Fantasian: Neo Dimension

 I played Fantasian Neo Dimension.

Fantasian is an RPG developed by Mistwalker, released in 2021 on mobile devices. The "Neo Dimension" enhanced version was released in 2024 on modern platforms.

I played the Nintendo Switch version. 

Fantasian is a classic-style JRPG. It uses pre-rendered backgrounds with fixed camera angles, in a similar style to Squaresoft's PlayStation 1 RPGs (Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, Chrono Cross, etc). It also uses invisible random enemy encounters and turn-based, menu-based combat. This is a fully classic style JRPG through and through!

In fact, this game was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy. So the similarities are no coincidence. Also worth mentioning is that the music in Fantasian was done by Nobuo Uematsu, another well-known name among Final Fantasy and other RPGs.

The story of Fantasian follows Leo, a boy who wakes up in a strange factory without his memories. Leo is greeted by two seemingly friendly robots. Leo doesn't have much time to figure out what's going on, because it just so happens that the three of them are in the middle of being chased by a giant killer robot. Leo doesn't remember anything about why he would find himself in this situation, but eventually he manages to escape by use of a Warp Device he finds. Leo teleports to safety, using his vague memory of a girl, and the memory of a small town. ...because, apparently, the Warp Device relies on its user's memories in order to function.

With nothing more to go on but his memory of this girl, Leo begins his adventure. Along the way, Leo discovers his lost memories, meets new allies, and learns about the nature of the "mechteria", a dangerous infestation that has been spreading across the land.

The storytelling in this game is really nice. For the most part, it's a normal kind of JRPG story - the characters are all fun and likeable, and there's lots of great interactions between them. The story isn't too overly complex, though it does occasionally go into some confusing detail about the nature of human emotions and how they relate to interdimensional physics... you gotta take it at face value, you know?

But more uniquely, there are these occasional moments where the game uses a storybook narration style. This happens whenever characters talk about the past - especially when Leo regains one of his old memories. The storybook scenes have a slow pace with illustrations, accompanied by a soft, gentle narration reading the words on screen, and it even uses a sort of kinetic style of text where important words or phrases appear larger, and text can appear at different speeds for emphasis. 

I find these storybook scenes to be really sweet and relaxing. They invite you to just take a moment to just slow down and listen.  I really like it. :)  And every time you watch a storybook scene, it gets added to your quest log so you can re-watch it again whenever you like.

As you explore the towns, you can talk to NPCs and visit shops, buy new equipment, and find sidequests and all that good JRPG stuff. Outside of the towns are the more dangerous areas - usually pathways between locations, or dungeony areas, which have monster encounters in them.

The dungeon areas are fairly short and simple in this game - they normally take the form of a simple maze of paths, with dead-ends and treasure chests and hidden collectable items. There are a few areas with some interesting navigational challenges, but for the most part, the challenge of the areas comes from the enemy encounters. Again, very reminiscent of the classic Final Fantasy style of RPGs.

So, the battle system is simple, but it has some unique twists.

You have a party of up to three characters versus an assortment of enemies.

You can either select a regular attack, a skill, or an item. Skills take MP to use, and items can be bought or found around.

Turn order is determined by everyone's Speed stats, and is shown as a timeline in the bottom of the screen.

The combat works with a line of sight system. All your attacks, including regular attacks, take the form of a projectile slash or beam of some kind. You select a target by positioning the trajectory line so that it connects with an enemy. Enemies can block other enemies from being targeted if they're positioned in front of them, however this also allows you to target multiple enemies at once by using a piercing skill that can cut through them.

Characters with magic attacks can also curve their trajectories along the edges of the battle screen, which can allow for some cool trickshots where you can target many enemies with a single attack, depending on their positions. There are also a few area-of-effect attacks, where you place a circle on the field to try and include as many enemies as you can within it.

This targeting system is only applicable for the enemies - your characters don't have any formation system to worry about, and the enemies target your characters freely.

An important aspect of the combat system is buffs and debuffs - Some characters have skills that can buff your attack and defense, and I enjoy the fact that there is no separate stat for magic vs physical or anything like that - all damage-dealing moves are improved with attack boosts, and all damage taken is reduced with defense boosts. Because the buffs are so important against the harder enemies, it would be too fiddly if there were so many different types of buffs to worry about, so the game keeps it simple. 

I actually found myself using items quite a lot on this game, which is surprising considering how many RPGs seem to encourage you to hoard them.  For example, if you use an Energy Drink on one of your characters, they get an attack up buff, which can actually make quite a difference, especially if you're paying attention to the timeline and use it on a character whose turn will be next. 

These buff items are not difficult to come across, and as you get further into the game, you'll be swimming in them, so it never feels wasteful to use a buffing item or a healing item in battle. In fact, once you have a ton of them that you're unlikely to run out, you start to think about usable items as just another available option for your character on their turn, rather than as a special resource that must be used wisely. 

That being said, that doesn't mean consumable items are so abundant as to be completely free to use: One of the party members you meet is Ez, an enthusiast of engineering and crafting, whose attacks use up consumable items rather than MP. I think having a player character like this is a clever way to make sure that the player's large stockpile of items has any danger of actually being used up, since Ez's skills often use many items at once. And I always enjoy it when games find unique ways for party members to differentiate themselves in their gameplay.

The combat system really gets to shine during the boss battles. Each boss battle is a uniquely designed encounter with its own individual patterns and gimmicks. And there are a LOT of bosses in this game.

An example of some of the boss variety...

Some bosses have multiple pieces to target - a big robot with two arms who charges a super laser, which can be stopped if you break the arms. Or a big salamander whose tail can perform a healing move, so you can cut off its tail to prevent it from healing. (but you can only reach the tail with curved shots, as straight-on hits will target the main body).

There's a boss who summons minions who charge the boss's ultra attack, so you gotta make sure to prioritise hitting the minions to avoid that (and using a piercing skill to hit the minion and the boss at the same time is even better).

