Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon is a DS remaster of the original NES Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, a game that if you went back to is very rough and the challenge in playing it is more that you are probably so used to modern Fire Emblem doing some basic things. The biggest one being that modern Emblem does everything with percentages and numbers, it is all very readable compared to the original’s bars of indeterminate value, unless you feel like busting out a calculator. Or even displaying what the critical chance is. And that is just some of the things you will immediately encounter if you give the original NES version a play!
Something else that you will notice in the original, magic users don’t get magic stat ups. In fact, a magic stat doesn’t exist, mages do set damage depending on the magic tome they have equipped. To balance this, resistance is a stat that just doesn’t increase for anyone who isn’t a magic class (Mage, Curates, and their promoted forms). Strictly speaking that is a lie, Marth has a 2% chance his Resistance will increase. To help soften the blow from magic users, you can get Talisman items, there are 3 of them, one of them in a secret shop. These single use items increase your resistance by a whopping +7, that’s generous. You could also make use of the Barrier staves and Pure Water items that give you a temporary bonus to resistance, but that takes effort, which is a me problem, so I should have considered using it as it would have helped a lot.
Something that is of note, stats have a limit of 20 in the original, besides HP, which caps out at 60, though the odds you will have any unit at 60 HP is pretty remote and unnecessary, though the few HP boosters you can find do give you a healthy amount of HP that makes that lofty number much more obtainable even for promoted units, which, incidentally, not all units promote. Only Mercenaries, Pegasus Knights, Cavaliers, Archers, Mages and Clerics promote. So, if you are quite partial to having the walking tanks that are FE Generals or critical hit machines like Berserkers, Swordmasters and Assassins. Well… Tough. You don’t get any of that here. The enemy gets Generals! They tend to feature as boss enemies on a regular basis. It does mean that the pool of promotable units is sadly quite small and thus the amount of promotion items is also on the smaller side.
Weapon pools are also a little on the low side, with only 5 variants on lances and axes. The strongest axe being the devil axe, which is a fringe case weapon, so standard best axe is the Steel Axe. No silver axe for you! Also, the weapon triangle doesn’t exist in the original game. Which is probably for the best, as the game loves to go heavy on Cavaliers and Knights. With an abundance of sword users, you’d be in for a miserable time. Even the Wyvern Rider doesn’t get access to axes, which is a… Choice. I say this as if we should be considering the weapon proficiencies of classes off the newer games and not just accept the way it was originally created.
Now I know what you are thinking, Ishambard, you are spending a lot of time talking about the original Fire Emblem, but this is your uncondensed thoughts on the DS Remaster. Yes, very astute of you, but it is important to lay down some groundwork on this game, as it is from this background that we can establish some of Shadow Dragon DS’s shortcomings. So where do we begin? Magic users? Yeah, why not? Magic users are fun in Shadow Dragon DS because they get Magic growth, it’s a pitiful amount, averaging in the 25% region for most characters. Only those who start as magic units are lucky enough to push to 40%. Most enemies do not have any resistance to speak of, so, it’s not all terrible, it does turn mages into little nukes. So even if you can trickle grow magic damage, you’re likely to do some hefty damage to the slower knights and general boss enemies. But. Here comes the rub. Much like your opponents, your resistance growths are next to nothing, unless you are a magic user class. Some late game stages start to get magic user heavy and those talismans you might have used in Shadow Dragon NES, well, they now increase your Resistance by +2. A miserable +2. That’s going to help so much, especially when Swarm tomes come into play.
Strictly speaking, this is a bit of a bold-faced lie. Shadow Dragon DS introduces a new mechanic that is somewhat interesting and shakes things up significantly. The ability to reclass characters to other classes within a set group. There are three groups. Men A, Men B and Women. Men A can be considered lighter characters, Myrmidons, Cavaliers, Archers, Mages and Curates. Men B can be considered heavier characters, Mercenaries, Knights, Hunters, Fighters, Pirates and Dark Mages. Oh yes, they introduced a new magic user class, so you can turn some of those excess fighters you get early game into a magic user. Dark Mages are basically a budget Shaman from the GBA era, looks similar, but it just a bit meh as they use the same spells as the standard mages, but are just… Slower, with a little bit of bulk to them, courtesy of their base stats from a bulky melee class. The final class group is Women, it’s basically Men A, but you also can reclass any of your ladies into Pegasus Knights. The Whitewings don’t seem so special now! Reclassing has an impact on growth rates and initial stats and there probably are some shenanigans where you can spend a few levels in alternative classes to get Resistance growth on some of your other characters, but the stat correction that occurs when shifting between magic users to non-magic users is quite extreme in terms of those defensive values. Some classes, like the Myrmidon, Cavalier and Pegasus Knight can allow for Resistance growth if the character’s base resistance growth is greater than 5. So outside of magic users, your best chances of resistance is fringe cases of about 10%. So, for most characters an average of 1 or 2 over the course of 20 level ups. Once again, I have lied to you, because there is some additional nonsense in the background called Dynamic Stat Growths. Every time a stat fails to increase on level up, it gains a +10% boost to levelling up the next time. So, if you fail a 20% chance, the next level up it will be 22%, and it compounds upwards until you gain a stat up. Interestingly most characters have a base growth of 5 or more, but class alterations on resistance reduces this to 0. It does make you wonder if there could be a potential for negative growth on a stat and how that would impact the game. Resistance is important element to talk about because late game there are a handful of stages that get very heavy on the magic units. A late game stage where you fight one of the games major antagonists is nearly exclusively magic units. Some of the units have a tome called Swarm, which has a range of 3 – 10. Okay, sure the accuracy is a little on the low side, so there is a good chance for evasion, but it can really sting when units are raining that down on you and you have very little counter it, unless you invested in one of the ballistae users.
