Shadow Dragon brings the most refined gameplay Fire Emblem has ever seen, but shoddy story telling show the game's age.
Shadow Dragon's story is a bit more original than one would believe. Prince Marth is forced to flee from his kingdom when war breaks out. His family sacrifices themselves for Marth's flight. Swearing a vengeance, Marth leaves his kingdom for years before beginning his quest to recapture his kingdom and defeat the one who sparked the flames of war, the Shadow Dragon. While the story is a bit cliched at times, the issue is that the game lacks plot development, something that the series has taken great pride in, especially in the past four installments.
Battles have little to no pre-war discussion, so the player never really fully understands who they are fighting, or why. Basically, an short skit informs the player where they are going and they are thrown into battle. The later chapters do alleviate this to a small extent, but even then the lack of text is astounding considering the other titles. That is not to say that the text is poorly written, because what is there is fluent colloquial and surprisingly sound.
Characters suffer the same fate as the story. Marth is the only character that has any visible identity. Virtually everyone else, aside from a few supporting characters and villains, has no personality. In the early chapters, everyone has at least some development, but everything stops after the prologue. From Chapter 1 on, almost every single character joins Marth's army with only a few sentences. Some characters join and never even have one line in the entire game, making them feel expendable. The player will not feel any attachment to most characters, and since certain characters can only be unlocked by meeting certain requirements, those being that the player has to have a certain number of recruits (generally being much lower than the amount of characters that can be recruited), any incentive to even keep these characters is dissolved.
Shadow Dragon may be lacking in the story department, but the gameplay is anything but. Shadow Dragon has the most refined gameplay in any Fire Emblem game hands down. Touch screen controls add speed while the traditional set up allows precision. Both can be used at the same time, or one can be disabled at the player's discretion. The player now has the ability to 'lock' a single enemy's or multiple enemies' attack range by pressing the A button when the cursor is over said enemy or enemies. The X button can be used to have all enemy attack ranges visible at once as well, a helpful addition when in larger, more open maps with enemies with a large attack range. The DS's two screens help keep the battlefield uncluttered with the top screen displaying stats of a single unit or the overall match up between the enemy and allied forces, another welcome feature. A few key commands are missing however. The Rescue command is nowhere to be found and only Marth can visit villages, which really leaves Marth at a disadvantage for gaining experience.
Leading up to battle, Shadow Dragon uses the Path of Radiance home base feature. The ability to merge weapons of the same type is now available, a much needed feature that has long evaded the series. Players can purchase weapons (of low quality) at the armory and purchase basic necessities at the shop. Another feature borrowed from Path of Radiance is the Forge allowing players to create custom weapons, but the Forge in Shadow Dragon really serves more as a weapon editor than an actual forge, because the forge uses items already in the player's possession. The most interesting addition is the option to change a character's job. For example, at the beginning of the game Marth's army will consist entirely of cavaliers and fighters with a few others thrown in. Not exactly diverse. But since there are three fighters and no mages, changing one of them into a mage might be a good idea. Not to worry though, stats are altered to fit the new role, but at higher levels the stat alterations will not matter. On a side note, the Resistance stat growth is absolutely dreadful all around. Most non magic characters will be lucky to gain 3 Resistance stats by the time they have reached 20/10, something that makes planning out that online battle team a bit more difficult.
Online features are a bit more expansive than one would expect. For battles, players select 5 units and go into a flat out death match against their opponent. Battles support voice chat, so there is some personality not found in the campaign. An interesting online function is the online shop. Players select a file to use for purchasing and then gain access to some of the games more powerful and exclusive weapons, with the available weapons changing daily. Overall the online is a solid start for Fire Emblem's first venture into cyberspace.
On the technical side, Shadow Dragon pulls an interesting move away from sprites. The graphics are some sort of pseudo-cell shading (in battle that is) that really does not do the game much justice. While they are not ugly, they just do not seem fitting for a game like Fire Emblem. They do run smoothly though, and aside from lacking facial features the character models are detailed with crisp, vibrant colors.
On the audio side, Shadow Dragon falls short of delivering the highest quality music. The music is still pleasant and fitting, but nothing really sticks out and is not the most memorable either. The soundtrack is fairly large and is available for another listen in the sound room after completing the campaign.
Overall Shadow Dragon delivers a solid strategy experience. While some of the series' features were lost in translation, Shadow Dragon introduces more and improves on just about everything else. The story is uncharacteristically weak and the character development is about as deep as modern music, i.e. not. In short, Shadow Dragon brings the most refined gameplay Fire Emblem has ever seen, but shoddy story telling show the game's age.