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How good are Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn?


Harvey
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I never got the chance to play these games so for those who have played them, well how did they turn out to you all? Is the story good/bad?(no spoilers pls), is the gameplay on par with previous FE games before? And what of the map designs?

 

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Overall, it's a good saga.

The story in Path of Radiance is very good. Lots of nice character moments and supports. Radiant Dawn, however, is a mess of a story and Ike is so thoroughly butchered as a character.
Gameplay, it's good. Not too much different from standard Fire Emblem, honestly. Radiant Dawn can at many points be unfairly difficult, though.

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Path of Radiance - good stand-alone story, some clunky mechanics, but should otherwise be enjoyable.  Except biorhythm, which annoys me.

Radiant Dawn - story tries to pick up after PoR.  Not as strong as PoR in terms of story IMO, a particular design choice exclusive to Hard is weird, but does its best to wrap up Tellius.  Biorhythm still sucks.  Gameplay-wise, it's awkward because the game jumps back and forth between places after a certain point.

I don't think you'll regret playing either of them.

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From what I've seen, PoR is a common pick for "favorite" entry on different sites. The story is certainly in the higher section among FE games, and the characters are generally good. Supports are based on map deployments, which could not have been a bigger improvement on the GBA games system. The game is very easy, but the maps are well designed so it mostly keeps you entertained. This may sound random, but far and away the biggest weak point of the game is the game speed. Have something else to do if you're playing in real time, enemy phases will legitimately take minutes later on. 

Radiant Dawn, imo, is... All over the place in all aspects. The story has some great moments, and some awful moments. The unit imbalance is extreme; sometimes you're handed behemoths and sometimes you have an entire team of below average units. You play as different factions in different parts of the game, which has both good and bad aspects. The roster is huge, with I believe 70+ units. Support conversations basically don't exist in this game.  The game introduces cool things like height. 

Both games do an excellent job with varied mission objectives. Shape shifters play a massive role in the story of both games, although their gameplay mechanics work very differently in each game. Expect to hear about racism A LOT playing these games. Both games feature 3H style super canto, so mounts and fliers are dominant. 

Give both games a shot, obviously go in order.

Edited by Boomhauer007
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Difficulty-wise:

  • PoR is certainly easy, the lack of the, imperfect, Japan-only Maniac Mode adds to this issue.
  • RD is harder, with it's English Hard (actually Maniac in Japanese, English Normal is Japanese Hard, English Easy is Japanese Normal- but it really is easy) not that much harder than English Normal, but with some annoying changes. RD is harder earlier than later, but usually provides crutch units to get you through.

Unit Balance:

  • Clear mounted bias in PoR, but everyone is generally usable. BEXP means training up a weakling won't take as long or be so hard. Snipers are weak due to enemy-phase bias and reduction in the effective bonus.
  • Mounted units are toned down, but due to the Part system of rotating armies, new availability imbalances not usually found in FE emerges. The crutch units you're sometimes given end up being far too good. Enemy-phase bias again, but Snipers got better, at the price of being the absolute worst game for magic units in FE history.

Map Design:

  • Setting aside the easiness of PoR, and it's map design to me is not inherently worse or better than GBA FE. Maybe the not the best, but it works.
  • RD's map design starts stronger earlier, but weakens by the very end. Relatively unique to FE in the maps convey the narrative fairly well, not exactly set-pieces, but connecting story with gameplay is a little stronger here.

Narrative:

  • PoR stays safe and traditional, but some would say it does that well.
  • RD goes big and ambitious, with great success and great failure. It's divisive- do the faults outweigh the good, or vice versa? Depends greatly on the individual player.

Character-wise:

  • PoR has a cast thats fairly good on the whole I'd say. Supports that range from great to ...what? are present, but fewer in number than in GBA and 3DS FE.
  • RD relies somewhat on carryover characterization from PoR. RD's Supports are extremely hollowed out and not truly worthy of the name. This said, if you're in the main plot, you can be well-characterized. A good Base Conversation or boss convo can help a character too.

World-building:

  • Universally, Tellius is considered to have some of the very best pre-3H world building.

Music:

  • PoR is fine, I like, but it might be only average to others.
  • RD's soundtrack is grandiose, again, I have a bias for it. But some may rightly find it too rich, oversaturated with instruments into an orchestrated cacophony that induces indigestion in one's ears.

