Now that I have finally experienced the joys of Casual Mode Fire Emblem, I am never playing Classic Mode again. Ever! It is seriously not worth the annoyance and frustration. In fact I marvel at my initial negative reaction when I heard of casual mode. “No perma-death?! What a travesty! It shouldn’t even be an option! How can you still call this Fire Emblem?!” And actually it’s not very FE-like without the perma-death, but WHO CARES??? As the saying goes, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Now I’ve gone casual I’m never coming back.
So I loved Casual Mode, but this Fire Emblem Shin Monshou
Since I didn’t finish Shadow Dragon and only played about 10 chapters or so, I was a teeny bit lost when all the characters from that game kept showing up. Every chapter has at least one potential recruit, possibly more, who can only be gotten by having someone talk to them, only I don’t remember them or their backstory so I don’t know who to use to recruit them. Besides, I had more than enough people in my party from start to finish soooo… death to all traitors! I felt zero attachment to any of them, and neither did my main character Chris because he’s new to the party too. IIRC the only enemy recruits I had by the end were Sheema, Rickard, Abel, Astram, Beck and Jeorge, and none of them made it onto my final team anyway.
I also learned a lesson from FE:SD and Fire Emblem Awakening and started the game on Hard instead of ‘Normal’, so I got a moderate (very moderate) challenge out of the game. My Fighter>Pirate>Berserker>General>Berserker Chris was a beast from start to finish who hit level 20 around chapter 18, so I was never in any serious danger. The rest of my party couldn’t really keep up, though, especially once the dragons/wyrms started showing up. I can think of at least three different stages (desert, the volcano, the ice place) that I finished with only Marth and Chris alive. But that’s the joy and beauty of Casual Mode. No more restarting because a cleric got killed right before I finished the stage, hurray!
I enjoyed Casual Mode. I enjoyed wrecking mobs with my overpowered MC. I enjoyed barely surviving some stages by the skin of my teeth. And one or two of the supports were amusing (Chris x Feena level 3). Aaand that’s it. The music? Eh. It was okay, typical FE soundtrack. Graphics? So, so dull. Maybe depressed artists are just cheaper, that’s why Nintendo hired one. The characters were really bland as well and there were just too many of them. Gameplay-wise there’s nothing remarkable or worthy of note. I should probably take some of the blame for using Casual Mode and obliterating the need for strategy, but I won’t. Why? Because many other SRPGs come with defacto Casual Modes and still manage to be pretty challenging. Shin Monshou should have tried harder.
Last and least, the story didn’t didn’t mean much to me because Fire Emblem Shin Monshou no Nazo is a direct sequel of Shadow Dragon. “Oh no, Hardin, how could you?!” the characters cry, but I don’t remember Hardin at all, so *shrug*. “We have to save Nina! We have to save Lena!” I faintly remember them, but I don’t care much for them, so *shrug* Then again if I had played SD I would be quite annoyed, because I would have killed Gharnef and Medeus in the previous game only for them to come back hale and hearty in the sequel like nothing ever happened.
Btw, minor plothole: at the end of my game Gharnef is still very much alive. Apparently I was supposed to go to some village and pick up a Starlight tome to fight him with, but I never got it. So instead of beating him I had to lure him off his throne and keep him busy killing my doodz while Marth snuck behind him and seized his throne. That clears the stage, but it doesn’t stop the problem of Gharnef being out there. Why doesn’t he interfere with my attempts to fight Medeus? And why is my party so happy at the end when Gharnef is still out there plotting death and murder against my kingdom? It doesn’t make much sense at all.
Well, whatever. I’d be lying if I said I cared. Shin Monshou amused me for 13 hours and I actually finished it, unlike Shadow Dragon or even the infinitely better Summon Night 3. Also somehow playing SRPGs helps me ‘recharge’ my mental batteries so I can try more experimental stuff, which I will now proceed to do right away. See you later!
Kind of dumb, but for the games that have it, I play Casual mode FE but always “pretend” that I’m on classic and reset when someone dies from me making a dumb strategic mistake.
But if it’s some kind of freak last minute ambush + critical hit after a 30 minute long grueling stage though I just let it go. I figured it would be more in the spirit of things.
I think for most of the enemy recruits, there’s usually an intermission talk you can do where the recruiter character just spells it out directly and go “Hey, I know X, let me talk to them” because I don’t even remember much of SD when I played it (it was snooze) and could still recruit most of them here. On the other hand, this game has mostly really terrible recruits I noticed so yeah with the exception of maybe 1 or 2.
You probably got the “bad” ending. You had to collect all the parts of the regalia to socket into the shield to create the Fire Emblem and all that to get the true ending and if you miss one you’re kind of screwed. Not that I recommend you go back to the game if the gameplay isn’t pulling you in, I suppose.
Some of the enemy recruits were like this, e.g. Julian -> Rickard, Jeorge -> Astram. But some like Etzel and Warren and plenty of other guys just showed up and stood around without saying anything. They were just asking to be killed, IMO.
The way you play Casual Mode is the way I was planning to do it so as to keep the best of both worlds. But once I started, the lure of just finishing the game already was too strong. I can’t turn back now.
I got all the pieces of the star sphere and completed the Binding Shield, btw. It’s the Starlight tome in that one village in chapter 21-ish that I failed to get, forcing me to fight Medeus without the Falchion. The ending I got didn’t seem bad at all to me, though I did massacre all those bishops in the final stage so I wouldn’t be surprised if I (deservedly) missed a few scenes.