That doesn’t mean Ike’s story isn’t interesting. It’s just a shame all these old time clichés keep coming. Sometimes, you can enjoy a beautifully designed cut scène that can easily stand next to the atmosphere of Final Fantasy. Too bad there aren’t much of these cool animated scenes. Strange, because the normal scenes are never this atmospheric and bombastic. You’ll just have to watch two dull heads moving there lips while they are saying all kind of exiting stuff, yet it never really gets emotional that way. It seems as if Nintendo is putting the excitement and intensity of the game a level behind with this approach.

The core of the gameplay stays unaltered though. Like in the Sacred Stones, you fight with different warriors, everyone with their own capacities. The game uses a clever rock paper scissors system. A sword is stronger than an axe and an axe is stronger than a spear, while a spear is easier to handle when battling a swordfighter. Off course, you will have to deal with healing characters and different items. Be careful with your men though, because after they died, they can not be brought back to life.

To explain how intense the gameplay of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance really is would be to much work, because it can get very intense. This game is made for the real RPG lover. It’s possible gamers who like Final Fantasy don’t give a rat’s ass about Fire Emblem. It so much more strategy based than other mainstream RPG’s. If you like walking around in big cities to talk with customers in a magic shop, you might as well skip Fire Emblem. After talking to a head mumbling with his mouth a little, there will be a fight, and so on.

You don’t have to expect miracles from the graphical engine. It does what it is supposed to do, nothing more and nothing less. The environments look ordinary, even boring and uninspired, but the awesome animated movies compensate that. The attacks of your men are shown in little ingame movies, but you are likely to turn them off after five times, because they take away the speed of the fights.