Those who haven't followed the Fire Emblem series, now 11 iterations deep, will likely recognize the game's lead protagonist Marth, who has guest appeared in Nintendo's Super Smash Bros. series. Marth's adventure in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is the standard stuff—a once peaceful kingdom is threatened by the resurrection of the Shadow Dragon Medeus, forcing our hero to rise to the occasion, take up arms against evil armies and restore peace to the Kingdom of Archanea.

The majority of Fire Emblem's trademark turn-based strategy gameplay remains unchanged, but developer Intelligent Systems has done much more than simply remake an NES title for the first Nintendo DS entry.

Can Marth's modern day re-imagining defeat his retro past?

Loved
Classic Mechanics: The core of what makes Fire Emblem so appealing hasn't changed dramatically over the years, generally for better than for worse. The turn-based gameplay, rock-paper-scissors weapon system, and ally recruiting remains intact. But Nintendo has refined the interface, adding the best improvements from the series' evolution to Shadow Dragon.

Smart Use Of The Platform: Intelligent Systems uses the DS's top screen to great effect, packing it with helpful info, from character stats to helpful single-screen tutorials. Given the DS's popularity, the developer has made the game more friendly to those new to the Fire Emblem series, making the learning curve easier than ever, adding mid-battle save points, padding the story of the original with a series of prologue chapters that act as painless tutorials.

Lovingly Crafted Presentation: The visual care that's been a hallmark of the Fire Emblem series hasn't been overlooked. Characters are beautifully rendered, as are storytelling splash screens. The excellent battle animations that make one-on-one fights imminently watchable return, but seemingly based on pre-rendered 3D models. They're still smooth, but lacking in the detail of the hand-animated versions seen in previous games. The English localization, as expected, is generally spectacular.

Online Multiplayer: Shadow Dragon adds online multiplayer via the Nintendo DS wi-fi adapter. While the appeal of multiplayer battles isn't nearly as strong as the single-player story mode, it's feature rich enough (but just enough) to make online battles compelling and Shadow Dragon replayable.

Oh, The Replayability! Over twenty five chapters, loads of characters, ample upgrade options, rare weapons via the online shop, and an excessive six levels of difficulty should ensure that your purchase of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is money well spent.

Hated
Middling, Scattershot Story: Perhaps it's the antiquated storyline or the generally humorless cast of characters, but Shadow Dragon's storytelling is probably the least attractive aspect of the title. It excels in the gameplay department, but makes for a rather bland tale, despite its various factions and political intrigue. But, hey, if you like political intrigue in your fantasy turn-based strategy games, it's here in spades.

Mid-game Confusion: While the game does a decent job of welcoming the new player to the world of Fire Emblem, it isn't as generous with its later game tutorials. The game may leave players hanging when it comes to understanding character classes (and character re-classing), and weapon forging, forcing them to *gasp* refer to the instruction manual. Veterans likely won't scoff at such trivial things, but new players may feel a bit lost.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon may feel overly familiar (and possibly overly easy) to fans who have played the localized versions of the series on the Game Boy Advance, GameCube and Wii, but the core gameplay is still compelling enough for another spin on the DS. The addition of multiplayer and touchscreen controls is welcome, as are the less punishing save mechanics, especially to those of us who aren't as tactically gifted as we'd like to be.

Intelligent Systems has done a capable job of making a nearly two-decade old adventure feel fresh, even if the ultimate result is a very good, but not great, turn-based strategy game. Consider Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon recommended to fans of the developers Advance Wars series and newcomers ready to dabble with a simple-but-deep role-playing strategy game.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon was developed by Intelligent Systems, published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS, released on February 16th. Retails for $34.99 USD. Played campaign to completion, tested online battle modes.

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I'll likely have to forgo that obsession Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, scheduled to move six spaces forward to retail next week. Since I'm planning on reviewing the Nintendo DS game over the course of just a few days, someone's going to have to give up the ghost.

Take solace in the expected heavy losses with new shots of the Intelligent Systems developed game.

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While all that was making my head explode going on, I also got the chance for some quality time with Mirror's Edge and Gears of War 2. Oh, and I also got my hands on NXE - it was pretty sweet.

I'm going to go feed on something else now - preferably pizza. Fahey got me stuck on pizza.

Shadow Dragon is Marth’s chapter of the Fire Emblem story, and Nintendo is relying on his Smash Bros. fanbase to overcome the 18 year gap between Famicom and DS. The game has got the full music/graphics makeover going for it, along with a pretty spiffy localization job (somebody knows thy olde English). Alas, there’s only so far cosmetic surgery can go; visually, Shadow Dragon just doesn’t stack up to, say, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings or Wild Arms XF. The talking heads cutscenes are pretty enough, but the Battle Chess-style fighting animations and map sprites look so pixilated you could grate cheese on them.

Forget the graphics, and focus on the gameplay. I slammed turn-based gameplay in my Fallout preview (and I’m not taking it back, so nya!), but I acknowledge it as a linchpin of SRPGs. It’s also one of the biggest stumbling points for SRPGs on portable systems.

The goal of any “portable” game is that you can stop playing and put it down whenever you need to. And I’m not talking about just closing the DS; this might shock you, but there are times when you really have to turn the damn thing completely off. For SRGPs, this is a problem, because the good ones have battles that can drag out for well over half an hour. Shadow Dragon addresses this problem by adding a mid-map, one-use save point. This acts as a quicksave function, since you can usually bypass the save have one character close enough to it at any time to use it during a turn (before the nice flight attendant snatches the DS from you).

You can also use it as a halfway point to save yourself if you get owned spectacularly in the the last three moves of the battle. This is really handy, considering that Shadow Dragon practices perma-death. That’s right. You can’t revive your units at the next town. No matter how important they may seem to the story, they can die; and if they die, they’re not coming back. Also, if they’re carrying a quest item in their inventory (say, the Dragon Sword or a dungeon key), they take it with them when they die and you can really fuck yourself in a boss fight without that Dragon Sword.

Despite that casual slice of brutality, Shadow Dragon has a gentler side. You can scale back the difficulty from “merciless” to “hard” (yeah, the lowest difficulty setting is “hard” – they didn’t screw around back in 1990) and go through the user-friendly tutorial that gently breaks perma-death to you about an hour in (even Marth was like, “He’s coming back, right? Right…?!”). There are also “supplemental” chapters to the story, should you lose one too many story characters in battle. I had this super nice princess chick riding a Pegasus lead me towards her father’s castle, only to bite it at the hands of a mage halfway there. Her daddy was awfully nice about it and two cutscenes later, I had a new Pegasus-riding chick from somewhere completely different that joined my party.

A major new addition to the game is the multiplayer mode. You can choose a unit you’ve trained and go head to head against a buddy on WiFi, or – if you’re one of those “nice” types – you can loan one of your units to a buddy for them to use. I didn’t get to see this in action, but I’m told that if you loan a unit, it’s not like you lose it – it just creates a copy of it on your friend’s game for them to use temporarily. A loaned unit will generate XP for the borrower only, I guess (lame), but if you’re too lazy to train your own units in the arena, unit loaning sounds like a good deal.

A lot of care and attention went into bringing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon to the DS. It may not show in the graphics, but it’s dead obvious from the moment you start playing, whether you played the original or not. The Marth factor might only matter to Smash Bros. fans (and there’re four brand new prologue chapters for your back story fix); but SRPG fans owe it to themselves to give this game a go.