Another new feature that deserves praise is the ability to re-class your characters. Did you run into a string of bad luck, and have both of your healing characters defeated in your last map? Simply take say, an extraneous archer that has fallen low on your depth chart, and change that character into a curate, the healing class. Be sure to pay attention to your character’s stats before you do this-you wouldn’t want a character with low magic being your new magic wielder, after all-but the good news is that a level five archer is now a level five curate, keeping the same hit points, defense, etc. You can only have so many of each class at a time-don’t get any ideas about turning all of your characters into Paladins or anything-but this is a great way to recoup some of your losses and keep you moving along in the storyline without having to backtrack and reload a previous save.
Items and weapons can be bought on the field of battle in vendors and armories, but there is also a permanent armory within your caravan, accessed in between chapters. The selection is limited though, so you will need to spend time during battles finding yourself new weapons and healing items in order to make things easier on yourself in later levels. You can also forge one item after you finish a level, though this gets expensive to do. Essentially, this allows you to take a weapon you already have and augment it to your play style-want Marth’s rapier to be more lightweight to allow for more combos, or do you want to increase the critical rating of it for more special hits? You can tweak these elements, and then rename the weapon if you would like for easy identification, though forged weapons have a blue tint to their name as well.
Another new addition to the series is the online shop, which has special items you can buy with gold acquired during your campaign; these items also change often, so you will want to check in and shop every now and again, even if you aren’t in the middle of playing the campaign. One reason to do this is because Intelligent Systems, like they did with their last entry in the Advance Wars series, has introduced online play. You can choose five of your units to bring into battle against a real-life opponent, so having them equipped with the best items and weapons that your money can buy is a good idea. You can also borrow your friends’ units to help you out in the campaign if you are stuck, which, given the random nature at which attribute points are dispensed when you gain a level, is a pretty big deal. While the five units seems low-most campaign levels have you bring somewhere between 10 and 15 units or so-it’s a good sign that there is online play to begin with, since it’s something that could benefit future Fire Emblem releases on both handhelds and consoles.
It’s clear Nintendo wanted to make Fire Emblem accessible for newcomers-of which there will be plenty, given the Nintendo DS’ reign on top of the hardware charts-so a few items were implemented in addition to the save points and the enemy movement hot key. First of all, if you struggled through any other Fire Emblem on Normal difficulty, that won’t happen this time, as Normal means Normal, the level that your average gamer can complete the game on without too much fuss. That does not mean that Nintendo made this game too easy though, because they did not. Normally, you cannot play a Fire Emblem title on a harder difficulty until you have completed the game on one of the other levels, but this time around Hard mode is unlocked from the moment you turn your game on, giving veterans a taste of just how mean Nintendo can be in regards to difficulty.
There are six different levels of difficulty, with five variations of “Hard”: Hard, Brutal, Savage, Fiendish, and Merciless. In addition, you don’t get the time to give Marth and his friends a few extra levels in the brand new Prologue, which was created for newcomers and as a way to introduce a little more backstory into the game. These multiple difficulty levels increase the replay value of this already long handheld RPG substantially, and along with the online play, make it so that Shadow Dragon is a title that won’t leave your DS or game case anytime soon.
My favorite part about having this on the DS though may be that both screens are used effectively. You no longer have to backtrack into a menu in order to see your character’s or an enemy’s statistics, as they are always there on the top screen-you can see what level they are with a particular weapon’s usage (higher levels means you can use more powerful swords, staves, axes, and so on), what their defense, magic, speed, and attack are, as well as what they have in their inventory. If you are all set with that information and would prefer to look at a map of the area to see where all of your units and the enemy’s units are, then you can also do that simply by pressing the R button to toggle the top screen’s view. Add that to the fact that you can now use the stylus to make moves, rather than moving an arrow around on a grid using the D-pad, and you have two wonderful additions utilizing the DS hardware outside of the Wi-Fi capabilities.
While the story is not as strong as other Fire Emblem games we have been exposed to the past six years, Intelligent Systems more than made up for it with the entry level difficulty for newcomers, some very welcome tweaks and changes to the gameplay, the hardcore range of difficulties for veterans of the series, the online battles and shop, and the effective utilization of the DS hardware. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon was more than worth the wait whether you’ve been waiting for a new entry since you finished Radiant Dawn or if this is your first foray into Intelligent Systems’ classic franchise, and should remain in your DS collection for a long time to come.
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