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BATTLE SYSTEM
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INTERACTION
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ORIGINALITY
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STORY
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MUSIC & SOUND
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VISUALS
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CHALLENGE
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cheaply difficult |
COMPLETION TIME
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20 to 30 hours
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OVERALL
2.5/5
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Rating definitions
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Billy: "We must find the sacred stones, dear brother Jimmy!"
Jimmy: "But
"
Billy: "No buts about it, Jimmy! We are the double dragons,
and we will have the stones!"
Jimmy: "Billy
"
Billy: "Yes, Jimmy?"
Jimmy: "They don't make our games anymore."
Billy: "WHAT YOU SAY!?!"
Jimmy: "I don't know what happened, Billy. But we don't do
games anymore."
Billy: "But, but, this is about the sacred stones. The sacred
stones are our thing."
Jimmy: "No, dear brother. We don't even have a cameo in Fire
Emblem: The Sacred Stones."
Billy: <gasp>
The Fire Emblem series has a long history, albeit one that
is centered on Japan. It is only recently, with the 2003 release
of Fire Emblem, that North American gamers have come to know
this strategy RPG series. The Sacred Stones is the second
installment to hit the Game Boy Advance. Veterans of the previous
title will find that both iterations share much in common.
A shining example of dialog.
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The Sacred Stones primarily concerns a royal brother and
sister who are caught up in a whirlwind war, being tossed about
with no real understanding of what's going on - until it's too late
to do anything but fight back. The heart of the backstory is standard
RPG fare: someone is attempting to free a demon king sealed long
ago by a number of sacred stones, and it's up to the forces of good
and great justice to right this most terrible of wrongs. The stones
had been entrusted to the royal families of five kingdoms, and Eirika
and Ephraim will end up traveling all over the continent in hopes
of enlisting aid in their struggle.
The story is told exclusively through the use of storyboard scenes,
which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. However, the archetypal
characters combined with extremely stilted dialog leaves the player
in frustration at being told the story rather than experiencing
it through creativity and plausible suspension-of-belief. To add
insult, the storyboards are completely still, save for one animation:
the eyes - which may be looking at the other characters, the fourth
wall, or searching for aliens - blink. And blink. And blink again.
Such is the stuff of RPGamer nightmares.
As with the Growlanser series, exploration is made from
a pre-defined series of points on a map; the player can backtrack,
but free-roaming is not possible. Occasionally, monsters will visibly
appear on the world map, allowing the player to level up, but also
blocking the path back to a needed armory or shop. Battle maps are
sufficiently large, perhaps even overly so due to the limited movement
of many of the character classes.
Battles are composed of individual fights between two characters;
no simultaneous or splash damage. Individual fights play out as
a giant game of rock-paper-scissors, with each of the three types
of weapons/magics being strong and weak against another. The number
of characters deployable varies according to the map, with some
characters being required for different battles. Since the battle
commands are generally rather limited (attack, use an item, or wait),
strategy mostly consists of making sure that strong units are attacking
weaker ones and keeping weak units out of harm's way. Characters
will automatically attack once or twice, depending on their speed,
and the enemy will have a chance to counterattack if its in range.
Characters will automatically counterattack the enemy if attacked
during the enemy's turn - a good thing in many cases, but the lack
of a defend option presents a problem in formulating a deep strategy
for trying to recruit characters while on the battlefield.
Inadvertently, Natasha
makes Lute the new bubble-boy. |
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The two royal siblings can gather several dozen characters to their
cause during the course of the game. Some are added automatically,
and some must be recruited by specific characters or by certain
actions. Each character has its own class, and very few characters
have overlapping classes. Characters level up, gaining stat bonuses
in a completely frustrating random manner. Many characters can also
undergo a class change after level ten, but this requires the usage
of specific, rare items. Since the experience gains are capped at
level twenty, it becomes a bit of a scramble to make sure that every
character is going to be able to class change at an appropriate
time and not be stuck wasting experience.
The Fire Emblem series has a reputation for difficulty,
much of which is founded on the fact that resurrection is an impossibility:
if a character falls in battle, s/he is gone for the rest of the
game. The game won't actually end unless it's one of the primary
protagonists that commit involuntary seppuku, but perfectionists
will likely end up restarting a fair number of battles. This is
more due to the cheapness of some bosses who can one-hit kill beefed
up characters than any actual difficulty in the strategic arena.
Of course, the AI almost always attacks the weakest characters en
masse, limiting the usefulness of inexperienced units.
Graphically, The Sacred Stones does a great job showing
that sprite-based games can still be beautiful. Storyboards are
rendered in an anime-style, with much detail placed on individual
character portraits. In-game battle sequences are also well animated,
but the battle maps themselves begin to get a little repetitive
by the end of the game. Aurally, the game provides a good soundtrack,
though some of it seems not to fit the mood of the game that well.
The game does offer some replayability. A built-in arena for linking
two games together allows players to customize a team to take on
someone else's top contenders. The game does also feature a hard
mode that can be accessed before completing the game on easy. A
story decision in the middle of the game leads to two very different
paths; completionists will want to hit both of these. Finally, each
character has support levels based on the amount of time they spend
with another character; in addition to battle bonuses and added
dialog, these support levels can affect the endings for each character.
Overall, The Sacred Stones is a mixed bag. It's difficult,
but that stems most from cheap shots. It has a fair amount of strategic
planning when it comes to figuring out which characters to upgrade
to which classes, but the limited in-battle sequences of rock-paper-scissors
become old rather quickly. Recommended for fans of the series and
of the genre, but it's not for most RPGamers.
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