America and every other one of those lame "English" countries had never heard of Fire Emblem until Marth and Roy showed up in Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I assume had first impressions similar to "WHO THE FUCK IS THIS CRAPPY JAP?" Of course, Marth placing in high tier in Melee and A tier in Brawl, as well as Sacred Stones and... that other game doing well in sales over here and across the pond, those insane Japanese guys over at Intelligent Systems decided, "Hey, maybe those evil capitalist Americans should know how Marth came to be." So they took the first JP Fire Emblem game, made it look more current-gen, and threw it on the DS as SHADOW DRAGON!

Now that I'm done being racist, I can dive into the review. Shadow Dragon maintains the same gameplay as its younger brothers and sisters, a turn-based, team-based, RTS. However, in comparison to the last game (for the handhelds) we Americans got, which was Sacred Stones, its a lot tougher. I was able to get through a little more then half of Stones without having a character die, but I found myself turning my DS on and off multiple times before I even cracked level 4 (No one on my boat dies. Ever.) I still find it reassuring, and the style is tried and true, so really, any changes to it would be BLASPHEMY!

A cool feature in it is class-swapping. It's exactly what you think it is, before a level, you can change the class of any character, save Marth. This makes it feel fresh, and its an easy way to get mages. Unfortunately, since you can only have so many of any class, it limits something that could have been really really fun. Also, I wanted to see how it would work if I had a team of 18 Heroes (most broken class in the game) and a lord.

And my hates of this game don't end there. The graphics look like something from the 32x. Kinda live action, but not exactly, and all the computer effects end up ugly because of it. At least the bits when characters talk to one another is good and fresh-looking, like a proper Fire Emblem game

Don't get me wrong, I like this game. Its highly strategic, makes you think, but the graphics are just so disgusting its distracting. I turned off the animations because it looks so wrong, and I know that they can do better then this. This is a game from way back when, those were great games. So... what happened?

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