One of the few good games on GCN
Gameplay and Depth
If you’ve played the Game Boy Advance versions of Fire Emblem, you’ll be ready to jump right in here. Path of Radiance plays exactly like its portable predecessors, except it’s prettier, longer, and more complex.
In case you aren’t familiar with the formula, here’s a quick rundown. Fire Emblem is a turn-based strategy series with RPG elements. It’s best described as an Advance Wars with a dynamic cast of characters that grow and strengthen as you command them in battle. Like in role-playing games, characters in Fire Emblem level up as they fight, and they can be outfitted with various types of equipment and supporting items. There are a host of differences between Fire Emblem and other strategy RPGs, but perhaps the biggest difference is the fact that once a character dies, they’re gone for good. While it isn’t necessary to finish the game with each and every character alive, most players will find it very difficult to bring themselves to complete a mission after they have lost a living, breathing part of their convoy. As a result, they’ll resort to restarting the mission from the beginning, which can take quite a long time and can become rather frustrating. Understandably, this is widely considered to be Fire Emblem’s claim to fame, but it is also at times its biggest flaw.
Path of Radiance is built with the traditional Fire Emblem design. It is entirely single-player, and there is only one mode of play (quite the opposite of Intelligent System’s related franchise, Advance Wars). The game progression consists of dozens of missions sewn together by a series of conversational cut scenes, presented in the form of beautifully hand-drawn backgrounds and minimally animated character cut-outs. Path of Radiance also sports a handful of gorgeous CG anime sequences in order to effectively communicate the game’s more intense and memorable moments. And there are a number of those moments, as the storyline is anything but second-rate; it’s complex, emotional, and often unpredictable, and for a tactics game, it’s about as good as it can get.
To summarize briefly, you play the part of Ike, a young but highly capable warrior who is intent on following in his father’s footsteps as one of the greatest commanders in history. Early into the game, you learn of a surprise attack that devastates your homeland of Crimea. As mercenaries supporting Crimea, you decide to take up arms in support of the troubled land, only to find yourselves caught up in a much more complicated series of events shortly thereafter.
The approach the developers have taken with Path of Radiance allows the player to experience the story with as little or as much detail as he or she pleases. Of course, playing Fire Emblem has always been a highly literary and verbose commitment. There’s already loads of text to work through that is required. But there is also tons of optional content included in the form of “support conversations” that helps colorize each character’s background. Although these conversations are entirely optional, they do offer advantages in the form of status bonuses if you decide to endure them. As is the case with all of the FE games, you can also pick up optional party members by speaking to them when they appear on the map. You’ll have to be careful not to kill these characters before speaking to them, however, or else you’ll never be able to have them on your side.
Fire Emblem games also always manage to carry a huge amount of appeal in terms of gameplay and depth, and Path of Radiance is no exception. There are many different types of units, from knights, to fighters, to mages, to myrmidons, and in Path of Radiance, even some that are able to morph into animals (called laguz). Each type of unit wields its own type of weapon, and all carry corresponding strengths and weaknesses.
As you may be able to tell, the core gameplay of the Fire Emblem franchise is still intact in Path of Radiance, but plenty of new features have been added to embellish the formula. Firstly, there’s an entirely new unit type that plays quite differently from the usual humans. As previously mentioned, they’re called the laguz, and they possess the unique ability of transforming from a defenseless human-like form into powerful beasts. In order for them to transform, however, certain conditions must first be met. A special meter fills slightly each time a turn is taken or a laguz is attacked, and once this meter is full, they are able to transform at will. In their animal state, the laguz are unusually strong and agile… but it doesn’t last forever. Each time they attack, and each turn that passes, the meter depletes slightly, until it empties completely and they revert to their weakened forms. It is the planning of your battle around this cycle that adds an additional strategic element to the experience.
Another neat option that is new to Path of Radiance is the weapon forging system. It’s fairly simple: you choose a weapon to start with as a template, and then adjust the Attack Power, Hit Rate, Critical Hit Percentage, and Weight to meet your needs. The farther you adjust from the base weapon, the more money you must pay to make it happen (these things can become quite expensive). After all of that is finished, you assign your weapon a name and a color of your choice. This is something you’ll probably find yourself experimenting with more and more as you get further into the game – personally, my blue Masamune served me for many battles.
Smaller-scale additions include a shove command that allows one unit to push another one over one space. You can Order or Direct your teammates with a general strategy, such as a target point on the map (this is convenient when you don’t feel like moving all the units manually, but you need them to head in a general direction). There are also other new features, such as additional victory conditions like escape points (reach them and send out units to “escape” the battlefield and clear the map) and defense points (defend a spot on the map for a set number of turns). Battling tactfully will earn you bonus experience, which can be awarded in-between battles to any unit you choose; this helps to balance the problems with certain characters systematically falling behind in strength. And one particularly cool addition is the skills system: after collecting them on the battlefield, you can award skills to allies that, once equipped, give them the upper hand in various ways (e.g., critical hit damage cut in half). Each skill consumes a certain portion of a person’s total skill capacity, and they can be removed once assigned, but once they are, they disappear for good.
