Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

I played Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light.

This was a game released on the Famicom in 1990 in Japan only. It's the very first game in the Fire Emblem series!

In 2020, Nintendo did a special promotion for Fire Emblem's 30th anniversary where they temporarily released an English edition of the game on the Nintendo Switch eShop for four months. After this promotion ended, the game was removed entirely from the digital storefront and has become completely unavailable ever since.

I'm not a big fan of this practice at all. They finally translate one of their legacy Japan-only games, and they don't even keep it available for people to buy? Why, Nintendo, why?

As a Fire Emblem fan, I've been waiting for so long for Nintendo to release the Japan-only Fire Emblems 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12 in English! When they finally decide to actually do one of them, why would they then decide to revoke its existence so shortly afterwards? This is cruelty towards your biggest fans, Nintendo, you know that?

But anyway. Obviously I did buy this limited edition release when it was available in 2020, and this game has been sitting in my Nintendo Switch's library for four years now.

I'm a big fan of the Fire Emblem series, but I never actually played very much of the first entry before! What kind of Fire Emblem fan am I, who hasn't even played Fire Emblem 1? I owed it to myself to make use of this rare English version I have access to, and decided to actually play through the dang game!

And... I'd say I had a great time!

...

Okay, so before I get into the actual game itself, I want to talk a bit about this weird Switch version. Nintendo did it in a way that is very unusual from the way that retro translations are typically done.

It seems that this Switch app is running the original Fire Emblem 1 Japanese Famicom ROM, in a bespoke emulator that is specifically set up to replace the Japanese text with the equivalent English text in real-time. The actual underlying ROM it's running is the same old Japanese FE1 ROM as ever.

This means that Nintendo didn't have to actually make the English text work within the memory constraints of a Famicom ROM.

NES games from the olden days did have rather limited English text. Games like Zelda and Simon's Quest could only display awkward limited sentences with only capital letters in big chunky square tiles. Even games like Dragon Warrior, which had remarkably well-written full sentences with proper capitalisation, still had to use a chunky tile-based font.

But the English text here in Fire Emblem is quite thin, and it uses a variable-width font, in a way that I don't think could actually work on NES? I'm no technical expert by any means, but it seems to me like this English text, as seen in this version, would not be capable of displaying on a real NES the way it does here. They managed to fit way too many letters in the small text windows, and they don't use nearly enough abbreviations compared to actual NES games. 

Okay so for example, English versions of 90s games would often struggle with item names - anyone remember "Mrbl3" from Breath of Fire? Here on the Switch FE1, they can fully write out names such as "Silver Sword", whereas the unofficial fan translation romhack for FE1 can only fit "Silver", and then it uses a custom little sword icon instead of the word "sword". The fans had to come up with a solution that worked within the confines of the NES ROM, but Nintendo wasn't under any such constraints for this Switch version.

It looks to me like Nintendo just wanted English text, without the need to actually figure out NES romhacking to do it "properly". It's a completely different philosophy from fan translations - the fans who make them need the game to work in their favourite emulators and on their flash cartridges to play on original hardware, so it has to be done as a modded ROM. Whereas Nintendo knows that this version they're making is only ever intended to run on Nintendo Switch, so there is no need to actually limit it to the constraints of NES hardware.

Nintendo doesn't have much interest in making their solution behave "authentically" like a NES game - they only cared about making one of their older games run in English on Switch, using whatever means they had access to.

But this philosophy comes with some drawbacks. Their method of displaying English text that's reliant on a proprietary hackjob of an emulator makes it so that this version of Fire Emblem 1 is not actually possible for them to release on the Nintendo Switch Online selection, which uses its own NES emulators that wouldn't have these specific hacks in place. It's a bit upsetting because the Japanese version of the NSO selection has the regular Japanese Fire Emblem 1 in there no problem. So if Nintendo ever wants to release their official English version of Fire Emblem 1 again in the future, it'll have to be a special thing separate from their other NES games, and separate from the Japanese side of things too. 

...if it's gonna be such a pain for them to rerelease this thing, why on earth would they remove it from the eShop in the first place? It still bothers me so much.

But anyway....

This version also has a few extra emulator options - you have the ability to save and load a single savestate, and you have the ability to rewind turns mid-battle. They achieve this by quietly saving a savestate in the background at the start of every round, up to 19 of them in a row, and you can pick one of these to revert to at any time. ...and then they call that a "rewind". I suppose they added this for modern fans who are used to how games like Three Houses let you undo a bad turn.

I decided to not make use of these features as I wanted to play the authentic Fire Emblem 1 experience.