Something we need to talk about is enemy composition, most enemies you will encounter are cavaliers and knights. This great news for Marth and his rapier, as that isan effective weapon against those classes and the effective multiplier to damage is x3. Even super bulky Generals can take serious damage from the Rapier or Shiida’s new unique weapon, the Wing Spear, which has the same effective properties of the Rapier. Both weapons are not terribly abundant, but you can probably obtain about three copies of these weapons before you gain access to Hammerene, a staff that can fully restore item durability. Back on enemy composition, despite there being a handful of new classes that the player can use, these classes are not used by the enemies outside of the Gaiden chapters. Navarre is the only enemy (though he can be recruited) who starts as a new class. A bit of an aside for a moment, Navarre is strange character, I don’t really understand why he is considered a popular character, when even in the original game he was, at best, okay. But it is mostly because I am a massive fan of Ogma and characters like him. Anyway, due to setup for enemies, everything starts to feel a bit samey, and it makes effective weapons amazingly effective in most chapters. Also, with the weapon triangle being in effect, it does mean that axes suddenly become a great weapon type, especially on classes like the Hero and Wyvern Rider.
Another thing we should discuss regarding weapons. In Shadow Dragon NES, to gate characters out of just equipping powerful weapons at lower levels, you had the additional stat of Weapon Level, this was changed to the more modern style of weapon proficiency of having a skill level ranging from E to A, like in the GBA Fire Emblems. The thing is, increased weapon proficiency not only got you access to new weapons, but from ranks C to A gave you additional bonuses. With Swords getting more damage, Axes getting more accuracy and Lances getting a mix of the two. For most of the game this is very minor and doesn’t really come into play beyond stopping you from giving Shiida the Silver Lance that Jeigan starts with, for instance.
There is another strange quirk to this game, the whilst the game features a limited cast and permanent death, there are mechanisms in place to help those who might struggle with this whole thing. Once your overall party size gets reduced to a certain number, where you would struggle to fully deploy on a map, the game starts to generate generic replacements. These would be characters with a name, but no mugshot portrait, instead just using a picture of the character class as their “face”. The generic classes will be appropriately levelled and with suitable stats for the stage you are on. These characters will have subpar growths from the actual characters. But they do come pre-equipped with a basic weapon, so at least you don’t need to initially equip them. It’s clearly a means to prevent yourself from being soft locked by Fire Emblem’s permadeath mechanics. There is also another benefit to playing poorly, it is how you reach the games Gaiden stages, the stages that are unique to this version, complete with an additional character for each stage. It is just bizarre, I feel most players would be unlikely to understand how to reach these stages and it isn’t as if the new characters are particularly outstanding. Though Norne and Frey, two new characters who can only be obtained through the new prologue missions, exceeded my expectations, especially when you consider my Norne, as an archer, was boasting one of my higher defense stats even compared to traditionally tanky characters like Draug. As for Frey, well, most of his non-magical stats were in the high-10s by level 20 as a cavalier, absolute madness.
With all that, Fire Emblem Shadw Dragon DS is quite faithful to the stats of enemies and how the levels play out. Most of the tweaks to the system are to the players advantage, turning what is quite a challenging and clunky NES game into something that is playable and enjoyable. Think of Shadow Dragon DS as a bit of a Quality-of-Life update for the NES version and that should temper your expectations of how this game plays and feels. Going onto it with that mindset and you’ll find something that is quite enjoyable.