There's a boss who poisons you and then feeds off your poison to absorb power - so equipping anti-poison items will prevent the boss from doing its strong moves. Or if you don't have enough anti-poison gear for everyone, curing poison with an Antidote just before the boss's turn can be useful too.

There's a boss whose mega-meteor attack causes debris to float around it to form a protective barrier, so you need to make sure to kill it before it does this move too many times (or remember to use one of Ez's skills to move the debris out of the way).

There's a boss who revives itself if you don't kill it and its two knights at the same time (so using the area-of-effect attacks to hit all three at once is a good idea)

There's a boss who summons several spirit swords while charging their super move, but the move can be weakened depending on how many swords you kill before the attack comes out (which may be easier or harder depending on how many swords you can get in your line of sight at once).... 

...I think you get the idea. There's a LOT of boss variety in this game, each one making full use of the battle system's mechanics in interesting and unique ways. 

The bosses are the standout stars of the game for sure.

I should mention that, the original 2021 mobile release version of the game was considered a very difficult game The difficulty was in fact the most common criticism of the game by reviewers and fans. When the Neo Dimension version came around, they turned the existing difficulty into "Hard Mode", and created a brand new "Normal Mode" so players can progress without getting too overwhelmed. Because I read about this before I started playing, I decided to play the game on Hard Mode so I could see it as it was originally designed, and... wow, these bosses can be super tough! I frequently died against the bosses in this game. I had to really rethink, re-equip, and reconsider how to approach them. But interestingly enough, I never really had to grind.

But that's because this game actually has some anti-grinding measures built in, which I'll talk about in a sec.

But yeah. I agree that the bosses were definitely too difficult for the original release - I felt undeterred because I knew I was willingly doing it to myself by selecting Hard Mode. But players of the original 2021 version must have been feeling pretty desperate to go up against such difficult encounters with no choice but to keep trying.

But anyway. 

The enemy encounter system is interesting.

On the surface, it feels like it's a classic random encounter system, but as you play, you'll realise that it seems to work based on fixed number of steps travelled. Encounters seem to happen at regular intervals as you walk, rather than purely randomly. Reminds me a bit of Legend of Dragoon in that regard. 

Encounters in this game are definitely on the maybe-a-bit-too-frequent side, but it was done this way in order to work with the added "Dimengeon" system.

Early in the game, Leo finds a machine called the Dimengeon Machine, which allows you to store enemy encounters away in an alternate dimension. You can turn the machine on and off at any time, and if you're walking around fields and dungeons with it on, instead of an encounter starting, you'll just see a notification saying "enemies sent to the DIMENGEON", and you'll see a little capacity gauge fill up. And you can keep walking with no interruption.

So if an encounter would have been against four enemies, you'll see your Dimengeon gauge is now at 4/30. next encounter would have been against seven enemies? Now it says 11/30. A third encounter that would have been against 5 enemies? Now it's at 16/30. At any time you can decide to enter a battle within the Dimengeon, which means that you'll have to fight every enemy inside, all in a row, without the ability to run away.

This is interesting and unique, and I rather quite enjoy it. It allows you to reduce the amount of interruptions that combat encounters make, while consolidating them all into one big encounter to take on when you're good and ready. I personally like to explore a dungeon without interruptions, and then whenever I reach a save point, I like to empty out the Dimengeon Machine there in relative safety. It reduces annoying interruptions when I'm remembering which paths I've already taken etc as I explore the environments, and getting the fighting done at the save points also allows me to save right after having the big encounter.

You need to be careful, because if you let the Dimengeon Machine fill up to maximum capacity, it forces you to fight them all 30 of them right there and then.

While fighting an encounter of 30 enemies, you generally fight them 10 or so at a time, and as you kill them, more and more will spawn in until all thirty have been killed. Thankfully it's not literally 30 enemies all at once, that would be too much.

Since you have to fight so many enemies at once, Dimengeon battles are a great way to make full use of all those area-of-effect and line-of-sight attacks in order to kill lots of enemies as quickly as possible. This is another example of the game's various gameplay systems working well with each other - a Dimengeon Machine system would be difficult to make work well in a different RPG that didn't let you target multiple foes at once for example, because it would be extremely arduous to clear it.

One annoying aspect is that, there are occasions during the story where the Dimengeon Machine is not available. This mostly occurs when playing as characters other than Leo - at certain points in the story, the perspective shifts to other characters, but Leo is the one with the machine... so without him, you have to put up with the regular overly-frequent encounter rate. This is a bit annoying, but not having Leo around only happens a few times, so largely it's not too much of a problem. 

Since encounters are not random but happen at predictable step intervals, you can strategically use the Dimengeon Machine to reduce the overall number of enemies you come across as you explore. If you choose to fight inside your Dimengeon just before a new batch of enemies would have appeared on the next step, it will reset the step counter with the dimengeon fight, which means the encounter you stopped short of won't appear afterwards. I like how the system allows for neat little minor optimisations like this if you're paying attention.

The game is structured in two distinct parts. During part 1, the story is quite linear. Leo goes from location to location, and you have no choice but to follow the story as it's presented. Once Leo gets the Warp Device functioning again (the one from the prologue), you unlock fast-travel and are free to return to previous towns to do sidequests and stuff, but even so, there isn't much freedom of exploration during the first part of the game.

After about 20 hours of playtime, part 2 begins, and suddenly the whole game is extremely open-ended. Now you have six or seven areas available to you all at once, and every previous town has a slew of new sidequests available too. 

The way to progress the main quest is not conveyed to the player at the start of part 2 - you're just dropped into the world and have to figure it out yourself. I do enjoy this way of doing it, it feels fun to discover everything. 