On the battlefield, things have changed a bit. For one, attack and movement ranges are now displayed automatically when the cursor rests over a unit, and it’s possible to toggle on and off an enemy unit’s possible attack grid with the simple press of the A button. This makes it exceedingly easy to maneuver your units out of range of your foe; simply switch on, simultaneously, all of the attack grids of the enemies closest to your party, and then move them so that they are just outside of that grid. This marks just one of many subtle refinements that translate into indispensable convenience after just a short while.
Other aesthetic touches help bolster the presentation of the game. Battle scenes are now fully 3-D, with the camera zooming around to and fro while the units attack one another. These scenes still seem a bit slow at times, but as always, you can simply switch them off for a much quicker but still distinguishable set of map-based animations. Personally, I found myself opting out of the drawn-out animations after just a few missions. The new 3-D battlefield is lush and filled with varying terrain, although it can become a hindrance to the gameplay at times with respect to locating your units. This isn’t a big problem, however, as you can simply hit the X button at any time to cycle to your next available unit. Also, you can rotate the isometric viewpoint slightly to the left or right with the use of the C-Stick, and the L Button toggles between three different zoom settings. The end result is a slightly more visually compicated presentation, but nothing that truly detracts from the overall gameplay once you get used to it.
Needless to say, Path of Radiance adds some truly valuable new content that helps to revitalize an otherwise seasoned formula. But it not only expands in terms of depth; it also boasts an uncharacteristically lengthy quest. Path of Radiance is a truly massive game, even in spite of the fact that there is only one mode of play. It’s quite likely that most players will spend over sixty hours just completing the main quest the first time, and many will spend far in excess of that. Couple that with the three-level difficulty selection – and the fact that the game is sufficiently challenging even on the easiest setting – and you have quite a worthwhile package on your hands.
Speaking of difficulty settings, if all of these gameplay details have your head spinning, or if you’re new to the series and are concerned that you’ll never pick up on the intricacies of this complicated series, don’t despair – the easiest difficulty setting offers regular, comprehensive tutorial segments that preface each and every new feature you meet throughout the game. They’re easy to understand, and they’re actually presented in a quick and interesting fashion… so as long as you pay attention, chances are you’ll never have to pick up the manual in the first place, even in spite of the complicated nature of the game.
Graphics
Path of Radiance’s visuals aren’t anything breathtaking, but they’re perfectly sufficient. The most important thing is that everything is clean and consistent and pleasing to the eye, and the artists have accomplished that here. Battle animations are a bit stiff (a first for the series, thanks to the foray into the third dimension), but character models are all well done, as each character comes to life with a vivid personality all their own.
Textures are adequate, and frame rates are consistently good. Hand-drawn background art and FMV cut scenes are particularly beautiful; the former often resembles something you might see in a painting, and the latter is easily of good enough quality to be packaged and sold separately (although there is hardly any of it in the game).
Sound
Path of Radiance’s music is positively fantastic. The soundtrack possesses an epic quality that is unparalleled by nearly any other GameCube game, and it’s quite possibly the best musical score in the entire Fire Emblem series, as well. While it’s comprised entirely of MIDI, it’s some of the best sequenced music I have ever heard, and the quality is so high it’ll have you second-guessing your ears.
Sound effects are equally impressive; footsteps, sword clashes, and lightning strikes all are crisp and convincing. In case you’re partial to one particular form of audio, you can adjust the music and sound volume at your leisure, something that is always a welcomed feature. There is also some sparse, yet excellent, voice acting in a few of the FMV cut scenes. It would have been nice to hear more voice acting throughout, but that isn’t a sound issue so much as it is a Fun Factor one. Again, though, the real star here is the music – it’s just terrific.
Fun Factor
Strategy RPGs that are well designed have always possessed an addictive quality that’s difficult to match. The premise of building your army individually, character by character, is infectious. The storyline also helps to keep the player interested – it’s really quite good.
The only thing that truly damages the overall fun factor here is the same problem that all Fire Emblem games share. That is, once you lose a character in battle – through just one mistake – you must restart the entire battle in order to bring them back. There are no revival potions or methods of undoing your mistake. True, this simply makes the game that much more realistic and strategic, and of course, as mentioned earlier, it’s never imperative to keep everyone alive. But most gamers will find it impossible to continue once they’ve lost a member of their army, and that nearly makes it into a necessity. Since battles often take a long time, restarting over and over when you make a mistake can be very irritating. Perhaps in the future there should be some form of character revival – albeit rare and expensive – so that this problem can be converted into an intense decision of whether or not it’s worth wasting the money to save your time.