For fans of the Fire Emblem franchise, it will likely not be a surprise that Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn are two of my favorite games in the series. Before games such as Three Houses, Path of Radiance was one of the more fleshed-out games in terms of world-building. The world of Tellius, and the story of Ike and his allies, spanned two games, creating a lush, vibrant experience.

Now that Path of Radiance is on Nintendo Switch Online, I’ve been enjoying playing through it. While there are some quality of life things in the newer games (like optional perma-death), it has been fun to revisit a more classic style of Fire Emblem. Sure, certain things haven’t exactly aged well, such as the Laguz/Beorc racism allegory that drenches the storyline, but the character building is immaculate for a lot of the main players.

These characters weren’t thinly veiled anime tropes, which some of the Three Houses characters fall into. Instead, these were people who had relationships and stakes in the world and its story.

Path of Radiance is also a simpler (to some degree) experience. It is simpler in that there are elements of the party-management and character-building that appeared in Three Houses. However, instead of the explorative Life-Sim elements of Three Houses and Engage, you get bonus XP for doing certain things in battles, which you can allocate to characters at will.

This is wonderful for certain characters who do not have combat options, such as Staff-Wielders or the Heron clan. This also adds an extra layer of strategy that isn’t really present in current Fire Emblem releases.

With all of that in mind, I love both the more modern games and games like Path of Radiance. Going back to one of my favorite games in the franchise has actually made me even more excited for Fortune’s Weave. I’m curious to see how Fortune’s Weave evolves the franchise even further, hopefully with a beautiful narrative.

I’m also hoping that the release of Path of Radiance on NSO means that we might get a remake of it and Radiant Dawn in the future. If not, then perhaps they’ll give us Radiant Dawn on NSO somewhere down the line, so we can play both games in the Saga on our Switch consoles.

Either way, if you haven’t played Path of Radiance yet, I hope this article has at least made you curious. It is a tougher, more unforgiving experience than what you might be used to. However, it is a wonderful entry that paved the way for the more modern games in the franchise.

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