss out on once they're gone. As far as I can tell, everyone is fungible, short of the main character Prince Marth. (If he dies, it's game over.)
To my surprise, however, Shadow Dragon started off in a pleasingly approachable manner. When you plunge through the New Game option, you get to choose one of two difficulty levels, the lesser of which is specifically described as being intended for first-timers. (On the hard difficulty, enemies are up to five times stronger.) The normal difficulty also includes a tutorial that introduces you to the very basics of movement, attacks, and weapons balance. This tutorial avoids being totally dry and technical by doubling as a prologue that lays out the initial moments of betrayal and invasion that send Marth and his comrades fleeing from their castle and searching for allies. It's a nice way to introduce you to both the storyline and the core mechanics quickly.
Even after you've gotten the basics down--moving units square by square across the battlefield, knowing when to use which weapons against whom, that sort of thing--the game does a great job of contextually popping up further tutorial information on the DS' top screen when you need to know it. You'll get hints about topics like weapons durability, equipment trading, recruiting enemies to your side, and more throughout the first several missions. It's all presented in an easily understood way without feeling obtrusive.
In fact, despite all these aids, I've definitely seen the hardcore side of Fire Emblem in what I've played so far. First of all, I suspect I'll have to give up this compulsion to finish every mission with all of my characters intact, because even only a few hours in, I've had to restart some missions several times when I carelessly let one of my favorite characters die (or inadvertently killed a named enemy unit I wanted to recruit). I'll never finish the game if I don't abandon my perfectionist tendencies. And though you can outfit and switch units around before a mission, if you want to purchase new weapons or trade items back and forth inside a mission, you've got to physically move the units to an armory or next to each other and expend a turn in order to do so. Ditto creating permanent mid-mission saves; you have to move a unit onto one of the scarce in-map save points, which are themselves single-use, and then use a turn to create a hard save you can reload repeatedly. "Tough but fair" seems like an apt phrase in talking about this game, in short.
At any rate, I've had a great time with the first few hours of Shadow Dragon. Due to my complete lack of prior experience with Fire Emblem, I can't tell you how well this game stacks up to its predecessors--but as a newcomer to the series, I can tell you it's not nearly as difficult to get into as you might think.
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