Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Roy's War for Lycia
Western players first met Roy as a swordsman in Super Smash Bros. Melee, but his home game never left Japan. Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade was released on 29 March 2002 and was the series' first handheld entry. It began life years earlier as Fire Emblem: Maiden of Darkness for the Nintendo 64 and 64DD, shown in 1997. When that project stalled, Intelligent Systems restarted it for the Game Boy Advance in 2000, and little survived from the earlier concept except Roy and Karel.
At a glance
- Original game: Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi (Game Boy Advance, Japan, 2002)
- Created by: Intelligent Systems; published by Nintendo
- Directors: Toru Narihiro and Masayuki Horikawa; music by Yuka Tsujiyoko
- Genre: Tactical RPG
- Language of this edition: English and Spanish, via fan translations
The story and the shape of the game
Roy of Pherae leads the army of Lycia against King Zephiel of Bern, who wants to bring back the dragons. Along the way the army hunts for legendary Divine Weapons, and the plot branches through the Western Isles, Arcadia and then either Ilia or Sacae, before ending with the Binding Blade and the Demon Dragon Idunn. It was the first Fire Emblem with a branching narrative.
The team wanted a gentler game than the notoriously hard Thracia 776. Roy's death still ends the run, and a Hard Mode appears after the first completion. Famitsu gave it 9, 9, 8 and 10, and it sold more than 345,000 copies by the end of 2002.
Why it was translated by fans
The series' Western breakthrough came through The Blazing Blade in 2003, the prequel set about twenty years earlier, and Nintendo prioritized that and The Sacred Stones instead of localizing The Binding Blade. A fan translation is how English-language players, and Spanish speakers, can play it today. RPGamer's retrospective noted that such translations were easy to find.