Pantsless Marth stands ready. As of March 31, 2021, this game is no longer available in English.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Anyway, I’ve been having some thoughts lately, and I thought I’d share the here on the blog.
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, the first Fire Emblem game for the Famicom/NES (hereafter FE1) is respected as the originator of the now-popular Fire Emblem series, but it is generally regarded as clunky and outdated compared to newer entries, especially from the Game Boy Advance onward. For a while, I regarded it this way too, seeing it as a barebones game hobbled by the limitations of an 8-bit system. To me, the games from the GBA onward had it right, since they had better-developed characters, better gameplay, and lots more content thanks to the relentless march of computer technology.
During the holiday season, I purchased the official English translation of FE1 from the Nintendo Switch online store; unfortunately, it became unavailable after March 31, 2021. That said, the game can still be played in Japanese on the Famicom app (which you need a Japan-region account to acquire, but once you have it, you can play it on your US account just fine.)
Like I said, I thought of FE1 as an obsolete old clunker. Then I started reading commentary from Jeffro Johnson, author of Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons and Dragons. He points out that “storygaming,” the dominant mode of play for tabletop RPGs, is very different from the way such a game was built to be played:
