| firebush03 said: Would this be a good entry point into Fire Emblem? I have PC so I can emulate whatever if there’s a better starting place. (And I recently purchased Engage & Three Houses for Switch via FB Marketplace.) |
Excellent entry point for newcomers:
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Great story
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Good art design
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Extremely easy
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Good cast of sympathetic characters
That said, it's one of my least liked Fire Emblems simply because it gets boring really fast. The start of the game is nice, but once you hit the mid game, that's when the gameplay and balancing issues start showing and the game falls apart:
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Enemies are ABUNDANT in this game, which means 70% of the time you spend on the battlefield will be watching painfully slow animations of enemies throwing themselves (and killing themselves) at your party. In later games there is QoL updates to skip enemy-turn, unfortunately not present here
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The enemy AI gets the crown for being the dumbest I've ever seen in a FE game
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Enemies have very whack stats: they are offensively weak, meaning if you have units with good defensive stats they are virtually unkillable and will run around the map killing everyone with ease (really, give some BEXP to Marcia and Jill and they will fly around the map killing everything that dares to attack them)
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…but those enemies also have HIGH DEFENSES, sometimes taking two or even three turns to finish them off (which connects to the game being painfully slow)
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Class balancing is really ass, to the point that unit quality comes down to: "Is this unit a mounted unit with a 2-range weapon?"
Path of Radiance is basically Canto-emblem (Canto is the some of the skill that allows you to move again after attacking that cavaliers and fliers have in this game)
This makes it an overall very poor strategic game, so if you are an experienced strategy gamer (Tactics Ogre, FF Tactics, X-Com, Triangle Strategy, or even other Fire Emblem games), you will likely find PoR shallow and unbalanced experience. I gave it 3/5 stars, because the story and the universe are REALLY nice, but gameplay-wise is a 2/5
