Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

Much like Sacred Stones (the only other Fire Emblem game I've played), this game has a ton of charm, is fun but can ultimately be frustrating. As you probably know by now, Fire Emblem has a system where if your character dies, they don't go into limbo where you can revive them later, they're just DEAD. So if you care enough about story archs and your characters, then you're going to want to keep everyone alive. This is tougher than it sounds because one little mistake can screw up an entire battle. Even though I played this game for 25 hours, I'm sure I put more than 10 extra hours into the game since they only count the time you actually win, and I had to reset the battles MANY times.

I liked Path of Radiance and all, but it didn't really improve much over Sacred Stones, and it actually dis-improved by losing the World Map that Sacred Stones had down perfect. The lack of voice-work was kind of annoying. Despite all of that, the core of the game is still fun and engaging and will give you a nice hefty challenge.

----------Battle System----------
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is a turn-based Strategy RPG. All turns are based in rounds. Your team always goes first, and after your final character has moved, or you "end" the round early, then the enemies get a chance to move and attack. If it's your round and you attack an enemy, then you get the opening attack and have a slight upper hand in battle, the same goes for the enemies when it's their turn.

Your characters gain experience after each attack. After 100 experience points your character will gain a level. After each level your character will gain a random amount of skill points, for example you'll get one point of HP, Magic, Strength, Defense, etc. If your character has 20 levels and gains the 21st, then he will advance into a new class and go back to level 1. You can possibly advance your character earlier with a Master Seal (like in Sacred Stones) but you'll lose out on alot of skill points in the process (so I would advise to never use one in this game). If you gain a new class you can sometimes gain new abilities or be able to hold new weapons, or even get to ride a horse.

There's not a large variety in mission tasks. Either you kill the boss, Seize a castle gate, Survive so many turns, or kill everything in sight. The game flows in chapters, so there's one battle per chapter, except for one that was broken into 3 or so parts.

You can equip 4 weapons and 4 items. Items include heal boosting items, keys and such. Some items can be "equipped" that boost your abilities. I don't remember being able to do that in Sacred Stones, so that's a cool thing.

The weapon system is unchanged, not a bad thing though. Fire Emblem features a rock paper scissors battle system with weapons. Depending on what weapon the character is holding will determine what kind of advantage he will have in battle. Lance beats sword, sword beats axe, and axe beats lance. Magic and Arrows are unaffected in this, but they can be used to your advantage one what kind of race or class the character is. For example, Arrows will obliterate flying characters but won't damage Knights.

After each chapter your team gets bonus experience points, and you can then assign those to whatever character you want to get them. Path of Radiance has a similar support system from Sacred Stones, so if your characters battle side by side then they might gain more trust and will become more powerful within battles. In Sacred Stones you had to talk to your characters while in a battle to improve their Support levels, but you can do it outside of batting in this game. There's also an "Info" section where you get to talk to random people, either from the "towns" you are at or people from your team. This is mostly useful because characters will join your team through this on occasion. After the battle is also the only time you can buy items or weapons. There's a new system (I think) called Forging. You can "Forge" new weapons, and create the weapons stats by paying a blacksmith (I'll assume) how to make it. This is pretty cool but can get expensive after a while, and you stop gaining money towards the end so it can be tough choice.

You can learn and equip skills aswell by finding them in houses or off of enemies. You have the space of 25 points for skill points, but most things cost between 5 and 20 points, so you can only hold so many. If you remove a skill, then it's gone forever, so choose wisely when it comes to them, but I didn't find enough to worry.

----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Ike, the son of a respected knight and current leader of a mercenary group. Your mercenary team is based in country Crimea, a fairly weak and neutral country. While out on a mission, they mercenary group gets word that their country of Crimea was invaded by the neighboring country of Daein. Crimea was conquered quickly with the royal family slaughtered. Ike and his group runs into a woman claiming to be the Princess of Crimea, and the game really starts there. Lots of twists and turns from there.

Ok, the story wasn't bad at all, but it was very similar to Sacred Stones, so it didn't exactly grab me like Sacred Stones did. I liked the characters and their developments, Ike had the biggest development in the game of course, but he gradually gets stronger and wiser through out the game and it's pretty believable.

The dialog scenes were just way to long, I think I would have enjoyed them more if they're voiced out though. It's just to much dialog thrust upon you at one single time without a break.

----------Graphics----------
Ehh... there really isn't anything to impressive within this game, on a graphical level atleast. But I LOVED the animated cutscenes, they looked fantastic and slightly unique with a blended mix of Anime, CGI and Cellshading effects, the only downfall is the lack of cutscenes. The battle fields show more variety in this game than Sacred Stones, you'll fight in towns, castles, boats, fields, snow stages and so on, so that's a plus, but they're all pretty faceless and forgettable (then again the fields still look better than the stuff show in Gladius or La Pacelle Tactics and dozens of other SRPGs I'm to lazy to think of).

When you activate a battle, you'll be forced into a battle scene, a fully 3D rendered battle, one character on the right and another on the left. They take turn with their hits and so on. It looks ok and all, but it gets pretty old after a while and I had to turn them off. This wouldn't be so bad if the loading was as quick as the GBA titles.

----------Sound----------
The music was good for the most part. No complaints, it had an epic feel and had a good sense of an "evil" tone and a "good guys" tone when these characters showed up. Nothing to special I guess but good enough. The only time there's voice overs is within the animated cutscenes. The voices are good, but there's only like 5 or 6 cutscenes in total.

----------World Map----------
There isn't one and this is one of my pet peeves with this title. You'll see a map during dialog scenes before or after battles, it shows where your characters have traveled, so you DO get somewhat of a sense of adventure, but you don't actually move your characters anywhere unlike The Sacred Stones for the GBA. Since you can't fight random battles like in Sacred Stones, you can't level grind, so they combat this with "Bonus experience" and with this you can give out experience to unused or weaker characters if you please.

----------Time to Complete Game----------
24:50:00

That time doesn't including the looong credits, the long ending dialog scenes or cutscenes or anything after the final boss. The ending is just plain LONG. Not in a good way either, it was the most longwinded part of the game. The game ends with one nice animated cutscene, and credits with a depressing Japanese pop song, with subtitles.

After all of that they finally show your stats, but they scroll to fast to write down. Most battles take an average of 40 minutes, while the longest took nearly 2 hours. They then scroll the character stats by level and "Wins". Not 100% sure what Wins mean, but I'll assume kills. Ike was #1 with 164. I had two characters that fell in battle.