Platform: Game Boy Advance
Genre: Strategy Role Playing
The Good: A lot of characters to choose from.
The Bad: Too many characters to choose from.
Axes: Are effective against lances, but weak against swords
Strategy Role Playing (SRPG) games are not a prominent feature in today’s gaming menus for good reasons. Most are slow, require too much planning, and too prone to trial and error- enough reasons to turn away for most. Perhaps because of the sheer lack of alternatives, the Fire Emblem series managed to shrug off the shackles of the aforementioned- its simple yet polished game play a difficult invitation to decline.
The Sacred Stones is the second Fire Emblem game that made it to the now defunct Game Boy Advance.
Fans of the series will find Sacred Stones right up their alley. The convenient excuse of terming rock-paper-scissors game play as strategic options are your usual made-to-order, while the much celebrated “If characters die, they are gone for good” feature needs no introduction. Bold, italic, and underlined.
Sacred Stones, though, could help with a little better balance. For a title that is supposedly heavy on strategies game play, there are too many battles, too many enemy units and too many expendable allies to focus on; while the lack of variety in characters, graphics and music undermined its production values. Yet for the starved, The Sacred Stones remains one of the better ones around.
Bad game? No. But I seem to have played better ones. [7.5]