Part 2 also introduces several new gameplay mechanics. Now there exists a Tension Gauge - a meter that gradually fills up during combat, granting access to a powerful super move that targets all enemies when it's full. And you also get Character Growth skill trees - leveling up now earns SP, which can be spent in the skill tree to unlock new moves and passive buffs. For example, Leo can learn an auto-counter passive, which gives him a chance to automatically respond to taking damage by hitting the enemy back for free. There are new skills such as Taunt, which forces enemies to target Leo instead of his friends. And all sorts of other cool stuff can be unlocked too. Additionally, Part 2 allows you to swap your party members as you wish. Previously they would join or leave as the story dictated, but now you can to choose who's in your active party or not. All this means that, starting from part 2, the combat gets a lot more intricate and customisable. But part 2 is also where the more difficult boss encounters start appearing too.

The skill tree in this game has the ability to actually undo decisions. You can unspend your SP and reclose the skill tree nodes and try other ones, any time you like. And sometimes this can be important versus specific bosses - for example, Leo's automatic counterattack skill might actually be a detriment versus a boss who responds to direct damage by exploding... ...So because there exist bosses like this, it is really really good that they also let you unlearn skills whenever you want at no extra cost. We would have some major problems otherwise.

This structure where the first part is linear and the second part is open is very reminiscent of Final Fantasy VI. And in fact, I read somewhere that Sakaguchi did say he re-played Final Fantasy VI for inspiration before working on Fantasian, so I have no doubt that the similarities are fully intentional.

Part 2 is also where the anti-grinding measures comes into play. Since you can do everything in part 2 in any order you choose, they needed to solve a game design problem of how a player might be overleveled for an area just because they decided to do it later. They didn't want their cool boss fights to be trivialised due to players choosing to do other quests first.

So the solution they ended up using is...

After you reach level 35, the game starts significantly reducing the amount of EXP you earn from normal encounters.

And that's it. There's just a flat level 35 cap on EXP gains. Of course you can level up beyond 35, but only from bosses and endgame enemies. So during the majority of Part 2, you'll be hovering around the 35-40 area for a large potion of the game. Only once you reach endgame areas will you resume levelling up normally as this EXP limit seems to selectively apply based on the enemies' levels compared to yours. 

To be honest, it feels a little artificial to limit it like this. Suddenly you just stop earning EXP in the name of game balance. I do appreciate that it means that bosses never become pushovers, but it also means that the order you decide to tackle them in is less important than it could have been. And if there are any RPG fans who prefer to grind levels in order to take down tough bosses, their preferred playstyle is no longer viable at this point.

And also, this level-up situation actually does lead into one side area becoming impossible to complete on a regular playthrough.

Late in the game, you unlock a bonus area called the Void Realm, where you can rechallenge difficult versions of previously-fought bosses. There are three levels to the Void Realm: Outer, Middle, and Inner. However it's only really possible to beat the Outer level. The Middle level has a "recommended level" of 80, which is just ridiculous. You can't hope to touch any of the bosses in the Middle Void Realm at all, and grinding to that level is also made impossible due to the level cap system. So what gives?

Well, this game has New Game Plus mode.

In order to activate New Game Plus, you must reach the room before the final boss, find a treasure chest with a token in it, and take the token to a shrine in an optional area that becomes active if you've been following a semi-optional sidequest chain. If you offer the token to the shrine, it will offer for Leo to go back in time, which is essentially starting a New Game Plus run.

...I find it interesting how defeating the final boss has no bearing on New Game Plus - when you beat the boss, the ending plays and it doesn't save anything to your file. 

In New Game Plus, you get to play again with all your items, weapons, skills, and everything you have already. The main difference is that enemies are higher level. Which means that, now the level cap system now allows you to very easily level up to 80+ ...because whatever calculation it's doing is now taking higher-level enemies into account. I don't get how it works, but for whatever reason I'm now getting a lot more exp just because I'm on New Game Plus.

I...kinda don't like this approach to be honest.

On my New Game Plus playthrough, it took me 6+ hours of speeding through the game, breezing through the bosses with my endgame build, skipping all the cutscenes etc, just to get to the point where I was back in the endgame with all my party members, finally ready challenge the Middle Void Realm.

I didn't exactly want to add an extra 6 hours to my playtime just to finish the last side area before I stopped playing the game. I kind of wish that... they just let me level grind in the end game properly without having to be in New Game Plus?

There's a bit more going on in New Game Plus than JUST the higher level enemies, though - they added an extra explorable cave in the first town for some reason, but it's an annoying maze with no encounters, just lots of dead ends and no map..., and the prize at the end is a unique equipment item that raises maximum HP. I guess that's cool? Dunno why this needed to be New Game Plus exclusive tbh. Game design is funny sometimes. They also give you a brand a new skill tree exclusive to New Game Plus, but it's mostly just stat boosts and endgame style bonus perks such as "increase overworld movement speed" - no tangible new combat abilities or anything.

But anyway.

Overall... I'd say that Fantasian is a really cool classic JRPG! Its battle system is simple and inventive, and its systems mesh very well with both the unique random encounter system, as well as the extremely well-designed boss fights. The characters are fun and lovable, and the storybook narration style cutscenes are very pleasant to watch.

I really like Fantasian! This is a good game!

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?

UFO 50

I've been obsessing over a new game called UFO 50, which released on Steam last month.

It's quite a remarkable game. It's really grabbed me like no game has grabbed me for a long time.

The release timing was a little unfortunate, because The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom was released so soon after UFO 50 launched. I haven't been able to focus solely on either one, since I want to play them both so much. ... I've kind of been awkwardly hopping back and forth between them.

I'm getting close to the end of Zelda, though, so after I'm done, I can dedicate approximately the rest of my life to UFO 50 from then on.

So what is UFO 50 then?

It's a package of 50 entirely brand new games - retro-style games, designed to look and feel like 8-bit NES and arcade-style games, but created with modern design sensibilities. 

And they're not minigames. This isn't a Rhythm Heaven situation where each "game" is actually just one level... ... Rather, UFO 50 actually has fifty entirely fully-realised, complete game experiences. Their scope is kept to NES-era standards, so there aren't any 100-hour epics or anything like that, but none of them feel like an incomplete product either. I could easily see any one of these games being sold by themselves.