Additionally there is a 2x speed option, and you can even set it so that it only comes into effect during the enemy phase (which is a good inclusion, since the computer is fairly slow-thinking in this old game) However it is literally just a 2x speed-up, so it also speeds up the music and makes it all squeaky high-pitched, ...so I don't tend use this feature either. I don't mind watching the slow computer play its turns out to be honest. It's kind of a vibe just watching the game play its turn.

...

But aaaaaanywayyyyy! Let's talk about Fire Emblem 1 itself! I'm gonna go into a bit too much detail, so I hope you're prepared!

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is a turn-based tactical RPG by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, released in 1990 for the Famicom.

Not only is this the first Fire Emblem game, it's one of the very first tactics-based JRPGs in general! Fire Emblem was responsible for inventing and popularising many aspects of Japanese tactics-RPG design and gameplay. 

The story is about Marth, the prince of Altea, a nation in the Archanea region. Marth travels the lands gathering an army, battling various foes from different factions as he rescues neighbouring kingdoms, liberates his homeland from occupation, searches for the legendary sword Falchion, pursues the evil wizard Gharnef, rescues his sister Elice, and eventually faces off against the Shadow Dragon himself, Medeus. 

There are a lot of different story threads going on at the same time here. I did find it a little bit difficult to follow what the actual sequence of events was, because the story is only really told through very brief dialogue scenes that are shown at the start of each chapter. I am fine with this though, because each story scene is mostly there just to give context to its corresponding battle scenario anyway. 

It feels like there's a lot of underlying lore and history that they created for the game's setting, but it feels like it's struggling to fully present itself within the confines of the game's limited dialogue system. It's interesting because it definitely comes across that there is a lot of story detail in this world, yet we as the player only get a small glimpse of it during the game. And of course later Fire Emblem games would flesh out Marth's story and the land of Archanea more thoroughly. 

The story is not so much the focus of the game, though, so let's talk about the gameplay.

The game is structured into chapters, each one being a different battle scenario. There are 25 chapters in total, and you play through each chapter one by one, in order. You cannot go back to previous chapters, and there are no optional battles - this is a strictly linear game where the story only moves forwards.

 You can save your game only after winning a chapter, though you can also create a temporary suspend point if you need to turn the game off mid-battle.

Each chapter takes place on a tile-based map, usually either across various grassy plains, or inside castles (with one desert chapter thrown in for good measure). The player has a number of blue units under their command, and the enemy side has a number of red units. 

You control a cursor on the screen, and with it you can select a unit to see its stats: Level, HP, Strength, Skill, Weapon Level, Speed, Luck, Defense, Movement, Resistance, and EXP. You will also see what items they hold - enemy units all have one item each, usually their equipped weapon, while player units can hold up to four items. Each unit belongs to a certain character class which affects its base stats, what weapons it can use, and other unique attributes such as the Pegasus Knight who can fly.

The game alternates between player phase and enemy phase.

During the player phase, you can select any of your blue units to move, and they can move as many tiles as their Move stat allows. Some kinds of terrain will take more movement to cross - a forest tile takes 2 move to cross for example. In general, mounted classes have more Move than on-foot classes do. Additionally, some terrain may be passable or impassable depending on your unit's class. A flying unit is not impeded by forest, mountain or water tiles at all.

So, when you're moving your little guys around the map, if you position someone within attack range to a red enemy unit, then you can select the Attack option and pick a held weapon to initiate an attack on the enemy. Most units need to be right next to an enemy to attack them, while archers need to be one space away. Mages are flexible and can attack from both nearby and one space away.

During your turn, you can move any of your blue units once each, and when you've ran out of unmoved units, you can press the "end turn" option to begin enemy phase. 

In enemy phase, the computer does the same thing - it moves all of its red units, and once it's done, player phase begins again.

Each enemy unit can have one of three behaviours during enemy phase:

1: They will always try to move closer to your units, and will attack whoever they can reach.

2: They will stand in place until a player unit enters their movement range, at which point they will then start pursuing them.

3: They will never move from the spot they stand, but will still attack anyone who enters their attack range. This type is normally reserved for the boss of each chapter, as the boss guards the goal.

If an enemy unit has multiple player units in their range, they will prioritise targeting units they can deal more damage to. Lower defense units are more likely to be targeted than higher defense units. However, if Marth is in their range, the enemy will ALWAYS prioritise attacking Marth, no matter what. The only time they ignore Marth is when Marth's defense is too high for them to do any damage to, which can start happening lategame.

When an attack occurs, in either player phase or enemy phase, the game shifts to the fight screen where the interaction will play out automatically. During the fight, a few things take place in a certain order:

First the initiator will attack the defender with their equipped weapon. 

