Haha so Ashera’s deaths contribute to the unit’s overall kill count in the end seeing Rolf’s 800+ kills. This means it’s theoretically possible for any unit unit despite availability to have the most kills in the entire game.
Radiant Dawn is my absolute favorite FE. I remember that I played the game 13+ years ago over 150 Times in total. In speedruns and with weird self-imposed challenges. I had a lot of fun watching your playthrought. I remember how one of my challenges was to kill Ashera 100 Times and was amazed that you took the same idea to an extreme. Radiant Dawn features a crazy amount of exploits and shenanigans that I enjoy, even if it is for minimal gain. And doing grindy and ludicrous tasks for hours is something that I love in FE and is honestly my speciality. Thank you for this run.
Well. You’ve done it. You’ve played through Cindered Shadows ten times. To explain the joke he said he didn’t want to play this game and used that phrase to describe the feeling a couple years ago
awakening chapters 19 and 24 are the only really egregious big flat open fields. there's definitely room for improvement elsewhere but those are the real stinkers
Well, what a moment to make a "channel" to get commenting privileges, huh? I remember watching and (re)rewatching Big Klingy's massive Radiant Dawn LP where he went out of his way to show as much writing and dialogue possibilities as possible, including secret scenes for the Tower. Every chapter brought new thoughts, analysis, opinions, always very positive since it was (at time of recording) his favourite FE game. Comparing that LP to this series of a mad strategist experimenting, trying to both optimize and sub-optimize efficiently, breaking everything about games offers both new food for thoughts, both in positive and negative directions. I am a reader first and foremost, so a gameplay-focused player is inherently different from me and it leads to these reflections of narrative vs fun, unfun for narrative purposes, but also the limits of challenges and unbalancing for the sake of the Art as it can impair people as they struggle to reach the conclusion, even moreso the NG+ "rewards". All in all, a grand series as always. Thanks a lot, Masked Knight!
Well... I DID. Most of the animations suck, but I did it anyway. It was honestly worth it may it be just for Micaiah's little spins and legendary tomes' animations.
Radiant Dawn was the ambitious sibling, who flamed out and now lives back home with their parents. Their older sibling, Path of Radiance, works a boring, but stable job and has a loving family.
Radiant Dawn would definitely benefit from a remake to smooth out some of the rougher design edges because when it works (the Endgames for both Part 3 and Part 4) it _really_ works.
I think the "on rails" argument applies even more for the endgame. Each time I try to go with a different team I quickly realize how similar it is every single time. probably because of stat caps. So no matter how much you train your units, the laguz royals will always be the ones who do all the work
Radiant Dawn is indeed the Fire Emblem of all time. The good parts are very satisfying to playthrough, while the bad parts are just extremely annoying. Still, Tellius is one of my all time favorite FE settings nevertheless. GGs.
The fact that perceptions of FE10 has changed to the point where criticizing/disliking it is now considered a hot take is mind-blowing to me. I truly have lived long enough to be come the boomer.
I think it helps that, with the physical copies being so rare, most people these days experienced PoR and RD through emulator, and the games' most grating flaw (slow, long enemy phases) can be fast-forwarded through.
Honestly a pretty fun series. Absolutely do see your issues with the game and why they bug, but I do see the appeal Radiant Dawn holds for some people. Killing the final boss 1000 times is certainly a unique element.
Unfortunately, I generally agree. The first time I played it, I thought it was the greatest fire emblem game of all time. On successive playthroughs, the game is generally worse for wear and you do kinda play the same.
Yeah. The most interesting metagame on replays ends up just being figuring out ways to actually play the game differently with emphasis on different units than you used last time.
I really like Radiant Dawn. Story wise, the Tellius games are unambiguously my favorite in the series. On the other hand, the gameplay has ambitious ideas that don’t always live up to the level of excellence that the devs were aiming for. It’s still in my top 3 or 4 FE’s.