Visuals:

  • PoR's 3D graphics are primitive for the GameCube to some extent. The artstyle is ultimately unrefined compared to RD.
  • RD improved on the artstyle, reducing bold and garish colors for restraint and maturity. 3D graphics got a serious bump in quality to boot. The 3D battle animations can be gloriously flashy if you're into that.

 

And as has been said above, PoR especially, but RD too, are slow to play due to things even when to map animations taking a while to carry out. It's the Pokemon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum of FE.

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
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Good stories, mediocre gameplay, terrible difficulty (RD's better in this aspect), extremely slow pace due to drawn-out animations and inability to skip anything.

That's my summary. From what I've seen, people who play these games for the story tend to consider PoR the best game in the series, or at least one of the best. Those who value gameplay above all don't like it as much, and tend to prefer RD. People wanting a challenge should look elsewhere, plain and simple.

As somebody who belongs in the latter two categories, PoR is my least favorite FE, and although RD is faring better, I wouldn't place it even near the top half in my ranking of FE games. Still, you might think otherwise. I'm just sharing my humble opinion.

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Path of Radiance leans a bit too heavily on the standard side of the spectrum. Kind of predictable with only a few interesting plot twists that get by more on being clever rather than character altering (well except Greil's death, but that is tossed very heavily in the predictable category even without over a decade of hindsight). It keeps things safe mostly, not too great and not too terrible. Though I should note I played it after Radiant Dawn so that's probably coloured my opinion quite a bit. Regardless of that the gameplay leans massively on the easy side. Mainly because the actual hardest difficulty was axed from the western release for some reason. But even taking the normal mode (labelled hard in the west), it seems significantly easier than the easy mode of other games.

Radiant Dawn is a much messier game, but for me that makes it much more interesting. The gameplay patches up some of the biggest holes in Path of Radiance (like being able to reassign skills, that was just really frustrating). I find it's difficulty curve good and the story goes to some more interesting places even if that also means it's focus is diverted quite heavily. The last part in particular is tasked with cleaning up a lot of loose ends it doesn't really make a whole tonne of sense to do at that point given wider context. Overall I'd rank it higher than Path of Radiance. It's probably amongst my favorite games in the series, though it's a bit on the long side to casually play through multiple times (not that I haven't mind you, just haven't played it as many times as some of my other favorites).

Also if you play either of the games, I advise swapping to map combat animations after like a single chapter. The animations aren't terrible but the loading times for them will probably double you're total play time for the game. And the map animations look plenty decent in their own right.

Edited by Jotari
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Gameplaywise, they suck. PoR gives you too many good characters that destroy the laughably underpowered enemies. It's a very boring game and the animations are far too slow, (lacklustre options for emulation don't help this). 

Storywise PoR is passable, the game relies too much on “furry racism" to make the evil empire's goons easily killed. Ike's whole character arc kinda goes against the whole “hate and revenge bad" subtheme of PoR. Blood pacts are dumb. The worst aspect of PoR was that it was written to have a sequel, so the writers just left a bunch of loose ends in the game and went “Oh, you want to know the rest of the background stuff? Too bad buy the next game" We might shit on Fates (and rightly so) for its 3 routes and general poor writing, but at least it had 3 narratively satisfying (not in terms of quality, only in terms of being an actual resolution to the plot, with the exception of Azura vanishes go play revelation) endings for its routes, unlike PoR which kinda vaguely says with Ashnard dead Daein is given to the Empire as a vassal state, but it must be rebuilt yet. 

RD gameplaywise has a few good maps, locked behind far more terrible ones with arbitrary game over conditions. 

Storywise, RD takes everything that PoR did well and sorta takes a dump on it. It even more heavily relies on “furry racism" to carry its mishmash of a plot as you jump from perspective to perspective between two opposing armies, going from Ike's the laguz are our friends, to the Darin army and it's kill 50 Laguz in the swamp map. 

Tellius, is IMO not worth playing, a second or third time. Don't force yourself to play the Tellius games, some people do enjoy them, but if you're only playing them for the sake of playing every FE game, once is enough. 