The games in the collection have been given a fictional history and backstory, in order to tie them together into a bigger meta-narrative involving their development. According to the lore, this assortment of games was created by "UFO Soft", for the "LX" computer. Each game in the collection has a fictional release date, ranging from 1982 to 1989. And each game also has a fictional team of developers who worked on them, which is seen during the credits when you finish a game. Each game additionally has a cute little comment about its supposed developmental history attached to it, such as "Designed to take advantage of the LX-II, which allowed for more colors per sprite"  or "The original release came with a full color hint book". I enjoy how mundanely realistic-sounding some of these snippets sound.

As you play through the games in the collection, you might start to notice that the games tend to get "better" in terms of complexity and scope as you move forward in time through the list. The first game in the collection, titled 'Barbuta', is described as being "Developed secretly on company time" by just one person, and it looks and feels like an extremely old experimental adventure game - the kind you'd maybe see on the Commodore or Spectrum. No music, black backgrounds, a slow-moving character, one-hit deaths, weirdly-drawn sprites, a non-distinct player character, non-obvious puzzle solutions... Meanwhile, the 50th game, 'Cyber Owls', is a fast-paced genre mishmash of action, shooting, stealth, beat-'em-up, all with large character sprites, marketable character designs, voice clips, and clearly higher "production values".

But this is all part of the narrative the game is trying to show us about the story of UFO Soft. It's like playing games from an alternate reality, where we get to explore this huge library of this one developer's works over the years. 

In reality, however, the 50 games were designed by a team of six extremely talented indie game devs with a lot of prior game dev experience - the project lead is none other than Derek Yu, the creator of one of my favourite games of all time, Spelunky. So this game already had my attention the moment I saw it was his project, heh.

They say on the Steam store page that their goal was to design games that are "authentic but also modern". which means that, while the games look and feel like they could have come from the 1980s, they did not shy away from including features or gameplay styles that did not exist back then. They are inspired by the oldies, but not constrained by the same limitations. 

The games are full of genuinely interesting ideas and twists on old genres that make them really interesting to explore. For example, There's an arcade-style platformer called Ninpek, which at first seems very faithful to the old arcade style of auto-scrolling platformers of the 1980s such as Capcom's SonSon, or SNK's Psycho Soldier, but it has a few unique twists I've never seen before - such as, when you die in Ninpek, you get to choose your respawn point by moving a little ghost around, and this ghost can even shoot the enemies so you can make sure it's safe to come back. That's a very interesting little twist!

Another game, Magic Garden, is a very unique arcade-style game that plays like a cross between Snake and Pac-Man, and it plays like an endless score-chasing arcade game where you have to rescue "oppies" (funny blobs that look a bit like puyos), and you get more points the more of them you rescue at a time (so it's a bit like Flicky too, I guess?) . However, the twist here is that... after rescuing 200 oppies, the game actually ends. It's designed like a classic endless score-chasing game, but it is in fact not endless. Which means that, in order to get a high score, you have to actually optimise your play so that you gain as many points as you can within the confines of the 200 oppie limit. You can't just rack up a score rescuing them one at a time indefinitely, you have to make your oppie trail longer and riskier in order to score big.

 ...This is actually quite interesting when you think about it, because... in the olden days of the arcades, it was generally expected that a player would put a coin in the machine, and that would allow them to play until they died. So arcade games weren't really allowed to "end" on their own terms, because a machine would quickly grow unpopular if the game booted the player back to the title screen without them having failed. Seeing how long a single credit can last you in a game is a big indicator of skill in the arcades, and a big incentive for players to master specific games. And so this is why even games designed as a linear series of levels would always end by looping back to the first level with your score intact, so you could keep playing until you died. Endless games tended to get harder and harder and faster and faster in order to demand more and more skill from a player who is determined to stay alive. 

But UFO 50 isn't exactly beholden to the tropes of the actual arcades, now, is it? Magic Garden is an interesting example of a very arcade-style game built for a non-arcade platform. There is no need for the gameplay to speed up, so it doesn't - it stays consistent the whole way through. There is no need for the game to be endless, so it forces a limit in order to make the scoring system more interesting.

From a game design perspective, it's quite fascinating.

And Ninpek and Magic Garden are just two examples of this collection doing some very unique game design things to otherwise tried-and-true genres. ...And There's 50 of the dang things! And somehow they've all got an interesting twist to make them special in some way! It's actually insanity how much good game design sense is present in this collection.

The sheer variety of different game styles is quite remarkable as well. There's action, adventure, puzzle, platformer, puzzle-platformer, racer, arcade, run-'n'-gun, strategy, RPG, exploration, tactics, point-and-click, beat-'em-up, shmup, arena fighter, dungeon-crawler, golf, gambling, rougelike, deckbuilder, tower-defense, and even an incremental idle game of all things...??? Not to mention some of the games that I don't really have any easy label for.

As well as the large variety of genres, there's also a large variety of game lengths and game difficulties. Some games can be completely beaten in 15 minutes, while some of the bigger games can take hours and hours. One of the games, Grimstone, is literally an entire JRPG, which is the longest game that can easily take 15 or 20 hours or more.

Some games are easygoing and chill, while other games are very difficult. And they don't shy away from that classic difficulty either - that's an aspect of 1980s game design that they have fully embraced with this collection. It's really cool to see this kind of old-school difficulty done so well in a modern release.

UFO 50 encourages players to play every single game by having cute little unlockables. Each game has three "prizes" to win: a gift, a gold, and a cherry. The gift is a small item that goes in the "garden" menu, which is a little side area that sort of acts as a trophy case for all your gifts. These are awarded for completing a small task in a game, such as finding an item, exploring a certain amount, reaching halfway to the goal - basically the gifts are generally not difficult to unlock if the player is willing to engage with the game for more than a cursory glance. The gold is awarded for beating the game and seeing the ending - getting a gold turns the game's icon on the selection screen golden, and your best gold time is recorded. After attaining gold, the requirements for earning a "cherry" become visible, which usually involves going above-and-beyond just clearing the game. These can be things like earning a certain high score, completing a bonus objective, clearing every single optional level, or doing the whole game without dying. Earning a cherry turns the game icon red, and your best cherry time is recorded separately from the best gold time. Earning golds and cherries is also the way to earn the Steam Achievements for UFO 50.

