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The Omniscient
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Jun 4, 2005, 4:21 AM
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Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones Review
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Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is an expansive, fantasy adventure/role-playing game, real-time strategy, and turn-based combat.
In this tale, the five kingdoms of Magvel have been hurled into war. The centuries-long peace that has been forged between them is trashed when the kingdom of Grado unexpectedly launches a sneak attack on its neighbors. For some mysterious reason they're out to destroy the Sacred Stones being guarded (one each) by the four other kingdoms. The Stones keep evil at bay, and when the battles start-guess what? - yeah, the creepy crawlies are back in town! Skeletons stalk the living, revenants attack the tax-payers, spider monsters feast on farmers, zombies eat your neighbors, cats live with dogs. It's a bloody mess, but that's where you come in.
You start out playing as the princess, Eirika of Renais. Your kingdom's in shambles and your father, the king, is history, but and your brother, Prince Ephraim, continue to fight a guerilla action throughout the land. Later the game story splits into two quests and you can choose to play as your bro to carry the good fight into entirely different enemy territory. One thing is certain: Fire Emblem gives you your money's worth
You're endowed with a magnetic personality, too, because you build up a party real fast. There s at least a ten-member crew that you manage and lead. Party classes include the familiar Pegasus Knight, Cavalier, and Priest. New classes include the Mage Knight, who wields weapons and magic, and the cool Summoner, who can call forth monsters. The range of attributes you can monitor and build up is impressive for a Game Boy game, although the abbreviated attribute labels can make the tiny status screens look like a mumbo jumbo of letters and numbers until you get it all down.
The turn-based combat system is compact, neat, and inspired. Like an RTS game you begin every battle by positioning your team members around a grid-based terrain map. Every character has a unique range of movement so there s plenty of experimenting necessary to put together the right formations versus enemy placement.
As individual units engage each other, you re treated to a familiar-looking one-on-one side view that features surprisingly refined combat animation. In fact, Sacred Stones is probably best enjoyed visually by using the Game Boy player to show off the action and topnotch character art on a television screen. It's also much easier to examine menus and track attributes with the larger screen.
Additionally, in all battles, it's possible to play do-overs if your favorite character happens to bite it. This ability to re-fight any battle essentially builds a strategic element into the game, as you can play around with a variety of tactics just to see what happens. Sacred Stones draws much entertainment value from making you care about the characters. In between the fighting, conversation sequences showcase excellent graphics with detailed, refined character art. The general design of these scenes is elegant, even if they tend to get repetitive as the game goes on (and the sounds aren't the most original or captivating.)
Pay attention to the conversation, too, because as in the earlier Fire Emblem games a lot of information passes back and forth between characters. Also like the earlier games, the dialogue is too long, approximately one sentence or phrase too long in many cases. Luckily, Sacred Stones's dialogue works, and despite the overall verbosity it never bores you to tears. In fact, you will understand every character's motivations in the quest and possibly form attachments to some of them.
All that talking does have a downside, however. In general, Sacred Stones offers a solid soundtrack that nicely adds emphasis and energy to the action onscreen without being too intrusive. But the dialogue screens audibly type out conversations in a word balloon. The appearance of each letter is accompanied by the loud dit-dit-dit sound often used in videogames to display radio messages. It drowns out the music and because of the wordiness of every conversation it eventually drives you to turn down the sounds.
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is a great little game that instantly
sucks you into a deep fantasy world of conflict and combat. The
learning curve is average for an RPG game, but the rewards are well
worth the study time. If you're an RPG fan with a mind for strategy
this game belongs in your GBA.
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