We Will Reclaim This Land: Thoughts on Fire Emblem Path of Radiance
Recently, I’ve been playing games in what are basically little “syllabuses” where I’m playing either a specific genre or series in bulk. This allows not only for myself to get a really up close look at how design progressed but it also makes me a bit more aware of the periphery things like the current state of the fandom. One of the most recent collections of games I’ve played was dungeon-crawlers and while I want to eventually write something here about some more of the fantastic games I’ve explored in that genre I want to write about my second syllabus: Fire Emblem.
I'm no stranger to the series. I covered a lot of the games which were released in the 2010s during my time as a journalist and have played many of the older games. I didn’t cover Three Houses much when that released; that was the job of my peer Gita Jackson and I think it was the right choice for the moment. That was a game really defined by online fandom in very important way and having someone really good at covering online fan ecosystems was pretty important. It was a recent itch to play and talk about Three Houses (and the musuo spin-off Three Hopes) that eventually turned my gaze back to the rest of the series. In particular, I wanted to cover a few blindspots I had. One of the biggest are the games set in the world of Tellius: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. The games preceded the lightning-strike success of Fire Emblem Awakening and while they have a good reputation, I missed them when they were released. Low sales and a limited stock of physical copies meant that I never really grabbed copies when I could. This was a bit of a mistake! The Tellius games have a pretty strong reputation and after playing Path of Radiance I can see why. This game rules. While this was not the sharpest game from a tactics perspective, the caliber of writing and world-building in this game puts pretty much every else in the series to shame. So let’s talk about a young man named Ike and how his stumbling into the wrong place at the right time alters the course of history…
Humble Beginnings
Ike is not a lord. He is not a prince or would-be leader of a national alliance. He’s not, at least for now, someone destined to swing a holy blade against the force of darkness. Among Fire Emblem protagonists, this made him something of at outlier until the arrival of Byleth in Three Houses. But beyond being a commoner, Ike is truly a rookie. His father Greil leads a respected mercenary company but Ike’s a trainee and only now joining his peers in the field. This modest background is key to his character but also helps elevate the early game experience in Path of Radiance, which stands now among my favorite early games in the series.
Fire Emblem tutorials are fairly inconsistent. Of particular note are the tutorial processes of the Game Boy Advanced games which came before Path of Radiance: Blazing Blade and Sacred Stones. Blazing Blade was famously the first Fire Emblem game to be released in the West and as such it features a lengthy (and on first playthrough) mandatory story with Lyn, a young woman from a Steppe tribe who is secretly the daughter of of a noble lord. It’s an okay story with a likable lead character but it holds your hand quite a bit to the point of functionally limiting your available options on certain turns. Sacred Stones isn’t quite as restrictive but it funnels players through a series of very small maps that often contain narrow choke points; these maps come off feeling perfunctory. Now! Some of this is understandable given the worldwide release but also because our protagonists in these games are relatively sheltered people. But they also assume very little of the player and I think that’s a mistake. Path of Radiance tutorializes combat heavily but this feels particularly justified as Greil is obviously training his son to one day assume command of the company. But while you’re often given scenarios with pretty clearly expect solutions, the combat situations open up much sooner. This is helped by the fact that while Ike and some of his fellows are young fighters looking to make a name for themselves, he’s also paired up with a few higher durability units that provide safety from mistakes. Important among these units is Titania, who fulfills a role as the “Jagen” of the game. This unit archetype, named after an aged cavalier in the first Fire Emblem game, is meant to be a high power unit that can carry the early game before statistically falling off. Titania doesn’t fall off! There’s downsides to this; part of the reason these units are meant to fall off is to give incentive to train up “project” units but there are upsides insofar as she can address key threats in a way that allows players to make a few misplays without forcing a hard reset of a map. In this way, she’s a bit like Sacred Stone’s Seth but whereas Seth is so good that a prime strategy of that game is “deploy Seth and rush your objective” for the entirety of the game, Titania’s role