Initially, I was sure that I would not make a separate material on Fire Emblem Gaiden, but would only mention it as part of the conversation about the first part. It seemed logical – both games were released on Famicom (Japanese "Dandy"), both are turn-based tactics, and if you put two screenshots side by side, it may seem like this is one game.
The game was again released exclusively for Japan, and many years later, when games in the series began to be released around the world, fans translated it into English at least. There seem to be no archival materials about the development of the second part, compared to the first: only a couple of mentions in interviews and information that the development team has not undergone changes. So I’ll just talk about it as the next part of FE in the “Dandy” era within one material.
But those were thoughts before my own passage of Gaiden. But after finishing it, it became clear to me that despite the visual similarity, the second part has changed so much that it can and should be discussed separately. After all, even things that seem fundamental have changed.
A few words about the plot
First of all, Gaiden put as much emphasis on storytelling as possible in a turn-based tactics game for Dandy. The game now has a full-fledged introduction, where they literally explain to us what is happening. The main character is a boy named Alm, who is raised in a remote village by a retired soldier Maisen, whom Alm considers a grandfather. But on the continent of Valencia, where the heroes live, war breaks out. Valencia is divided into two kingdoms: Rigel and Sofia (for some reason in the fan translation Zofia, but in Japanese there ソフィア). General Dese from Sofia goes against his king and starts a civil war, while Rigel is not against destroying Sofia. Alm joins the militia and first settles affairs within the country, and then deals with the external enemy. But that’s it in a nutshell.
If you dig deeper, there is also a second hero – priestess Selika and childhood friend Alma, for whom there will be a parallel storyline. At first, the game pretends that the chapters alternate: first we play as Alma, then control passes to Selika, but already in the third chapter the heroes act in parallel. Celica, being a priestess, is trying to improve things spiritually: she is looking for the missing goddess Mila in the hope that she will settle all the problems of mortals. Alm, being a materialist, decides to direct Sophia’s powers to Rigel, because it becomes a matter of survival. Rigel plans to use a water lock to flood Sofia.
When Alm gets to Emperor Rudolf of Rigel, the battle turns out to be quite simple. Rudolf refuses to attack Alma, but he still has to be killed.
And just before his death, Rudolf reveals a secret to Alm – he is not Alm, but Albein, the son of Rudolf and the heir to the Empire. Valencia is divided by gods: the female deity Mila and the male deity Duma. Duma ruled Rigel, Mila ruled Sofia.
The gods hated each other, which is why there was a constant war between Rigel and Sophia, but at one point the rulers of both states refused to give their heirs to the gods and hid them, because the heirs, by the will of the gods, had to continue to fight. Princess Celica, heir to the throne of Sofia, was raised in a monastery on the distant island of Novis, unaware of her parents. Prince Alm was given to General Meissen so that he could grow up to be an ordinary village boy. But General Dese’s coup changed everything. Alm has in his hands the Falchion – the sword of the Duma itself, in which Mila is sealed, which Celica learns about during her pilgrimage. And in the end, both heirs also seal the Duma, and themselves unite the lands of Valencia into a single kingdom, which they will rule after the wedding as king and queen.
About gameplay changes
There are only five chapters in Gaiden, during which you will also have to help others in order to replenish your army. Alm will meet a magician whose sister was kidnapped by an evil wizard, save a paladin girl from execution, and in the fourth chapter there will be a severe battle with two armies at once. In my opinion, the mission is impossible in this form, but one of the commanders is on the field only because his beloved is captured, and if she is saved before this battle, he will deploy troops and help us. Celica will find three sisters, unicorn riders. The same girls were in the first part of FE. She will also encounter a couple of mercenaries on her way, and there will be a mission where, in addition to our army and the enemy, there will be allies on the field under the complete control of AI (that is, we do not participate in any way in their course). These are three potential allies, but if one of them dies, then… alas and ah. Nobody canceled permanent death from the first part.
By the way, allies controlled by AI are indicated in blue, just like our troops. Later AI allies will become green units and this will become a meme within the FE fanbase
Although not without nuances. In Gaiden there are shrines that work similarly to an item that enhances a fighter’s class. And in the Alma branch and in the Selika branch you can find a sanctuary that can also resurrect a fighter. But in the case of Alm, this sanctuary will be in the fourth chapter, almost at the end of the game, so if you lost a fighter at the beginning, then it’s better to forget about him – at the end of the game, without leveling up, he is unlikely to survive the battle, it’s not worth resurrecting the poor guy for this.
