From Mario to Pikmin to Xenoblade, Nintendo spent much of 2020 filling its newest system with old games. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is presumably the last, and arguably the most fascinating, of Nintendo’s retro offerings for the year. Finally, Americans can purchase an official English version of the game that kicked off the beloved strategy-RPG series. This is a vintage NES game, not a modern Nintendo Switch game, but Fire Emblem’s debut is strong enough to satisfy old-school collectors and contemporary players, alike.
Sacred Text
Nintendo’s first trailer for Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light captures many American players’ first experience with Fire Emblem: They played as Marth or Roy in Super Smash Bros. Melee, and were utterly baffled by these foreign Japanese characters. In fact, the first Fire Emblem game that came to America in 2003 was actually the series’ seventh game. So, even though the franchise now regularly releases in the West, that still leaves us with six games as total question marks, including the original adventure of its inaugural hero, Marth.
Shadow Dragon receives a full English translation for this Switch re-release, but the NES game’s limitations mean the story can’t be as lavish as more recent entries. You simply save your home kingdom from an evil dragon. Despite the game’s 8-bit origins, the script still features the character and charm you expect from Nintendo’s localization. I understand why Caeda, Navarre, Tiki, and other co-stars became popular fan favorites, and why Marth himself is a hero king of legend to this day.
Shadow Dragon actually received a complete Nintendo DS remake a decade ago that did launch in America, but having not played that game I can’t say how closely the two scripts compare. For another comparison, Nintendo released the original NES Mother game in America for the first time as EarthBound Beginnings in 2015, but that game was already translated in its day before being shelved. Don’t let this raise your hopes for Mother 3.
A Limited-Time Legend
Much like Super Mario 3D All-Stars, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light’s re-release celebrates an anniversary. The game first launched in Japan in 1990. Also like Super Mario 3D All-Stars, for whatever inexplicable reason, Nintendo plans to stop selling Shadow Dragon at the end of March 2021.
I can understand only making a limited number of the fancy physical special editions, complete with a replica NES cartridge and fake alternative universe Nintendo Power magazine. However, arbitrarily delisting a digital version of a game continues to make no sense, and I hope there will still be a way to buy this game in the future.
It’s also curious that Nintendo treats this NES game as its own $5.99 release, instead of including it with the other NES games that come with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Some games in that subscription are also special releases, like Star Fox 2 or remixed versions of Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, so it’s not like Shadow Dragon wouldn’t fit. With this standalone release, Nintendo almost returns to the Virtual Console-style of a la carte retro game sales.
Master Plan
By releasing the first Fire Emblem game to a wider audience, it seems like Nintendo wants to retcon the franchise as a piece of its history just as important as Mario, Zelda, or Metroid. If that’s the intention, then it’s a success. Playing this game reveals how much of what makes this franchise so wonderful was right there from the start. Marth’s turn-based tactics battles feel as foundational to their genre as Mario’s platforming, Link’s adventures, and Samus’s exploration.
Shadow Dragon wastes no time plopping you onto a board with a handful of units and numerous enemies. You strategically manage your units’ class, equipment, and abilities to effectively deploy them in battle. Normal knights have great defense, but poor mobility. Pegasus knights can fly around the map with ease, but go down quickly when sniped from a distance by enemy archers. Swords beat axes, axes beat lances, and lances beat swords. All weapons break if not eventually repaired. Magic spells introduce their own complications.
Units that survive grow stronger with experience, but if they die then they’re gone forever. Unlike its military-themed sibling series Advance Wars, Fire Emblem wants you to invest in your units as real people in a fantasy world, not disposable weapons. That’s the “RPG” half of this strategy RPG.
Fire Emblem is an infamously brutal series, although, in this case, the primitive sprites made me less attached to the characters and more willing to sacrifice them. Newer entries ease players in with casual difficulty modes that turn off permadeath. Shadow Dragon doesn’t go that far, but the emulator lets you create save states and rewind your turn indefinitely to correct mistakes. You can also crank up the speed if you get tired of seeing the same battle animations.
Aside from the English script and new save features, though, this is very much the first Fire Emblem. Don’t think this is anything more than an NES game, a high-quality NES game, but still an NES game. Visually, maps can only change so much over the lengthy campaign, and it can be hard to distinguish units at a glance. You won’t find Fire Emblem: Awakening‘s romance options or Fire Emblem: Three Houses’ boarding school drama. While this can feel like a step back, I actually found the greater emphasis on pure tactics refreshing. If anything, Shadow Dragon feels more at home with chess, shogi, and other classic strategy games in Clubhouse Games.
Roaring Flame
As someone who mained Marth in Smash Bros. for many years, Fire Emblem has long fascinated me. The newest games are rich, outstanding strategy-RPGs in their own right. However, with Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light ,you don’t just get a great (if old) game, you get the long-awaited missing piece in this franchise’s history.