It's interesting because this essentially "gamifies" the very act of playing games itself. If you've beaten 9 games and are one game clear away from that "beat 10 games" Steam Achievement, maybe that by itself is enough incentive to try out one of the ones you haven't tried yet? 

It's all very compelling.  ... and it's always a bit intimidating to boot up a game from a genre you're not too keen on, but if your mindset going in is, "I'll play this one until I get the gift", you might feel less pressured about it. But the gift requirements are well-designed enough that they actually do end up causing you to learn how to play. So with your newfound game knowledge, now the game feels familiar, and you can then naturally continue playing from there.

It's really fascinating because this collection has definitely made me sit down and learn how to play games from genres that I'm not usually too keen on. I'm not the biggest beat-'em-up fan in the world, but for whatever reason I was compelled to learn how to play UFO 50's "Fist Hell", which is a really rather unforgivingly difficult beat-'em-up game. I sat down, failed horribly at the game for several hours, and gave up. But something was eating away at me in the back of my mind the next day. So I looked up a youtube playthrough of the whole game, observed how they approached it, figured out the mechanics, the enemy patterns, the player's options in various circumstances, everything - and then played it again, persevering until I finally managed to earn the cherry. ...and now I am left with a bigger appreciation for beat'-em-ups than I had going in. It's quite remarkable. I can definitely see this collection introducing many new game genres to people who don't have much experience. 

...Maybe a different player with a different gaming background than me will pick up UFO 50 and have an equivalent experience with Grimstone, the JRPG? It'd be so cool if this game turned more people into classic JRPG fans this way, haha.

So overall.... I'm having one heck of an amazing time with UFO 50. I've got around 130 hours of playtime on this collection overall, and so far I've managed to earn the cherry in 24 games. And some of them were pretty tough stuff. ...My eventual goal is to get cherry in all 50 games! This is gonna take me forever lol.

UFO 50 might be my number one favourite game release this year.

...but now I feel like I need to apologise to The Legend of Zelda for saying that lol.

Suikoden Tactics

 I played Suikoden Tactics.

This is a PlayStation 2 game released in 2005.

Oddly enough, this game is just titled "Rhapsodia" in Japan, with no mention of Suikoden in the title.

...Apparently, the word "tactics" brings to mind an idea of intense, difficult strategy in Japanese, so they did not want to use it in the Japanese title to avoid giving the wrong impression. Though I still don't understand why it isn't something like "Genso Suikoden Rhapsodia" to keep its association with the rest of the series. I don't even know what "Rhapsodia" means or refers to. There's nothing in the game with that name. ...

but anyway. ...

Suikoden Tactics is a follow-up to Suikoden IV, taking place a few years after the end of the previous story.

Unlike most other Suikoden games, the main character is not a silent protagonist, and is not named by the player. The main character here is Kyril, a boy who sets off on a journey to uncover the truth behind the mysterious "evil eyes", a type of demonic weapon that is being used to turn people into twisted fish-like monsters.

During the course of the story, Kyril will travel across the Island Nations and into the heart of the Kooluk Empire in his search, meeting many familiar characters from Suikoden IV along the way.

As a sequel to Suikoden IV, this game has a save data bonus available for players with Suikoden IV save data on their PlayStation 2 memory card. If their Suikoden IV save data has all 108 Stars of Destiny, then two additional characters become available to use in Suikoden Tactics - and they are the main protagonist of IV (who I named Lazlo), and Lazlo's friend Snowe.

Lazlo is a very strong character in Suikoden Tactics, having access to his incredibly powerful Rune of Punishment spells. Despite making things a lot easier, it actually does make the game more fun to be able to use him, so I think this is a very nicely-done bonus feature.

Suikoden Tactics is a tactical RPG where battles play out on a grid-based map, using a team of units that the player must position on the grid in order to attack opposing units.

The game is a typical tactics RPG style game, played on a square grid, with enemy units versus player units. The units in this game represent individual characters. So, unlike in the tactics battles from Suikoden II, where one unit represented a leader with a battalion of unnamed soldiers... in this game, one unit is just a single, unique, named character - much like in Fire Emblem. I definitely prefer it this way. 

In typical tactics RPG fashion, you can move your units a certain number of tiles based on their "Move" stat, and if you position yourself within range of an enemy unit, you can attack them to deal damage. 

Turn order in this game uses a timeline system, based on the Speed stat of each unit on the map. Having higher speed means a unit will have their turns earlier and more frequently.

Each character has similar stats as seen in the main Suikoden series, including the ability to upgrade weapon strength at the blacksmith, and the ability to equip rune orbs for magic. Magic works the same way, too - with a list of limited-use spells that increases based on level. And just like in the main Suikoden series, there are also no distinct character classes outside of what kind of weapon each character uses.

The skill system first seen in Suikoden III returns! After every battle you earn Skill Points, and can spend them on your units to add various attributes to them. Attributes such as a chance to dodge, a chance to parry, a chance to counterattack, stronger spells of a certain element, doing multiple attacks in one move... and also other things such as the ability to move, attack, and then move again on the same turn if you have any unused movement left (like how horses work in Fire Emblem. :D ). Unlike in Suikoden III, the skill points are a partywide resource, rather than earned on a per-character basis, which gives you a lot of flexibility with choosing who you want to power up. I actually think the skill point system works better here than it did back in Suikoden III. It feels like learning new skills really does make a difference, whereas in III the skills had a more subtle effect.