isn’t necessarily to complete the game on behalf of the player but rather act as a bulwark against things like sudden enemy reinforcements. This is a game full of strong units and easy ways to level favorites (we’ll talk Bonus EXP later) so you don’t need Titania in quite the same way that you really need Seth in Sacred Stones. She can be replaced or simply remain deployed to serve as a corrective factor against a map’s surprises. There’s a map in the early game which highlights the strong structure. A training patrol in a field is interrupted when Ike and his gang stumble on a woman in need of help. The arrival of troops from the empire of Daein complicated factors; Daien has just declared war on nearby Crimea and the mercenaries are mistaken for enemy soldiers. This map is a mostly open field where the mercenaries are deeply outnumbers but there’s both a thicket of trees that provide protection and the field itself is ideal for Titania since she, as a calvary unit, excels in that terrain. The result is that you’re able to collect your allies into a well-organized unit (Ike at the head, his mage buddy Soren in the rear with a healer companion in tow) while Titania can move easily to rout an enemy pincer attempts. Pretty cool! It’s a serious situation on a map with a lot of free movement space. There’s an “intended” solution which helps players learn the value of terrain advantages as well as crafting makeshift squads. You have the ability to avoid getting swarmed thanks to Titania but still have chances to train Ike and your mages. And it also leads us into the Actual Plot of the game…
Golden Age
The woman which Ike and his comrades have rescued is Princess Elincia, the secret daughter of Crimea’s ruler and now perhaps the only living person with a claim to the nation’s throne. There’s some debate among the mercs (chiefly Soren, their sullen tactician) but they eventually agree to be hired and escort Elincia to the neighboring kingdom of Gallia, where she might safely plan how to retake her country. This marks perhaps my favorite stretch of the game. You have a very limited number of units, are almost always outnumbers and more importantly you lack access to the convoy for a long time. In Fire Emblem, having a convoy is required to have access to merchants, blacksmithing, and other features that allow you to overcome limitations. A low strength unit in certain games where these features are available early can overcome that weakness with a weapon forged at the blacksmith which might bear more strength or critical hit chance. In this portion of Path of Radiance, you’re not really able to do this.
Additionally, this is a game with item durability. Eventually, you will use your weapons through overuse if you’re not careful. Without being able to repair or restock gear easily, there’s a few great things that happen. The first is that you’re given incentive to diversify your attacking party members so as not to weaken a single unit's weapon but the second is that you’re taking a lot of durability loss regardless and this really helps you feel like a unit on the run from greater forces. Another game famous for this is Thracia 776, which I intend to play down the line. In that game, funds are very limited and because you’re essentially a guerrilla force you have to steal items from enemy units or else capture them and take their gear afterwards. Path of Radiance isn’t this demanding but the early game sprint does often feel desperate. Which fits the story! I’m gonna talk about the story tone later but it’s hard not to play this section of the game and not see the long shadow of Berserk. There’s something of a reverse “Golden Age” arc happening here. In that story, the mercenary Band of the Hawk enjoys great martial fortune and eventually noble patronage before eventually needing to end up on the run. Here, we work in reverse. Ike and his friends start on the run and eventually work towards that ennobling and more traditional war phase. The Greil Mercenaries, comprised both of fresh faces and cynical newcomers, feels very much like that initial cast of misfit warriors from Berserk. Some are even craven enough to leave you after Ike’s father dies! It’s a wonderful mix of overwhelmed idealists and self-serving malcontents and I appreciate that the game allows this group to make mistakes and give some of the pretty real flaws. Future games really strive to pack your team with Very Good People but Path of Radiance understands that it’s both shared ideology but also just stroke of luck material circumstances that bond people. There’s a lot of reasons someone might take up a sword and Radiance allows for varied character motives here. Path of Radiance never feels as good again as it does in this initial arc. There’s a ballooning number of amazingly capable units, more consistent influxes of cash, and more options for answering tactical challenges. Some of this is tied to a very unique system which both helps players immerse themselves in Ike’s shoes but also upends some of the game’s balance…
Here’s Your Bonus!