Next, the defender will counterattack using their equipped weapon. If the defender cannot reach the attacker with their weapon (for example, if you are attacking an enemy swordfighter with your archer), then no counterattack occurs.

After both units have done their attack, then the two units' speed stats are compared. If one of them is sufficiently faster, then they will do another attack. If both fighters have similar speed, then the extra attack does not occur.

If at any point one of the two fighters' HP reaches zero, they are dead and the fight ends immediately.

The player unit will receive EXP equal to the amount of damage they dealt to the opponent, and if the enemy was killed, then they gain a large amount of additional EXP too. Enemies do not gain EXP at all, though bizarrely, enemy units do inexplicably show a non-zero EXP value in their stat window.

All attacks will either hit or miss, with the likelihood being determined by a calculation based on the attacker's Skill stat, the defender's Speed and Luck stats, terrain bonuses, and the modifications that their held weapon has.

The amount of damage an attack deals is based on calculations involving the attacker's Strength and Weapon Level stats, the defender's Defense stat, as well as additional modifiers from the equipped weapon. 

Magic attacks work differently - every type of spell deals a set amount of damage. Fire always deals 5 damage, Thunder always deals 7 damage, and so on. The Resistance stat reduces damage from magic, however every unit has 0 Res by default, and it can only be raised by artificial means - either using a Talisman (a rare stat-boost item), or by using a consumable Pure Water item, which boosts Res temporarily for a few turns.

Additionally, there is a small chance the attacker will land a critical hit, which deals thrice the damage. The critical hit chance is calculated based on Skill, Luck, and weapon modifiers. Spells can also crit, despite normally having set damage.

This system of critical hits can make battles a quite a lot more exciting - it feels good to occasionally get a lucky break like this, and it happens juuust infrequently enough where you can't ever really rely on it happening, but can still quietly hope for it in the back of your mind. It's a great balance.

(It might be interesting to note that every single enemy unit in the game is forced to have a Luck stat of 0, likely for game balancing purposes - to reduce the game frustrating the player with too many enemy crits.).

Every weapon has a durability value that will decrease by one with every successful hit. Missing does not decrease durability. When the durability reaches zero, the weapon breaks and disappears from the unit's inventory completely. If a weapon breaks, the next weapon in their inventory will automatically be equipped, or without one, they will become unable to attack. It is necessary to frequently resupply your units with new weapons as you play through the game.

Enemies do not have weapon durability.

So yeah, this is basically how the attacks play out. You pick an enemy to attack, who then attacks you back straight away. And sometimes you get two attacks if you're using a speedy unit.

I think this is a very cool way of doing it. The fact that enemies get a chance to strike back is one of the most interesting parts of the strategy in my opinion. If you have an enemy you can't kill in one shot (which is most of them), then you need to think about how to approach them. You need to think about which of your units are capable of taking hits, which of your units can do the most damage to secure a kill, and which of your units should be speedy enough to double-hit the opponent.

There's all sorts of different ways to go about it depending on the circumstances. For example, it is often a good idea to approach an enemy but intentionally not attack them on the player phase. Because if, for example, an enemy takes two turns to kill, then attacking them first means you'll be taking a counterattack, PLUS their next attack when enemy phase starts. But if you just position your unit next to them and end your turn without attacking, then on enemy phase, they'll attack you, you get your counterattack hit in, and now you can finish them off with an attack when player phase starts. It's the difference between getting hit once or getting hit twice.

Also, it might be worth noting that, sometimes NOT killing an opponent on enemy phase is beneficial as well. For example, if you put a strong unit of yours in range of three enemy units, then on the enemy phase, all three will try to attack them. If your unit's counterattack kills the first enemy, then that means there's a free space available for the second enemy to do another attack. And if your counterattack kills the second enemy too, then the third one will also have an opportunity to strike. ...and taking three hits from the enemy all in a row with no chance to back off is a dangerous thing. So sometimes giving your strong unit a weaker weapon that doesn't kill the enemy is a good idea, so that their counterattack leaves the enemy alive, blocking the other two from attacking during the same enemy phase. 

...yeah, okay some of these things may be a bit too complex to describe in a way that makes sense unless you have some Fire Emblem experience. But you see what I mean, right? The attack-counterattack system has a TON of strategic depth to it!

There's a lot to keep in mind, yet somehow it all feels very simple in the moment, since all you're doing as a player is telling a unit where to move and who to attack. The game handles all the calculations and complicated things, and if you as a player don't quite yet know how everything works, you can learn it intuitively, piece by piece, through practical experience.

Knowing how the game works is where the majority of the strategy in this game comes from, so it is important to get a sense for it if you want to do well, but it's not mandatory to be an expert in order to progress either. I think it's a really nice balance.

