Fire Emblem: Dream of Five Definitive Edition (Game) Review.

 

This review was completed on the first playthrough and using the 'Musain' divergent route/A Route. This playthrough as with all Fire Emblem's I play was accomplished using save states. If I play it again and finish 'Onduris' divergent route/B Route, then I may write a second review.

 

The week I played this mod was not a kind one; as a tired agoraphobic socially anxious woman, this week was full of comings and goings. Change, at its core, is a frightening thing for me; it's also necessary for things to improve. It's not like I want difficult things to happen but innately we live in a societal structure where change is hard to wrought and difficult to keep when we have better.

 

So it was this week, where everything kind of fell apart where I really tried to play and finish Fire Emblem: Dream of Five. The Definitive in its title refers to this being the fully realized version of a mod/hack made for Fire Emblem 7: The Blazing Blade, this one being realized on its sequel, Fire Emblem 8: The Sacred Stones. This granularity seems kind of part and parcel but these games, the Game Boy Advance Fire Emblems were essentially a song of my growing up; they accompanied me during a rocky part of my life and were part of a series of events that make them both special and distant to me. I've not sat to play or enjoy those games properly in years. All the little things about these games; the way a myrmidon is animated cutting, how big and chunky the Generals were, the blips of characters speaking, still in mind head years later.

 

This game, to me, feels like a Fire Emblem 9 if it had been another GBA sequel. In truth, from what I've played, what gripped me so much was not just how it felt like Fire Emblem as I remembered it, but delivered a plot and characters that felt Fire Emblem. Oblique mystics, stunningly cool Paladin ladies, political infighting and sabotage, down to unnecessary character death and smirking nobles. But it also does what the older ones tended to struggle with, at least until a further transition to 3D; more characters notably that are of different sexual orientation or of race and even body type. Character recruitment, that the younger me might've personally loved quite a lot (what if you could recruit/save a Morph from FE7?) and also, though a lot of the music is lifted from other games, the translation to the GBA soundchip and the choices for me, were quite wonderous or inspired, with the preparation screen music being my personal favourite. It does little things, granular things, either with new classes, new sprites, or these touches that just make the characters represent me or others who are vulnerable just a little more that make me go into it again.

 

It's not all perfect. Difficulty seems locked to one fixed setting and while this hack is amazing as a new Fire Emblem experience, I would not call it beginner friendly. Ironically, for myself, it started to become a lot easier to handle, but it's clear to me that an easy mode would in my personal opinion make this mod one of the best I could show to someone new to the series. Enemies feel very damage soaking and the care to avoid allowing you to grind the typical manner means that while the difficulty curve stays fixed, it's always a little harder then I think I'd like. The story itself represents realism, though there's some language that feels while realistic perhaps, incredibly harsh, such as some fatphobia against the one plus size character in a support of hers as well as some general language that's reflective again, with this in mind, of the harshness of the setting but seems very colonial that doesn't feel quite worked through enough. I am again, bearing in mind part of this is the point so I would advise sensitivity to it if you go in; the game's plot adopts a slightly more intense and stark story for a Fire Emblem; it's hard to explain as other Fire Emblem's have had incredibly dark stories, including ones on the GBA. But suffice to say, it does lean into the political cruelty and the spinelessness of dozens of people to build its plot.

 

That all being said; this experience for me is personal because by the end, it left me with a reminder of a lesson; you cannot allow yourself to be the puppet to what will make others like you, nor stay dancing to the tune of a lost era you were not even a part of, but are demanded to attend to. The game seems very heavy on two things; change with empathy, and discarding what no longer has empathy for you, but we remain attached to. That being said, that's my interpretation and it's what I'm using to make sense of things. And that's enough for me. Please go give it a play. It was a change I was happy to get lost in for a bit.