Additionally, specific characters can also team up and perform co-op attacks. In order to unlock co-op attacks, you need to position the compatible characters next to each other often enough during battles, and eventually a "talk" option will become available between them. When two units talk, they will increase "good will", which means that they will occasionally defend each other from incoming attacks. And after attaining enough good will, they will then learn co-op attacks.

Co-op attacks require the two units to be positioned in a very specific way, but they are usually extremely powerful. They also have a cooldown, so you cannot keep using them over and over. Choosing which units to bring to a battle is often a matter of seeing which pairs have the most useful co-op attacks, which is something I really like - anything that gives individual characters more unique traits is a good thing.

Overall, I think they did a great job at making this game still "feel like Suikoden" despite the change in gameplay genre. The blacksmith, rune orbs, skill points, and co-op attacks, plus of course the ability to find and recruit lots of new characters... all of these Suikoden-specific mechanics work well in making the game feel like a proper Suikoden game, despite it not being a standard JRPG like the others. 

That being said, the one major element that binds all Suikoden games together - the 108 Stars of Destiny - is completely absent from this game. There are around 60 or so recruitable characters in this game, and that's your lot. There is no mention of any Stars of Destiny, and the overseer Leknaat who usually appears before the hero to tell them about the Stars does not make an appearance in this game at all. I guess it's fine since this is a side story.

Speaking of the story, though. ... I felt like the story in this game was pretty weak. A large portion of the game is just Kyril going around the various island nations, investigating rune cannons. Not a lot really happens to move the narrative along until quite near the end of the game when the Kooluk Princess and her family start showing up. This is definitely a game to play for its gameplay and not its narrative. Though the story does resolve in a nice way at the end.

...

The main unique gameplay system in Suikoden Tactics is the elemental ground system. And I feel like this system is at the heart of the tactics in this game.

Each character has an innate elemental affinity of either Fire, Water, Lightning, Wind, or Earth. Their element grants them one elemental strength and one elemental weakness. Kyril has a Fire affinity, so he will be powered-up and will heal HP if he is standing on a fire tile, and weakened and take damage if he is standing on a water tile. And these are not subtle changes in power either, they really do affect you significantly. 

Elemental tiles are created whenever magic is used. There are low-level spells just for the purpose of making an elemental tile, but also the higher-level damaging spells will create elemental tiles as a side-effect too. And large area-of-effect spells such as Explosion will create elemental tiles within the entire affected area. Additionally, each battle contains a couple of elemental wisp enemies that don't attack, but instead just spread their element around as they flit about.

Making sure that your characters have the ability to create their element where they or their allies need to be standing is a crucial part of the strategy, as is forcing enemy units to stand in their weak elements. This is where team composition is important too - pairing together lots of characters of the same element can make it easier, since they can all share the same patch of tiles, but then you have less versatility for when the enemy starts creating their own tiles and overwriting yours. 

It's also interesting that the healing spells, Healing Wind and Kindness Rain, will create a wind tile or a water tile on whoever they heal. Sometimes this can be a good thing, sometimes not. Sometimes getting healed but standing on a bad tile is a compromise that's worth it. And there are all sorts of interesting tradeoffs and risk-vs-reward decisions like this that arise due to this system. It's actually really cool and unique.

I also appreciate that the game is good at giving reminders. Whenever you are about to force a unit to step on a bad tile, a little speech bubble will appear above them, with a sad face icon. And likewise, if they're on a good tile, the bubble will show the happy face icon. I also like how if you're about to accidentally include an ally in a damaging area-of-affect spell, there's a little "hey, what gives?!" speech bubble for that too, giving you a chance to cancel the spell and aim it better. It's a really good way of making sure that a player is making informed tactical decisions, and that any self-damage the player inflicts upon themselves is done intentionally.

This game also has another really cool feature in that you can swap-out an active unit for a benched unit whenever you like. I think this is really really cool, as it allows for so much more strategic use of your entire team, and not just the ones you've decided to focus on levelling up. 

For example, if you have a powerful unit with a slow speed stat, you can make the decision to not put them in the team at first, and instead bring a weaker unit with high speed... and when it's their turn, switch to the slow unit so that they can get a turn earlier than they would have if you had just brought them from the start. Or maybe mid-battle, the enemy ends up creating a large amount of fire tiles, so you have the option to bring out a mage with a "damage all units on fire tiles" spell, who you otherwise wouldn't have known to bring before the battle started. There are all kinds of strategic decisions that come up mid-battle that can't be predicted beforehand, where switching to one of your reserve units is the perfect play. It's so good to have this option. :D This is something I wish Fire Emblem had!

There is a limitation that, if a unit is swapped out, you cannot bring them back into the same fight again, which prevents the system from being completely overpowered. It's a good limitation for game balance.

Throughout the game, you may acquire a few Kangacorns (kangaroo beasts) and Giant Owls, which a portion of your characters are capable of riding. Kangacorns increase movement range considerably, but lower evasion and prevent use of special techniques. Giant Owls allow you to fly over uneven terrain, but you ignore the effects of elemental tiles. Mounts can be mounted and dismounted on a unit's turn at will. It's another option that allows for some interesting flexibility during battles, and I also like how it interacts with the elemental tile system too. It's a good thing when the game mechanics come together so nicely like this.

Oh, and one other mechanic that I found really interesting was how, upon gaining a level-up, a unit's HP is fully restored and all spells become usable again. It's really interesting to me, because it turns gaining EXP into an actual strategic choice. If you've run out of spells, why not attack a nearby elemental wisp and hopefully level up, to get your spells back? Or if you're about to die, why not try going toward the enemy, to attack them and get a level-up instead of fleeing? It gives you some interesting on-the-fly decisions to make, which I really like.

...

