Contest: We Want to Give You a Fire Emblem: Awakening 3DS

Posted: January 30, 2013

I'm still struggling my way through Fire Emblem: Awakening, and I'm a big believer in communal suffering. So rather than toil alone in the face of overwhelming odds, I'd like to pass the agony and ecstasy of this strategy RPG along to you, our beloved readers. As it happens, this is a simple task for us, as we have one of Nintendo's Fire Emblem: Awakening 3DS bundles on hand.

Sure, it's a mini-3DS (not an XL), but come on -- that deep blue emblazoned with the sword and dragons is pretty rad. And it comes with Awakening pre-installed, which means you can always pop open the system and have it right there to play, and curse at. I don't know, maybe that's not so good. You're likely to throw your 3DS in fury after losing a key party member at the final round of a laborious 30-minute battle, and you wouldn't want to smash a cool system like this, would you? Nevertheless, you might as well enter.

So what do you need to do to win this sweet piece of kit? It's very simple: Create a piece of awesome Fire Emblem fan art. 

"But Paaaarish," you lament. "I can't draaaaaaw!"

Hey, man. It's cool. Art isn't just illustration, you know? We'll accept any kind of fan art -- drawings, paintings, comics. Play-doh sculptures. Toothpick renditions of Marth. An animation. A tattoo. Stick figures suffering permadeath. Whatever! As long as it's creative and clever, it's all good. 

So here's the breakdown:

1. Create a brilliant piece of Fire Emblem fan art. There are no real rules aside from (a) the fact that it has to be about Fire Emblem and (b) it needs to be work-safe. This means you, BrokenH.

2. Post it in your 1UP blog.

3. Post a link in the comments of this blog entry no later than 11:59 p.m. Monday, Feb. 4.

4. Check back Tuesday evening to see if you won!

The usual rules apply: You can't win if you or someone you love works for 1UP/IGN/Fox/News Corp. And you have to live in the U.S. to be eligible.

Beyond that, let your awesome talents run rampant. And if you win, be sure to hunt me down at PAX Prime this year to Street Pass with my team, yeah?

Fire Emblem's Place in History

Posted: January 30, 2013

The Internet's consensus on Fire Emblem: Awakening, the latest strategy RPG from Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, should be hitting the ether today. Our review won't be showing up until sometime next week, I'm afraid. I've been having a doozy of an experience with the game and don't want to review it until I've spent a little more time with it -- or rather, made a little more progress with the story for the time I've invested. Thanks to all the mid-battle resets I've had to do, my actual play time as indicated by the 3DS Activity Log is about three times that indicated on the in-game clock. Alas.

Don't take my silence as a criticism of the game, though. It's tough, but that's what Inteliigent Systems was aiming for. Fire Emblem has a certain reputation to uphold, and Awakening definitely doesn't pull its punches despite the inclusion of a "casual" mode that eliminates permanent character death. Don't read "casual" to mean "toothless," though. Casual mode on hard or insane difficulty will inspire a man to perform just as many mid-battle resets as Classic mode.

I feel like Americans have a tenuous relationship with Fire Emblem, as with many Nintendo franchises that began in the 8-bit era but didn't make their way west until later. EarthBound would be the major exception, with its vocal fanbase, but otherwise it seems the seeds of true Nintendo fanaticism were sown in the NES days... or not, as the case may be. Famicom Detective Club may as well not even exist; Advance Wars has a modest following at best; and let's not even mention The Mystery of Murasame Castle.

Even though the Fire Emblem series would take more than a decade to finally limp its way into English after its 1990 debut, the franchise has exerted considerable influence over the direction of role-playing games. Specifically, strategy RPGs. You could even make the case that Fire Emblem essentially invented the genre.

Of course, no game exists in a vacuum, and that holds true Fire Emblem as well. We've mentioned before that computer and console RPGs descended from Dungeons & Dragons, which evolved from a desire to bring granular rules and adventures to tabletop war games. Video game RPGs cover the gamut of those inspirations in an impressive spectrum, with super high-level strategy titles like Civilization or those inscrutable hex-based PC games at one end and action-RPGs like Zelda and Darksiders at the other. 

I'd place Fire Emblem more or less dead center between the two extremes. At the strategy end of things, game action revolves around controlling things at an extremely high level. Units usually consist of squadrons of warriors or entire armies, dealing with the fate of entire territories and even nations. Commanding resources allows you to build structures, accumulate war machines, and recruit units to build long-term strength. At the other end of the spectrum, action RPGs put you in control of a single warrior, with resources generally taking the form of equipment and consumables that allow you to survive moment-to-moment challenges.  

