A look back at: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

It's rather telling that I'll try to get to every single franchise I can at one point or another, and now I finally get to check out the flagship game of a number of Super Smash Bros. characters, starting with Marth's flagship game, translated to Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. Honestly in hindsight, the fan translation I picked up for this NES game pissed me off. Mars? Really? He's known all around as Marth, and I realize some things may be lost in translation at some point or another but the translators of the patch I picked up took a lot of liberties, to the point of even breaking the fourth wall in one rare dialogue box that references future games in the series. Thanks a lot. Don't spoiler me on that stuff just yet.

As for Fire Emblem's gameplay, I feel as if this is a relatively nice starting point if someone would get into tactical RPGs, though not the best starting point. Final Fantasy Tactics does a great job, while I was not a fan of how Shining Force dealt with things. Fire Emblem is somewhere in between. Units pretty much always counter, and depending on speed stat, one unit could get a follow-up attack which is one thing you'd really want to get. Skill stat is what dictates hit percentages, and misses still suck, but at least you'll be able to gauge your hit percentage with the stat bars at the bottom of the units, plus attack and defense. Critical hits are awesome surprises when you get them, and deadly when used against you. Because of the permadeath mechanic that units have to deal with, you really don't want to take chances with losing the best units. I believe the creators of this game wanted all players of it to do an Ironman-style challenge when playing, as in you lose units, you just move on. Well, you still have a lot of limited choices in term of characters, AND a limited choice in weapons before they break, so you know that's always a ton of fun, ain't it?

Marth, being the main character, is an enemy magnet. He at least dodges many attacks and counterattacks well. I recognize his critical hit animation is different from others, and actually translated to his Final Smash from Brawl onwards. As for the other characters, those in the mercenary class, which could promote to the hero class, were the exceptional ones without weaknesses, and they were pretty much in all my parties. The horseback riders (social knights, paladins, horsemen) were great for maneuverability, while armor knights were the opposite yet were walking tanks, but both do a decent job with things until you meet the enemies that have specific weaponry against them. Dragon knights were awesome but then you contend with those with the dragon-slaying weaponry. OR arrows, which work well against the pegasus knights too. Mages and clerics are quite typical, with bishops combining them. Clerics on the other hand have the dumbest leveling up mechanic, they have to be hit!? Weird. Then there's the Mamkutes, secretly dragons who have infinite uses of their stones and just are tanks as dragons unless you have the dragon-slaying weaponry. And of course, all these kinds of units, you gotta figure out ways around them all the same. Along with that, weaponry dropped by enemies is usually better than what you own, the shops only give half-decent things until you find a good member card and find SECRET SHOPS. Oh, and I spent a lot of time in arenas, saving before using each one hoping that the character that enters doesn't die. It made some chapters go up to 99 (turn limit), but it's worth it to level people up before promoting them or using them later. But hey, at least I got the chance to play a Fire Emblem game and enjoyed what I could. I look forward to many others.

Game/mod/ROM hack walkthroughs

It really does suck that we have lost the GBAHacks site. I guess due to the inactivities, broken links, and possible strikes, it had to happen. And I did have a number of walkthroughs for ROM hacks submitted to Knuckle San so that they can be of help to those who can't understand the crypticness of certain ROM hacks. In that case, I'll just have to post them on PokeCommunity and here. This post will of course be updated accordingly whenever I finish a walkthrough and a ROM hack.

Just to be clear, these are links to walkthroughs. I'm not here to distribute ROMs.

Full walkthroughs:

Pokemon Adventure Yellow Chapter + Blue Chapter + Gold Chapter + Green Chapter

Pokemon Altair and Pokemon Sirius

Pokemon Ash Gray

Pokemon Dark Cry: The Legend of Giratina

Pokemon Dark Crystal

Pokemon Dark Rising 2

Pokemon Dark Rising: Order Destroyed

Pokemon Dark Violet

Pokemon Gold & Silver '97 Reforged

Pokemon Grass Jewel

Pokemon Grass Jewel 2

Pokemon Hyetology

Pokemon Luria

Pokemon Metal Red

Pokemon Nameless

Pokemon Polka Aqua

Pokemon Polka Aqua 2

Pokemon Prism 

Pokemon Saiph  

Pokemon Scorching Scarlet

Pokemon Sky Twilight

Pokemon Snakewood

Pokemon Stigma

Pokemon Sweet

Pokemon TDT

Pokemon Ultra Fire Sun 

Pokemon Vega

Pokemon Victory Fire

Pokemon Voda Red

Touhoumon Cirno 

The Wooper Who Saved Christmas 1 + 2 

Partial walkthroughs/Pokedexs/Other stuff

Pokemon Emerald Seaglass (general walkthrough only)

