The Binding Shield

Day 374

Holy crap, I should really consider getting more sleep. Today was stressful enough without the added anxiety of exhaustion. Still, I stayed up late for a (good?) reason--to finish Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem. I wanted to be done with it and now I am! At just under 24 hours, it's far from the longest game I've played recently, but the number of times I had to restart missions would surely inflate that duration by a significant amount. Sadly, this extra time is not recorded.

Even after beating the game, I continue to regret my decision to play New Mystery on hard mode. Not until the very end of the game did any of my characters feel powerful. This is in small part due to lower stat growths and stat caps in New Mystery compared to later games of the series, but also due to the many many enemies that had competitive stats with my own characters. This is distressing because there's frequently ten times more of them than there are of me! Granted, I have strategy and a human brain on my side, but it's often not very much help.

The level of care I had to take in many of these missions sapped a lot of the fun out of it for me--and yeah, it's my fault. I shouldn't have played hard mode. I'm sure there still would have been a number of challenging missions regardless--and I would have had the opportunity to level somewhat weaker characters on easier chapters had I the desire. Because I was playing hard mode, I was unable to level characters like Norne, Elrean, and Merric. They started out too weak and simply could not survive.

I think the Fire Emblem series has gotten a lot better over the years at fielding a roster of likable characters that are all at least marginally useful in combat. New Mystery has a decently sized roster but so many of them are absolutely useless. Pre-promoted units have traditionally not been great in Fire Emblem, but the effect is worse still in this particular entry. There were some aesthetically pleasing characters that I really would have liked to use given the opportunity, but I just couldn't. They would not have survived. 

I guess I'm expecting too much out of a remake. Intelligent Systems wasn't looking to reinvent the wheel but instead update a classic and redistribute it to a new audience--and I'm appreciative of that. If not for their efforts I doubt I would have gotten the opportunity to play New Mystery. The folks at Heroes of Shadow also deserve recognition, because without them, I wouldn't have been able to play it in English! Sadly, they seem to have fallen off the face of the Earth. It'd be great to see them work on other games in the future.