Collection essentials #549: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (GC)

By 2005, Nintendo had been in the business of 3D consoles for nearly a decade. It took this long for Fire Emblem to finally be seen in 3D. During the Nintendo 64 era, Intelligent Systems developed the fifth Fire Emblem game for the…aging Super Famicom (Super Nintendo), the last Nintendo-published game on that platform, and no Fire Emblem ever graced the Nintendo 64. The series had shifted to the 2D handheld Game Boy Advance for a few years before finally hitting the GameCube late in its lifespan. 

Path of Radiance features a brand new continent, standing alone story-wise from the previous game. The continent of Tellius is home to Beorc (humans) and the Laguz (half-beast people who can temporarily transform into full-on beasts). You play as Ike, son of a warrior named Greil who leads a band of mercenaries to which Ike is a new recruit. The nearby nation of Daein is up to no good, and the game’s cast gets caught up in shenanigans after rescuing a woman who escaped from them. The story has a lot of the elements you’d expect from a Fire Emblem game, and while I struggled to give you a lot of details despite having beaten the game twice, it’s not bad. The story is generally told through images and text like the 2D Fire Emblem games, but occasionally Path of Radiance has voiced cutscenes for big moments, which is a nice touch.

The basic premise of the gameplay is pretty much the same as the average Fire Emblem game up to this point. However, there are quite a number of tweaks and changes that Path of Radiance brings which help set it apart. As this is just a simple blog post, I won’t be talking about them all in detail. One of the most significant is the concept of “bonus EXP” which can be divvied out to characters in between battles. As a reminder, you typically can’t grind in old school Fire Emblem games, so to build up low-level characters you have to find a way to “feed” them a lot of kills. In Path of Radiance, you can build them up a little easier by using your bonus EXP on them. There’s also the ability to forge custom weapons, with the ability to invest money in various attributes of the weapon to make it better when you make it. This game also brings back “skills” which characters can have, something that had been absent for a few entries. In this game, skills can be equipped to characters. The specific skills available depend on each unit and their class, and characters are limited in how many they can have equipped at a given time.

The graphics and presentation are alright, but leave a little to be desired. For a late-generation GameCube title, it’s not very visually impressive. The battle animations feel a little bit hollow. There’s no voice work at all when units attack, which contributes to the visual presentation feeling a little too mechanical. There’s no real excuse for this either, since Shining Force III for example had better battle animations including voice clips on the Sega Saturn seven years earlier. Thankfully, Fire Emblem as a series would eventually learn not to make this mistake again.

As an experienced Fire Emblem fan who enjoys a challenge, it’s also a little disappointing how easy this game is. Normal mode felt to me like an utter cakewalk, and hard mode was a little better but still wasn’t quite satisfying in my opinion. 

When I first got into Fire Emblem in 2005, Path of Radiance’s release was just on the horizon. I didn’t immediately buy it when it came out, though. I can’t remember how long I waited, but I grabbed it at a GameStop at some point within the next year or two. And I think I waited a little longer to actually play it, but I certainly had done so sometime before 2009. Then, years later in 2017 I revisited the game and played through hard mode. My opinion of the game is that it’s quite good and a faithful iteration of classic Fire Emblem, but it’s not quite in the conversation if I’m trying to narrow down my favorite in the series. The game does a lot of things well, but doesn’t really blow me away in any area and feels like it could have been at least a little better. It’s definitely worth playing for those interested in the series.

Nowadays Path of Radiance is infamous for fetching high prices on the secondhand market. However, to those who own the new Nintendo Switch 2, that system’s online service will at some point be making Path of Radiance available to play for subscribers, giving an accessible way to play the game officially on modern hardware. Though, if you have a way to play the GameCube original, that’s probably a better choice since you will then be able to transfer save data onto the game’s sequel. 

Even though it may not be my very favorite, I’m still such a fan of the classic Fire Emblem formula. I love the strategic gameplay and the complete absence of grinding. Path of Radiance is one of those games, and therefore it’s an automatic collection essential of mine. Simple as that!