Fire RMNblem

Overview

Being a Fire Emblem, it's appropriate that RMNblem should be as frustrating as it is impressive. While functionally a rom hack that duplicates the systems, world map concept, and general shell of the plot from FE Gaiden, Fire RMNblem seems to have gone about this the hard way, reproducing everything faithfully in Sim RPG Maker 95. This wild swing between low effort (reskinning a game) and high effort (reproducing a game by hand) seems to dominate every aspect of Fire RMNblem, and by the end of it I was unsure whether I had enjoyed the game as a whole, but I knew that I had played a lot of it.

At its worst, Fire RMNblem is an impenetrable haze of in-jokes, repetitive battles, and the kind of game balance that is best defined with the words "rom hack."

However, at its best, Fire RMNblem brought out in me a kind of childish glee. When the game balance was good, or when I got one of the jokes, it was very good. On the other hand, when the balance was strained or one of the jokes missed, I just kind of sighed and kept playing.

Fire RMNblem is not a perfect game, but it is a great contribution to the community, and I can only hope more Emblem-esque games will follow in its wake.

Plot

Let's start with the bad news. Fire RMNblem's plot mostly exists as a vehicle for its in-jokes, and that keeps it from ever really making the player care about what's happening on-screen. There is some world-building that comes out of some of the jokes, but there's really nothing on the level of Shut Up And Jam Gaiden, where the jokes manage to loop all the way back around and become interesting setting elements.

The essence of the story is that Kentona has become crazy and Liberty must overthrow him, and at this point if you're from outside of the RMN community you're already lost as to why this is funny.

Similarly, the best humor in the game is in its various satires of and homages to the RMN forums members, and that won't make a lot of sense to anyone who hasn't been here for a long time.

For most people, the plot's not going to be why they play. It'll be to see people they know and, optionally, to field them in battle. But having a plot that's both scant and fourth-wall-breaking turns it into a drawback, and there were a couple of scenes that I found myself enjoying less than I would have if there'd been no story to them.

Balance And Gameplay

Fire RMNblem is a pretty exact copy of Fire Emblem Gaiden in its overall design, but it veers into rom hack territory in its specifics.

In Fire RMNblem's case this is sort of a worst-of-both-worlds, but let me show you why.

Fire Emblem Gaiden, being only the second game in the series, had a few radical departures from the formula-setting original title. One of these was its world map, where the player could roam, pursue side-objectives, and repeat battles. Being able to explore the map and choose which encounter to challenge next adds a new layer of strategy to the game that I sincerely wish another Fire Emblem would embrace, but it also means that the careful pacing of the game can be quickly unbalanced with a little grinding, and it does strange things to the game's meta.

Normally, this wouldn't matter too much to a casual player, but being a rom hack in terms of design and difficulty, Fire RMNblem requires players to play the meta.

Confused?

Here's an example.

In a Fire Emblem, when a character attacks and deals damage, they gain experience points. If they reach 100 exp, they reset the exp gauge to zero and they level. When they level, they have a percentage chance of increasing each one of their stats. Which stats they might increase depends on their own unique and secret stat growth percentages. In practice, what this means is sometimes a character will level and increase all of their stats, and sometimes they will level and increase nothing. These 'dead levels' can severely weaken a character in the long run, and characters that are strong in the early game can be worthless in the late, and vice versa. On top of that, character levels cap at 20, so unless a character is able to 'promote' to a new class, starting again at level 1, there's only so high you can grind them before they've reached their peak potential.

In practice, this often means you start with a bunch of weenies that you can eventually power-level into the strongest, baddest dudes in the realm, but you have to tolerate them being weenies in the meantime, and use your stronger units to support them until they're tough enough to tank entire formations on their own.

Now, in Fire Emblem, when a unit dies, they're dead forever. RMNblem (and Gaiden) allow you to cheat a little by gaining access to specific shrines that can bring people back, but generally when you lose a unit, you reload the battle. If you lose someone good and you instead press on, and if you do this more than once, you run the risk of hitting borderline unwinnable situations in the late game, so it's better not to waste all those hours and just savescum now.

