While I will freely admit to loving the first three Paper Mario games, I will also admit to not having been a fan of Intelligent System’s other baby, Fire Emblem. It isn’t that I’ve never tried it; I tried Awakening on 3DS back when it was still new and promptly bounced off of it after a few hours, I tried Genealogy of the Holy War in 2021 and never made it out of Chapter 1. After that, I just never tried any of the other games. I think I know the reason, or at least I believed so for the longest time: I am bad at strategy games.
You can put me in front of a turn-based RPG – Shin Megami Tensei, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Etrian, Bug Fables, etc. – and I’ll probably find myself blazing through random encounters as if they were nothing by the end. Plop me down onto a chess board and expect me to strategize, however, and suddenly my brain turns to mush. It’s one thing to select the best move for any given RPG battle, it’s another to put the onus on me to figure out where to put a party member, let alone keep them alive when any of these normal enemies are just as capable as any of my party members. I think this trapped me in a vicious cycle, where because I believed I was bad at SRPGs, I never sought out to play them beyond the opening hours, and because I never sought them out I kept believing I was bad at them.
Flash forward to 2026 – it’s the beginning of the year, Nintendo’s “famous” drip-feed strategy has “blessed” us with Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on Gamecube NSO, a long-awaited game that’s notorious for being expensive as hell on the second-hand market. Since my Game Clearing plans for 2026 were relatively empty aside from Golden Sun: The Lost Age, I decided to give this series one final “proper” try, and if I ended up bouncing off Path of Radiance I very well would have dismissed this series, this genre, as one that’s not for me.
In my opinion, the best feeling in the world is playing a game that you initially dismissed as not being your type, having everything just click into place, falling in love with it and going “Ohhhhhh, now I get it!”. That is exactly the feeling I got with Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance.
The story follows a group of mercenaries called the Greil Mercenaries, who get wrapped up in a war between Crimea and Daein when the mercs find Crimea’s hidden princess and are tasked with escorting her to Gallea. While the opening story beats are fine, it only really kicks off when the main character, Ike, is thrust into leading the mercenaries after his father, Greil, is killed by the enigmatic Black Knight. From there, I ended up getting really invested in the story and characters, to the point where I didn’t want to put it down. It also delves fairly deep into the fictional politics between the different nations, as well as racism between the beorc (humans) and laguz (animals who can turn into humans). It was really interesting to read about, even if it was a little heavy-handed at times.
One thing I will praise the text for is that, like with the first three Paper Mario games, you can rewind text in case you accidentally skip it. In practice it’s more like the text rewind features in other visual novels (ex: Ace Attorney, Katawa Shoujo) instead of per text box, but it’s still a really nice quality of life feature that I wish were in more story-heavy RPGs!
Of course, I figured I’d at least enjoy the story. Frankly, the gameplay was what I was more worried about, since that’s why I bounced off other SPRGs in the past. Each player turn, I am tasked with moving my characters across a chess-like arena, fighting enemies if able, or healing if necessary. After my turn, the enemy makes their move, and depending on how I’ve moved my characters I may end up getting attack, or worse, killed. The strategy, then is to move my units in a way that minimizes the risk of my units getting killed, such as avoiding the enemy’s movement area or walling off tight corridors with my tanks, to list a few examples. I’d assume this is standard operating procedure for an SRPG, but again I’m new to this so I don’t know the SOP yet.
The game has a lot of playable characters, and it has a habit of constantly supplying you with them every other chapter. This isn’t like Final Fantasy VI, thankfully, where you have to constantly backtrack to swap out equipment (though this is an apples to oranges comparison). Each unit has a specific weapon and stat spread, and as a result have a specific role they end up filling. They also can have special skills which can help each unit fulfill their roles better. This actually kind of reminded me of the badge system from Paper Mario, especially with the Wrath and Resolve skills being reminiscent of the Danger Mario badges, though its execution is way different (for one, removing a skill is permanent and you can’t get it back). Some units are better than others, though – I noticed I was relying a lot on Titania early on, to the point where I had to bench her so she wouldn’t keep taking EXP. Jill was also one of my favorites, in part because I liked her character arc but mostly because her utility was unparalleled. Oscar ended up being my most used unit, in part because he can tank pretty much everything and dish out so much damage.
Probably the big catch this has is that once you’ve gotten used to using early-game characters, you may not want to invest in or use any of the later ones. The reason for this is because this game has permadeath, and you’re not expected to keep your early-game characters if they kick the bucket. I’ll fully admit to cheating a bit by redoing the map when this happened, but this is more out of habit than anything and I’ll probably do a run without doing this at some point.
When you battle enemies, you each get one or two attacks, and then the battle ends until the next encounter. I’m not that familiar with how strength is calculated, but once I select an enemy, I can see their attack and defense stats as well as how mine compare to see how much damage I can do. This also reminded me of how Paper Mario’s damage calculation is done, to the point where I kept going “ahhh so this is where Paper Mario got it from!”, though the number values are a lot higher here obviously. I also quickly learned that Speed is an incredible stat, as it not only lets me dodge more often but let me deal two attacks if my speed was high enough. It’s pretty neat! The one downside is that bosses, aside from major story bosses, tend to go down in one or two hits, if even, since they’re roughly the same strength as your party. It’s kind of the nature of the beast, so it’s not a huge deal.
