Why Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem represents the death of design
Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem (1994)
Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem (1994)
It’s very possible we’ve been rather spoiled by the wealth of apps and online services available to us nowadays. But is it my imagination, or are user interfaces and user experiences just getting worse and worse?
Strangely, it also seems that both the salaries and demand for UX and UI Designer jobs are growing like crazy. Perhaps this means that they're attempting to solve this aesthetics problem by throwing mega money at it, but I’m sorry guys, it’s all to no avail.
Take the video streaming services for example, and by this point every single one of us has hands-on experience with these. Well, you try and search for something on Netflix and you can just forget it.
The search function is slow, sometimes difficult to find depending on what device you’re on, and the movie or show you're searching for won’t be there anyway, but here’s some other slop you won’t enjoy. Great, folks, thanks for that.
Amazon is pretty bad for this, but I reckon Disney Plus takes the biscuit. And sure, by the time you read this, they’ll have updated or even overhauled it. But it’ll still be a load of convoluted graphical user spaghetti, you watch.
Seriously, good luck using the seek function on Disney Plus, or skipping to the next episode of a show if you so desired. The search feature is boggier than Goofy's old underpants. Deafies like me struggle to get the subtitles activated. And generally the whole app is dog slow. Just think of the amount of financial clout Disney have, and all you get in return is a 1990s app experience for over a tenner a month.
But it doesn't get much better on desktop internet either, as I’m sure you'll agree. Go onto any website these days, and it's cookie warnings up your wazoo, asking you if you Consent, which is always a tricky word. Consent to what exactly? Ads crowbarring themselves into random paragraphs and throwing the whole body of text off-kilter? Well, no, I don’t really consent to that. But what choice do I have?
And once you've got past that, there’s still pop-up ads; things you probably shouldn't click; things you definitely didn’t click but is still helping itself to a separate tab in your browser; videos trying to play automatically; and ads for very strange things and local MILFs in your area, and you’re never quite sure if they’re targeted ads or not.
Generally, you feel that the whole website is almost audibly creaking under the strain of trying to load up everything all at once, before trying to deliver it to your face at high speed. And my God, the amount of websites that want you to register an account these days, just so you can give all your details away. How many opportunities do you want to throw to the hackers?!
And speaking of leet hackers, the worst sites out there for user experience are the streaming ones, and I ain't talking about your family-friendly Netflixes or Amazon Primes this time. Those are legal streaming services, for those types of honest Joes who pay for digital media - not like me, in other words.
They say you can find anything on the internet eh? Well, I call poppycock on that. Just you try finding an illegal sports streaming website that won't feast on your computer with a zillion pop-up ads, twice as many as you get on a mobile phone, all sprouting from that rogue Play button that you not-so-innocently pressed. Streams like that are no good to me, Melvin - won’t you please take some pride in your illicit handiwork?
But no matter the app, just when you get used to a new UX, the bloody rules change. They know what they’re doing, I’m aware of that. Large shops and stores do it too, changing their entire layout to keep things fresh and con you into buying things on impulse.
Do the Facebook designers wonder why their platform has fallen off, though, when the Timeline feature has dispensed with things you might actually want to see, in favour of stupid videos and a billion ads? Or let’s take Reddit, inexplicably popular despite having one of the worst, most confusing designs of all time. Their experiences might improve somewhat if you download their dedicated apps, like they always implore you to. But then, how much can you polish those turds?
It seems that good user interface design is a tightrope alright, a sweet spot that ain’t easy to hit. And you better believe that the third Fire Emblem game, Mystery of the Emblem, missed this sweet spot by miles.
It’s the first Fire Emblem game on the Super Nintendo, so you might be hoping to draw a parallel between this and perhaps the Zelda series; a classic NES opener, then an off-the-wall second game, before a masterpiece on SNES. Following this trend, could Mystery of the Emblem be an all-time great game?
You gotta be joking. This is actually just an expanded remake of the first Fire Emblem game, which was also inaccessible to English-speaking players for decades, until a limited time localisation hit the Nintendo Switch
The first Fire Emblem game came out in 1990, with Mystery of the Emblem coming out in 1994; bit early for remakes, don't you think? Though I suppose, I wouldn't hit Mario All-Stars with that one if I’m being fair. This one is split into two Books, which is what the Lord of the Rings installments did as well, and they were just as much of a slog to get through.
Book 1 is a slightly abridged remake of the first game, where you follow Prince Marth and his fellow paladins, Pegasus Knights and archer cronies through many battle maps. Then Book 2 is the new story, a few years on, with lots more dialogue.
To be fair, this results in a hell of a lot of chapters to play through, about 40 in total. But it's so slow and clunky that a lot of people, including myself, simply won't last that long. It's still just too early, too primitive, that you'll be wishing for a later game in the series for every single minute you spend playing this.
There's no weapon triangle, no support conversations, no housekeeping between battles, no real twists and turns, not much of anything. Again, I hate to say that a game has aged, if even because that would imply that it one day held greatness and beauty. But let's face it, by the time we were able to play this game in fan-translated English, it had already become sour milk.
But let’s not forget that the first three Fire Emblem games have all received remakes, and they bloody needed them. This game’s DS remake (which also needs its own translation patch) renders Mystery of the Emblem thoroughly obsolete.
At least there, you’ll find access to two screens and modern UI sensibilities. Going back to the SNES, it leaves you with an awful lot to do. When engaging enemies, you won't get the damage calculation done for you, you’ll need to actually do the sums yourself.
The units move slowly, and so do the battle animations (which otherwise look good, mind you). Mercifully you can turn off all battle animations… but then you can’t see your experience gain, or what stats increase after a level-up, which will never be generous anyway.
The whole game still feels archaic, barely updated from the NES, and generally it’s a waste of your time. Forget about epic war scenes and sieges, your biggest challenge is against the cursors and the menus, requiring your full concentration at all times just to trade items, or to figure out if you'll double-attack someone. For a classic strategy game, its UI is horrendous, somehow even worse than the first game on NES. And it ruins the entire experience for me, before we’ve even got going.
Mystery of the Emblem is a Fire Emblem game still on Web 1.0, HTML 2, CSS 1, whichever looks and feels the oldest. Do yourself a favour, if you're looking to get into the Fire Emblem series, and search for a far better, latter one to start with instead. Just don’t ask me to recommend you a website for providing you with this info - we’ll both end up suffering a slow death by pop-up ad.
20 September 2024