Radiant Dawn will still always be my favorite, I know it has issues but it's also just so much more ambitious than other games in the series. I also just love the story, IMO it's the last time the series has pulled off a story quite as ambitious and unique
Radiant Dawn is a great game for learning to stop worrying about investing in/training units and just use good units. Not that you can't end up training units in RD or other games, but it's not nearly as important in any FE game as players tend to think it is, and it's actually more fun to not put yourself through the tedium of grinding. But you refuse to accept this lesson, so you don't like RD :P
Because the game doesnt want you to trivialize the game with a single overleveled unit? You will still get value for your investment down the line, it just doesnt trivialize the game like some units in other games. Not only that but the game rewards both short and long term investment. a lot of more modern games only reward long term and dont even push you towards using pre-promotes or units you get past the first half (lol 3H)
@@ResurgentRaven Eh I disagree. Most of the mastery skills are pretty useless. Reavers are generally one-rounding anyways, Colossus doesnt do much. Flare and Corona are inconsequential. Sol is nice, but unnecessary. All of the Laguz mastery skills are mostly useless, they're one-rounding anyways (especially Royals), except for maybe Ravens and Tear. Aether is nice because Ike (with Ragnell) sees so much combat, but all the other mastery skills are just "deal more damage" in a game where one-rounding is pretty much a given anyways.
I think the "on rails" argument applies even more for the endgame. Each time I try to go with a different team I quickly realize how similar it is every single time. probably because of stat caps. So no matter how much you train your units, the laguz royals will always be the ones who do all the work
Radiant Dawn has quite a few great maps, but they wanted this game to be really big, which I think resulted in a lot of uninspired filler maps. It reminds me a bit of Fates where most of the good maps where put into Conquest, leaving the other routes with many bland or straight up annoying maps. But with Fates you can at least choose to ignore them by not playing the other routes.
Aside from reworking map design fixing unit availablity would be at the top of my list. Having a unit be available in part one for 3-5 chapters then have them scoot off to west bubbafuck until the final 4-5 chapters of part four, stats completely unchanged from part one, and having to fight for one of the permanent limited deployment slots for the rest of the game is ridiculous. Even if you only really need 10 or so busted units for the final chapters that I feel puts a hard ceiling on team variety cause at that point the unit(s) crawling behind have to be fed the scrapes of bonus xp thats left and get a hella strong forge weapon if their class even allows for it. Game is cool but damn some units have it criminally bad and its not even mainly cause of stats/growths. And next playthorugh gotta have a lot more death than this lol
Not one of the part 4 maps is a big open route map. Part 4 definitely has the weakest map design, but they just straight up aren't wide open. Silver Army has a map with a fort for choke points, rivers, and a huge section of thickets, and a desert map. Greil Army has a fog of war map with a defensible camp position and an indoor map with tons of ledges and choke points. Hawk army has the closest to a wide open map, but there are still multiple distinct paths with choke points and terrain, and their other map is a swamp map.
You could argue that the Desert map in the Silver Army is the one he's talking about. That one is a rout map and more than half of your units are penalized for traversing it.
You know you're secretly tsundere for this game, Excelblem :) It's just not Ashera, RD is filled to the brim with degenerate strategy opportunities and player expression, some of which you've showcased. Don't tell me you didn't enjoy killing Jarod with a staff, or having 7 triangle attack users(five of which with canto), or stealing the DB's items in 3-8, or watching Kurthnaga kill his entire race. ... either way, I definitely don't think Radiant Dawn is exempt from criticism, but in the broader context of FE conversation nowadays, it seems to get way more shit thrown at it than praise, so I feel more compelled to defend it. I think a lot of folks still don't realize that barring arguably Fates and 3H, this is the most ambitious FE we've ever had, and it selling as little as it did was not only undeserved, but also incredibly unfortunate for the message this sent to the devs (no more risks, no more complex story integration) Yes, RD constantly screws with your deployment options, and I can absolutely hear that people don't like that. Yes, it's slow on your first playthrough, yes it's very poorly balanced, yes not all of its maps are winners (but it has 42 of them !), and yes, the supports may as well not exist. But come on, this game deserves some respect for all that it attempted. Anyone who cannot see that, isn't giving it a fair assessment, period. Again, it's fine to dislike it. Presenting it as a lesser, failure of an entry, however, is not. Because sales be damned, that's not what it is.