Nearly every arena is split into different chapters, for a total of 29 chapters. I’d say for the most part, the levels are pretty tightly designed, and rarely outstay their welcome. Yeah, it can be a bit slow moving across the board, and the enemy phases can take a hot minute depending on how many enemies there are, but I never found this much of an issue once I got hooked. There are some interesting chapters here and there, such as a full on stealth mission in Chapter 10, as well as a chapter where you have to avoid being hit by boulders in Chapter 25.
I’d say my favorite chapter in the whole game would have to be Chapter 17, right at the halfway point. Ironically, it’s the only chapter to have four different parts, so it’s the longest in the game by a wide margin. However, the story behind it, where you have to track a missing heron laguz, Reyson, and hopefully make up for Begnion’s past sins, is really cool. I also really liked how the chapter constantly changes objectives between parts, so you can’t just rely on one strategy to win, necessarily. The setting and atmosphere of the dead Serenes Forest is really foreboding, so it manages to feel different than anything that’s come before as well! The payoff at the end makes it all worth it, too, since not only is the forest restored to life, Ike is promoted to Lord (though I wish this happened at the very end of the chapter instead of after the save point). Just about the only issue I could levy against this chapter is that it’s entirely possible for Tibarn to kill-steal the boss, where it would’ve been way more satisfying to leave it to the player. Aside from that, I had a blast with this chapter, and it represents the point where I started really kicking myself for not getting into this series before.
By contrast, the one chapter I outright don’t like is Chapter 15. It’s a desert level, and the sands make it hard for anyone who’s not flying to move. Beyond that, you have to fend off against laguz units, which tend to be pretty sturdy and mobile in the sands. Okay, sure, fair enough. That’s not my issue. My issue comes from all the optional shit this game tacks onto this chapter in particular. Not only are there lots of hidden items to find in the sand (as in, you don’t know they’re there until you step onto specific tiles), it’s random whether or not you get them unless you have a thief (Volke or Sothe) out. On top of that, there’s a new recruit who you can only add to your party by stepping on a single out of the way tile (again, you don’t know which one without using a guide) with a laguz unit specifically (either Lethe or Mordecai at this point in the story). On top of that, the game rewards you with Bonus EXP (more on that in a bit) if you can somehow get through it without killing anyone because of story reasons, which is a lot easier said than done when they're trying to kill YOU and you can't force Lethe or Mordecai to just stop attacking beyond not popping a Laguz Crystal. It’s not the only time the game rewards you with BEXP for doing something like this, but it’s particularly frustrating here because of everything else around it. It easily gave me the most trouble out of anything else in the game, and I know it’ll probably frustrate me again once I replay this game.
In-between chapters (after Chapter 8) you can buy equipment and items and have support conversations between party members. Money ends up being extremely plentiful by the end, but mostly because you get several tons of gold after beating certain chapters, though there is the chance of running out if you’re relying on custom equipment. Custom equipment tends to be really good, better than most of what you can buy in shops, but it can be very pricey the better the stats. One thing I did not really take advantage of was support bonuses, which can buff your stats if you keep certain units together. This is mainly because I initially treated support conversations as if they were just text, and didn’t realize I was running out until I saw Ike had one left. I’m convinced the intent was to have the player focus on one pairing per unit per playthrough, and save a different one for a repeat, and I’ll definitely take more advantage of that next time.
New to this game, as far as I’m aware, is bonus experience. After beating certain chapters or completing certain objectives, you can get bonus experience which you can use to level up other units in case they’re lagging behind or are only one point away from a level up. This has the benefit of making sure any of your party members can keep up even into lategame, but it comes at the cost of trivializing the rest of the game if you let it. There is a quirk where you can save some bonus EXP by only doing it in increments, and I took full advantage of that, but it can slow the preparation down significantly. Not helping matters is that if I wanted to get the best stat upgrades per level up I usually had to save and reload, which was trivial on NSO but can be a pain on real hardware.
The music is pretty solid, though this is no surprise coming from Intelligent Systems. I always love when an RPG changes its battle theme halfway through a game, and this is no exception. The visuals are also pretty good too. I especially liked the critical hit animations the party makes. The one thing I noticed is that the UI and character artwork makes this game kind of look like the PSP remakes of Ys 1 and 2, even though this probably came first.
Overall, I had a blast with this game! Like I said at the beginning, it got to a point where everything just clicked into place. I don’t know if I would consider this my new favorite Gamecube game, but it’s definitely earned its place in second at the very least! Still not a fan of Fire Emblem as a whole just yet, but I’ll definitely be trying some other games (or even other SRPG series) since I liked this one so much!