Fire Emblem stood astride these formats. It combined the need to manage space and distance on a large battlefield with a focus on individual warriors. Intelligent Systems had already dabbled in strategy gaming with Famicom Wars (yes, the original predecessor to Advance Wars), but that game strayed from the classic RPG form. The individual units the players controlled were expendable mechs or platoons of soldiers, offering no significant permanence or continuity between battles. More direct predecessors existed in 1988's Laser Squad (whose creators would go on to create X-Com: UFO Defense) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Pool of Radiance (perhaps the finest digital interpretation of D&D until Baldur's Gate came along). But Pools hewed close to the old-school Ultima take on RPG combat -- positioning mattered in only the most general sense -- while Laser Squad lacked much in the way of RPG mechanics. Oh, also, they were both PC games.

Fire Emblem hit a sweet spot directly in between -- one perfectly suited for consoles, too. The role-playing elements made the game more intimate than a standard strategy game; you didn't want to protect your units for strategic value alone, but because they were characters with personalities. Plus, you'd been bringing them up from level one, so losing them would undermine all the work you'd invested in them. 

At the same time, despite its RPG flavor, Fire Emblem's battles didn't unfold like typical role-playing fights. They weren't quick, meaningless battles with low difficulty and low impact. Each encounter unfolded like that of a strategy game, playing out over 10, 20, even 30 minutes apiece. It was unlike any other RPG on the market.

Fire Emblem's unique style inspired an entire genre. Everything from Shining Force to Tactics Ogre owes its existence to Intelligent Systems' work. Pity it took so long for the series to make its way to the U.S. -- by the time Nintendo finally worked up the nerve to bring the games into English, we'd already been enjoying its descendants for years and Fire Emblem came off as seeming perhaps a little staid. 

What's the Deal With EarthBound on Wii U Virtual Console?

Posted: January 28, 2013

Last week, Nintendo annnounced a bunch of details on upcoming Wii U software, including a solid plan for the the system's take on Virtual Console. All in all, the Virtual Console service doesn't seem as bad as we'd expected -- it's limited, yes, with support for only a handful of platforms announced (including the inexplicable decision to bring Game Boy Advance titles to Wii U rather than 3DS, where they would make some degree of sense). And owners of these titles on Wii will have to pay a dollar to $1.50 apiece to upgrade to the Wii U version... but since I expected to have to shell out full price again as they've been making us do on 3DS, a modest upgrade fee doesn't seem so bad.

The magic of lowered expectations is that it then becomes difficult for anyone to disappoint you. Thanks, Nintendo!

Nintendo issued a loose list of upcoming releases (incuding a limited-time pilot program in which we can buy a selected title for 30 cents each month) for both the American and Japanese markets, and they were surprisingly similar. There was just one key difference, though: Our friends in Japan will be able to buy Mother 2, aka EarthBound for 30 cents. Meanwhile, the game didn't even get a hint of a mention for the U.S.

So that means we're screwed again, right? Japan gets this game for cheap, and we'll have to continue shelling out $200 just to play it without stealing it, right?

Substitute "Reggie Fils-Aime" for "Starman Junior" and you have the essence of the past week's worth of message board conversations in a nutshell.

I'm not sure that gloomy outlook is correct. I've seen quite a few theories about why we haven't seen EarthBound on Virtual Console -- remember, it was teased as "coming soon" in the Japanese version of Smash Bros. Melee years ago but never appeared over there -- and the one that holds the most water is that the heavy use of audio sampling and familiar popular music riffs has tangled the game in the wires of an overly timid legal department. If that's the case, those concerns would hold about as true for the Japanese market as in the U.S. If the game is cleared for release in Japan, there shouldn't be any real impediment to a U.S. release.

So why, you ask, didn't Nintendo mention it? Why didn't it get a name drop last week in the American Nintendo Direct? Why aren't we going to be able to buy the game for 30 cents?

If you have to ask these questions -- especially that last one! -- you still have much to learn about Nintendo.

If Nintendo excels at anything, it's making money by leveraging its catalog of legacy software. They know there's money to be made by satisfying the U.S. market's demands for an EarthBound rerelease. Why on earth would they sell the game to its fans for 30 cents when they know people will pay hundreds of dollars for it? Not that they're going to charge hundreds of bucks when EarthBound makes its way over, but you can be sure that if it does show up in the U.S. again -- which I consider more likely than not -- it'll happen with great fanfare, much noise, and a healthy price tag. Sure, they could sell the game for 30 cents, but the Nintendo way is to hold an ace like that close to the chest, to be played when they need to perk up their fans.

And hey, since Game Boy Advance will be on Wii U Virtual Console, maybe we'll finally get Mother 3, too. Naw, just kidding. That'll never happen.