Pumping in some places has become multi-level. Mages, clerics and knights on pegasus are promoted only once. The rest now have a triple class upgrade. In general, the guys that Alm takes with him from the village start out as the “peasant” class, but upon reaching the third level they can already be promoted, and into one of five options: archer, soldier, mercenary, horseman, mage. The archer upgrades to a sniper, and then to a horse archer. The soldier turns into an armored knight, and then into a general. The mercenary becomes a myrmidon, then a dark knight and, if this is not enough for you, the dark knight can be rolled back into a peasant, maintaining the stats, and again go through the path from a peasant to a mercenary, then a myrmidon and into a dark knight. Moreover, this only works with the mercenary branch – other classes do not roll back, so the horseman becomes a paladin, after which a golden knight, and the magician becomes a sage.
Alas, the pumping animation https://guazubetcasino.co.uk/ has disappeared. A unit’s promotion is shown as a strip of text, and the new image can only be seen after starting the battle
The characteristics of the fighters remained the same, but their ceiling was increased – from 20 to 40. Perhaps that’s why they made it possible to endlessly pump peasants into dark knights. However, the question arises – how to farm so much, considering that the first game was a linear set of cards? This is where the first fundamental difference between the sequel lies.
Firstly, here we walk around the world map ourselves and choose where to go. There are locations where enemies spawn endlessly, and you can fill them with a couple of levels.
Secondly, when Alm and Selika begin to move parallel to the plot, troops will begin to be sent from enemy castles to destroy us. If by this moment you have pumped up your squad, then these enemy reinforcements will only become additional experience for you and will not pose much harm.
Moreover, the game assumed that we would be engaged in farming, because there is an automatic button, so that you could drink tea while your fighters figure it out themselves. Although, given permanent death, it is better to use this command carefully, otherwise you will not notice how you will be left without a cleric.
Why cleric? The fact is that the developers (apparently) received feedback about the pointlessness of the existence of this class in the first game, so we corrected the healers a little. Treatment still does not give experience and even worse – it now wastes the cleric’s life points, but in return all healers have the “nosferatu” spell, which drains life from the enemy. And the cleric, with an aggressive auto-move, runs to apply it to the enemy, and the enemies are still happy to focus the healer and kill him in a couple of hits. The reason why all the clerics became vampires is the second fundamental change.
Weapons are no longer wasted. The attacks are endless, no need to carry three types of swords in your bosom. But the magicians remained, and their damage is still terribly dangerous, because resistance still does not increase when leveling up. In order to balance this, it was decided to turn all magic into a kind of “blood magic”, that is, all spells spend the life of the caster. New spells are no longer purchased, but appear on their own when the magical character levels up – this is familiar to those who played Three Houses . I don’t know if anyone said something like “casualized” in 1992, at the time of release, but these changes made it so that in the end it became a little more convenient to play.
The inventory remains, but within one item. This can be either a weapon for a damage bonus, a shield for a defense bonus, or a ring. There is a very good ring that doubles the stats you receive when you level up, with which you can fashion yourself one or two extremely strong fighters if you pass the ring from hand to hand before leveling up. By the way, items can be transferred between Alma and Seliki’s squad thanks to NPCs in the villages.
There are also smaller changes, but they still work for convenience, in my opinion. For example, the thief class in the first game was a kind of puzzle about two chairs. You either carry a thief in your squad so that he opens doors and locks, or you clutter up the inventory of other fighters with keys, which are separately for doors, separately for chests, and in the story there will be a bridge that is also lowered with the help of a separate key. The thief has a single key, this key also has quite a lot of charges, but in battle it is no good, only the cleric is worse. He uses the weakest sword, he cannot pick up a silver weapon, so in later missions he is not combat-ready at all. In Gaiden you no longer need to think about this – the thief class has disappeared, chests do not appear in battle.
They are only available while walking through peaceful locations, when we walk either Alm or Selika in real time.
Or here’s another small change that clearly works to reduce complexity. Archers no longer kill Pegasus Riders with one shot. Except for cases when the enemy archer is equipped with a bow as a weapon in his inventory, but this happens very rarely, because equipment among enemies is only found among bosses. In other cases, you can fly at the shooters and not be afraid of anything, now pegasi, along with everyone else, are afraid of magicians.
But here is an interesting point related to the fact that the game has ceased to be a changing set of cards. In the first part, before each mission there was a choice of fighters, where you clearly saw all your guys, and at the top it was indicated how many you could take to the battlefield. Gaiden starts without this, and at first you won’t have any questions about where the choice of fighters is, because you have a small squad of 5-7 people, and they all take part in the battle. But then you reached the fourth chapter, started another battle and realized that something was missing. Or someone. It seems that I found a replacement for the squad, but there is none on the field. And then it turns out that there is a limit on the number of fighters, while there is no choice on the start screen.
But still, this choice is there and it is available while moving around the map – there is a Units tab, where the available fighters are not just listed, but also displayed in order of queue. In general, you may not notice this, but if you run around clearing caves in order to fill the level, then what catches your eye is the fact that only 10 fighters fit in the cave, and Alm and Celica can recruit up to 15 fighters into a squad. They are placed according to their position in the Units tab, and this must be taken into account.
