Akai_Shuichi's Blog

Back to Akai_Shuichi's Blog

Right after finishing the prequel of this game, Path of Radiance, of which I wrote about in my previous entry, I immediately went into Radiant Dawn, a game for the Wii that was released in 2007, 2 years after Path of Radiance was released for the Gamecube.

Path of Radiance was a game that, while it did had a main plot that was completed during the game, still left a fair amount of things in the air that were begging for a sequel, so Radiant Dawn was not really an unneeded sequel that came out of nowhere. There was a lot of material to work on, though sadly, I can't say that work in particular was very well done, but I'll get into details about that later.

Before writing anything else, I will highly recommend you to play Path of Radiance before playing Radiant Dawn. These two games are highly related and the events of Path of Radiance constantly come up during Radiant Dawn. Because of that, if you want a better understanding of the world in Radiant Dawn, and you don't want the whole Path of Radiance game completely spoiled, I highly recommend playing Path of Radiance first.

Let's first start talking about the (really) negative point about Radiant Dawn, which is the story. It really pains me to write about how incredibly bad the story in Radiant Dawn is. If you read my review on Path of Radiance, you'll notice how I consider Path of Radiance one of the better Fire Emblems in terms of story. But I can say that out of all the Fire Emblem games I've played (4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and part of 11), Radiant Dawn is easily the worst in terms of story. The game had all the potential in the game because by playing Path of Radiance it is clear that the game was done with a sequel in mind, but I don't know what happened in-between games, but the writing in Radiant Dawn is something at many points I could only call retarded.

The whole progression of the story was horribly done, sometimes making very little sense, and each and every villain during most of the game was simply stupid evil. You know, to the point it actually makes no sense. This is common to a point in Fire Emblem, but even for the franchise standard, this was way over the top. The new main characters also often acted in stupid ways, and everything had some kind of progression that made very little sense.

Pretty much the whole cast from Path of Radiance is also back for this game, and while they were still the shining point for this game, this game really didn't add anything to them. They at least didn't ruin their previous characters, but not adding anything to them in a whole game kinda feels a bit like a disappointment.

The game at times showed some good ideas, little flashes of "brilliancy" that could've made this game so much better, but it seems like it was never able to build up on them, and things always had a progress that made me feel like the game was a fanfic written by a 13 years old kid.

At least the game mostly kept the whole lore of the previous game, which is among the better ones in the franchise. The whole thing about the world was mostly kept, and even given a small nice twist at the final part of the game, which is one of the few good flashes the game had.

The game is divided in four parts, which are divided in 3 different armies and main characters, except for the fourth part which joins all three groups. I actually liked the idea here and their execution plan felt alright in terms of structure, except for the fact that they made the army of the first part comprised of incredibly useless units, the second part's army was fine, but all those units quickly became worthless because the second part was really short and their units had very bad availability, and the third part group was incredibly powerful and with high availability. Balance here was awful, and the game suffered a lot from it. Making a final part with all armies combined was a nice detail though, and while it can be incredibly easy since that can easily be the strongest army out of any Fire Emblem, it felt good to end the Tellius saga.

Now, while the units balance could be fairly bad. Now it's time to talk about the good things about Radiant Dawn. For starters, in terms of gameplay it mostly took everything from Path of Radiance and made it better. The game felt smoother, enemy critical hits were much less annoying and I haven't played a Fire Emblem with as much creativity with its maps as Radiant Dawn. Gameplay-wise, Radiant Dawn not only does the job well, but it's just the peak of the Fire Emblem franchise. The game is fairly long and filled with very fun and memorable maps, which is what I would say the most important part about this franchise. It's a game that felt really good in terms of gameplay, with the exception of those maps where you had almost only worthless units, though that in itself could be called a challenge in its own way even.

The game allowed saving mid-battle, but in a way that didn't really incite for abuse of optimal situations, but good enough to fix stupid mistakes like random low criticals or making a mistake while moving a unit, something that was incredibly annoying in the previous game. I did miss a "Load" option, or even a reset option. Having to close the game and reopen it when wanting to go back could be a bit annoying at times, but this was really a small detail considering how much better they did this part.

So yeah, this makes even more disappointing the horrible story, since had the game kept a story of the level of Path of Radiance, or even if it was slightly worse, this could've even become the best Fire Emblem overall, but the story made it impossible to be even close to that point.

Radiant Dawn has one of the most solid soundtracks in the franchise, and it even improves the work done for Path of Radiance, which was already fairly solid. It has a vast amount of themes, and they're usually pretty good.

While there is a console jump between Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, I didn't feel Radiant Dawn did much for the graphics. Admittedly, the Wii is kind of a joke in terms of graphics for its generation. The game still looked alright, though never too impressive.

While much of this text is a critic to Radiant Dawn, I would still recommend this game because the gameplay can be that fun. And having that many units to your disposition is something new in this franchise. If you're a fan of the Fire Emblem gameplay style, this game is most definitely a must-play. Just try not to take the story too seriously, and you should literally expect nothing out of the story.