Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

Released on November 5, 2007 for the Nintendo Wii by Nintendo after development by Intelligent Systems and Nintendo SPD, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn features tactical RPG gameplay across 37 chapters in a medieval fantasy setting.

"Who can account for taste?" asked my American Lit professor in a comment on my paper for Cormac McCarthy's drag of an overlong romance western adjective vomit, All the Pretty Horses. My English professor's favorite all-time book was All the Pretty Horses, and while he insisted that the fact that I disliked it would not affect my grade, the B he gave me in his lower level class sure looked conspicuous next to the A's I made in literally every single other English class I took as an English major. 19 A's and a B. "Who can account for taste?" my ass.
I don't like Fire Emblem games. I can see that now. About halfway through Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, I decided that continuing to play the 2007 Wii tactical RPG would be about as fun for me as...reading All the Pretty Horses again. By why isn't this storied series my cup of tea?

Game Over? But I just started!

Radiant Dawn starts well enough, with some cool, action-packed, atmospheric cinematics. Some magical girl with a cute bird is on the run, and some guy shows up to protect her. There's all kind of societal strife and war, and a bunch of over-complicated political mumbo-jumbo, and then you're suddenly looking at an overhead view of a city street, controlling some characters on a playing field.
When each of your respective characters gets their turn, a movement grid appears around them, upon which you can direct the character to any spot. The grid moves with you as you progress across the playing field, at times growing smaller according to more difficult terrain, like slopes. If you move close enough to an enemy, you can choose to attack them, whereupon a screen showing an animation of that attack appears. You also have the choice to end the turn using an item, like a healing herb, instead of attacking. Complete the chapter goals, like defeating a boss, or staying alive for a certain amount of turns, and you complete the chapter. There are 37 chapters.

I told you the stupid bird was cute.

And that's...the gist of it. As the game progresses, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn adds more and more complexity to the basic core of its gameplay, like missions geared specifically toward defense, missions involving prisoner rescue, allies added to the playing field the player can't control, and playable characters who can shapeshift. So much minutiae is added with each consecutive mission, that the corresponding tutorials become laughable--really, I'm 15 missions and 30 hours in, and you want to show me another instructional video?
I had a good time to start. Radiant Dawn felt like an onscreen board game and turn-based-RPG rolled into one. The game allows you to utilize many different types of characters: swordsmen or ax men who have to land right next to an enemy square in order to attack, archers who can attack from two squares or more away, lancers who can do both, and many more. There are even mage characters who can heal the rest of your party. Sure, you don't really get to know these characters, and they start to become more and more interchangeable as the game goes on, but early in, when the fields of play and mission objectives are simple, strategizing how to best use them is a thrill. For the first 10-15 hours, I was truly enjoying the game. Then cracks began to appear in the facade.

Look, it's Ike from Smash Bros.! Uh...I think I'm gonna go play Smash Bros. now.

First, I started to notice I wasn't interested in Radiant Dawn's needlessly complex, emotionlessly told story: Here's some prince. Here's some king. Here's some other prince who doesn't like the first prince. Here's some tyrant doing tyrant stuff. The people are restless. War. Famine. Repeat.
Radiant Dawn introduces character after character, location after location, and it's all just narrative white noise. Seven or eight missions in, I started skipping the cutscenes, which had become a time-wasting drag. You can access each mission's objective at any point during the chapter anyway
That's fine, I thought. I'm only playing this for the gameplay, anyway.
Then, it happened.
I reached the final chapter of the second part of this five-part game. Each part focuses on a different set of characters in a different location of the game's kingdom, which ensures you not only won't get too attached to any of them, but will be even more confused by the convoluted plot. When the characters die in a mission, they're dead permanently, anyway. Okay, so back to the end of the second part of of the game...
As I hinted at before, every one of Radiant Dawn's chapters has a condition that must be met to progress. They also have conditions of failure, such as allowing a particular character to die,or giving up on certain square on the playing field. The second part's final mission features many, many enemies and allies, and has a winning condition of surviving for 15 turns. A turn finishes when every character for you, your enemies, and your allies have had the opportunity to act. The game was already starting to get stale, when I, with a horror, realized I would be wasting time just sitting there, watching enemies and allies moving around for a vast amount of time. I eventually pulled out my stopwatch, and found that during each turn in the chapter, the enemies and allies took at least 3.5 minutes to complete all their moves...and I didn't have the option to skip watching their moves take place.. 15x3.5 is...more than 50 minutes. That's more than 50 minutes of just one of Radiant Dawn's 37 missions that I had to spend just sitting there watching what was going on on the screen. And this is a mission that occurs before the halfway point. I nearly went out of mind.

Why does your game hate me, Ike?!

That's not going to work for me. Ever. That chapter also included the failure condition that two particular characters could not die without the chapter automatically ending in defeat. I once made it to the final turn, after two hours of chapter gameplay, only to have one of these characters perish. So much time wasted. Thankfully, you have the option to save during a battle, but save at the wrong time, like say, right before the turn where your vital character has already been trapped and is about to die, and you're screwed. This type of pacing just isn't for me. At that point, I realized that, in order to keep my happiness and general well-being, I would need to quit playing Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn.
And so I did.
I should mention, though, the music up to that point was solid Nintendo stuff, but not good enough to make me want to finish the game. There's some voice-acting, but it's rarely utilized, mainly just in certain cutscenes. The graphics are solid, particularly in some of said cutscenes. Really, everything about the production values is solid. The gameplay, though...as much fun as the more straightforward missions can be, just becomes too tedious...
To me. As I said, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn just isn't my type of game. Perhaps I'm being too hard on it. Then again, the overly convoluted narrative is a legitimate complaint. The way the game introduces too many characters to allow the player to emotional connect with any one of them is a legitimate complaint. The way the player has to sit through long patches of video game AI making its moves is a legitimate complaint. Cormac McCarthy taking 100 pages just for the kid to ride his damn horse home at the end is a legitimate complaint! Yes, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn isn't my type of game--but I'd have the same complaints about these issues if they existed in a game in any genre that I enjoy. Imagine having to watch K. Rool putz around for an hour before you, as Donkey Kong, are allowed to defeat him? That's not very enjoyable...and life's too short to spend 60 hours playing a game you don't enjoy.

My better tomorrow will be spent playing a different game!

I can say, when the missions didn't involve me waiting a million years, I enjoyed the strategy involved in moving my characters in a grid like pattern against enemies. I enjoyed leveling up my archer (your characters level up, growing stronger after enough fights, but you can also level them up from a group pool between chapters, as well), buying him better arrows (there's a camp store you can visit between chapters), and turning him into a genuine weapon. I enjoyed maneuvering my stronger fighters, like Sothe (during the parts he was available) into a group of enemies that were giving my other characters trouble, and waylaying them. There are certainly many elements here to enjoy--but the flaws, piled on top of my personal taste--because who really can account for taste, right Dr. McKinnon, you jackass?--were just too much to bear. I don't like reviewing a game I haven't played to the final credits, but in this case, for my sanity's sake, on to the next game.

8.0

Graphics

They're fine. It's the above average, higher-res GameCube graphics you've come to expect in Wii prestige titles. Cutscenes look nice. 

7.5

Music and Sound

It's fine. Decent voice-acting in the cutscenes. Effective, if unmemorable music.

6.5

Gameplay

Some great, grid-based tactical RPG fun, saddled with overlong missions that force you to watch your enemies move for hours.

7.5

Lasting Value

There are at least 37 missions, and lots of options, but does that really matter when I have no drive to finish the game?

6.8  FINAL SCORE