Retro spotlight: Tear Ring Saga: Chronicles of War Hero Yutona

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Here’s one of the most important things you can know about Tear Ring Saga: Chronicles of War Hero Yutona (or TearRing Saga, or TearRingSaga — it really depends on who is writing it out, if they’re using the stylized version of the title, etc.). It’s Fire Emblem. It’s Fire Emblem in all but name, and even that bit is only because a lawsuit was threatened. You see, Tear Ring Saga was developed by Tirnanog, a studio founded by Shouzou Kaga after he left Intelligent Systems. While with Intelligent Systems, Kaga created Fire Emblem, the first of which was the Famicom’s Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. So, it’s no surprise that Tear Ring Saga would be Fire Emblem-esque, but again, it’s not really “esque.” It’s just Fire Emblem.

This is not a bad thing, from where we’re sitting, in the sense that hey, more Fire Emblem is a good thing. The problem is more on the legal side, where Nintendo and Intelligent Systems were forced to defend their copyright. What you need to know, too, is that Kaga wasn’t just trying to make legally distinct from Fire Emblem. He was making a successor series that used “Emblem” in the title: Tear Ring Saga was originally Emblem Saga, with a name change only coming in at the last minute because Nintendo heavily implied that publisher Enterbrain was going to be taken to court, and probably not in a case that they’d win.

Consider that the primary protagonist, Prince Runan, reportedly had blue hair in the game at this point, which was common for Fire Emblem’s royal protagonists. Weapon names and class names made their way from Fire Emblem to what was then Emblem Saga — think “Myrmidon” and “Killing Edge” and the like. Sure, Myrmidon wasn’t a word invented by Intelligent Systems, but it is to this day associated more with Fire Emblem than any other video game series, and the weapon they almost always tended to wield when you found a recruitable one — the Killing Edge sword — is very much a Fire Emblem-specific thing. Oh, and Tear Ring Saga’s artist and character designer, Mayumi Hirota, just so happened to be the artist for the previous Fire Emblem title, Thracia 776. And while not Tear Ring Saga itself, Kaga’s new studio was named after a location from Fire Emblem IV. “Tirnanog” is a Celtic word, but it’s one Kaga had used before in the series he saw himself as the shepherd of, is all. Lots of connections there, is all.

Again, it’s fine that Kaga wanted to keep making Fire Emblem games the way he wanted to make them — which is to say, more complicated and more difficult and more challenging and less trending toward something Nintendo would feel comfortable localizing for a worldwide audience not raised on Kaga’s masochism — but marketing your new game in the style of Fire Emblem as a Fire Emblem game is asking for a lawsuit. Per Nintendo’s press release on the suit they eventually did file, “the original title of the game, Emblem Saga, had a similar name to the Fire Emblem series and was used deliberately for promotional purposes until it was changed a month and a half before the release date.” Nintendo also claimed that this method of promotion and design was "bringing false recognition to users." This even extended to those in media: IGN admitted in their coverage of the lawsuit back in July of 2001 that “more than one IGN editor initially believed [Emblem Saga] to be an extension of the Fire Emblem series.”

Luckily, the results of this suit were good news for everyone involved, as Nintendo won in court, but not in the complete fashion they were hoping for. They went for the extremely petty and vengeful tactic of, on top of $2 million in damages, having Tear Ring Saga pulled from retail, but had to settle for Enterbrain paying them 76 million yen (a fraction of the $2 million demand) in appeals court. Tear Ring Saga was able to stick on store shelves, and it did well, too, selling 345,000 copies by the time of the initial suit despite being a niche, Japan-only title that released for the original Playstation the same year that its successor console arrived.

Tear Ring Saga might not be a well-known game outside of Japan or to non-Fire Emblem fans, but it carries a significant legacy thanks to this lawsuit. It helped to establish legal precedent for spiritual successors in video games. Gameplay could be exactly as you knew it with the original franchise, even certain traditional item or character names and such could be used again, as well, so long as the game wasn’t marketed as an official extension of whatever it was a successor to — permission wasn’t required from the company holding the rights to the original work for this to occur. Which is how we now live in a world where Mega Man and Keiji Inafune’s Mighty No. 9 can coexist even if Capcom wasn’t thrilled about that, where Castlevania and Bloodstained are both out there, where Konami’s lone response to Eiyuden Chronicle continuing Suikoden’s legacy is to promise to remake the originals. Where Bakugan can stand in for Goemon, and why we can sit here and hope for some other neglected Konami series to have an original or vital creator decide hey, I’m going to make more of those, with a different name.