Path of Radiance has many factors that make it an easy game and among these is the fact that pretty much every unit has sufficient stat growths to outclass the enemies in the game. That by itself isn’t a problem; it actually means that you can invest in pretty much every character and see good returns. This pairs with another system that has a lot of upsides but also some problems: Bonus EXP.
Completing maps expediently or fulfilling special criteria nets you a cache of experience points which you can freely feed to whatever unit you want back at your base between chapters. This is pretty neat and I think there’s a lot of benefits. The first is the most obvious: if you plan your bonus experience spending properly, you are able to use pretty much any character you want. This can range from mostly average characters that you like but can do well when given that EXP (shout outs to my girl Nephenee!) but it can also mean quickly powering up obviously good units right away. Marcia, a pegasus knight, joins you early in the game but likely has some deficiencies compared to some of the mercenaries you’ve trained up because her level is a bit low. This is an immediately solvable problem if you spend Bonus Experience. Fliers and other cavalry units are very strong in Path of Radiance and being able to leap over that stat deficit to make Marcia equal to your other units or even spend extra points to hyper-level her takes very good unit and readily turns her into possibly your best soldier without the need for a training process. This kind of flexibility is something the series adopts much more earnestly in later games where not only can you power level easily but you have a lot of ways to reclass pretty much any unit be it through support bonds in Fates offering access to a partner’s jobs to the open-ended instructional format of Three Houses. All of that starts here with Bonus EXP enabling fast character growth. This makes Path of Radiance a very approachable game where you can play with your blorbos! We all love that! Thankfully there’s no reclassing in Path of Radiance. So each character retains their unique role and so unit identity doesn’t erode even if the play has a lot of freedom in how they might boost a unit’s level to meet the challenge of a specific map.
On the downside, you *do* remove the training process and that can rob certain characters of an “arc” backed up by the game’s mechanics. Take Donnel from Fire Emblem Awakening. He’s your villager unit and starts with bad growth but can turn into a great soldier if you train him. In that game, you need to level him once in his intro chapter or he doesn’t join you. This is takes a bit of tactical work; you need to protect him and set up situations where he can land killing blows but the narrative result of that level up is that he gains confidence. The player is also given a sense of what’s ahead for them if they want to train Donnel further. It won’t be easy but his various skills and big level ups are appealing. In Path of Radiance, you can bypass this work with Bonus EXP. A hypothetical “Donnel” could join your squad and you don’t need to act out the story of fielding him and training him. If you have the bonus points available, you could immediately turn him into a buff dude. So while Path of Radiance gives you flexibility, it does this at the cost of allowing the mechanics to build a story.
However! Bonus EXP does help characterize Ike because more often than not you get the best bonuses for completing a map in a way that aligns with his character. Let’s take this map here. Which is so interesting, I knew I needed to grab a screenshot for this blog.
It’s a later game map some after Ike has become the commander of the Crimean Liberation Army. He’s a bit more seasoned now and the war had dragged on into a pretty bloody affair. An enemy and his squad have fled into a nearby temple and have taken the clergy hostage. The goal here is to defeat the boss but he’s behind tons of clerics that he’s using a meat shields. The player could simply chop through everyone but that’s not really in character for Ike so the game grants bonus experience for everyone you save. What do we do? In Path of Radiance, it’s possible to shove enemies or allies so long as their weight doesn’t outnumber your character’s own value by a certain threshold. The clerics don’t have high weight values so a very simple option here is to attack the armed soldiers but shove the priests out of the way in order to reach the boss with as little bloodshed as possible. Alternatively there is an enemy sage who drops a “Bolting” tome. This magick spellbook can potentially hit enemies up to ten space away from you. If you have a suitable mage, you can grab the tome and give it to them and then attack the boss from far away without necessarily needing to go through the trouble of shoving the clerics. So you have multiple solutions and at least two of them are make sense for Ike in this moment. He’s not the kind of guy to cut down hostages. And if you commit to the character and find a way to avoid that (which is to say if you engage in a bit of roleplaying) then you are rewarded with even better experience gains than if you massacred everyone. This is really great! So! Bonus EXP creates some issues because it removes certain mechanical “arcs” from some characters but it can effectively put you in the main characters shoes and even give you a pretty nice smattering of experience points for doing so. These extra experience points flatten the difficulty somewhat but I think I’m okay with it given that the objectives for gaining the bonuses themselves tend to smash mechanics and narrative together in interesting ways. Because, hey… this game has a really great narrative and tone?