I actually think this is an example of some really elegantly-designed game systems. It's all simple enough to be able to control with two buttons and a d-pad, meaning a player who doesn't know the game is still able to make progress fairly intuitively... yet the game is still complex enough to have a lot of tactical depth, which allows the gameplay to be highly dynamic and interesting. It's really good stuff. 

...okay so. I'm gonna go a bit on a tangent here, but...

For the most part, I want to speak only of what exists in Fire Emblem 1 without referring so much to things that were introduced in later entries in the series. (after all, it's not fair to judge the first game by what later entries improve on) However, there is one aspect right here that is the most significant difference in my view, that I really can't avoid bringing up.

In later entries of Fire Emblem, there is a "battle preview" window that shows you the exact numbers before you commit to an attack. Starting from Fire Emblem 4, before you confirm your attack, a preview window pops up with the exact attack value, defense value, and chance to hit after all modifiers, on both sides. And from Fire Emblem 6 onwards, the preview window even does the work of calculating the difference between attack and defense to give you a "Might" value, showing the exact number of HP a successful attack will do, as well as now showing the percentage chance of critical-hitting, and whether or not you are fast enough to double-attack.

I've always appreciated how Fire Emblem is such a precise game with its numbers, and how it always gives you all the information you need to make good tactical choices. And this preview window is a big part of that.

Fire Emblem 1 is still a precise game under the hood - there is never any wiggle room in the numbers like in some other RPGs that make use of fuzzy damage rolls... but the precise information is not conveyed to the player very plainly. The lack of a battle preview window can be seriously jarring to a fan of the later games who has come to rely on them for their strategy. Occasionally in Fire Emblem 1, I have initiated a fight where I deal 0 or 1 damage, as I may have underestimated my opponent's Defense stat compared to my Strength + Weapon Level + equipped sword type. This is something that would never occur in later games that would have told me how bad the numbers were beforehand. I would have been given a chance to cancel my move and try something else.

Now, it is possible to gain an idea of how tough an enemy is without the preview window - you can just look at their stats and figure out the numbers yourself (and doing this is useful even in the later games whenever enemies are too far away to initiate battles with, meaning you can't bring up a preview window anyway), but Fire Emblem 1 has a problem that makes even this method of figuring out the damage more difficult... 

You see, the most problematic element in Fire Emblem 1 is how weapon stats are completely hidden. You can see in your inventory you've got items such as "Iron Sword", Steel Sword", "Lance", "Steel Lance", "Killing Edge", "Levin Sword" etc etc etc... and in this game, the difference in names is all you can see. There are no item descriptions in this game at all, and no way of seeing the differences between them aside from trying them out firsthand and paying attention. ...Because I have knowledge from future games, I already know that a Lance is heavier than an Iron Sword (and therefore reduces more Speed when equipped), but the first game makes no effort to inform the player about any of this.

It makes it so that, moreso than in any of the future games, you really do have to learn to acquire a vague "sense" for the fights. You have to observe how much damage an enemy does to one of your units, and with that in mind, extrapolate what that means. If you just saw one of your guys with 10 defense take 12 damage from an attack, you then know that your other guy with 8 defense will take 14 damage if attacked by the same enemy. If you just got doubled by an enemy you attacked with a heavier weapon, you know you should probably switch to a lighter weapon if you go for them again. ...This much is easy enough to figure out as you make your way through a chapter, but the problem is that you don't get access to much of this information before you're already taking the damage, which can put you in a bad spot without having had much chance to avoid it... unless you REALLY know how to calculate the stats perfectly and have encyclopedic knowledge of all weapon modifiers...and can be bothered to do the calculations for every single enemy you come across.

But you know what? It's... mostly fine, actually. After I got used to not having as much information as I was used to, I kinda just... didn't mind? It was sorta freeing actually, to just send my guys out there and hope for the best. Of course it wouldn't always work out, but that's part of the learning experience. It's a bit of a different vibe, but after all's said and done, it didn't actually affect the game as negatively as I was fearing it would. It still felt perfectly like playing Fire Emblem to me. And that is an interesting conclusion to come to, considering how Fire Emblem's precise stat and damage system is something I consider a key part of its identity. This game still absolutely embodies what it means to be a Fire Emblem game, even when the stats aren't front-and-center.