I've always viewed Radiant Dawn as having done two things with its map and segmented designed. 1) Teach newbies how to play Fire Emblem 2) Bake story into gameplay (intrinsically has mixed results :^)) 3) Basically not allow juggernauting until part 3. 4) Make stat caps matter throughout the entire game/in the prior entry The first half of part 1 has very stereotypical Fire Emblem gameplay, but the second half of part 1 seems to purposely eschew allowing you to use your better training prospects. I suppose this was done to keep the struggle real in 3-6, as if you were allowed actual maps(replace Micaiah only map with an actual map)/to use Jill in Swamp map, then your unit quality might actually be high enough that 3-6 isn't a challenge. Part 2 is all story setup. It provides the excuse for why we're not focused on the Greil's sooner/actually moves us towards them somewhat organically with the Crimean Revolt happening in response to the events of Part 1. Part 3 is the main game. You're allowed a lot of freedom, even the ability to make the Dawn Brigade chapters even more of a struggle by stealing their units. The Dawn Brigade chapters are kinda there to keep you surprised/prevent you from just having EZ PZ maps even if you really know what you're doing. Part 4 is story time with training maps, more or less. Time to reach caps, because your end goal is killing God. No, it won't be easy. Pay attention! You are also given your royal laguz prior to the tower, buy and large, except for Caineghis/Giffca. So the option exists to ignore training, too, if you feel you don't need it. Missed opportunities in Radiant Dawn imo include having almost no Goldoa arc, letting us miss out on maps that include its topography completely as well as really learning dragon laguz culture. Isolationism is boring. I also feel like the game would have benefitted from actually being larger. If each part was doubled in size, I feel like the game would feel and be better paced. All in all, I love it and always have. Warts and all!
Radiant Dawn would be interesting, but I cannot tolerate the time it takes for turns to play out (due to animation times). This is also an issue I have with Path of Radiance obviously, the endless swarms of weak foes you get in the Tellius games simply do not compare positively against the fewer, higher quality enemies that games like Engage and Three Houses give you, or the faster animations that the handheld games offer. Basically it's a timesink that's a real bother to play through multiple times, even though the actual gameplay is interesting.
Radiant dawn is so interesting knowing what comes next (ds games, possible death of the series). Despite all of the mechanics and interesting ideas, the same core theory in game design rings true. “Gameplay is king.” Without the actual interesting map design to compliment all of the mechanics added, nothing really feels impactful. Without incentives to do all the cool alt fight convos and side switching, it just goes unrecognized by most players. Even the characters that are developed don’t really mean much mechanically and on a meta-layer of design its clear to see why “waifus” ended up being core to the series today. Its interesting how important supports can be from a flavor perspective. Even as barebones as they are in later titles, just giving a player any small reason to care about non-story units makes a difference. Its no surprise that RD’s terrible support system is part of the total design problem. Radiant Dawn is so interesting because it gets almost everything wrong and yet its designs show up all over the place in future games, with more well thought out execution (except biorythm, bring it back!!!)
I feel like part of the issue people have with the game is that the devs designed a game where "Optimal" gameplay wasn't required, but then made some of the most patently obvious optimal characters in the series. The people who love the game don't feel compelled to use the obviously OP nonsense, and the people who find the game boring are the types who love optimizing the game. Because they don't have to do any strategizing, and there isn't much argument or debate to be had. Just throw Ragnell and the Laguz Royals at all your problems. Personally I loved the game, and I just used whatever units I liked/thought were cool. And it was a great time!
I would say the 1st 2 parts are generally worse than 2 Lyn modes in a row since Lyn mode since playing Lyn mode actually has the satisfaction of certain units being much stronger during their actual join time. Radiant Dawn happens to just keep ramping up the difficulty without auto-leveling or making sure the level curve of the game is at all consistent. I kinda blame IS for likely using Bonus EXP as an excuse. Since they likely felt that with all the OP units they give you that you were mainly just going to using it on pet projects.
Honestly a fun series, and i also agree with the whole map design thing. The fact that mist of the maps are more plot than gameplay actually kinda breaks it because for one some of it is just the same maps from PoR so nothing that much new either and for two its just average map design with characters that are either twinks or a buff men. Overall a honestly good take on the game because it may be a critical take but criticism is a good way to learn how to adapt to the next challenge, or something like that.
Now that I think about it, did Excel ever need to reset at any point after deciding to quit the Ironman? Because if not, that does mean it's still technically an iron man. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I don't really watch the livestreams.)
Meh. I can understand finding the annoyance of playing this game on anything harder than Normal (Hard in JP version) to be underwhelming since most of the Part 1 units will be little more than meatshields. But that's the big problem in just about every FE game. In harder difficulties or routes you have no reason or resources to put into weaker units. I however, have gotten plenty of satisfaction in seeing some of my Dawn Brigade units actually do well against the Greil Mercenaries on easier difficulties. I still think the story does well in providing the major characters with actual major setbacks. Most FE games don't do that. Of the Western FE games, only FE10, Awakening, and Engage do this. FE10 had the Blood Contract and the Laguz retreat, Awakening had the assassination of Emmeryn, and Engage had the opposing Lady Veyle reveal and the stolen rings incident. I'd say the only thing FE10 struggles with is how to make combat Laguz units actually good. Only way they're actually solid units compared to their beorc counterparts are if they come with Formshift, a Laguz Gem, or solid starting stats. Most of the underlings are scrubs and the Royals are much better but come in really late (aside from Tibarn/Naesala). Everything else I found great. The bases were improved from FE9 (infinite forges, a use for coins, secret shop with cooler items and potential stat boosters). The animations were improved from FE9. The skill selections are better and more refined to allow for skill swapping. Every unit gets a Mastery Skill which is overpowered and actually carries weight (though I wish that more enemy units had them).