Love the Subhuman Self
Let’s first make something clear: on the broad strokes there is nothing happening in Path of Radiance that hasn’t been done elsewhere in the series or really anywhere else in fantasy works. You have an evil empire on the march, a princess in hiding, magick spells, fantasy racism, and more. All the hits are here and that can be to the game’s detriment at a glance. It is in the telling that the story shines and that’s both because it takes all of the things seriously but only to a point. Path of Radiance knows we’re dealing with some well-trodden fantasy but it elevates through the quality of the dialogue itself. When you write a fantasy story, there’s often a pull to be very general in how you write characters. They serve more as semiotic than as people. Which can be fine. I also love it when the lost prince raises his sword and reclaims the kingdom. But Path of Radiance avoids (mostly!) these bromides in favor of people who, in spite of grand circumstances, talk to each other like real people might. They bicker and debate their next moves, struggle to adjust their language as they learn certain terms are offensive, and generally react to their situations as you and I might. If we were also wyvern riders or lightning sages, y'know? The secret sauce here is undoubtedly the game’s protagonist whose humble backgrounds and general discomfort at ceremony allows him to cut to the heart of the matter of most scenes. Ike’s arc is mostly about seeking the mysterious Black Knight who killed his father and balancing his urge for revenge with the needs of his army. That’s a good core conflict but the thing that makes Ike really shine as a protagonist is that he doesn’t really have time for the intrigue and backstabbing of nobles. For instance: at one point in the story, Ike and Elincia have travelled from Gallia to the much larger theocratic empire of Begnion in order to ask their aid in marching on Daein. When Elincia is brought before the nation’s young leader and her cohort of senators, they make a show of doubting Elincia’s claim of royalty, forcing her to essentially beg and prostrate herself for their aid and acknowledgement. Very shortly after this, those gathered reveal that they already knew Elinicia was who she claimed. Ike doesn’t stand for this. He stands firm and calls out everyone in the room. “You continued to humiliate her for your own entertainment? For some game of words and wits? …with nowhere to turn, she endures mortal danger and terrible heartbreak to reach your door. And you laugh at her? Where is your decency?” It is a defining moment for Ike and one made possible because the writers really asked “How would a real person respond here?”
