Introduction

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, often abbreviated to “SD” or just “FE11”, is the first DS game in the franchise, a remake of the original Fire Emblem, and one of the least beloved games in the series.

Many fans think that, after the comparatively very complex Radiant Dawn, which included skills, third-tier class upgrades, the Shove mechanic, etc., returning to basics felt like a pretty backwards move. Add in an extremely bare-bones story, a host of characters who have literally no lines aside from death grunts, the worst requirements to get bonus chapters in the franchise (and possibly just...video games in general) and a rather poorly received shift from fancy 2D sprites to very rudimentary 3D models. The game wasn’t very well liked, and the sequel didn’t even get localized.

All that aside? I still think Shadow Dragon is a good game. It’s probably one of my least favorite Fire Emblems, but it’s a good game.

So I’m LPing it. Welcome.

What kind of game is Shadow Dragon?

The Fire Emblem games are turn-based strategy games, known for featuring pretty huge casts. That’s because, unlike games like Advance Wars, your units are not replenishable, as any characters who fall in battle stay dead forever. Your goal is not to let that happen as you use the variety of available units, classes, and weapons to complete all of the maps and save Archanea.

Didn’t you already do this?

I did the sequel, New Mystery of the Emblem/Heroes Of Light And Shadow. Honestly they look extremely similar. That’s on the Archive here: http://lparchive.org/Fire-Emblem-He...ght-and-Shadow/

Certainly not “required reading”, I wouldn’t submit anyone to that many of my awful jokes, but I’ll probably reference it a lot because I’m incorrigible.

What kind of playthrough is this?

I’ll be doing two playthroughs. The main one you’ll see will be on Hard Mode (Just basic Hard, not 2-5 stars because I am, in fact, not very good), but Hard does not include the Prologue. So the Prologue and bonus chapters will be taken from my side run on Normal. On this main run I’ll be recruiting every single character, and not letting any of them die. I also plan to mess around a lot more with the Reclass system than I did in FE12, to try and make some more interesting combinations. There are some hidden gems.

This game has a bizarre requirement to get the bonus chapters that requires your total unit count to fall below a certain threshold to unlock them. Basically you have to make your army commit mass suicide. It’s stupid. So the Normal Mode run will basically be me ramming my units into a meat grinder to unlock the bonus chapters, and then playing through those. I’ll just show off the highlights of this one, not the whole thing, so you don’t have to watch the whole game twice.

If you think FE11 is so bare bones, are you doing something else with it?

I’m planning on trying to spice up some of the dryness by adding in some bonus content from the sequel, which adds much more dialogue for the characters. I also never played the DLC maps in my last LP, so I’ll be rectifying that here, as some of them serve as pretty nice epilogues to this game to bridge the gap between it and the sequel. That being said…

Audience Participation?

Though FE11 is a very linear game, the reclassing function opens the game to a lot of fun alternate classes for units. I have a few ideas in mind, but if you’re familiar with the game and want to toss out a class+unit combination, or unfamiliar and just want me to try something out, I’ll give it a shot so long as it doesn’t cause me to get totally obliterated. Unfortunately, reclassing won’t be unlocked until Chapter 4, so you’re stuck with my decisions until then. Sorry in advance.

Sadly there are no hats in this one.

Spoiler policy?

Shadow Dragon has about the most generic fantasy plot of all time. I’m not super worried about this, especially since I’m kind of LPing these games out of order. I’m just fine with story spoilers, I’ll probably drop a few, although I’d rather not do gameplay ones. For example, saying we’re going to fight X Dude is fine. Just please don’t talk all about the map surrounding X Dude until we get there.

Update Schedule?

Nothing concrete, I try to just kinda pace it with the thread, which is code for "i do not know exactly". I'll probably be moderately paced at the start, slow in the middle, and fast at the end, because somehow that's how these all turn out.

hard 1 c’mon man

I have a hardwired fear of ballista and ballista accessories.

Fan Art

vilkacis and I were both pretty happy to see Wrys again. But fuck Knorda Market.

LordHippoman posted:

i'm sorry

vilkacis posted:

I'm not.

Vilkacis also helps you envision Camus as that guy from your Literature and Philosophy classes who wouldn't take off his ascot, but that might just be my experience.

Vilkacis also found great use for Astram, Camus, and Hardin's old art.

Camel Pimp knows Caeda rules. Everyone should. Camel Pimp also makes portrait edits and they rule.

Camel Pimp also presents the ideal Shadow Dragon.