2/5 ★ – Kalle_Deimos's review of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light.

TLDR: Damn! This is a full length FE game? *20 hours later* DAMN, THIS IS A FULL LENGTH FE. Gameplay: The first half of my playthrough of FE 1 was pretty amazing. For it's time, I cannot BELIEVE this game was on the NES. It feels very ambitious and well put-together. All the different classes, equipment system, growth rates and named characters. It's very impressive. Sure, lots of modern staples are missing. Most classes can't promote, especially the ones who need it the most. Every member of your army is named but half of them are generic soldiers who share potraits with other units and don't say a single word. And the units who do speak only speak once or twice and then are forgotten to time. Except for Caeda and Marth. Even Bantu gets some spotlight for recruiting Tiki. But besides that, Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light heavily resembles a GBA FE minus all of the improvements. It's not even a novelty, the game is genuinely so much fun until you get to the half-way point and it starts to drag and it just keeps dragging. Because there's so little new stuff to discover, it can feel like you've experienced the whole game pretty early on since theres not many new characters or gimmicks to throw at you. And once that happened to me I realized I still had 10 more chapters left. And some of these chapters are pretty hard because they'll send so many high-ranking enemies at you that even your best units can only take a couple of rounds from which slows the experience down even further. On top of this, because its an NES game the game is just slow in general. Animations take forever, moving your units across the map take forever, dialogue takes forever. It's a SLOW game in and out. And finally, mix in important QOL improvements that we've been spoiled with like pre-battle inventory management and Curates earning EXP by healing, and you got a funky experience. And the ending chapters can be infuriating with their heavy reinforcements full of enemies that can easily overwhelm you if you miss even one attack. And the hit rate felt very skewed? I missed so frequently that I started to doubt the accuracy indicator. Enemies with lower accuracy hit me more often than me! Maybe I had a consistent string of bad luck, who knows. But goddamn it was infuriating to watch me miss 5+ times in a row with 75% accuracy. I can't rate this game too highly, but I did like it quite a bit despite my criticisms. It's a bare bones FE experience but one that has its charms in the first half. I would not suggest this game for anyone unless you're a big FE fan. It is an NES game, an impressive NES game but still an NES game. Story: An evil dragon and countries split apart by war. Again, the standard FE affair before the games got more interesting...for better for worse. You can gleam some small character stories from the cast and how some of them interact with each other and that's pretty cool. There's not a lot of zany characters and everyone is pretty grounded, which is nice because they come off more as people than cartoon characters. But a lot of this is also due to how they only have a couple of lines of dialogue maximum. Another cool concept that this game starts and carries through the franchise is Manaketes going mad with age and we get to see some of this developed with Bantu and the villains. It's good. Graphics: I hope you love color green, blue and white. That's all we're getting here. Sprite work is pretty interesting. Fighters do a weird crab walk. Portraits can be hit or miss. And of course, a lot of assets are recycled. It's fine. Sound: I dig the music quite a bit. I thought I was gonna get sick of it but I never did. The map theme just makes me bounce up and down in my seat. Fight theme has a good bit-crushed bass line. Boss theme is great. That CLASSIC recruitment theme. Good stuff. Extra: Not really much in terms of extra content to seek out. The game is gonna be the same game each playthrough. I guess the only difference will be RNG. Favorite Thing: Darros my beloved Not My Favorite Thing: Magestone Manaketes. Incredibly powerful enemies that take very little damage and can nullify magic completely, their only reasonable counter. It's ABSURD. And the amount they throw at you at the end is ridiculous. Not even the Falchion is effective against them. In fact, the Falchion kind of sucks?? What???