I think the lack of a battle preview window was the main reason I felt put off by Fire Emblem 1 for so long as a series fan. But after giving it a proper chance now, I don't have a problem with it at all. I mean, yeah, I do appreciate that the later Fire Emblem games played to the series' strengths by improving player information, but now that I've properly gotten "into" Fire Emblem 1, I can truly say that it doesn't make the game impossible or unreasonable to have to play without it, and the lack of a preview window isn't some huge "oversight" that makes the game bad. The game is perfectly well-designed the way it is. In fact, Fire Emblem 1 is way easier to complete overall compared to the insane difficulty of Fire Emblem 5, or the less-difficult-than-5-but-still-really-hard difficulty of Fire Emblem 6. And they had preview windows and everything. ... So there really isn't anything to worry about with FE1 in my opinion. 

Besides, besides........ why am I so worked up about knowing the damage numbers anyway? I mean... what happens if one of your units dies, huh? It's not big deal, right? ...right?

Well... it kiiiiinda is. It really depends on your perspective. I'll get to unit death in a moment.

Let's talk about the player units more broadly first, shall we?

In Fire Emblem, the enemy red units are mostly generic nameless footsoldiers, however the player's blue units are ALL unique individual characters with a name and a face. Every single one of them.

You start the game with a handful of units - Marth the Lord, Caeda the Pegasus Knight, Jagen the Paladin, Abel and Cain the Cavaliers, Draug the Knight, and Gordin the Archer. On the first chapter, there is a village, and if you bring Marth to this village, Wrys the Curate is added to the team. If you don't bring Marth to the village before winning the chapter, then Wrys can never be added to the team for the entire rest of the game. Recruitable characters do not appear later on if you miss them.

On Chapter 2, four characters automatically join Marth's team - Ogma the Mercenary, and a trio of Axe Fighters: Bord, Cord, and Barst. Additionally, if you pay attention to the red enemy units, you will notice that two of them are not generic bad guy units, but are in fact named and faced individuals: Darros the Pirate, and Castor the Hunter. These two will attack the player and can be killed by the player as normal, however if you approach them with the right character, a "Talk" option appears alongside the regular attack option. If you talk to them, you can convince them to join your side, turning them from red to blue. Marth needs to talk to Darros, and Caeda needs to talk to Castor.

When recruiting enemy units like this, it isn't always obvious which of your units needs to go talk to them. Throughout most of the game, it's usually Marth or Caeda, and you can usually figure it out by paying attention to their dialogue as they attack your units. Though some may take trial and error.

Chapter 3 again has two characters who join automatically - Julian the Thief and Lena the Curate, as well as an additional enemy character that can be recruited by talking: Navarre the Mercenary.

Now, from chapter 4 onwards, the game puts a limit on which characters you're allowed to bring. If you've recruited everybody available thus far, you'll have 17 characters, but there are only 15 slots available on your team for this chapter. And Marth always needs to be one of them.

Throughout the entire game, new characters are constantly available, either automatically obtained at the start, or through recruiting during the chapter. In fact, there only exist five chapters in the whole game that don't have any new characters to obtain.

In total, there are 52 playable characters in the game. (though you can only have 51 of them at a time, because Samson and Arran from Chapter 16 are mutually exclusive)

However, the available team size is always going to be around 12-17ish depending on the chapter. So you will never have an opportunity to use everybody if your goal is to train a strong team... since there's only 25 chapters in the game, with a set number of enemies to fight against, there's only so much EXP to go around, you know? You have to make decisions about which units to take into all your fights, and which units to bench. And if you gain a new unit you want to use, you might have to decide who in your main lineup is gonna get benched.

Now... this is where we can talk about death.

In Fire Emblem, when one of your units loses all of their HP from an enemy attack, they die. And when they die, they are DEAD. They do not come back. When this happens, you have to make a choice. Do you reset the game to start the chapter over and be more careful this time? Or do you continue on regardless?

In terms of gameplay, a unit death is not usually too big of a deal, because you will generally have enough benched units to replace them. However, if you lose one of your more well-trained and capable units, or if you lose a unit that has a unique ability, that might be a much bigger blow to your team - you may not have a suitable replacement, so restarting might be the correct play even if you don't mind a few deaths here and there. It's all up to the player and their playstyle.

There's one important aspect at play here that changes the whole dynamic up. And that's the emotional or personal aspect.

In Fire Emblem, all 52 playable characters have a unique name, a unique face, a backstory, some dialogue scenes, and other traits that make them unique as individuals. If you're someone who grows attached to your little army as you play through the game, you might not want to let any of them die at all. I certainly don't like seeing any of my guys die, that's for sure, haha. So for someone who prefers to keep everyone alive, they might play with the mindset that any death is unacceptable and requires a restart, no matter what. And for some players, it's not just about developing an attachment to them, it can also be about wanting to play a "perfect" completionist playthrough with no deaths, too.