Purely story missions are extremely rarely so limited; I only remember that same battle of Alma against two armies, where one of the commanders can be lured away by freeing his girlfriend from captivity – here we are limited to a dozen fighters. Already in the next mission you can expose everyone.
I’ll also note that in the story missions themselves there are no enemy reinforcements. It’s not that this was a direct positive moment from the first part, but there was still something interesting emotionally when you relaxed watching how the fighters dominated the map, and then enemy knights came out of the buildings, and you urgently had to turn on your brain to figure out how to save the fighters who were ambushed. There is only one type of reinforcement in Gaiden, which is quite specific.
A new type of enemy has appeared – shamans. They summon monsters: in some mission these are just weak zombies, but in another mission the shaman summons deadly dragons. Summon shaman random. Sometimes he will summon one or two fighters, and sometimes he will spam everything around him, and it does not matter whether we are talking about a shaman summoning dragons or a shaman with zombies. This is how summoning itself works. We also have invocation as one of the cleric’s spells. Illusory fighters are summoned, good at distracting enemies and even causing damage. But if the illusion kills the enemy, then the experience disappears, but an ally could have taken it.
Do you know what happens in story missions?? Pink squares, which can be roughly called the “base”. If someone is standing on the square, he will restore some of his health at the beginning of the next turn and at the same time receive an increase in evasion of 40%. In a sense, this square replaces the castles from the first part, where the mission boss sat. But the castle in FE1 only gave 30% evasion, and the boss usually stood there quietly. In Gaiden, there are sometimes several of these squares on the map, including on our half, but on the enemy’s side there can be about 3 squares, and the fighters do not hesitate to retreat to them for treatment. But I didn’t just mention these squares right after the shamans. The fact is that shamans often initially stand on these squares, and there is no point in leaving them, because all their actions in battle are tied to summoning monsters.
Therefore, at first it seems that the enemy reinforcements were worse, because you don’t know whether they will come at all or not, and if they do, then on what turn to expect them. In Gaiden you see a shaman and immediately understand that there will be reinforcements, and worse than the enemy ones from the first part. You don’t know how many of them he will be able to cast, and you still have to manage to hit the shaman. And yes, shamans respond to an attack, and they do it with very dangerous magic, so although they are passive, they are still dangerous in a direct confrontation.
Afterword
It’s difficult for me to formulate what Fire Emblem Gaiden is in the context of the development of the series. It seems that the game is clearly more convenient and player-friendly, but this was achieved by removing mechanics such as inventory and store, or even removing entire classes, in the case of the thief. That is, on the one hand, the implementation that was presented in the first game felt like it was really better to remove it. At the same time, the idea that there is a sneak in a combat unit, weak in a fight, but useful for research and resource extraction, is quite suitable. As well as the fact that a combat detachment periodically needs to replenish these same resources in the form of weapons.
Gaiden is clearly trying to find a compromise. The plot has become richer… or you can even say that the plot has appeared in its full form. Here, by the way, an interesting point is that Gaiden was created as a side story to the first part. The name itself suggests this: the Japanese "gaiden" literally means "side story", as it consists of the character 外, meaning the phrase "outside", and the character 伝, meaning history, legend or the verb "to convey". Therefore, Valencia, like everything that happens in this game, is a side part of the first Fire Emblem, although the gameplay is a direct development of the first part, and not some kind of spin-off.
Later, the gameplay of this part will be described as “unconventional” and “unconventional”, but you yourself understand this if you are familiar with the later parts of the series, for example, with the Nintendo 3DS. But still Gaiden left a strong influence on future games. Things like movement on the world map and multiple main characters will still show themselves. Moreover, even infinite weapons are used again after many, many years, but this is rather an exception.
The main advantage of Gaiden is that its ideas have stood the test of time a little better. And if for some during the release years some decisions of the developers might have seemed like “opportunities”, now Gaiden is holding the bar quite well as a representative of turn-based tactics with “Dandy”. Although it’s still difficult to play without speeding up the process: the battle animations are long, there are a lot of options to dodge a blow (which is why you have to watch the animation again), and at the same time, no one cancels the grind, which seems to be optional, but it seems that when you encounter dragons in the fourth chapter as Alm or with the final mission, you understand that it would be nice to pump yourself up..
In short, it’s extremely interesting what the authors will do next. Will the third game be a mixture of the advantages of the first and second?? Or maybe they will abandon the “non-traditional” elements from Gaiden and will refine the original mechanics… or even introduce something completely new? But the main question is whether someone will tell the Fire Emblem developers that the Super Famicom (aka Super Nintendo) has been released, and it is possible to develop a game on updated hardware? After all, Gaiden, although it was released in 1992, was and remains a Japanese exclusive for the Famicom.
One thing is for sure – the series will continue, because sales of Gaiden have exceeded 324 thousand copies, which is only 5 thousand less than the original game. But what this continuation will turn out to be is a topic for a separate, next conversation.