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Fire Emblem

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Grandson lost his original Fire Emblem game, but was glad he found it on Amazon

Fire Emblem ROCKS!!!!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 16, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game and if you've ever played it you probably agree with me. It's a good mix of combat and strategy into one excellent game.

GREAT GAME!!!!! GREAT BUY!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

fun strategy game worth the price. One of the best games i have ever played. Great buy for everyone. Great replay value.

An amazing, if challenging, game that will captivate you with its complexity and story

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is the first Fire Emblem game I played, and I bought it as a way to pass the time spent in the car when my family moved. Never did I think a strategy game could engross me so completely. The Fire Emblem games are famous for their unforgiving nature. When a characters dies, they're gone. No revive spell, no item to bring them back. They're dead. This fact influences every single move you make in this game. And while that sounds like the formula for an incredibly frustrating game, it's not. It actually makes the game that much better. In other games, as long as you win the battle you win. But Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones encourages, no, demands perfection. Because every unit lost is a person that you've gotten to know. In many cases, you risked another character to even get this person to join your team. If they die, you turn off your GBA and try again. And when you finally do beat a particularly challenging level without losing anyone, you feel very proud of the fact that you just conquered a force much larger than your own, and did it without taking one casualty. And so as the game tells the story of a rag-tag group of soldiers surviving and even winning in the face of overwhelming odds, that story becomes very personal. The characters didn't just win, you, as the player, won. It's this very personal connection that you develop with the characters and their plight that makes the story so compelling, and what makes this game so good. Sure, it's hard. Yeah, it's incredibly frustrating at times. But when you take down the final boss and get to read the future fate of every unit you acquired over the course of the game, the satisfaction is worth every bit of that frustration and difficulty. On top of the story, the gameplay is every bit as good. You can customize units as they grow and change class, determining what types of weapons and skills they get. You can build friendships and relationships between units, which will influence what their end story will be. The music is nice, but sometimes a bit repetitive. The graphics are good, considering they're on the GBA, and the combat animations are well done. If this tells you anything, my girlfriend borrowed this game from me several months ago. She now owns my GBA and this game simply for the fact that she won't give them back.

Bottom Line:
This is a very difficult game, but in the end it's well worth it. The story draws the player in and doesn't let go. If you've got the patience for it then this game should not be passed up.

alright...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

It was okay. It kind of repeated itself and missions always seemed the same. good for a road trip or boredom but nothing to get totally immersed in.

Average story, challenging and fun.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really enjoy strategy games. It was a mistake to play on Hard, because it was too difficult. There is very little room for error, so you can lose some characters easily. Still, I enjoyed this game and recommend it to strategy fans.

Nintendofan

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I really like this game. It's fun, but some levels will get tedious because you will have to redo them several times to win. I like the fact that you can revisit locations even after you finish the chapter. Splitting the storyline in the middle gives a good reason to replay the game.

Solid but not groundbreaking gameplay.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones is a tactical role playing game. The gameplay is similar to the Advance Wars series, but the setting is a standard fantasy world. Basically, you move a variety of units across a terrain board to fulfill a specific goal and complete the mission.

Some players may find the long sections of dialogue tedious, but the exposition is designed to explain the plot and provide motivation to finish the missions. Unfortunately, this makes for a linear storyline and at least in the first few hours of gameplay, the player has no freedom to deviate from the setup.

The job system is not nearly as deep as that in Final Fantasy Tactics or even FF Tactics Advance, but there is some growth and weapons customization. Players may be annoyed by weapons breaking after a certain number of strikes. Also, because of the rock/paper/scissors system, a normally powerful character might struggle with a lesser enemy simply because the wrong weapon is equipped.

The battle map graphics are good and fairly clear, although the character sprites are small and sometimes hard to distinguish. The music is better than average. I have not completed the game, but guessing at the number of hours it takes to complete, Sacred Stones is probably a good value.

Overall, this is a solid game and if you like tactical RPGs you will enjoy it.

THE BEST

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

this has to be my favorite gba game of all time. it kinda stinks though that if a guy dies. he dies and he does not come back. i sugest that you also buy an a gameshark so that you can make sure your guys live to see tomorow. overal great plot and storyline. i just love it.