from the way you've been expressing about the game, I consider this epilogue extremely tame. You seemed to overall enjoy breaking this game down more than you let on, or maybe these recap videos just made it seem so
Second worst fire emblem game, ahead of only sacred stones. I like the story, and on some levels I can commend it's ambition in terms of mechanics and structure... but ultimately, the horrible availability of training projects combined with god units that play the game for you just suck out everything I would play a fire emblem for.
I don't know about that, it's difficult to have an advanced understanding of a game you didn't even buy... From what I know, one of the worst things this game did (on top of releasing 4 days after Mario Galaxy in the US), was to localize Normal and Hard modes as Easy and Normal mode respectively. Which, yes, is a thing they did. This led to every journalist unknowingly playing Hard mode with no tutorial, and canning the game critically after it likely kicked their butt. FE didn't have the pedigree it has right now back then, so most didn't give it a second look. I'm unsure about what happened in Japan, though.
@@CyclonSilveryeppers it is a bit more complicated. First RD was the sequel for POR a game that came late in the gamecube life span which was not a popular system for srpgs and was on the wii coming allso pretty late into it's life cycle. Shadow Dragon did slightly better but still less than POR and the New Mystery didn't even get an international release and sold poorly in Japan made worse that it was the remake to the most successful Fire emblem game in Japan but got only a third of the sales making it a failure especially since Japan Effing loves Marth. Double sad is that DS was actually a much more popular system especially in Japan so the DS games numbers were very disappointing and while the Tellius games wound the series the Marth Remakes almost killed it However if we go further back the problems started with Thracia and Binding Blade Thracia took waaaaay too long to come out so it came out on snes long after the N64 was released selling worse than every fire emblem game ever. This caused what would become Binding Blade to miss the N64 along with losing Kaga leaving as the game became the Binding Blade on the game advance which sold better then Thracia but worse then the two games before it. Blazing blade got an international release as an Attempt to recover and did great relatively but steam ran out by POR as ever game after Blazing blade did worse till awakening. It should be noted that Blazing Blade had a lot of push and marketing in the USA which helped a lot. Basically the series was struggling since Thracia and a small recovery going international only to collapse again
Haha so Ashera’s deaths contribute to the unit’s overall kill count in the end seeing Rolf’s 800+ kills. This means it’s theoretically possible for any unit unit despite availability to have the most kills in the entire game.
Lehran finally gets the most kills
@ 😆 a screenshot that I’m sure has never been seen
I have seen a replay of a save where the top 3 kill counts were rafiel reyson and leanne. nonsense is enabled
Fr, time to use Fiona to get 1000+ Ashera kills
FE10’s chaotic design choices are a metaphor for the game’s plot about how chaos is “pretty cool but maybe not for everyone”.
Killing a god 1000 times just to a send a message is a Excelblem thing to do lol
Radiant Dawn is my absolute favorite FE. I remember that I played the game 13+ years ago over 150 Times in total. In speedruns and with weird self-imposed challenges. I had a lot of fun watching your playthrought. I remember how one of my challenges was to kill Ashera 100 Times and was amazed that you took the same idea to an extreme.
Radiant Dawn features a crazy amount of exploits and shenanigans that I enjoy, even if it is for minimal gain. And doing grindy and ludicrous tasks for hours is something that I love in FE and is honestly my speciality.
Thank you for this run.
Interesting maneuver
You know what sounds cursed? A Draft Race of Radiant Dawn.
Well. You’ve done it. You’ve played through Cindered Shadows ten times.
To explain the joke he said he didn’t want to play this game and used that phrase to describe the feeling a couple years ago
Daaang
That's a nice joke
I hope that saying you dont like big flat open fields for maps isnt actually considered a hot take within the fandom, but you never know
I would quip about Awakening fans here, but I think they all know that they don't play that game for its map design.
awakening chapters 19 and 24 are the only really egregious big flat open fields. there's definitely room for improvement elsewhere but those are the real stinkers
This fandom's ability to handle disagreements about fiction maturely makes Sonic fans look like saints.
