My favorite FE game by far. It has really great characters, a fun story and world that continues off of FE9, a 3-tier class system, the best defend maps in the series, incredible OST, and some pretty good cutscenes for its time. There are a lot of downsides that I overlooked my first time playing with it that are pretty obvious now: poor unit availability with the 3 separate armies, overpowered royals units, long-ass enemy phases, and some maps are horribly unfun to replay. Overall, it’s the FE game that I come back to and play the vanilla edition the most. I’ve beaten it about 10 times and probably will end up going back to it again in a few years.
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Legitimately perfect 11/10 no notes
I’m not even really joking. Like, yeah, it obviously has Objective Flaws or whatever. People have endlessly picked at its nits for plot holes and hyperanalyzed every facet of its gameplay and decided for themselves what they do and don’t like about it and what they might like to see improved. It’s weird and oddly-paced and has a fair few silly plot contrivances and bears a host of bizarre and unique mechanics we’d never see again. It’s a game with way too many ideas and not all of its ideas work the way they were likely supposed to. None of that’s even wrong!
But for me, Fire Emblem is all about Vibes. I think broadly there’s no truly bad FEs, just FEs that maybe aren’t my thing, and thus my preferences tend to be purely based on how much they stuck with me when I was done with them and how much playing them FELT fun in the moment. And somehow RD just hits all the right notes for me to love it endlessly, warts and all. It wasn’t my first Fire Emblem, but it maybe did more to cement the series in the very special place it holds in my heart than any of the others, perhaps excepting Sacred Stones (my actual first). I can poke fun at and kvetch about things in it that don’t really work plenty, but at the end of the day it’s all done in love. RD is weird and ugly and busted, and I adore it.
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idk why they even put the dawn brigade in at all if they were going to be so incredibly shafted almost immediately. Also the blood pact strongarming Micaiah into a race war which she then gets to avoid thinking about the consequences for long because Yune takes over. What a waste of a perfectly interesting character
RD is extremely cool but it jeopardizes the storytelling for every party you’re given access to by having the other parties exist. I have multiple friends who despise Micaiah because she genocided Laguz despite Ike, the god of all fire emblem or whatever, ending racism supposedly. Whatever man. Elincia’s party is the least affected by the incredible bad weaving.
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Still my favorite mainline FE. Yes, it’s flawed, but it has a lot of things that I adore – more than any other mainline FE game does. Moreover, none of RD’s flaws are major enough to bother me.
A lot of mechanics and aspects of RD have not returned to the series since, which is a shame, because I really like them. To name a few:
- Three-tier class system (I like it a lot more than reclassing and split promotions, I think RD’s length is actually perfect and the three-tier class system supports it progression-wise)
- Switching perspectives (no, having a route split is not the same thing)
- Varying unit availability for certain maps (I LOVE the fact that many maps are designed around you using a specific squad, I think that’s really fun and it serves as a great unit showcase – coupled with maps where you can deploy a variety of units, it feels like the game is giving you a taste of each unit before allowing you to choose who you want to use long-term, and that’s awesome)
- The base system (I adore basically everything about the base, if RD had full-fledged supports it would be literally perfect for me – PLEASE bring back simple menus like RD’s…)
- BEXP (I have absolutely 0 issues with that system and would like it to return)
- Base conversations (they are Epic and I will not elaborate)
There’s more stuff I could bring up, but these are the main things that stand out to me. I definitely see the issues other people have with this game, but it remains my favorite mainline FE, and I don’t see it being removed from that spot unless IS radically change their current approach to FE design.
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I think the problem Ike creates in the story comes from IS seemingly trying to create a heroic epic around him and create a character along the lines of Heracles or Odysseus. While I don’t like Path of Radiance, this concept worked better there because the story was pretty much: Ike goes around the continent and everyone important realizes he’s a great guy that they should get behind. It became awkward in RD because the other party leaders are real people with problems and doubts who are at the mercy of political and societal forces beyond their control, while Ike is still a larger than life heroic figure, and the result was two story telling styles fighting with each other. The fact that Ike’s (and Elincia’s) conquest of Daein had negative consequences for the people of Daein because they left the country in Begnion’s corrupt hands doesn’t fit into Ike’s hero story, so it never gets brought up again after Part 1, even after Ike and Micaiah meet. Ike was having people be okay with him subjugating their countries long before Corrin became famous for it. Just look at the way the game frames Part III in the interlude teaser: “A hero fights for the laguz and justice; the Maiden of Dawn fights for the Beorc and Daein.” The story is no longer concerned with Daein’s liberation and treats it like some petty concern where Micaiah is missing the big picture.
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Funnily enough, RD Hardmode was the thing that taught me to use units as pawns and to focus on macrogame over microgame. I used to sweat over small things (item durability, who got exp, using all my favorite characters, beating the game with no deaths, managing inventories and gold, ect.), now I just throw units at the enemy until I get to the end credits. Made me wayyyy better at FE.
So most of your assessment is correct, but you can turn off battle animations and turn movement speed up to fast. (It’s actually faster than PoR)
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Also someone mentioned RD difficulty earlier. They have it backwards, PoR was made easier in NA but RD was made harder.
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For those complaining about the battle speed, I hope you know about Map Animations. First thing I do when playing Radiant Dawn is put on map animations (and move the Wii mote to vertical). The map animations look absolutely fine and, while yes, enemy phase can still be pretty long, it’s much briefer than if you’re moving to the fully modeled combat animations for every encounter.
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This is factually false since JPN RD has multiple nerfs compared to international releases;
No Daein regalia
Edward and Leo are lvl with lower bases
You can’t promote anyone by leveling to 21
Seals and crowns are slightly less scarce, but still rare enough that you cannot get a full team promoted easily
Skills are worse and some useful ones like resolve are nigh useless
The list goes on
Jon Rd is jank as fuck, and though the difference in difficulty between it and international is not as big as the PoR addition of easy mode, it is still a bigger challenge than the version we got.
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I’m pretty sure it was common knowledge that PoR normal mode in NA was JP easy mode while RD normal mode was JP hard mode?
Am I just old and out of the loop…
Also most of the factors you listed come into play much later when difficulty isn’t really an issue anymore
Edit: Jotari part of the sideways Wiimote gang?! So real for that tbh
If RD didn’t have so many damn units I’d go for battle animations by unit, but chugging through the list to toggle animations every time you get a new unit is suffering
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Why would I play games with two hands when I can do it with one! XD
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The control scheme just makes more sense to me for most games, likely due to the fact that the only gaming devices I’d owned before the Wii were a GBC and a GBA.
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