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my only advice is "when in doubt, give it a try"

you can either stay here and read many different opinions about those 2 games, letting them influence you, or you can actually go and play at least PoR and then decide whether you liked it or not, and if you want to play RD as well

Edited by Yexin
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FE9 has a good and simple straightforward story and world building. Gameplaywise it feels like a mix of GBA and FE5.  The only issue is (for me at least), it's a very easy game. Even on hardest difficulty it's easy, even easier than FE8 in hard because it has no real threatening chapter aside of the early game ones. 

FE10's story is way more complex for having different segments with different groups but it's not worse at all. Gameplaywise it feels more polished by introducing new and unique mechanics among others and it features better maps. Though endgame maps tend to fall behind for having a repetitive mission objective. This game features three lords (despite only two are real lords) and one of them is a very fragile and not fast mage. Keeping her alive in the entire game isn't easy and cause frustration easily. This game has a unique support system by allowing anyone supporting anyone at cost of its conversation though. All conversations are more or less bland unless they had a support in FE9.

Speaking of that I recommend to play FE9 before 10 simply to get transfer boosts for FE10. It applies for having a A-support between two units or having someone with capped level and a capped stat. Some units can really benefit from stat boots in FE10.

As for the content playing FE9 first is nice, but not entirely necessary.

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Just play Path of Radiance, bro.

It's a great game.

Have not played RD yet but hey maybe you'll get into it.

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I personally am not the biggest fan of PoR, but it's got quite a few charming moments, although the gameplay can be rough. It's a fine game, just not my cup of tea. 

RD on the other hand, the gameplay is all over the place. I personally enjoy the mastery skills and such, but balance wise, they can be a big turnoff to people. The story isnt bad in my opinion, either.

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Being the one who has an Ike pic in his profile, i'll try to be as neutral and unbiased as I possibly can, as the Tellius series shines as my favorite of the entire franchise.

 

Characters: 46 playable characters in Path of Radiance, 73 for Radiant Dawn. Most of the new Radiant Dawn additions to the roster, are recurring non playable characters from Path of Radiance. While they are all fun to play, you will always have more alternatives in Path of Radiance, as Radiant Dawn is really story driven, therefore the massive character selection will not represent a threat or an issue up until a certain point in the game. Overall, characters are well written and relatable.

Narrative: I think the Tellius game still represent the highest peak in Narrative that Fire Emblem has in its franchise. In most Japanese games, growth is a big factor when it comes to characters. You do feel the growth of a Napping protagonist into your Edgelord as something close, just like seeing a younger kid growing up. And his allies and enemies, the world and the political landscape that surrounds the story, make the two games amazing even if completely parallel in narrative: Path of Radiance is linear to the point that it can be boring on long term: your second or third playthrough. But still, it is very interesting considering the high amount of details that the game gives you in the brilliant support conversations (which are limited). Radiant Dawn will drive you crazy at first, and your first playthrough will be your hardest challenge when it comes to understanding the scenario. It is a love it or hate it game, no doubts indeed. 

Mechanics: not the most brilliant games for mechanics. They are good standard/classic Fire Emblem games. PoR sees the introduction of Gauge for Laguz units (essentially they are half humans that can transform to beasts). Radiant Dawn had the introduction of Bronze Weapons and Ledges. Radiant Dawn shines because of the possibility of swapping skills among your units, while skills are permanent in Path of Radiance. Once you assign a skill to a given character, its his/her skill for the entire game and if you wish to remove that skill, it is gone for good. FE Radiant Dawn Skill management is fun and it is the only FE to date that did that.

Graphics: Talking about character design, PoR has a mid'2000, vibrant anime energy. By the other hand, FE10RD is more mature and dark-ish when it comes to style. Let's say FE9 is closer to Full Metal Panic and Ragnarok, whereas Radiant Dawn is closer to Death Note and Code Geass when it comes to colors and style. FE is not your AAA game when it comes to graphics, so let's talk about animations and map design.

Animations: Battle animations are BAD in both games. They are sloppy as heck. FE1 feels more natural and delivers better battle animations. Turn them off. People say RD battle animations are better than PoR. That's not a win though. RD animations are just slightly better than PoR but they still feel as the worst in the franchise. FMVs are even worse. If I say that they are fandubbed, i'd insult a lot of amazing dubbers. So let's say quality is on par with the first demo of a fandubber.

Map Design: FE9, Path of Radiance is good but shines in just a couple of maps like Chapter 19 and Chapter 23. Radiant Dawn. Oh, dang. Maps contribute to this game difficulty. If you like challenges, then you'll be more than happy with what this game can offer. 

