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.
