Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn directly continues the entry released on GameCube and continues the war between humans and laguz, beings capable of turning into animals. The storytelling itself is unusual: the game is divided into several parts, and the player gradually commands different sides of the conflict, so characters you fought alongside one day appear on the opposite side of the battlefield a few chapters later. The main new heroine is Micaiah, who leads a resistance group in an occupied land, but Ike and most of his party also return.

The gameplay is a classic turn-based tactics game on a square grid. Each unit has its class, range, weapon, and weaknesses according to the simple rock-paper-scissors rule, where sword beats axe, axe beats lance, and lance beats sword. Permanent death is crucial: when a character falls in battle, they don't come back, which makes every turn a serious decision and leads many players to restart the whole map from the beginning. Radiant Dawn ranks among the most demanding entries in the series, because the maps are extensive, there are a lot of enemies, and the player often starts with a weak group against superior numbers. On top of that come battles across three layers of terrain, weapon modifications, and a system where strong units can get a penalty for winning too easily.

Technically the game doesn't use Wii in any significant way; battles are rendered as three-dimensional animations against a flat background and the visual style is rather austere. The controls do without any motion elements. The music is orchestral, with serious and solemn themes matching the tone of the story. Reviews were positive, with criticism directed at the difficulty and at the fact that the game assumes knowledge of the previous entry. Today it's one of the most highly regarded and simultaneously most demanding entries in the series, and among fans it has a reputation as a trial to be passed. The pacing is calm, the tempo slow, and a single chapter can easily take an hour, so it's a game for long evenings. For the series it also mattered in that it remained the last entry on a home console for a long time, before the brand moved mainly to handheld systems.