I second that. I love that you cant just buy whatever you want without thinking about the long term consequences. PoR had waay to much money. Whenever you had a problem you just had to throw some cash at it. In RD you actually have to strategize and budget thinking ahead.

 Micaiahs team is naturally weaker than the other two teams who were featured prominantly in the first game. It only makes sense if you follow the story. It also can make for a bit of a challenge on a few missions in the first part and third part of the game if you dont utilize them efficiently. In most games dont you start of as fairly weak in comparison to how strong your character(s) become later on? I dont fully understand this complaint Darconi.

Soren is by far my favorite.

Titania is my second. I luvz her in real life.

Nephenee <3

And of course, Ike, he's definately my real "favorite" but he's a generic choice, so I'll stick with Soren.

As far as killing goes, Haar is too strong for too long, not to be the best in the game, imo. That movement plus strength in some of the toughest chapters is too much. 

@BengaBenga

Also, I've seen you say Soren's stat growths are bad, I think you need to do the bonus exp trick with him.

He'll max magic way early, unless you're getting really bad luck with RNG, he should max at least one other thing. Then just feed him bonus exp, he'll get a guarnteed 3 stat increases each level.

By the time he hit Arc Mage, in my game, he had 5 stats capped, including defense, and is now a rapist of any unit I got, I think he could take down Haar, honestly, easy, if Haar didn't hit and run.

^
Yeah, thanks for the tip. I'll try that.

Can someone please explain to me by the way how you can not notice you're signing something serious, not some stupid treaty, when you sign it in your own blood????

How good is the story in this game? I'm really starting to want this game, but I want Marth. :(

How good is the combat system?

Story is very good (like all Fire Emblems).
It starts of very simple and local conflict and then spreads across the continent of Tellius towards a kind of worldwar, involving different nations and races on different sides of the conflict. The cool thing in Radiant Dawn is that you see the conflict from both sides and your often forced to defeat the group you played with before. (not the actual characters, but their alliance).
After every battle their are conversations that show the politics behind the battlefield, which get increasingly interesting and complicated throughout the game.

The battlesystem is simple. You move all your characters one by one on a "checkerboard" battlefield and have him/her perform an action (attack, use item). Attacking is also done turn based, so one strike for your character, one strike for the one you're attacking (fast characters can strike twice vs. slow characters). After all your charcters performed an action it's the enemy's turn. Attacking is simply a calculation of mainly Hit percentage and Attack points, but the fact that you have a lot of different characters, with different weapons makes it a very strategical game.
Bows can only attack from a distance, magic close and far away. You have axes and spears that can be used from a range, but they are weaker than the ones that can only be used close etc. There are also weapons that allow for 4x attacks or have a high chance on a critical hit.

You have strong and weak characters in your party, but you have to make sure that you level your weak units by letting them gain experience points (mostly by attacking/killing enemies), so you can't kill all enemies with your strong units, otherwise your weaker units will be chanceless in further battles.

There's a lot more to, because everything can be tweaked and, like you can see in this thread, everyone plays a kind of different game because everyone favors different characters. There are over 40 characters available, but normally you use a maximum of 15, so you have to make choices.

As for Marth: Ike is at least as cool as Ike and Marth.
If you're not sure yet, you can probably buy the Gamecube Fire Emblem for $15,-. That one has an even better story, but the on the whole Radiant Dawn is a more extensive game (little harder as well).

Well, the story is a direct sequel to the awesome Path of Radiance on the Gamecube. I imagine as a stand alone story it would suffice, but you really can only get the most out of the story if you played PoR, but that's not to say that it has a "must've played PoR to understand it" element. The story is still quite good without ever having played the other game. It's not epic though, I'd still give it a 7.5 as a stand alone store, but the overall story for both games gets a 9 from me, and is one of my favs, the style in which its told is awesome.

If you like Ike from Brawl, you'll love him in this game, lol, from a story perspective at least.

Anyway, the gameplay is by far the best in a Fire Emblem to date. It actually lets you upgrade your units twice, which is a pretty big deal. Often, in the old games you'd get to level 20 ascended and still have several chapters to go, and feel kinda empty on where you could take your character. Now you'll struggle to reach level 20/20/20 with any and all of your units on higher difficulties, you probably won't make it with even one or any unit to 20/20/20.