But on the other hand, another perfectly valid mindset to have is the roleplay aspect. When you think about it, everyone's journey through Fire Emblem is uniquely their own story - which characters they trained, who became the strongest unit, who tried their best but couldn't keep up, who was benched, who was given the best weapons, who was given which roles in each chapter... there's so many different ways a playthrough of FE1 can play out, and an imaginative player might think of these scenarios from the perspective of a storyteller. If you think of Fire Emblem in this way, then a character's untimely death can be considered part of the unique "story" of that particular playthrough, and it might make things feel more meaningful to leave it that way. Maybe they valiantly sacrificed themselves for the sake of a friend? Or maybe they just got a bit overconfident? Were they always destined to die on the battlefield? There's a lot to work with if this is how you like to think about your RPGs, and Fire Emblem is quite accommodating toward this mindset.

I think Nintendo were very deliberate when creating this aspect of Fire Emblem. They could have made the player units just as generic as the enemy units, with only a handful of important guys like Marth being unique.... but they didn't. They went to the trouble to design and name over fifty unique characters for the player to use - and they did all this for the very first entry in the series! This means that the fact that everyone is unique and can potentially permanently die was considered by Nintendo to be an important part of the game design from the very start.

It really does affect the way you feel about using them and training them. It makes things more personal.

And the fact that there are so many spare units available does mean that the designers do expect a few of them to die here and there through the course of a regular playthrough. It's part of the game design as well. Having 50 characters in the game gives the lesser-skilled players some much needed leeway to work with.

...Oh and by the way, if Marth dies, it's an immediate Game Over, and you are forced to restart the chapter. He's the main character after all. 

Anyway. ... I haven't yet talked about how you actually go about winning a chapter, have I?

The goal of every chapter in Fire Emblem 1 is to bring Marth over to the enemy castle. Or if you are in an indoors chapter, then the enemy's throne. Either way, the goal is to make Marth stand on the specific goal tile, and then select the "seize" action on the menu to win. This is easier said than done, however, as there is always a strong enemy unit standing on that tile that must be dealt with first, not to mention all of the regular enemy units scattered around each map that will pursue you.

Each map starts with your units on one end of the map, the boss enemy sitting on their castle on the other end of the map, and lots of enemy units placed all over the map. You can select which of your units to use before the chapter begins, but you cannot choose their starting location. ...You can't even swap their starting points between each other, which is a bit annoying - the game can just decide your frontline units are gonna start in the back, and it'll take a turn or two to sort it out once the battle begins.

The maps also have some other important features and landmarks to pay attention to aside from the goal. These are: 

- Villages - they can be visited only by Marth. A village will give Marth a reward of money, an item, or a new character. However, enemy Thief units can destroy villages if Marth does not reach them in time.

- Houses - they can be visited by anyone. Visiting a house will give a few lines of text from the NPC living there - usually a hint, or a small snippet of lore. 

- Shops - There are two types: Armory for weapons, and Item Shop for other things. A unit must stand on the shop tile and have free space in their inventory in order to buy from a shop. That's right, all shopping has to be done mid-battle in this game. There are no between-battle towns where you can shop at your own pace or anything like that.

- Treasure chests - Can be opened by a Thief or by Marth (except for the chapter 6 chests, which Marth can't open). Chests have an item or money inside. Enemy Thief units will also pursue chests, and if an enemy opens one, the treasure inside is lost and cannot be obtained.

- Locked door - A door that blocks your way in certain areas. Can be opened by any character with a door key in their inventory, or a Thief with a lockpick. There are also a few locked drawbridges that require a specific "bridge key" to lower.

- Fort - a special type of terrain that, in addition to granting an evasion bonus, also heals a unit for each turn they spend standing on one. Can be very useful if you don't have any other way of regaining lost HP. (Maybe your Curate is on the other side of the map? Or you didn't bring one?) Additionally, forts are where enemy reinforcements come from. Reinforcements are not random - rather, each chapter has a set list of reinforcements that will appear on specific turns at specific forts. If you have a unit blocking the fort by standing on its tile on the turn that an enemy is supposed to appear, then it will prevent them from appearing entirely, which is a good strategy to reduce danger. (though if you're lacking in EXP, reducing the number of enemies that appear in the chapter might not always be beneficial?)

- Arena - These are fairly rare compared to other structures - only 6 chapters in the game have an arena available. The arena is a colosseum-like facility where you can fight to the death for a prize. It's the only way to gain additional EXP outside of the limited number of regular enemies, as well as the only source of additional money outside of the specific chests that have money in them... but it is risky. When you put a unit in an arena, you see a wager. If you feel confident, you can accept the wager to pit your unit against a random opponent. The higher the wager, the stronger the foe. In the arena, the same battle mechanics as normal apply, except it continues until one of the fighters dies, and there's no way to back out if it starts going poorly.