My first favorite Strategy RPG.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: February 24, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I will admit that, overall, the strategy-RPG genre has been very hard for me to get into. My first entry into the genre was with Tactics Ogre on the Gameboy Advance, which I thought was merely O.K., yet not enough for me to keep (that says a lot, since I rarely get rid of games). Final Fantasy Tactics on the PS1 I found rather... unbearable, to be quite frank, since it seemed to me to require more tedious power-leveling (e.g. beefing up your character's strength) and less strategy.

Considering these views I had of the genre, it's easy to see how I could be apprehensive about getting another one, not to mention I wasn't too keen on Advance Wars either (which actually shares some similarities to Fire Emblem, including the same developer). Suffice to say, I was pleasantly surprised twice over!

For those that don't know, Fire Emblem is, at its core, a turn-based strategy game in which you control a small army to complete certain objectives, which of course means you'll often fight your way through plenty of enemies. Initially you start with your main character, which in this game is Eirika (you have the option to switch to Ephriam after a handful of missions). As the game progresses, more and more characters will join your group--some automatically, some after you talk to them with the right character (the game will sometimes drop hints about who should talk with who by using dialogue)--which each have strengths and weaknesses of their own. For instance, in what has been dubbed the "weapon trio," there is somewhat of a "rock, paper, scissors" format. In this case, sword beats axe, axe beats lance, and lance beats sword. Bear in mind that it isn't nearly as simple as that. This only determines the initial advantage one has over the other, but a character's strength can be enough to go against the grain of this. Not to mention there are a few other items that have their own unique properties that are more or less effective depending on what they are used against, but the game does an extremely good job of telling you all these nuances and even has a guide handy that is accessible during missions with quick, concise info. In fact, pretty much anything you can highlight with the cursor has a quick access help topic associated with it that's as simple to use as pressing the R button--everything from getting info on ally or enemy units, right down to something as dumb as finding out what certain terrain does.

Being able to learn the ins and outs of the game in such an easy manner is certainly a good thing, because there is one aspect of the game that is unrelenting and brutal. If you lose one of your characters, they are gone forever. Granted, you do have the option of not losing them... IF you don't mind starting that particular mission all over again. It seems like a perfectionist's nightmare, yet I didn't have that must problem with that aspect. If you're think you might be worried a lot about losing characters, start the game on Easy. The game will still provide a challenge without being overly gruelling (well, the last battle will still be pretty hard). However, for those who are a bit more confident, the game offers up Normal and Difficult settings, the latter of which I've heard can be especially brutal.

Now, as far as visuals go, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but at the very least it's functional. The maps, which are setup in a chess-like grid with a bird's-eye view, are clear and concise. However, they lean a bit on the simple side, including how things are animated. Still, I actually prefer this setup compared to something like Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics. One of the better parts of the visual presentation are the little attack animations that happen when two units fight each other. The game "zooms in" on the units, producing two characters that attack, the animation of which is insanely smooth and quite impressive (some of the critical hit animations drive home just how devastating the attack is, in a way surprisingly good for an E-rated game). The funny thing is those animations are entirely optional. They can be disabled through the menu, or you can even assign the game to allow animations for only specific characters that you chose.

Sound, like the visuals, is also more functional than spectacular. The sound effect are geared more as a secondary way to tell you what's going on on the screen, which, despite being simplistic, adds surprisingly well to the effect. The music also blends well to the game, though I found a few tracks to be especially good in their own right.

Oh, on a side note, there's one thing I really loved about this game in the technical aspect. It has one of the best quick save systems I have ever seen. The game sports a normal save system in between missions, but during missions it has a unique quick save feature that is so good that it saves automatically when you turn off the system. Seriously! No buttons to press, no menus to dig through. Just power off the system and you'll be able to start again from that same point (unless you decide to erase the save). Ironically, this save system is annoying in a way that is clearly intentional. If you ever get one of your characters killed and power off the system at that point, you'll find that upon starting the quick save that it saved right before that specific enemy unit's action, meaning you are left with two options. Either proceeding on without that character or restarting that mission from the start. It's harsh, but you didn't expect them to make it easy, did you?

So, here's my summary of the pros and cons.

Pros:

+ Simple, yet surprisingly in-depth strategy gameplay.
+ Game eases you into the controls, which will become second-nature quickly.
+ Great cast of characters, representing some well balenced classes with their own strengths and weaknesses
+ Challenging, yet rewarding.
+ Smart AI that tends to target weaker characters, making you think.
+ Surprisingly intelligent dialogue despite the broad audience (the fact that it's rated E).

Cons:

- Can be a bit of a perfectionist's nightmare

In short, I recommend it to strategy fans out there.

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