Difficulty: Path of Radiance is considered to be a great starting point for Fire Emblem. Radiant Dawn is relatable only if you played PoR, and it is not a good starting point in the series. RD is not the hardest game in the franchise, but has a good amount of challenge in its normal/hard difficulty.

 

Hopefully you'll find this comment as neutral as possible.

Edited by vercio
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You get someone with an Ike profile pic immediately followed by someone with a Micaiah one, so it's safe to say I'm biased as well lol.

Radiant Dawn is personally my favorite FE I've played, including FE3H. It has a sense of scale and world building that is frankly unmatched by any other FE game I've played, the characters are great, the difficulty is there (anyone saying RD is too easy is... strange. It's been considered one of the more difficult classic FE games for a while but I personally find it to be a comfortable challenge), the maps are well designed for the most part and quite thematic. Also I like the animations but I get they're not everyone's cup of tea.

PoR wasn't quite as stand out to me. Not only was it more basic without quite the same sense of scale as RD, I also found the maps to be a bit lackluster, especially around mid game. The character supports are where PoR really shines, it gives the characters a grounded, realistic feel that makes them still some of the best in the franchise.

All in all, I'd definitely recommend playing them. Like any games they can be a bit divisive, so really it'll be down to your personal preference.

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Thank you for all the thoughts. Unfortunately, I don't think it'd be possible for me to get these games due to them being boarderline expensive and not only that, my Gamecube's dead and I have to get either a Wii or a U and by that point, the games would be like impossible to get.

Still, I'm quite envious that you all got to play these games...darn Nintendo, when will you do ports for these games already?

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PoR is a very chill game. There's no real way to screw up strategically (as in "longterm planning") because all units either start very strong compared to the enemy or can be made very strong in the blink of an eye. Terrible game if you like being kicked in the metaphorical nads, but a great game if you don't want to use 100% of your brain.

RD on the other hand is tough, with the earlygame being the most difficult part. It can be very frustrating if you insist on building your own army and try to raise all the growth units instead of leaning on the prepromotes because XP is actually pretty sparse in the first part of the game (at least on normal and especially on hard difficulty).

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The story and world building is fantastic. Path of Radiance is probably one of the more harder FE games out there (for the easiest mode) and Radiant Dawn is much easier, but longer. The amount of characters is also rather large, which is something they cut back on in Three Houses. You should definitely give them a try if you like other FE games.

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37 minutes ago, SSbardock84 said:

The story and world building is fantastic. Path of Radiance is probably one of the more harder FE games out there (for the easiest mode) and Radiant Dawn is much easier, but longer. The amount of characters is also rather large, which is something they cut back on in Three Houses. You should definitely give them a try if you like other FE games.

You obviously know better than me what game you had an easier time with, but I think PoR being harder than RD is a very uncommon take. I haven't played the easiest modes ever (PoR) / in a long time (RD), so maybe RD easy mode is actually completely trivial and I just don't know it. But since PoR's normal difficulty is about on par with ENM in FE7, I have a hard time believing that RD on easy is two steps below that level.

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Easy mode of both games have doubled experience (elite mode).

Though another differences in FE10 are that it features less enemies than on normal / hard mode and some early game bosses have weaker weapons a / o are stationary and a few mission objectives have been changed. 1-5 is a defeat boss instead of a survival mission. In 3-6 and 3-12 less enemies have to be defeated.

In FE9's easy mode only the battle experience is doubled, that's all I can remember.

Means on paper the jump from normal to hard is bigger in FE10.

Edited by Falcom Knight
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I've only played PoR but the story is good and the gameplay is fine to me, even though to a good portion of the community, they find the game slow.

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3 hours ago, Harvey said:

Thank you for all the thoughts. Unfortunately, I don't think it'd be possible for me to get these games due to them being boarderline expensive and not only that, my Gamecube's dead and I have to get either a Wii or a U and by that point, the games would be like impossible to get.

I got lucky and had a friend who owned both games. He's not a huge FE person and hadn't really even played them. 😄 Maybe if you ask around you'll find out someone you know has a copy and didn't realize it. Or you could find another way to play them.