Pokemon Liquid Crystal

Pokemon Mega Power

Pokemon Nameless (battle arenas/department guide)

Pokemon Resolute

Pokemon Sapphire in Reverse 

Pokemon Ultra Fire Sun 

And now for a new and additional bonus. I'm playing through ROM hacks of other games as well and will be writing walkthroughs of official games! Check the categories below:

Official game walkthroughs:

Turbo Turtle Adventures 

Legend of Zelda (NES) ROM hack walkthroughs: 

Timecrisis: Fall of the Moon

Zelda Challenge: Outlands (1st Quest)

Zelda Challenge: Outlands (2nd Quest)

Super Monkey Ball 2 ROM hack walkthroughs

Monkeyed Ball (includes Forgotten Stages)

Monkeyed Ball 2: Witty Subtitle 

SMBDX in SMB2 

SMB2 SMB1 Style 

Super Monkey Ball Gaiden 

A look back at: Pools of Darkness

First of the year. It took 24 days, but I get caught up being bored and doing my own advanced college work when no one is looking, still churning through one Pokemon ROM hack while at the same time working on walkthroughs of other game ROM hacks (there's now four for SMB2 on my main walkthroughs page), but I also churn through other series that I've had to deal with and Pools of Darkness is the fourth out of five Pool of Radiance games. Again, franchise in a franchise with strategy RPG mechanics that have remained the same with each game. Slightly better graphics! Freakier sound effects! That's what the developers have decided to ensure the game didn't feel more like an expansion pack to the others.

Yet overall, the gameplay is largely similar, but I guess slightly better than Secret of the Silver Blades. This is largely in part due to the game actually having more than one overworld, and you can navigate freely on the overworlds (though of course there are random encounters, what you do is your decision in these cases). I of course import my characters and their stats, plus equipment hold over. Neat, until I horrifying find out that the game still is quite difficult despite this. Dragons always terrify you. Those annoying spiders and their instakill poison are there. Bane's minions have magic resistance. Fireball and Delayed Blast Fireball, as great spells as they are, are often not useful due to fire monsters taking a lot of precedence. And don't even get me STARTED on the unfairness that is the finale of this game. Yeah, no in-between rests for three or so battles, one of which has the beholders with multiple instakill gaze sets. Even the walkthrough I was using this game to complete with gave up at some point and changed the difficulty setting, while a Youtube video I watched went with a "tire out the enemy until enough turns have passed" cheese strategy. I was obviously quite exhausted with this nonsense, and didn't even bother to try Dave's Challenge as a result. Note to creators, I know you want the best of the best beating your post-game challenges, but when you have exhausting finales for the main game, it's very likely that I'm not even gonna bother with the postgame.

But I guess despite that I did enjoy what I did. A hub dimension where you go around, doing major quests in that dimension to unlock the way to the other dimensions (one of which being a giant god's body) and defeating one of Bane's lieutenants in each one feels a lot better than a game that didn't even have a true overworld. And these overworld have sidequests and side characters meaning that there is usually something worthwhile to do if you deviate from the main quest. 

Blog Timeline 2025

And well I'm not gonna say I hated 2025. Wait, why are we starting out with THAT sentence? Because of the times I said it multiple Blog Timeline posts ago. To be perfectly honest, this might have been my most productive year yet and it will be a precedent for years to come because soon I'm bound to be submitting more things to the internet, whether it's reviews or internet walkthroughs or such. I had to renew a few things for my real life, including my card for this yearly payment thing for this whole blog, plus I went back into the college life, though it's mostly virtual and I find most of the subject matter easy to follow. It will damper my activity somewhat, or will it? I'm making some seriously good progress on games I both play a lot and do a lot.

Doomwiki: As usual I provide the template in adding in secret descriptions and anyone can re-edit things to make them more descriptive if that's their thing. Ever since December 10th's Cacowards I am actively trying to mull through anything that currently has a redlink on Doomwiki, and am still doing it into the new year. But when these new mods get pages, my descriptions are already ready. Yeah, so that's more or less copypasted from last Blog Timeline post, but it's EXACTLY how this has been going and amusingly enough I'm almost done with this stuff. But DAMN some of these newer WADs I'm mulling through are taking a toll on me. Physically, I might add.

Music: I got quite a lot of favorites this year. We have new releases from Tremonti, Chevelle, and Deftones (The End Will Show Us How, Bright as Blasphemy, and private music), they keep doing what they do and they do it extremely well. Volumes went for the djent-pop route in their latest release Mirror Touch and it's not too terrible, while Unprocessed's Angel is trying to straddle the line between the Polyphia-pop sound and trying to be edgier metal, considering how poorly received their last album seemed to have been. Dance Gavin Dance let loose with Pantheon, with Andrew Wells as the new lead vocalist and the sound is all over the place, but not in the best of ways, arguably in my opinion this was my biggest disappointment. 40 Below Summer and Earshot returned with Untethered and Humaning, respectively, and these two actually managed to make fantastic albums. The biggest surprise though? Three Days Grace with Alienation. While I preferred some of the other albums to this, the big surprise was making it so that both main vocalists were kept, and there's some really great tracks on this album.

