Why should I buy Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn?

[Sullla]

Gamerace said:

I do like strategy, but not the pure strategy games where you have to deal with supply lines and crap. But it sounds like this is more pure combat. Is that true? Is it more like Buldar's gate where you can position people on the fly, pull out wounded members and lure enemies into ambushes and stuff or more like a JRPG fighting where it's a line of heros and line of enemies exchanging blows?

Fire Emblem is nothing like the Baldur's Gate line of games (which were excellent in their own way). The comparison to a chess board is much more accurate; think of it as a chess game with a huge board and many extremely specialized pieces. We refer to Fire Emblem as a "strategy" game, but it really doesn't involve much pure strategy; the game is actually almost entirely tactical in nature, like a wargame in a lot of senses. Positioning of units is incredibly important. It's not unusual to be in situations where moving a unit one tile in any direction will result in instant death.

You have some control over your party members, in terms of picking which ones are active for each mission. One of my main criticisms of Radiant Dawn is that you have far less control over your party than any previous game in the series. (It's much more cinematic/story-driven than previous installments. Many players like this, I'm less of a fan.) Any character CAN become strong with repeated use, but some are generally much stronger than others. No one is mandatory, except the hero/leader unit (but you'd want to use Ike anyway...)

I love the Fire Emblem games, just keep in mind they are very, very difficulty and frustrating. I echo Chrizum's recommendation to try the Gamecube FE game first (Path of Radiance) which is a lot less intimidating for newcomers to the series. And as an old game, it's also dirt cheap today.