How the original Fire Emblem reminds me of my lost nobility
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (1990)
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (1990)
I know you never believe me when I come out with things like this, but I am actually descended from nobility. That’s right: I have blue blood. And you may well be wondering, if that’s the case Burkey, then why is it that you’re tight with money? Why were you on the dole? Why do you never exercise any kind of power? And why are you not inbred?
Well, perhaps some people would contest that last one. But I have a perfectly good answer to every one of these spiky questions, and unfortunately it’s that old devil at work again: organized religion.
You see, and by all means go and read up about the Burke and De Burgh families, my ancestors were all Catholics, and they owned more than one lavish, God-fearing estate in County Galway. Until of course, Cromwell and those awful Brits came knocking, and took the land right off us.
They told my ancestor, Richard Burke, that he could keep much of his land, if he would only convert his religion from Catholicism to Protestantism. That sounded like a great deal to me. I know this was back in the 17th century, but why wouldn’t you trade away your religion in order to hang on to your enormous gaffe?
Well, of course he chose poorly, and decided to stay as a Catholic. Thus he lost his land, probably lost his head along with it, and sent his children into hiding. And now look, three hundred years later, I’m potless. I have to write these things just to make ends meet.
Just kidding about that last part. I suppose it’s a Sliding Doors moment, isn’t it? If he hadn’t been stubborn about which Bible to read, maybe his choice would have resulted in crucial deaths further down the family tree. Maybe hanging onto Catholicism saved him, and by extension, me. I doubt it, but maybe.
That’s the butterfly effect, isn’t it? It’s quite possible that the only reason you and I are even here is because of the Second World War. Impossible now to know how things would have turned out for me, if old Cromwell had fallen victim to consumption. But that’s how close I was to being landed gentry, to living a life of leisure.
I could have been playing croquet and squash all day, whatever they are. Maybe some polo in the afternoon, whatever that is. Generally I could have avoided being a working man, and instead been that aristocratic eccentric layabout, with no responsibilities for the rest of my days.
Well, once I found out what happened to my family, I was not happy at all. I wanted to get my land back, my kingdom back, you know, that which was rightfully mine. There’s a lovely mansion in the country somewhere that should at least partly belong to me.
Maybe half of it could go to my brother, but it should be in our possession anyway - that’s my birthright, and old Richard traded it away. My guy from three hundred years ago should have considered the implications it would have on me, even if his alternative was death. Or a disappeared wife and kids. Or a slightly fiery horse stable.
This is why I strongly sympathise with Marth, protagonist of the original Fire Emblem on Famicom. He’s also lost his kingdom, the kingdom that will one day be his, as the crown prince. Understandably, he wants to get his land back, because you don’t take muggery like that lying down, do you?
None of us knew who the hell Marth was until many years later, of course, just like I wasn’t a well-known figure in the 1600s. That doesn’t stop me from complaining about it, of course. Marth did announce himself on the world stage, when he showed up in Super Smash Bros. Melee for the GameCube.
Everyone outside of the land of love hotels wondered who on earth he was, where he came from. Well, these days you can’t move for Fire Emblem, and indeed this game has had a few remakes, including an eventual localisation on Nintendo Switch.
If you want to be a good little Catholic and play the original game legitimately, your only real choice is that version. I don’t know why you wouldn’t just play a remake, although the Switch version has a few creature comforts – obviously it’s been translated into English, and you can speed up proceedings or go back a turn, in case one of your guys gets the head taken off him, Henry VIII style.
The Switch version wasn’t free, mind, and neither is it even available for download anymore. Nintendo, in a worrying trend, made it a limited availability release. Even though you’ve been paying at least twenty Euro a year for God knows what from their Switch Online offering. ROMs, a bad online service, and Tetris 99. Well, perhaps that last one is worth it.
I can understand why they hit us with a re-release of the first game, though. God knows this game really did need some quality of life improvements. Still, Nintendo don’t tend to deviate from their earliest visions, and this game codified a lot of what the Fire Emblem series is all about, particularly the permanent death feature. But whether you play the Famicom original with a hooky fan translation, or the dulcet text tones of Nintendo, this is a pretty tough game to get your head around.
It’s not as easy as Advance Wars and its bazookas, another series that’s been around on Nintendo consoles a lot longer than we think. You need to use your noggin in Advance Wars, but it’s still easy enough to get to grips with. You don’t have stats, level ups, items or towns. You’ll get this and more in Fire Emblem - by NES standards, this is quite a complex game, and it’s pretty easy to get it wrong.
There are a lot of things in Fire Emblem 1 that you simply won’t understand, whether in English or Japanese, and by the end of it, you shouldn’t be too surprised to lose all your units along with your land. That’s probably what happened to my old ancestor way back when. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate him for what he did to my legacy.
These days, I’ve gotten into Fire Emblem, but trying to start the series from its very first game, which I always like to do, was quite rough. I had to break my way in, though, because I was starting to look gauche. When I tried Fire Emblem 1, however, I was major risk of boaking it back up.
Picture this scene: you’re on holidays, or even just in some “exotic” eatery. And suddenly, peer pressure mandates that you must eat some wildly foreign foodstuff, the likes of which you’ve never seen before, not even on the floor on a typical Saturday night.
All eyes are on you as you quiveringly cut off a piece and raise the fork, or spoon if you should be that unlucky, to your mouth. It touches your sweating tongue, and your brain makes the calculations at hyperspeed, and it’s not one bit happy - it knows what’s about to happen.
The hue, the texture, the smell, the consistency, the thickness, it all looks deeply wrong. A dramatic chord strikes, the Inception foghorn if you want to be cliché, as you finally put the piece of food into your comically slack mouth, and things calm down again.
Now for the taste. And because your brain is still in overdrive, its subordinates, the taste buds, can give you one of two polar opposite readings: it’ll either be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever tasted, in spite of its rough exterior, and you’ll sigh with relief and break into a nervous smile as all of your fellow restaurateurs cheer and break into a melodramatic clap.
Or, conversely, you may momentarily embarrass yourself and the assembled company by spitting that bolus back onto the table at rocket speed. But at least you can proudly sit back and say you were right.
Well that’s what it was like for me, playing the original Fire Emblem. People tell me this series is the best thing since sliced bread, despite all appearances, so it must be true. I’m expected to come up smiling and toe the official line. And if I spit the game back out onto the table, I become the subject of tutting, frustrated muttering, even outright abuse. Suddenly I’ve let everyone down, just so I can “be different.”
Well, at least I tried with Fire Emblem 1, but it didn’t end so well, I’m afraid. The permanent death aspect is what this series is most famous for, and I knew I’d fall foul of it a hundred thousand times before good tactics, or more accurately good save-stateing, would spare me. Unfortunately, I’m just not the master strategist I like to think I am.
Though the question I’d ask is, who on earth was an expert tactician in front of their Famicom in the year 1990? I hadn’t even been born, while there are Henrys, Edwards and Georges out there who became Kings and commanded armies, straight out of the womb. Whereas my blood is, I dunno, whatever the polar opposite of blue is. Red, I suppose.
30 June 2023