What I've been watching: Obviously it's gonna be some more Pretty Cure. I binged through Wonderful Pretty Cure, an enjoyable but less combative season rather quickly. It then took me months before I saw its movie and that was fine. I also got on to watching Mirai Days, the sequel to Mahou Tsukai as well and it's like Otona, very few episodes and not overdoing things, thankfully, making it an appropriate sequel season I guess. Soon I'll be binging through Kimi to Idol Precure next, as it's getting ready to end.

ROM Hacks: Surprisingly for Pokemon ROM hacks, I only actually did six (technically seven). Even more surprisingly, I did guides and walkthroughs for ALL of them. Pokemon TDT, Gold & Silver '97 Reforged, Ultra Fire Sun (not a full walkthrough cause this game's setting is unchanged from Fire Red), Sapphire in Reverse (read above, but for Sapphire), The Wooper who Save Christmas 1 + 2 (two hacks technically), and finally Saiph. I am currently playing through the gargantuan hack that is Cloud White, trying to make a walkthrough of it, but it's taking a while due to job commitments and now college work.

And now THIS! If you've seen my pinned walkthroughs post, guess what, I've created some guides for Legend of Zelda (NES) ROM hacks! Oh yes, I got so bored with playing some of the same things over and over that I branched out slightly and played other childhood classics. So I just downloaded one ROM hack which changed only parts of the overworld and some dialogue and made a Google Sheets guide for it, then I moved on to the true classic ROM hack: Zelda Challenge: Outlands. I then made maps for it in the same format. And I plan to do more for other games. I did mention last year I went through custom levels for the Super Monkey Ball games. I just may revisit those and make walkthroughs of those ROM hacks, among other things that could come soon.

RPGs: Last year was 18. This year? 13, technically speaking. But that's because several of these were games plus their expansion packs. I am of course talking about this because of how I separated my Heroes of Might & Magic III and IV playthroughs to include expansion packs separately. Including expansion packs, my actual number was 17. So the vast majority of this was Heroes of Might & Magic mania. I told everyone I would get to this series and I made it quite clear. Started from the beginning, played the first game, the second game and its expansions all in one, and when I got to the third game I separated things and tried to play in the best chronological order possible. I then did Chronicles and then Heroes IV and its expansions. Whew, all in a year's work, but I gotta rest from all this. Apart from that, the start of this year saw me go through the Last Bible spinoffs to the Megami Tensei franchise, they're a whole lot easier than the mainline games for sure. And then I did not one, but TWO Kingdom Hearts games this year! One of which was my 200th RPG reviewed. Yippee! It's an example of hack-and-slash action RPG I actually enjoyed for that matter, though the card game mechanic with Re:Chain of Memories was enjoyed a little less. I'm just glad these games aren't that large. The current franchise I'm tackling, bear in mind, there's a ton of games in it, is another CRPG series, this time it's all Advanced Dungeons and Dragons stuff. Really going old school with this, and I've already completed three games already. But if you're expecting me to play Fire Emblem at some point, or Ultima, hold your horses. They are coming. I promise.

Other games: As I said earlier, I've been tackling Legend of Zelda ROM hacks, so that's something I am gonna do for certain. And the Super Monkey Ball ROM hacks for that matter as well. I did say I messed around in Freelancer more recently, and I played a lot of Discovery's newest update. A more recent thing was that I made a walkthrough for a licensed game I owned. I did in fact make a walkthrough for Turbo Turtle Adventures on the GBA, yeah it's an old game but it was an addicting puzzle-like game and I do in fact plan on making more game walkthroughs, mod or official game, in the future.

Productivity on my end has hit quite the peak for 2025 in terms of what I do for gaming and I don't plan to slow down. This of course means I will slow down when I least expect it though, because I did have to deal with some real-life issues, such as a loving pet dying and two grandparents also dying this year. I don't want to lose more than I gain. But I want to go through 2026 as strong as I went through 2025. 

A look back at: Secret of the Silver Blades

Wow, I was on fire this entire month. Quite ironic given that it is December we're talking here, but also even moreso when it was all little Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games from the early years of CRPGs, and believe me, I've got a lot on my plate with those. But it's actually nice to know that the games aren't super long either. Some, like this game for example, were somewhat arduous yet still very much doable, but hey, I gotta get to experience some oldies regardless.