To recap: vulnerable units, permadeath, gameplay revolves around keeping the one from encountering the other.

Enter the teleporting one-shot minibosses. Enter the swarms of high mobility enemy units with long-range bows. Enter the battles that start you in positions where, unless you clear the field in one turn, the computer's going to target your weakest troop and kill them for certain.

And that's only half of the problem. Fire RMNblem doesn't use the weapon triangle, which is a sort of rocks-paper-scissors mechanic that lets you get one up on certain enemies by equipping the right weapon. What this means is that damage formulas, which are straight-up attack - defense = damage, turn highly developed units into invincible walls, and this makes some enemies utterly untouchable to particular party members. Fire RMNblem doesn't do tooltips, where it calculates an attack's percentage chance of success and how much damage it will do and if it'll double the enemy, like in the SNES and later Fire Emblem titles. So you'll spend a lot of time right-clicking on enemies, right clicking on your characters, doing some quick mental math, and realizing that only your already over-levelled unit can face the current map's boss.

By the second act, my Kloey was an over-leveled monster, but I had to keep throwing her into the fray and wasting experience because the game tosses situations at you that you can only survive by building one unit into a horrifying statbeast. There are plenty of key enemies in Fire RMNblem that could kick a regular unit into the stratosphere and that take zero damage from a regular unit's attacks, and by mid-game I realized that I could easily solo any map with just Kloey, and it was the fact that I needed to take at least Libby along with her that held me back from a couple of victories.

So, this has been a lot of words about Fire Emblem-specific mechanics, but what's the takeaway? Fire RMNblem funnels you into over-developing certain units, then forces you to rely on them. This makes battles boring and slow, as you send your over-developed killer to deal with the real threats (which still can't hurt them), and the rest of your team scavenges kills from whatever remains. By the late game, this turns combat into a chore, and with there being several long late-game slogs of combat between plot points, I nearly gave up on my playthrough in the home stretch.

Design

These combat slogs wouldn't be too bad if they were all interesting tactical situations, but in encounter design there is also wildly varying levels of quality.

The majority of encounters in the game are heavily custom, and a bunch of them are interesting and cool. The early game consists mostly of maps that are directly pulled from Gaiden, and there the combat balance is at its tightest, but slowly the map design tone starts to shift from well-balanced battles to what I can only describe as conceptual fights, and tactical enjoyment becomes sort of a grab-bag.

There are a couple of amazing standout maps, including Calunio's dungeon, but there's also maps with things like sixteen witches in a row, or only wizards in a row, or only horseback dudes in a row, etc.

On the other hand, item drops and town encounters are frequent and interesting, and by mid game I found myself enjoying my time out of combat a lot more than my time in it. Fire RMNblem has a lot of cutscenes, replacing Gaiden's village-level free-roam with pre-scripted antics, but somehow these always had plenty of charm, and I was actually a little glad that this part of the game had been streamlined, since I would have walked where the main character walked and talked to the same people, but the cutscene did it faster.

Overall

This game caters to a very particular mix: people who like and grok the mechanics of Fire Emblem, people who have been in this community for a while, and people who have quite a bit of time to invest. Fire RMNblem isn't short, and it's got quite a lot of optional content to boot.

There's enough divergence from Gaiden that you can play this without spoiling your appetite for the unauthorized translation that's floating around out there, but the style and gameplay (at least for the first half) will definitely let you know that you're playing a Fire Emblem, and will either scratch that particular itch or cause you to start seriously considering shelling out for a 3DS.

If you're on the fence about this one, and if you've been in the community for any length of time, I heartily endorse trying it. But if you're here for the FE experience, it may not deliver everything you're hoping for.

On the other hand, perhaps that's what the more serious-toned Valor Emblem is for.