Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

But all this mothering has also given rise to a concerted, albeit fairly mild backlash at Fire Emblem's other big thing: permanent character death. Once they're gone, you either switch off and start from a previous save-game, or soldier on without them. Forever. Or at least until you finish the game's 20-plus chapters and start again. So it's to Shadow Dragon's credit that Intelligent Systems has introduced occasional, single-use mid-level save-points, which can be used by sending a character off to a particular spot at any time, and allow you to roll back the occasional misjudgement and only lose a bit of time to repetition as a result, at least for the first half of the game.

Shadow Dragon also introduces a reclassing system, which allows you to transform one type of unit into another - for example, to repurpose a spare archer as a knight - and you can do this during the preparation phase, where, as is traditional, you can also review the battlefield, retool your units and buy/sell/forge weapons. There was a danger here of losing some of the core team's identities in a whirlwind of Faking It, but if anything we found the opposite: incidental characters coming into their own in new roles, rather than languishing, greyed-out at the bottom of the character-select like the kid you never picked for football at break-time. As with everything in Fire Emblem, there's a lot of hidden depth to reclassing too, as there is to the new weapon rank system, even though they're arguably attempts to simplify, and sensibly you can't just turn everyone into the same unit halfway through.

There's also multiplayer, with online options (and voice chat for those with Friends codes), which allows two people who own the game to set up five-character parties and battle to kill each other off or seize and hold a fortress, with options like fog-of-war and card usage for players who've earned them in previous battles. You can also loan units, replicating them in a friend's game, and these can be used alone or in multiplayer, and there's even an online shop that sells stuff in return for in-game currency, with an Animal Crossing-style rotating inventory that adjusts for particular days and weeks of the month.