Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (Wii)

This may be the eleventh title in the series but not an awful lot has changed since it’s beginnings on the NES in 1990. There are some minor tweaks over the Gamecube prequel, to which this continues the story, but really this isn’t going to attract any of the new audience the Wii has so successfully courted.

The most immediate and glaring lack of innovation is the decision not to use the Wii’s motion sensing capabilities. One might’ve thought that for a grid-based strategy title the use of a mouse-like cursor might be ideal but instead you are forced to use the Wiimote as an NES pad! In hindsight this mightn’t have been a bad choice as the switching between the small tiles could become quite fiddly and the fatigue factor during a 2 hour long level might be crippling.

The graphics have received a welcome update (if not as much as some might’ve expected) with some nice spot effects for the magical attacks being the highlight. The anime cut-scenes are superb its just a shame there’s so few of them.

The freshest part of Radiant Dawn comes in the alternating use of multiple armies - levelling up, recruiting and arming 3 entirely separate groups of characters. This greatly helps to maintain your interest over what is a very long game(60 hours+) as you are effectively playing 3 instances of the game. Strangely, however, you are given charge of the weakest army first and are asked to negotiate 10 gruelling levels at the beginning. This then serves to render the subsequent chapters as quite an anticlimax seeing you breeze past the enemy with a new, and much more powerful, army at your disposal. Overall the approach does work and throws up some interesting twists towards the end of the game.

Continuing on the plot of the 2005 Gamecube game is handled with the story-telling skill one would expect from Intelligent Systems with the bold issues of prejudice, racism and the horrors of war smoothly transferred into a new context with original topics of hero worship and religion also being broached admirably. This is aided by the superior dialogue and scripting that doesn’t have you skipping though the endless juvenile nonsense contained in most text heavy games. Regrettably the narrative is let down at times by some unsophisticated changes in direction that helps break the predictable flow of events but could surely be accomplished by some subtler means.

As strategy games go this is up there with the best of them, it requires solid planning and tactics whilst bound by a logical and consistent rule-set. Its difficulty, although being steep, never leaves the player feeling cheated and always leaves the opportunity for a new approach. If the genre isn’t your “cup-of-tea” then this will do little to persuade you otherwise – especially with its sink or swim initiation, functional graphics and general lack of Wii-ness.