This quality of writing, this ability to really have people talk to each other like real folks might, also helps elevate what could have been a problem: this is a game that wants to talk about racism. It’s not quite central to the core plot of Elincia’s campaign to reclaim her homeland but one of the defining features of the setting is that there’s two kind of people: beorc (humans) and laguz (“beast people” of various different types) and there is a great ongoing tension between the two. Fantasy racism is a tricky thing and it doesn’t always land. This is often because the metaphors get stretched. Being a mage in Dragon Age can be shorthand for a great deal of things and while that wide applicability is partly the point, it can make for some awkward comparisons. Path of Radiance keeps things simply in the sense that there’s less attempts at connecting the matter to specific real world realities and while that runs the risk of minimizing the seriousness of the subject matter, it’s again the quality of the character writing that allows it to avoid being juvenile. Take for instance Jill Fizzart, possibly one of the best written characters in the game. Jill is a wyvern rider from Daien who joins Ike’s group first because she gets dragged into one of the game’s many battle scenarios and it’s better for her survival to stand with Ike even if he’s the enemy but she stays around and grows a lot. Daien is particularly bigoted towards the “sub-human” laguz and Jill is a product of the environment. Through exposure to the many laguz characters in our army, we get to see Jill change her mind on the matter. And it’s not something that happens immediately. We see Jill chided for the language she uses and the questions she asks, we watch her talk to other folks and outline what the education in Daien teaches about laguz, and if we go out of the way to connect her to the right characters, we watch her build individual friendships. And interestingly! Jill has the potential to *fail* her journey. One level has the army face her father, a general in Daien’s forces, and if Jill confronts him without certain support thresholds met and connections made, she can DEFECT BACK TO DAIEN! This also doesn’t feel out of character. Jill is a dynamic character who can explode in many directions. Very cool. And though I just mentioned supports (which are optional conversations) Path of Radiance also has ‘base conversations’ before many missions that mostly lack special criteria to see. These often contain hints about the next mission or maybe have you visit a local town to get a special item but some of them are reserved only for character growth. So where later games might hide their most important pieces of characterization in conversations you might never see, Path of Radiance makes a point to sometimes offer a non-essential but easily accessed scene with someone like Jill so that we can see her growth happen no matter what. It’s not conditional to players taking the right steps. The grounded touch that Ike brings allows us to have a protagonist who really gets to the heart of the matter even as he struggles with his own recklessness. Ongoing conversations, which are rendered carefully and not locked behind arbitrary conditions, mean that the story can still focus on the tense relations of beorc and laguz or find time for key relationships to build. The result is a game that really seems concerned with characters be it in the writing or the manifesting of roleplaying opportunities with something like the Bonus EXP system. It’s still a pulp fantasy story at the core but there’s always a character beat happening. Either with Ike in the main story, someone in the camp, or fresh surprises on the battlefield. Some characters admittedly get left behind compared to others but more often than not because Path of Radiance is trying to find time for *someone* at any moment, there’s very few moments that don’t feel important to someone. And thus to the player! The result is a story that always finds a way to hold your attention.
It’s hard to imagine what playing this game might have been like to someone who was younger and happened to pick up a copy at the right time back in 2005. Fire Emblem wasn’t new to the west but for as much as I like the GBA, I don’t know if they’re hitting like this. Which isn’t to say that they’re bad but rather to say that I think there’s something pretty special happening here in Tellius. While the tactics in Path of Radiance are fairly easy, it maintains an epic feel by packing the game with characters who go through remarkable growth arcs. From rookie to general, outcast to queen, and much more. The over-arching story here is pretty standard and while the day still ends with Ike holding his magick sword aloft to slay the vicious emperor, the story proceeds (much like its protagonist) with a modesty and relatability that is hard to find in the rest of the series. Other games like Three Houses might arguably rendered even more complex portraits of certain characters but even that game often finds those portrayals hobbled by the ways in which the branching story chops the plot into many disparate pieces that can be hard to reconcile. Not so here in Tellius. Whether you’re eavesdropping in camp, reacting to the sudden arrival of a new unit on the battlefield, or puzzling out how to gain the best experience point gains, you are always engaging with the world and always asked to consider the world and act accordingly. This creates a really memorable game packed with really great moments in and out of combat. I’ve already pressed on to Radiant Dawn, which I’ll probably break down by chapter. And as part of the ongoing Fire Emblem syllabus I also completed Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hope and will write something else eventually. And we’ll get back to dungeon games. Oh yeah! And I’m slowly getting back into freelancing (maybe talking about a different tactics series) so that’s exciting. Glad to be dipping the toes back into things there. In general, to cut out of the high word-count bullshit: I wish I hadn’t missed this one back when it landed. Awakening might be the key for understanding our modern Fire Emblem landscape but Path of Radiance is also a pretty key text if you ever want to understand how even a pulp series like this can hunker down and create something really gripping on all fronts.