Well, what a moment to make a "channel" to get commenting privileges, huh?
I remember watching and (re)rewatching Big Klingy's massive Radiant Dawn LP where he went out of his way to show as much writing and dialogue possibilities as possible, including secret scenes for the Tower. Every chapter brought new thoughts, analysis, opinions, always very positive since it was (at time of recording) his favourite FE game.
Comparing that LP to this series of a mad strategist experimenting, trying to both optimize and sub-optimize efficiently, breaking everything about games offers both new food for thoughts, both in positive and negative directions. I am a reader first and foremost, so a gameplay-focused player is inherently different from me and it leads to these reflections of narrative vs fun, unfun for narrative purposes, but also the limits of challenges and unbalancing for the sake of the Art as it can impair people as they struggle to reach the conclusion, even moreso the NG+ "rewards".
All in all, a grand series as always. Thanks a lot, Masked Knight!
Hardest Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn Challenge: Finish the game but keep Animations always on.
Gimme my trophy then.
This games' animations are the best in the series.
Well... I DID.
Most of the animations suck, but I did it anyway. It was honestly worth it may it be just for Micaiah's little spins and legendary tomes' animations.
That's a standard radiant dawn playthrough for me. Path of radiance however, is another story
and no emulator fast forward
Radiant Dawn was the ambitious sibling, who flamed out and now lives back home with their parents. Their older sibling, Path of Radiance, works a boring, but stable job and has a loving family.
This is a perfect analogy.
Agreed @@matthewhanf3033
Radiant Dawn would definitely benefit from a remake to smooth out some of the rougher design edges because when it works (the Endgames for both Part 3 and Part 4) it _really_ works.
Rolf being number 1 at the end of radiant dawn summarizes the craziness of excelblem perfectly
I think the "on rails" argument applies even more for the endgame. Each time I try to go with a different team I quickly realize how similar it is every single time. probably because of stat caps. So no matter how much you train your units, the laguz royals will always be the ones who do all the work
Radiant Dawn is indeed the Fire Emblem of all time.
The good parts are very satisfying to playthrough, while the bad parts are just extremely annoying.
Still, Tellius is one of my all time favorite FE settings nevertheless. GGs.
The fact that perceptions of FE10 has changed to the point where criticizing/disliking it is now considered a hot take is mind-blowing to me. I truly have lived long enough to be come the boomer.
I think it helps that, with the physical copies being so rare, most people these days experienced PoR and RD through emulator, and the games' most grating flaw (slow, long enemy phases) can be fast-forwarded through.
Rolf #1 common Rolf sweep
Honestly a pretty fun series. Absolutely do see your issues with the game and why they bug, but I do see the appeal Radiant Dawn holds for some people. Killing the final boss 1000 times is certainly a unique element.
Unfortunately, I generally agree. The first time I played it, I thought it was the greatest fire emblem game of all time. On successive playthroughs, the game is generally worse for wear and you do kinda play the same.
Yeah. The most interesting metagame on replays ends up just being figuring out ways to actually play the game differently with emphasis on different units than you used last time.
I really like Radiant Dawn. Story wise, the Tellius games are unambiguously my favorite in the series. On the other hand, the gameplay has ambitious ideas that don’t always live up to the level of excellence that the devs were aiming for. It’s still in my top 3 or 4 FE’s.
Radiant Dawn will still always be my favorite, I know it has issues but it's also just so much more ambitious than other games in the series. I also just love the story, IMO it's the last time the series has pulled off a story quite as ambitious and unique
Radiant Dawn is a great game for learning to stop worrying about investing in/training units and just use good units. Not that you can't end up training units in RD or other games, but it's not nearly as important in any FE game as players tend to think it is, and it's actually more fun to not put yourself through the tedium of grinding. But you refuse to accept this lesson, so you don't like RD :P
I agree completely with the "on rails" sentiment. If the game doesn't reward you for investing in a unit why do so?
Because the game doesnt want you to trivialize the game with a single overleveled unit? You will still get value for your investment down the line, it just doesnt trivialize the game like some units in other games.
Not only that but the game rewards both short and long term investment. a lot of more modern games only reward long term and dont even push you towards using pre-promotes or units you get past the first half (lol 3H)
I think the Mastery skills are their own reward and each character looks distinctly different from each other when promoted.