Because you cannot see the enemy stats before accepting the fight, I tend to find arenas way too risky to ever want to use. But they are an interesting option for players who need a bit of extra cash and don't mind the risk of death. Or for players who know the game way too well, and have encyclopedic knowledge of all kinds of possible arena foes and which ones appear at which wager ranges and... yeah. That's not most players.

- Convoy - Every chapter has this. When a unit of yours obtains an item but cannot hold it, it gets automatically stored in the convoy. You can retrieve items from the convoy by bringing a unit there and using their turn to store or take items. The convoy can hold 40 items total. ...The inventory-management in Fire Emblem 1 is very fiddly, because you have to do it all mid-battle like this, and it can take several turns just to accomplish the task of giving one item to one guy. Because once a unit has used the convoy and ended their turn there, they're blocking the tile, so no-one else can access the convoy until next turn. It's a bit annoying. There is no camp menu between chapters where you can manage items unfortunately, it's all gotta be done during a chapter, one move at a time.

So there's actually a pretty decent amount of stuff you may want to accomplish outside of just aiming for the boss directly. Buying new weapons, distributing the weapons to the right party members, going for the chests, killing Thieves before they ruin everything, figuring out how to safely recruit any new characters...and plain ol' just killing all the remaining enemies for the sake of getting as much EXP as you possibly can. The chapters can be pretty dynamic, with the player able to aim for multiple goals at once. I find it really interesting!

I haven't gone into detail about the different kinds of character classes yet. There are actually 22 different classes in Fire Emblem 1, which is quite a lot for an old game!

They are:

- Lord - a special class reserved for Marth, the main character. A swift and skilled swordsman who can use rapiers.

- Knight - has high defense, decent strength, but low mobility.

- Cavalier - a mounted fighter with high mobility and decent strength, can use swords and lances.

- Paladin - a Cavalier that has been promoted with a Paladin's Honor - stronger than the Cavalier in every way.

- Archer - has a ranged attack and decentish defense.

- Sniper - an Archer that has been promoted with an Orion's Bolt - has high skill.

- Hunter - has a strong ranged attack, but low defense.

- Horseman - a mounted archer, high mobility and has a strong ranged attack.

- Pegasus Knight - fragile and rather weak, but has high mobility and can fly over any terrain. Weak to bows.

- Wyvern Knight - a Pegasus Knight that has been promoted with a Skydrake Whip - much sturdier than the fragile Pegasus knight with higher mobility. Still weak to bows.

- Mercenary - a balanced swordfighter with high skill and speed.

- Hero - a Mercenary that has been promoted with a Hero's Crest - stronger with more skill and defense.

- Mage - fragile defense. Can use magic tomes, which inflict set damage.

- Curate - cannot attack and completely defenseless, can use staves for healing and bestowing other effects to allies.

- Bishop - a Curate or Mage that has been promoted with a Bishop's Ring - can use both magic tomes and staves.

- Fighter - uses axes, very strong, but low accuracy and low defense. 

- Pirate - uses axes, low defense, but can walk over ocean tiles.

- Thief - very weak, very fragile, useless in a battle, but can use lockpicks and open treasure chests. High mobility and speed too.

- General - extremely strong in both attack and defense, but has poor mobility.

- Ballistician - rides a wheeled ballista, has a ranged attack and very strong defense, but extremely poor mobility, and their ammunition is rare to come across.

- Manakete - a mystic dragonkin who has the ability to transform into a powerful dragon when equipped with a Dragonstone, useless without their stone. 

- Freelancer - a special class exclusive to one character named Xane, has the ability to temporarily mimic any ally. You can even have two Lords in play at once if you let Xane mimic Marth!

...That's quite a lot of variety in different types of unit! Honestly, for the first game in the series, I'm quite impressed with how they weren't willing to just stick to the basics - they needed to have some interesting variety in there, and I appreciate that. it's clear to me that they really wanted to push the gameplay systems as far as they could go, and all of these different classes are a result of trying to cram as much variety in the game as possible. I really like this.

While different classes have different stats, that doesn't mean that all characters of a class are the same as each other. In fact, two units of the same class can still be quite different to one another, and this comes about due to the level-up system.