The battles are also much larger and seemingly less forgiving. One mistake, as always, means a unit dies, and in this game, each unit is very important and if one dies, you pretty much are going to reset the game, because they really die in the story and are gone forever, complete with dying words.(some units die and its game over, like Ike)

There have been several times where I played for over and hour on one map, and had a character die to an enemy I didn't see, and had to reset my game. I've done this twice on one map in Radiant Dawn. It might sound harsh, but in reality that level of dedication to strategy is awesome. You will learn not to "collect your death" as I put it, and focus on winning the battle as decisively as possible without taking the risks more casual games would encourage.

The game itself is about 40 hours long on the first playthrough, but really will take a lot longer, considering your timer doesn't count resets.

The normal american mode was the Japanese hard more, and the level of difficulty at the beginning will be daunting for non-FE fans, but you will catch on quick if you're smart. If you're not, play another game, honestly, because being smart is a pre-req for this one.

Once your army finally forms up near the end of chapter 3, you will probably have developed an army of really strong units that will cruise through MOST of the rest of the game, ala Final Fantasy Tactics, but Radiant Dawn is a much more daunting game than tactics. Your focus will be to strike hard and take out the enemy as soon as its in range with multiple units, because leaving a unit alive can kill a character and ruin your map.

Enemies can miss, hit, and crit kill you in one strike, if they're lucky. You level up with RNG, or random number generation. This might sound sucky, but it adds a lot to the game, in the way of seperating which units you'll use on each individual playthrough. All in all, there are nearly 50 units to pick through the game, and they will all have different stats on each different playthrough.

That means, with the random crits, quick death, and RNG stats, you're playing an old school game with a new school feel. Not old school, N64, old school Famicom, difficult and unfair.

However, these are the best parts about the game. Real fans of anime, difficult and challenging games, JRPG's, SRPG's, Intelligent Systems, Fire Emblem, or hardcore gaming should check it out. It's a level above all of the casual games or Semi-"hardcore" games on the next gen systems. It's one of the few games out that really make me feel like I'm playing a real game, and not some fluffed up piece of hype meant to convince me that good games come along more often than they actually do.

This game is about being crafty, and careful, and plotting your movies to carefully win a chess game without losing a single pwn. I can't see anyone who actually IS a hardcore gamer, not liking this game, after actually completing it. Now, most of the kids on this website who like to pretend they are hardcore gamers, and laugh at us for owning a Wii, they'll probably hate the shit out of it, cause it's too freakin' hard.

It's only hard to dumb people though. It's "thinking" hard. If you can think and reason, you will love this game. That's the best review I can give it.

Also, who hates the Begnion nobles? I so owned them in chapter 3 when I was supposed to spare their lives.

I was like:

Rape your ass with Soren's wind spells? Don't mind if ah do!

Pardon my french. The R word will be in your vocabulary much more if you do play this game. It's the best way to describe certain characters in the english language. Just check basically any Fire Emblem FAQ, Guide, forum, or fansite, and basically the R word will be on the front page there just below the url.

Great reviews Zen and Benga.

I'll have to decide between this, GTA, and Okami.

Something told me to buy this game instead of Metriod, but I trusted Gamespots review like a dumbass.

Metroid was good, but it always gets a little puzzly and difficult towards the end. I did beat Prime 3 and thought it was the best in the series but overall, I just hate first person shooters.

On the gamespot forums, even the Wii-haters acknowledge the Radiant Dawn review is the worst review ever to come from gamespot, I think it got 70 percent of the votes for worst review, beating Tony Hawk 3, which got a perfect 10, lol.

It's generally acknowledged that the gamespot reviewer didn't actually complete Radiant Dawn, and had a bad reviewer tilt towards the game, if you'll read the review text, he contradicts himself multiple times and condemns the game for being too difficult.

A much better review is Bozons from IGN. We know he's a harsh prick reviewer and he gushed over the game.

That said, Fire Emblem trancends reviews. That's kinda like if Gamespot gave MGS4 a 6/10. It's not your fault, you didn't know it was bullshit, but I dunno how that reviewer can sleep at night.

Anyway, yeah, Radiant Dawn was generally well recieved, and most of its criticisms came as a result of it being directly developed for Gamecube(No Wii features, no graphics increase) and using the same engine as the previous game in most things, including combat, with the extra 20 levels.

This is a series that does not need to change. It's amazing, and it's ironically one of the best next-gen games out so far, yet it got lambased by gamespot for not evolving. Apparently all things commercial win out, on a site where Assassin's Creed is AAA, and Halo 3 scores a 9.5.

You don't have to listen to my review, but just know in your heart that if any review for any game ever, is bullshit, it's the gamespot review of Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, and virtually everyone at gamespot, even the mods, agree. For real reviews of this game, check IGN or another site, and hit up the Gamefaqs user review section for the game. It got better user reviews than Brawl.