@@ResurgentRaven Eh I disagree. Most of the mastery skills are pretty useless. Reavers are generally one-rounding anyways, Colossus doesnt do much. Flare and Corona are inconsequential. Sol is nice, but unnecessary. All of the Laguz mastery skills are mostly useless, they're one-rounding anyways (especially Royals), except for maybe Ravens and Tear.
Aether is nice because Ike (with Ragnell) sees so much combat, but all the other mastery skills are just "deal more damage" in a game where one-rounding is pretty much a given anyways.
I think the "on rails" argument applies even more for the endgame. Each time I try to go with a different team I quickly realize how similar it is every single time. probably because of stat caps. So no matter how much you train your units, the laguz royals will always be the ones who do all the work
@jokx4409 You dont have to pick a single royal that isnt Kurthnaga tho. You can simply not pick royals and go with a full mage (as possible) team.
Radiant Dawn has quite a few great maps, but they wanted this game to be really big, which I think resulted in a lot of uninspired filler maps.
It reminds me a bit of Fates where most of the good maps where put into Conquest, leaving the other routes with many bland or straight up annoying maps. But with Fates you can at least choose to ignore them by not playing the other routes.
Amazing series.
Aside from reworking map design fixing unit availablity would be at the top of my list. Having a unit be available in part one for 3-5 chapters then have them scoot off to west bubbafuck until the final 4-5 chapters of part four, stats completely unchanged from part one, and having to fight for one of the permanent limited deployment slots for the rest of the game is ridiculous.
Even if you only really need 10 or so busted units for the final chapters that I feel puts a hard ceiling on team variety cause at that point the unit(s) crawling behind have to be fed the scrapes of bonus xp thats left and get a hella strong forge weapon if their class even allows for it. Game is cool but damn some units have it criminally bad and its not even mainly cause of stats/growths.
And next playthorugh gotta have a lot more death than this lol
Not one of the part 4 maps is a big open route map. Part 4 definitely has the weakest map design, but they just straight up aren't wide open.
Silver Army has a map with a fort for choke points, rivers, and a huge section of thickets, and a desert map.
Greil Army has a fog of war map with a defensible camp position and an indoor map with tons of ledges and choke points.
Hawk army has the closest to a wide open map, but there are still multiple distinct paths with choke points and terrain, and their other map is a swamp map.
You could argue that the Desert map in the Silver Army is the one he's talking about. That one is a rout map and more than half of your units are penalized for traversing it.
You know you're secretly tsundere for this game, Excelblem :) It's just not Ashera, RD is filled to the brim with degenerate strategy opportunities and player expression, some of which you've showcased. Don't tell me you didn't enjoy killing Jarod with a staff, or having 7 triangle attack users(five of which with canto), or stealing the DB's items in 3-8, or watching Kurthnaga kill his entire race.
... either way, I definitely don't think Radiant Dawn is exempt from criticism, but in the broader context of FE conversation nowadays, it seems to get way more shit thrown at it than praise, so I feel more compelled to defend it. I think a lot of folks still don't realize that barring arguably Fates and 3H, this is the most ambitious FE we've ever had, and it selling as little as it did was not only undeserved, but also incredibly unfortunate for the message this sent to the devs (no more risks, no more complex story integration)
Yes, RD constantly screws with your deployment options, and I can absolutely hear that people don't like that. Yes, it's slow on your first playthrough, yes it's very poorly balanced, yes not all of its maps are winners (but it has 42 of them !), and yes, the supports may as well not exist. But come on, this game deserves some respect for all that it attempted. Anyone who cannot see that, isn't giving it a fair assessment, period.
Again, it's fine to dislike it. Presenting it as a lesser, failure of an entry, however, is not. Because sales be damned, that's not what it is.
I've always viewed Radiant Dawn as having done two things with its map and segmented designed.
1) Teach newbies how to play Fire Emblem
2) Bake story into gameplay (intrinsically has mixed results :^))
3) Basically not allow juggernauting until part 3.
4) Make stat caps matter throughout the entire game/in the prior entry
The first half of part 1 has very stereotypical Fire Emblem gameplay, but the second half of part 1 seems to purposely eschew allowing you to use your better training prospects. I suppose this was done to keep the struggle real in 3-6, as if you were allowed actual maps(replace Micaiah only map with an actual map)/to use Jill in Swamp map, then your unit quality might actually be high enough that 3-6 isn't a challenge.
