Tonight I finished the first game I have ever finished on the Wii, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. To be honest this was probably the first game that I really enjoyed on the Wii.
Fire Emblem is a Tactical Role player game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. Apparently is it the tenth game in the Fire Emblem series but it was first I have played or heard of. The game play is very similar to some older games that I enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics.
Fire Emblem game play is little different in that the core of the game is a turn based strategy game with fantasy characters. Between the battles there is a story element and generally a character building element where you can buy and sell items upgrade units.
The game is pretty long it took me about 40 hours to complete, there are 42 chapters or mission in the game divided up into 4 chapters. The plot is pretty simple but very involved and long at times, to be honest I skipped a lot of the plot elements because they dragged too much.
Reading some reviews of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn the common complaint about the game is that it is too difficult. Well I agree the game does have a steep learning curve after you get over that it is pretty straight forward. The game would not easy nor was it impossibly hard; I just found the difficulty was enough so that game did not become tedious.
All in all I really enjoyed the game; it was just a fun game that I could play for an hour here and there. Like so many other games I did not have to play it for extended periods of time to feel I had accomplished something.
My one critique of the game is that at times it did drag there were some missions that where put in for the sake of a mission. At one point in the game your army is split into three groups and each group is trying to get towards a tower for the final battle to save the world. Well on the way each of the three groups has to fight several battles so this just artificially increases the length of the game. Similarly when you are in the final tower there is several battle that serve no purpose other than increase the game length. This maybe increases the game length by about 5 hours maybe, which is not bad but they did not need to extend this game.
Another thing that was interesting is that your characters gain levels but there certain characters that are good when you get and they are always good. There are others that are useless when you get them and never get any better, it does not matter how many levels they get they always stink. I would have liked them to give you a character that starts off horrible but if you can keep them alive they become really powerful. As it is there are certain characters that just annoyed me so I pretty much killed them off.
Anyway I would really recommend this game, it was the first game on the Wii that I really enjoyed playing by myself, i.e. not a party or group game.
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