So far I think Curse of the Azure Bonds is the best of the three I played. All three of these games have the same overall gameplay style (so I'm not commenting about that cause I did that already) and you customize your characters AND can import them (without a doubt the biggest plus of this series thus far). Plot-wise, all games are quite simple in plot. In Pool of Radiance, you basically go after Tyranthraxus and that's all there is to that. In Curse of the Azure Bonds, you also go after Tyranthraxus in a different body, but I enjoyed the whole scope of getting rid of the accursed bonds a whole lot more. In Secret of the Silver Blades, we get to hear about some lore of two twin brothers, one good, one evil, but good doesn't want to strike down evil so he wants others to do it even after he is long gone. And we got rivaling factions to deal with. Black Circle! Banites! Silver Blades! The latter is the actually good faction of course.

The game's difficulty did surprise me a whole lot more than the previous games. While I got annoyed with those phase spiders in the last game, this one also has enemies that can instantly slay your characters. Or rather turn them to stone, lots of medusae, basilisks, and cockatrices in the mine shafts near the middle of the game AND near the end. Combine that with the drider enemies, the very annoying storm giants, and the durable iron giants, and by the end it felt like the mini-franchise was toughening it up a whole lot more. And then there's Vala, the one guest character in the series so far who proved the most useful out of all of them, mostly because she actually stuck around all the way to the end and was a competent fighter. Couldn't have done it without you. But hey, expect a blog summary tomorrow, I'm really on fire with reviewing things and other stuff I've been doing in the meantime. 

A look back at: Curse of the Azure Bonds

Yeah, gonna be going through quite a lot of D&D Gold Box games for a while. Luckily, they aren't that long in length, and the bonus of importing characters is a huge plus! Meaning I don't need to over-customize on things, and the going is easier. Slightly, easier. Of course, it's not all set in stone, despite a whole lot of the game already being similar than Pool of Radiance. The sidequests are actually tough this time around, and the game is a lot more linear as some of those quests are more mandatory than I once thought. And woo, we got some additional grub, two new character classes as well as more monsters that are far more dangerous. Otyughs, yuck! And don't get me started on those truly annoying phase spiders who's poison bites are lethal. That and the more human enemies and their classes show a little bit more intelligence overall, actually casting some annoying spells like the holding ones and such. So yeah, it was a tougher game despite importing my characters.

Aside from this, well I am a bit intrigued by the plot. How your characters get cursed with these accursed Azure Bonds is interesting, you don't remember what happened, you just know you got ambushed somehow and then the bonds are on all your characters. Ironically this kind of "ambush while you are sleeping" mechanic is in the games overall, it's just that this happens before the game starts and is "special", I guess. And having to remove the bonds one by one by defeating evil factions tied to those bonds, well, it is considered original at the time. I feel like Tyranthraxus returning as a different beast and being able to mind control the party feels like a small Deus Ex Machina. And then there's Nameless? Is this the same Nameless One I hear from other games? I will certainly keep an eye out. 

A look back at: Pool of Radiance

Yes, even way back in the primitive days of video gaming, or at least when the Dungeons & Dragons series decided to be ported to game consoles and PCs, there existed nonlinear sandbox-style gameplay. And so I start combing through another franchise mostly on the computers, though with many different types of titles and sub-franchises under its belt, starting with the Forgotten Realms series and Pool of Radiance in particular.

We have Might and Magic-style navigation, Might & Magic-style character creation, standard dialogue that isn't too different from those games, but the main draw is the nonlinear quests you can do and the battle system. The main quest is as simple as "go to the last castle of the game and beat the dragon" and that's all there's to it, but of course with a beginner party this isn't feasible until you get more stuff. Gotta get that gold, gotta get that experience, gotta keep your characters' skills and spells up to snuff, and the difficulty is actually quite varied. Early on, goblins and kobolds shouldn't actually give you trouble, even though you're bound to miss a lot, so shall they. The quests do involve usual monster killing in general, or some other things. One quest in particular basically is a trap too.

The battle system is a nice blend of tactical RPG with some nice sprites (that you set yourself) and enemies always approach in hordes. Weak enemies however will miss your experienced fighters and die quickly, however you of course meet the stronger suits who will take up more than one tile. Spells are really really good in this game though, the stinking cloud spell and the hold spell render units helpless and VERY easy to kill, then there's the awesome fireball spell with high power and AOE. Some of the battles will be long just cause there's so many targets to take down, and then you have to manually end battle which is annoying. Oh, and the loot? There's often lots of it, but with the correct walkthrough and all I basically had to get what I truly wanted in these cases. Another fun fact to this game's overall nonlinearity is that it's not over after you beat the main quest, you can go and do other sidequests any time afterwards.