Part 2 is all story setup. It provides the excuse for why we're not focused on the Greil's sooner/actually moves us towards them somewhat organically with the Crimean Revolt happening in response to the events of Part 1.
Part 3 is the main game. You're allowed a lot of freedom, even the ability to make the Dawn Brigade chapters even more of a struggle by stealing their units. The Dawn Brigade chapters are kinda there to keep you surprised/prevent you from just having EZ PZ maps even if you really know what you're doing.
Part 4 is story time with training maps, more or less. Time to reach caps, because your end goal is killing God. No, it won't be easy. Pay attention! You are also given your royal laguz prior to the tower, buy and large, except for Caineghis/Giffca. So the option exists to ignore training, too, if you feel you don't need it.
Missed opportunities in Radiant Dawn imo include having almost no Goldoa arc, letting us miss out on maps that include its topography completely as well as really learning dragon laguz culture. Isolationism is boring.
I also feel like the game would have benefitted from actually being larger. If each part was doubled in size, I feel like the game would feel and be better paced.
All in all, I love it and always have. Warts and all!
Amen
*Dies 1000 times*
Radiant Dawn would be interesting, but I cannot tolerate the time it takes for turns to play out (due to animation times). This is also an issue I have with Path of Radiance obviously, the endless swarms of weak foes you get in the Tellius games simply do not compare positively against the fewer, higher quality enemies that games like Engage and Three Houses give you, or the faster animations that the handheld games offer.
Basically it's a timesink that's a real bother to play through multiple times, even though the actual gameplay is interesting.
Radiant dawn is so interesting knowing what comes next (ds games, possible death of the series).
Despite all of the mechanics and interesting ideas, the same core theory in game design rings true. “Gameplay is king.”
Without the actual interesting map design to compliment all of the mechanics added, nothing really feels impactful. Without incentives to do all the cool alt fight convos and side switching, it just goes unrecognized by most players.
Even the characters that are developed don’t really mean much mechanically and on a meta-layer of design its clear to see why “waifus” ended up being core to the series today. Its interesting how important supports can be from a flavor perspective. Even as barebones as they are in later titles, just giving a player any small reason to care about non-story units makes a difference. Its no surprise that RD’s terrible support system is part of the total design problem.
Radiant Dawn is so interesting because it gets almost everything wrong and yet its designs show up all over the place in future games, with more well thought out execution (except biorythm, bring it back!!!)
Congrats on figuring out Ashera’s attack pattern
I feel like part of the issue people have with the game is that the devs designed a game where "Optimal" gameplay wasn't required, but then made some of the most patently obvious optimal characters in the series. The people who love the game don't feel compelled to use the obviously OP nonsense, and the people who find the game boring are the types who love optimizing the game. Because they don't have to do any strategizing, and there isn't much argument or debate to be had. Just throw Ragnell and the Laguz Royals at all your problems.
Personally I loved the game, and I just used whatever units I liked/thought were cool. And it was a great time!
Rolf being first with 876 wins! Well, you don't see that everyday! XD
Very fair analysis
The game ended in a very good ending A SKRIMIR FRAME! LET'S GOOOOOO! I WANT HIM CARNALLY! 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
My best friend is a Fire Emblem fanboy and this is his favorite Fire Emblem.
I really love this game!
I would say the 1st 2 parts are generally worse than 2 Lyn modes in a row since Lyn mode since playing Lyn mode actually has the satisfaction of certain units being much stronger during their actual join time. Radiant Dawn happens to just keep ramping up the difficulty without auto-leveling or making sure the level curve of the game is at all consistent. I kinda blame IS for likely using Bonus EXP as an excuse. Since they likely felt that with all the OP units they give you that you were mainly just going to using it on pet projects.
Also you can get through Lyn mode in about 30 minutes if you know what you're doing
Honestly a fun series, and i also agree with the whole map design thing. The fact that mist of the maps are more plot than gameplay actually kinda breaks it because for one some of it is just the same maps from PoR so nothing that much new either and for two its just average map design with characters that are either twinks or a buff men. Overall a honestly good take on the game because it may be a critical take but criticism is a good way to learn how to adapt to the next challenge, or something like that.
Rolf got top kill count nice
If anyone can do impossible task in a fire emblem game its Excelblem 😅
Now that I think about it, did Excel ever need to reset at any point after deciding to quit the Ironman? Because if not, that does mean it's still technically an iron man.
(Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I don't really watch the livestreams.)
In the end, it was just a bird.
Nods in agreement while it not being a problem for me as a person who doesnt often do ivestment projects.