I feel like I am forgetting something about this game… Something important. Something that makes this game, quite honestly, an experience for masochists… Oh. Oh yeah, it introduces difficulties level. Five of them to be precise! That’s insane, even more modern Emblem games opt for just two or three difficulty levels, and a more casual mode to remove the permadeath. What makes the difficulties in Shadow Dragon something truly abysmal? Let me count the ways!
For each rank of difficulty, indicated by stars, all enemies are given invisible level ups. 3 levels per star. Enemy level ups work on a similar logic to that of player ones and adds a small degree of randomness to enemies on stage, this can be quite frustrating if you are following a walkthrough to help you survive the first couple of stages, because those starting stages are brutal. The pirates on the first stage stand a good chance to OHKO certain characters especially on Merciless (5 Star difficulty). Due to their increased stats as well, you are unlikely to be getting the double hits you would normally use to defeat or significantly injure opponents for others to finish. Draug and Jeigan’s starting defense will help, but it won’t save you. On most stages, a block of 4 or 5 enemies will rush you and it can easily take 3 of your characters to take them down one of them. At that point it is a numbers game, and the numbers are not in your favour.
Remember that I mentioned that weapon levels didn’t really play a part, well, on harder difficulties they do. Those level 1 pirates have A rank in axes, providing them an additional +45 to hit. Even lance enemies get a healthy bonus to hit and attack at A rank. So good luck with hoping the weapon triangle will help you with those minor bonuses to damage, hit and dodge.
Another interesting quirk to hard mode is how it handles reinforcements. During some stages enemy reinforcements will spawn at set locations after certain triggers have been activated. These triggers tend to be entering a certain part of the map, or a certain turn number is reached. These reinforcements tend to offer a great opportunity to get some levels in, because they tend to spawn across several turns and on some stages will spawn the Horseman class. The Horseman class is a horseback archer and is classed as a promoted unit, meaning you get more EXP for defeating them! Joy! So, I haven’t said what the quirk is. Usually in Fire Emblem, enemy reinforcements spawn in at the end of the enemy turn and will act on the next turn, giving you time to react to them spawning in. Not on Hard Mode, they spawn in at the start of the enemy turn and will move on the turn they spawn in. This is all kinds of annoying, even more so when the enemies that start to spawn in are magic users.
Oh, you better believe that enemy magic users are getting those hard difficulty invisible level ups too. In the late game, there are a couple of stages that like to spawn in some magic units with that Swarm spell I mentioned earlier. And those magic users are now sporting buffed magic stats, higher accuracy, speed, etc. Oh, and we haven’t forgotten that element of the player characters getting very little in turns of resistance growth, right? Essentially, on one of the late game stages you have a unit that spawns in every turn for about 6 turns that can do a long range 25 damage magic attack to any unit within a 16 square radius. Absolutely miserable.
Whilst the increased difficulty options present an interesting set of new dilemmas and challenges, it does feel it crosses a border into the potentially unfair side. Now, admittedly, there are systems that the players themselves can abuse in return, but in my opinion that just makes the entire experience all a little toxic. A horrendous cycle of abuse, from gaining experience from chip damage against tanky bosses standing on healing tiles, plugging money into forged effective weapons, Wolf and Sedgar having 200% HP and 100% Defense growths when reclassed as a General and using them to stonewall non-magic opponents. Wasting turns to break enemy weapons to allow weaker units to get what experience they can. Mathematically figuring out your chances of success at the arena based off the prize money, well, you might, probably, be good at doing that anyway…
As mentioned before, I think Shadow Dragon DS is a pretty solid QoL update for the original Fire Emblem. It is not a bad way for people to get to know Marth’s origin story. It likely failed to break ground in the international market because our first introduction to Fire Emblem outside of Smash Bros, was a much more in-depth and compelling game in terms of story, Fire Emblem 7 which was on the GBA, and that was the second Fire Emblem title to be released on that system. And 7 is actually a prequel to 6… Fire Emblem is more confusing than Final Fantasy when it comes to the numbering, I suppose that is why the numbering is more of something the fandom does, as Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade and Fire Emblem the Blazing Sword (6 and 7, respectively) is a little unconcise to say in general conversation. But I’m getting distracted, as if a 2,950-word diatribe on Shadow Dragon wasn’t distracted enough. Essentially, International fans of Fire Emblem who had experienced 7, 8, Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn, are going to feel incredibly underwhelmed, unaware that this isn’t some amazing remake of the progenitor of the series. This was something more for the Japanese fans, and to be honest, despite some of the gripes I have with the nuances, having recently also played the original NES Fire Emblem, this is a pretty damn good remaster, it’s almost a little too faithful to the original, but if a faithful remake of the original wasn’t what you wanted, well, let’s be honest, this game wasn’t designed for you.