In this game, when your unit's HP reaches zero, they can either die or withdraw. If a unit withdraws, that's fine - you'll just have one fewer unit on the field for the remainder of the battle, but otherwise everything's okay. But if they die, then they are permanently gone for good. Some "important" units such as Kyril are immune to dying and will always withdraw, but for the most part, whenever a unit dies or withdraws is just completely down to luck. It can feel really tense when an enemy gets a lucky critical hit on one of your guys, and you are just HOPING that they withdraw instead of die, so that you don't have to restart the battle from the beginning. (because I'm not willing to continue playing if one of my guys dies)

...This is certainly a much more forgiving of a system than in Fire Emblem. In Fire Emblem, any unit that gets killed is dead, end of story. If a plot-critical character is killed, then they will be "wounded" for the rest of the game, so they're still forever unavailable to use, but are still able to appear in the cutscenes that need them. And if the main character dies, it's an immediate game over.

Honestly... as harsh is it is, I actually do prefer Fire Emblem's system. Whenever a character in Suikoden withdraws instead of dies, it just feels like the game is letting me get away with having poor strategy. It's a relief in the moment because it means I don't have to restart the battle, but in general, I think it's a bit of a wishy-washy way of handling it. I really do prefer the clear-cut rules of Fire Emblem.

...And actually, that brings me to another point regarding the way battles pan out, and yeah, I'm going to be doing some more comparisons to Fire Emblem, because I just love Fire Emblem so much...

In Suikoden Tactics, whenever you select an enemy to attack, it does give you a preview of how much damage you will deal and receive, just like in Fire Emblem. But unlike in Fire Emblem, these numbers are not precise. There is still some variance to it, which means that you can't fully 100% trust the game when it says that you will do enough damage to get the kill. If the preview says you'll do just barely enough damage, there is a chance you will get a low damage roll and the enemy will be left alive. 

...I guess this is okay, I don't mind there being a bit of luck to make things a little unpredictable, but I will say I do prefer the more precise style of Fire Emblem. Especially since this can be the difference between life and death for your units who can permanently die. I'm more okay with the fuzzy numbers in games like Shining Force, where a dead unit can just be revived in town. But in a game with permanent death, I'm decidedly less okay with the added uncertainty.

But what is a bit more annoying is how I can never seem to figure out how dangerous a particular enemy is from afar. The battle preview window only shows me an enemy's damage if I'm within damage range and if they have the ability to counterattack. Otherwise I kind of just have to "feel it out", and if I get it wrong and someone dies, that's a reset. 

I suppose it should be possible to look at an enemy's Attack stat to figure out how much damage they're gonna do to my units, but every time I tried this, I could never end up with an accurate number. ...in Fire Emblem, if you take an enemy's Attack, and subtract your unit's Defense, you will get the EXACT number of HP they will deal, before modifiers. ...So even if I can't reach the enemy to bring up the damage preview, I can still calculate from afar how dangerous they are. But in Suikoden, any attempt to do this didn't seem to work the way I was expecting. ... Maybe I just don't have enough knowledge about how the game calculates damage, and it would be perfectly possible to calculate it if I knew all of the variables. But again, I really do appreciate how precise and simple Fire Emblem is in comparison.

What I didn't appreciate at all is how enemy attack range is not shown to the player. The game shows you enemy move range, which is fine - if an enemy has a sword, then you can tell that their attack range is their move range plus 1 - or if they have a bow, you can surmise that their attack range is their move range plus 2. Which is all well and good. But when it comes to certain long-range attacks, the game kind of just... doesn't tell you? You again kind of just have to feel it out. But when "feeling it out" means stepping too close and taking a cannon to the face, it does start to feel a bit unfair.

This is especially a problem with the Golem enemies, who have a very strong long-range projectile attack, which the game makes no effort to inform us of whether we are in range or not. The game doesn't even tell you that the golems even have a long-range cannon attack in the first place. I'd've assumed that a big hunk of stone would be a close-range attacker only.

...How can I make informed tactical decisions if the game isn't even showing me all of the relevant information?

But anyway. Overall it's not really a big deal. Even if I personally prefer the way Fire Emblem handles the stats and numbers and damage calculations and all that, I'm not going to say Suikoden does it "wrong" or anything. It's still a fun tactics game, and once I got into its way of doing things, I was having a good time with the battles.

...

The way the game is structured, you have the story-critical battles that progress the game, but in between them you can return to previous areas and have additional battles whenever you feel like it. This means that EXP is not a limited resource, and you can grind your guys' levels to your heart's content. For this sort of game where you get tons of characters, this is a good thing. It's always a bit annoying in the older Fire Emblem games that you get so many characters but no opportunities to actually train them. 

 Travelling across the world map will take the party several "days", which is represented by a calendar number going up as you travel. But it doesn't really seem like spending days has much of an impact on anything. There aren't any things that become locked if you arrive too late or anything. Nothing like that time-limited Clive quest from Suikoden II...

Each day of the week has an associated element, but I'm not sure if the element has much meaning to it. At first I thought it might be like Trials of Mana where the element-of-the-day gets a boost during battles, but I didn't really notice any kind of effect like that at all. I also think it feels weird just how many days go by in a flash. It begins to feel a bit unrealistic that so much time can pass between plot points. Travelling from one end of the map to the other can make the calendar skip over 10+ days or more, and if you're someone who likes to do sidequests, you'll be doing this quite often. It just makes me start thinking... if I've already skipped back and forth across this map like twenty times, that's like 200 days spent, right? But this journey doesn't really come across like one that'd take the best part of a year to complete. And none of my characters are aging, none of the towns are changing, and... it just makes me start questioning things about the timeline of events that I'm not sure the game was anticipating the player questioning. ...

...At least it isn't as dire as in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles where one entire year supposedly passes between each level you play. Now THAT's a game that'll make you start wondering why your characters aren't aging.

In the town of Middleport near the start of the game, there is a quest guild where you can complete various side-objectives to get additional money and skill point rewards. Some of the recruitable characters are also found via these quests.