I wonder if there's a hard turn limit, like in Tetris. Some point when the game just can't handle another turn and breaks.
The fact than no FE games after RD was half that good is crazy...
3:20 you should have tried giving Rolf 100 fewer kills
I wish RD got a remake or something, because I like Micaiah a lot and I wish she wasn't so overshadowed by a flawed FE game and PoR's protagonist.
Mr excelblem when are you going to level fe6 marcus to 20
Now I wonder if there are people who will try to beat the 1000 kill record.
Also, boyd got 4th place, nice!
Meh.
I can understand finding the annoyance of playing this game on anything harder than Normal (Hard in JP version) to be underwhelming since most of the Part 1 units will be little more than meatshields. But that's the big problem in just about every FE game. In harder difficulties or routes you have no reason or resources to put into weaker units.
I however, have gotten plenty of satisfaction in seeing some of my Dawn Brigade units actually do well against the Greil Mercenaries on easier difficulties. I still think the story does well in providing the major characters with actual major setbacks.
Most FE games don't do that. Of the Western FE games, only FE10, Awakening, and Engage do this.
FE10 had the Blood Contract and the Laguz retreat, Awakening had the assassination of Emmeryn, and Engage had the opposing Lady Veyle reveal and the stolen rings incident.
I'd say the only thing FE10 struggles with is how to make combat Laguz units actually good. Only way they're actually solid units compared to their beorc counterparts are if they come with Formshift, a Laguz Gem, or solid starting stats. Most of the underlings are scrubs and the Royals are much better but come in really late (aside from Tibarn/Naesala).
Everything else I found great.
The bases were improved from FE9 (infinite forges, a use for coins, secret shop with cooler items and potential stat boosters).
The animations were improved from FE9.
The skill selections are better and more refined to allow for skill swapping.
Every unit gets a Mastery Skill which is overpowered and actually carries weight (though I wish that more enemy units had them).
What was that bird!? XD
from the way you've been expressing about the game, I consider this epilogue extremely tame. You seemed to overall enjoy breaking this game down more than you let on, or maybe these recap videos just made it seem so
Best fire emblem to play only one playthrough for.
It feels like IS would have been better off writing a novel if they wanted to tell this story
Radiant dawn but all unit caps and forced deoloyments are unrestricted
Second worst fire emblem game, ahead of only sacred stones. I like the story, and on some levels I can commend it's ambition in terms of mechanics and structure... but ultimately, the horrible availability of training projects combined with god units that play the game for you just suck out everything I would play a fire emblem for.
I think the game is pretty decent .at least, it was not as awful that PoR
If nothing else these final thoughts probably explain why this game almost killed the franchise before awakening brought it back from the brink
I don't know about that, it's difficult to have an advanced understanding of a game you didn't even buy...
From what I know, one of the worst things this game did (on top of releasing 4 days after Mario Galaxy in the US), was to localize Normal and Hard modes as Easy and Normal mode respectively. Which, yes, is a thing they did.
This led to every journalist unknowingly playing Hard mode with no tutorial, and canning the game critically after it likely kicked their butt. FE didn't have the pedigree it has right now back then, so most didn't give it a second look.
I'm unsure about what happened in Japan, though.
@@CyclonSilveryeppers it is a bit more complicated.
First RD was the sequel for POR a game that came late in the gamecube life span which was not a popular system for srpgs and was on the wii coming allso pretty late into it's life cycle.
Shadow Dragon did slightly better but still less than POR and the New Mystery didn't even get an international release and sold poorly in Japan made worse that it was the remake to the most successful Fire emblem game in Japan but got only a third of the sales making it a failure especially since Japan Effing loves Marth.
Double sad is that DS was actually a much more popular system especially in Japan so the DS games numbers were very disappointing and while the Tellius games wound the series the Marth Remakes almost killed it
However if we go further back the problems started with Thracia and Binding Blade
Thracia took waaaaay too long to come out so it came out on snes long after the N64 was released selling worse than every fire emblem game ever.
This caused what would become Binding Blade to miss the N64 along with losing Kaga leaving as the game became the Binding Blade on the game advance which sold better then Thracia but worse then the two games before it.
Blazing blade got an international release as an Attempt to recover and did great relatively but steam ran out by POR as ever game after Blazing blade did worse till awakening. It should be noted that Blazing Blade had a lot of push and marketing in the USA which helped a lot.
Basically the series was struggling since Thracia and a small recovery going international only to collapse again