When a unit levels up, each of their stats may or may not increase by 1, determined randomly. The chance of a stat increasing is based on the character's individual growth rates, which is unique for each character. For example, the first Paladin in the game, Jagen, is an old, seasoned veteran, and as such, his growth rates are very low. (as he has supposedly already reached the peak of his ability as a knight)

When Jagen levels up, his HP, Strength, Skill, and Speed stats only have a 10% chance each of increasing, and his Luck, Weapon Level, and Defense stats all have a 0% chance to increase. It's quite possible (and actually quite likely) that Jagen will get absolutely no stat gains at all when he levels up, making him more and more of a liability the further into the game you get. It can even feel like EXP given to Jagen is EXP wasted, as it could have been better going to someone that would actually benefit from levelling up.

A Paladin you get later in the game, Midia, is a young lady knight of noble upbringing, and her potential is significantly higher than Jagen's. Every time Midia levels up, her HP has an 80% chance to increase, Strength has 30%, Skill 50%, Speed 50%, Luck 10%, Weapon Level 50%, and Defense 20%. Even though Jagen and Midia are both Paladins who each start out with very similar stats to each other, it makes much more sense to bench Jagen in favour of Midia (or any other Paladin) as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, a unit's growth rates are completely hidden from the player. There is no way to actually get this information other than from external guides. In order to get an inkling for a unit's stat growths, you kind of just have to...pay attention whenever they level up. Which isn't great for long-term planning. Some players who aren't aware of the stat growth system might always decide to include Jagen in the team, since he's one of Marth's loyal retainers and is extremely strong at the start of the game. ...and the fact that it may be a bad idea to keep him around is not really communicated very well at all. 

This is a problem that unfortunately can only be avoided by savvy, experienced players. But even so, a newcomer shouldn't be too worse-off if they aren't aware of the growth rate system. There are enough units with high growths where this doesn't become a huge problem, even if you do keep Jagen around for every battle. it just means you're not playing at maximum potential, which isn't necessary to beat the game anyway.

A character can only reach level 20 before they stop gaining any experience. So once they reach 20, whatever stats they happened to roll throughout the game are the stats they're stuck with. (at least, without using the rare stat-boosting items)

When you want to promote a promotable class (Cavalier, Archer, Pegasus Knight, Mercenary, Curate, or Mage), you need to raise them to at least level 10, and then use a rare promotion item on them. When a unit promotes, they gain heavy stat boosts, and importantly, they revert back to level 1 - which means that their potential for gaining more stats is increased even further.

This also means that a pre-promoted character like Jagen or Midia has less potential than a promotable character like Cain or Abel. Because there's so much more opportunity to gain level-ups. A Cain who has been trained to level 10 and promoted into a level 1 Paladin has had 9 more opportunities to gain stat boosts compared to Midia who starts as a level 1 Paladin. And you could even wait until Cain reaches level 20 before promoting if you wanted to truly maximise his potential, though this isn't usually necessary, since a Paladin Cain is immediately more useful than a Cavalier Cain, even without the extra 10 level-ups.

...Also, by the way, the way Curates level up is kinda stupid. As healers, they cannot attack enemies, so the only way for them to earn experience is to successsfully avoid dying when an enemy attacks them. Every time this happens, they gain a chunk of EXP.

So to actually raise a Curate up to level 10 in order to promote them, you kind of have to artificially grind them on an enemy Thief or some other enemy that isn't going to kill them, while keeping them on a fort so they heal off the damage, and then keep passing turns over and over and... it's a mess.

Later Fire Emblem games would change it so that staff-users gain EXP every time they use a staff, which....kinda should have been how it worked to begin with??? ....Again, I don't want to talk too much about how the later games improved things, but this is such a stupid little thing, it was worth bringing up.

anyway...I think... I think that's about everything there is to this game.

In summary,

Fire Emblem 1 is a game where you play through 25 chapters, fighting your way through the maps by positioning your units with the cursor, to defeat each boss so you can get Marth to the goal, all while recruiting new characters of various different classes as you progress. Each map is a different unique challenge to overcome, with various different kinds of terrain and enemies to contend against.

Attacking an enemy means taking a counterattack from them immediately, but the same also applies to the opponent during their turn too, and you can use this to your advantage if you play your options right. All your recruitable units are unique individuals, and death is permanent.

That's about the gist of Fire Emblem.

Overall the game really impressed me with just how much it has going on for the first entry in the series. It feels like the essence of Fire Emblem came out already fully-formed with this first entry, which is not what I was expecting to be honest. I was expecting something a lot more prototypical, but it really is genuinely a proper Fire Emblem experience, which is really cool to see. 

So uh. .... Yeah. That's Fire Emblem 1! This game took me 40ish hours to complete, which is kind of insane for a 1990 Famicom game. Very cool.

I do want to play more tactics RPGs in the future. Fire Emblem is my favourite of course, but I am still very curious about playing various different kinds. Maybe I'll get to them soon, who knows?