In general I'm just going to second what most people have already said, and add that while I do really like both games, I tend to think they're a tad over-rated. Path of Radiance has a safe, low-risk, good-quality story, and the gameplay is laughably easy, though the variety in map objectives keep things moderately interesting. RD has a bigger story with bigger moments but also much bigger failures. Supports, one of the stronger features of PoR, are essentially axed, and when the game tries to tie everything up at the end, it just ends up making less sense. In terms of gameplay, RD is definitely harder, but sometimes not for the right reasons. However, both games have some genuinely fantastic spots and I think they're both worth playing.

Out of curiosity, what FE games have you played?

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3 hours ago, ping said:

You obviously know better than me what game you had an easier time with, but I think PoR being harder than RD is a very uncommon take. I haven't played the easiest modes ever (PoR) / in a long time (RD), so maybe RD easy mode is actually completely trivial and I just don't know it. But since PoR's normal difficulty is about on par with ENM in FE7, I have a hard time believing that RD on easy is two steps below that level.

Tbh . . . it's probably just me at this point. Since I have played RD more than any other FE game. I essentially have down the best ways to go about each chapter with my playstyle. Given that I've played so many times, it's hard to remember how much difficulty I had with the game on my first playthrough. But I've only played PoR a few times and even on my most recent playthrough (which was on the easiest mode) I found it harder than RD still. I'd attribute it to me playing the game so much. But since I can also pinpoint other FE games as being easier than RD, Idk. I think everyone can find things at a different difficulty too.

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I'm surprised to see some people come in here and say the gameplay sucks or the story is messy or whatever. I think Tellius is amazing and the best saga in the series. The lore is deep and PoR in particular has an excellent story and cast of characters. There's almost no one in the Tellius cast overall that I dislike. The gameplay is great too, and RD makes it even better by adding things like third tier classes, ledge mechanics, a number of unique chapter objectives, and so on. But don't go into RD thinking it'll be the same difficulty as PoR. PoR is fairly easy, but RD is actually rather hard.

I won't say these games are perfect, and I'd say RD has a few more flaws than PoR, but they are still the closest to perfect that FE gets if you ask me.

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4 minutes ago, Anacybele said:

I'm surprised to see some people come in here and say the gameplay sucks or the story is messy or whatever. I think Tellius is amazing and the best saga in the series. The lore is deep and PoR in particular has an excellent story and cast of characters. There's almost no one in the Tellius cast overall that I dislike. The gameplay is great too, and RD makes it even better by adding things like third tier classes, ledge mechanics, a number of unique chapter objectives, and so on. But don't go into RD thinking it'll be the same difficulty as PoR. PoR is fairly easy, but RD is actually rather hard.

I won't say these games are perfect, and I'd say RD has a few more flaws than PoR, but they are still the closest to perfect that FE gets if you ask me.

Pretty much this.

After playing through at least two playthroughs of Three Houses, I think I can safely say that Path of Radiance still has the best story of any FE game. Radiant Dawn isn't as strong, but it is definitely one of the better FE stories; top 4 at least. 

The characters are also fantastic; again some of the best that FE has ever seen. Ike is the best FE lord ever written, Elincia the best Princess-of-the-good-kingdom-that-falls-immediately, Greil is the best FE-lord's dad, etc.

The worldbuilding is above and beyond what most FE games accomplish and is the best the series has seen. At a glance, one could argue that the worldbuilding in Three Houses is better, but a fair bit of the worldbuilding in Three Houses is... misplaced; a fair chunk of it explores ultimately-irrelevant information while leaving out some facts that are necessary for the story and characters. 

The gameplay is great. Path of Radiance is basically a simple indulgence; nothing too complicated, but very enjoyable nonetheless. I certainly had to put more thought into my playthroughs of Path of Radiance than I did Awakening or Fates. Radiant Dawn does a great job expanding on the gameplay of Path of Radiance by adding the things that Anacybele listed as well as dark magic, 1-2 range swords, and other features. 

Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn are two of the best FE games in the series. There's only one problem with them: availability. Your options are either to use emulators or spend a lot of money. 

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34 minutes ago, vanguard333 said:

Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn are two of the best FE games in the series. There's only one problem with them: availability. Your options are either to use emulators or spend a lot of money. 

Here I am sitting on two copies of each. 1 RD copy is sealed as well. But yeah, the price is crazy.

Edited by lightcosmo
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