Some of the quests require sending off one of your characters to do the quest for you offscreen. For example, the Razril Knights might post a quest saying "Lance fighters wanted for training!". So you send off one of your lance guys, and then after 30 days, you can return to the quest guild to see how they did. If they were high level enough, the quest is successful and you get your rewards, but if not, then the quest is failed. A failed quest will reappear in the quest list after a few days, so you won't be locked out, which is a good thing. Though there do exist a couple of quests here and there that can be permanently missed.

I like this sort of thing. Anything that utilises the characters' individual traits that can make them useful beyond the main gameplay is a good thing in my eyes.

However, I do have one annoyance regarding the quests... During my playthrough, I was just accepting every quest I saw, but apparently that's not the most beneficial thing to do. The cat merchant Chiepoo has a rival company, "X & Co", and both of them will post quests to the guild hall. X & Co are a sleazy unlawful company, and Chiepoo is an honest merchant, and for every X & Co quest you complete, the worse off Chiepoo's shop will end up. Apparently there are some secret recruitable mercenaries that can only be obtained if you complete every single Chiepoo quest, while ignoring every single X & Co quest. ....... and I have to say, I think this situation isn't communicated to the player very well at all. There is no way to know, especially early on, that X & Co quests should be avoided. There's just nothing that indicates what's going on, and by the time you realise, it's way too late. I think it would have been much better if there was a completely separate quest menu, maybe a "explore the dark back alleys" option where the X & Co quests could be found, instead of them just being presented as regular quests in the guild hall with all the others. Additionally, I think it's strange that the player can visit Chiepoo's shop, but can never actually visit X & Co's shop. It just further obfuscates who they are if you can never actually see them.

It's a fun idea, but I don't like the way it's implemented.

During my playthrough, I recruited every single character except for the mercenaries obtained through the Chiepoo quest. And it was a bit annoying to be locked out of full completion like this.

Alright. Now I want to take a moment to complain about the game's presentation.

The character models in this game have a very flat-coloured style with thick outlines, which to be honest, doesn't look all that amazing. This was done presumably to increase readability of the characters when they are seen from afar during battles. This works well enough, but it sure doesn't make them look good during cutscenes. They could have made the models more detailed for the story scenes and kept the flat simplified models for the battles, but I guess having visual consistency makes sense too.  

The cutscenes definitely don't have a lot going on visually though. Scenes usually are just characters standing around talking, with very basic animations. It's not terrible-looking or anything, but seeing such simplified scenes in a game immediately following Suikoden IV, which had larger character models animated with proper motion capture... it does feel like a significant visual downgrade.

During the battles, I did often have issues discerning which characters were mine or the enemy's at a glance. Sometimes I would have a human enemy surrounded by my units, and then completely forget that he was there because he blended in too well with my guys. They could have given enemies a red outline or red circle under them, like how it is in Fire Emblem... or I guess I just need to pay better attention lol.

During battle, the environment is viewed at an awkward skewed angle, which can be slightly adjusted with the right stick, but you don't really have full control over the camera. I personally find it annoying to have to play diagonally like this, I kind of wish there was an option to just view the grid straight-on. You have three levels of zoom, one which is much too close to be useful, and two others that are okay, but I still ended up wishing I could zoom out even further to see the whole field at once. There is a button to bring up a simplified map of squares that shows the position of each unit, which is helpful, but it still would have been nicer to have more control over the camera in the regular view anyway. It just feels a little bit uncomfortable, but it's nothing I can't get used to.

The presentation of the towns, though... this is where things become quite disappointing. Unlike in all previous Suikoden games, there is no real exploration of towns or the world at all. Everything is done through menus. You enter a town, and it just pops up a background illustration showing a town square, and then you get a menu asking which shops you want to go to and which NPCs you want to talk to. 

Sometimes you can find additional recruitable characters in the towns, but it feels so artificial "finding" them by just seeing their name pop up in the NPC talk menu. 

When it comes to the Island Nation towns, the ones which were featured in Suikoden IV, I can do a good enough job just imagining the town layouts by remembering them from the previous game... but when we get to the later-game areas that were not in Suikoden IV, I only have an illustration to look at, and it makes me feel rather disconnected. (.....kinda reminds me of Sonic Unleashed in a way. The "real" Xbox 360 Sonic Unleashed had the fully-explorable towns, while the more "low-budget" Wii version just had menus instead. ...was Suikoden Tactics a "low-budget" game from Konami, I wonder? ... )

I wonder why they decided to do it this way. I guess it means that they don't have to create a character movement system for controlling Kyril directly? And they don't have to bother designing town layouts for the later areas? Sure, it saves development time, but it makes the world feel less fully-realised. :/ I know that there do exist plenty of games that use simple menus for towns, and it's not automatically a bad game design decision to do it this way... but Suikoden had never done it before. And Suikoden had always put so much emphasis on its worldbuilding, so maybe that's why it's a bit sad to see it here.

Additionally, regarding the NPC dialogue.. For whatever reason, whenever you talk to a generic villager NPC, their dialogue portrait is drawn without any eyes. And not in a cute way, but in a really rather creepy way. I have absolutely no idea why they decided to do this, and I don't like it one bit. It's distracting and doesn't give the correct mood to the dialogue at all. ...Is drawing generic bystanders without their eyes a cultural Japanese thing that I don't understand? 

Hmm, what else... 

I will say the map variety is rather nice, and I especially like the one town area where the little boats get their own turn on the timeline to move back and forth. That's pretty cute. And I also do enjoy how some of the returning Suikoden IV characters had their special skills translate over to a tactics game - I'm thinking of Rene the treasure hunter, who is able to find hidden items mid-battle. It's a good use of pre-established character traits.

...

...

Anyway. I think I'm running out of things to talk about with this game.

Overall, Suikoden Tactics is a good tactics RPG, but it is nothing too remarkable. I like how it expands the world of Suikoden IV, but at the same time, I wish it put a bit more effort into the story and worldbuilding aspects. The actual tactical gameplay is quite good though.

Next game on the list is Suikoden V. That's another huge one, so I think I'll take a small break from Suikoden before I begin playing it.