Being released on August 5th, Japan has already gotten a taste of the newly designed Fire Emblem for the Nintendo DS. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is a remake of the Famicon's Fire Emblem. Only to be released in Japan in 1990, this game is pretty much the English game we have been waiting for to tell the story of Marth, which people may know from Super Smash Bros. Melee and Brawl.
Mainly, if you played the Japanese Famicon version (or already played the DS version), the story is all the same, but with a few new content added into the game.
IGN wrote:
Four prologue chapters have been added to further flesh out the story. A tutorial is also now in place to help out players who may not be familiar with turn-based strategy games. The Fire Emblem series is known for being challenging, and from what we've seen of Shadow Dragon so far that challenge was in place since the beginning of the franchise.
Three save options are now available: your progress can be logged in between battles, you can quick save during a fight to restart later (although the file will be deleted when you return), and there are also checkpoints on maps that will automatically create a mid-battle save file. The checkpoint system is a way of rewarding the player for completing major objectives during a conflict.
Not only do these features exist, but the for the first time in the series, Fire Emblem: Shadow of Dragon will use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection for up to five characters from the single player campaigned can be used in battle against other players. For every victory you get gives you receive Cards, which give you special effects during battles. However, these Cards can always be toggled on/off.
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon will be released Q2 2009 for the Nintendo DS.
Anyways, nice to see that Nintendo has finally announced something for their most beloved "underground" franchise. It's also nice to see that they're keeping all six difficulty levels, instead of straight-up removing the hardest one like Maniac mode in PoR.