Nintendo might be a little overly litigious at times, but this was a pretty understandable suit — especially since no precedent was yet set, and Kaga was essentially going, “It’s Fire Emblem if I do it.” Now, the demand for having the game pulled from shelves was a bit much, especially since the name was changed to remove Emblem from the title (and Runan’s hair was changed to brown, but luckily the courts waved that off, and the precedent that had been lacking was now in place.

Kaga would go on to make a second Tear Ring game, Berwick Saga, for the Playstation 2. It was more its own thing at this point, not simply Legally Distinct-ish Fire Emblem, but that, like the original, remained a Japanese exclusive. Kaga has kept making strategy RPGs in the years since, and those have received a worldwide release. The short of it is that if you’re a person who doesn’t enjoy that Fire Emblem has become easier and more approachable over the years, that you were happier when it was openly rude to you, then you want to seek out Kaga’s post-Intelligent Systems work, Vestaria Saga I and II, which very much carry on in the tradition of his last pair of Fire Emblem titles, and are also available internationally through Steam: they are brutal, they are unforgiving, and they do not hold your hand, but that’s the draw, isn’t it?

It certainly was for Kaga, as a conversation between him and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi in Famitsu detailed:

Now, that’s not to say that Kaga didn’t want games to be approachable at all. The very next part of the conversation is him explaining what he likes so much about Final Fantasy and Sakaguchi’s work:

Kaga would follow this conversation up by making Genealogy of the Holy War and Thracia 776. Genealogy of the Holy War is one of the greatest Fire Emblems going, and easily the best that Kaga worked on. Thracia 776 is about as difficult as you can make Fire Emblem without people being able to correctly say that it’s unfair. I would not say either is necessarily “approachable” or designed for anyone to pick up and play, but they’re certainly more refined than the first three Fire Emblem entries. And this refinement helps lead to the outcome Kaga said feels best, in that you’ll try and try again despite your failures, and eventually succeed, and then experience a feeling that there’s just nothing else like.

Tear Ring Saga is similarly brutal, though, not quite as much as Thracia 776, a game that makes acquiring new inventory purposefully difficult to keep up the idea that your rebellion is a poorly funded long shot, that uses a fatigue system so you can’t just spam your strongest characters on every map, that allowed Kaga to emphasize another point he’d make in that conversation with Sakaguchi — that it’s okay for some of your characters to die, forcing you to forge your own path and experience your own story — by making sacrifices of some characters basically a necessity if you’re to succeed. It’s understandable that Kaga would back off of those extremes a bit, but Tear Ring Saga is still for the sickos. There are still extremely convoluted recruitment paths that require either guides or circumstance. There are still battles where it becomes clear five or six turns in that you’ve completely ruined any chance that you had of getting out in one piece due to your poor strategizing and anticipation of reinforcements, or failure to read the warning signs given to you by pre-level dialogue. It’s still a game where your gold and your weapons are in low supply, where some of your eventual strongest characters are some of the hardest to keep alive early on, where you have to balance characters who are powerful now but have low ceilings with those weaker ones who can become strong as you simply try to just survive the latest onslaught.

Genealogy of the Holy War’s hook was that it was a multigenerational affair on the largest maps Fire Emblem has ever had, a statement that’s as true today as it was nearly three decades ago, which allowed it to feel more like a battle taking place in an actual war in a way no other Fire Emblem truly has. Thracia 776 has you leading a rebellion that you know is doomed: you know, because its leader, Leif, is recruited in Genealogy of the Holy War in the aftermath of said rebellion failing, leaving its participants scattered or dead. It attempts to feel as much as possible like you’re leading a doomed rebellion, too, hence all the roadblocks in your way that keep it from being anything but a challenge from start to finish. Tear Ring Saga continues this trend: whereas Intelligent System’s next Fire Emblem would tone down everything a bit, scaling down and scaling back in order to be more approachable while still being very much Fire Emblem, Tear Ring Saga became complicated in a new way.

You have two lead protagonists: the aforementioned Prince Runan, and the privateer, Holmes. Runan and Holmes are pals, with the former attempting to build up an alliance of countries to free his homeland from the Zoa Empire, and the latter happy to help Runan where possible while also fighting off pirates and bandits. Their tales will intersect multiple times, and while Runan leads the main charge against the more dire opponents, Holmes has the easier challenges to handle. Which makes the role of his campaign something of a training ground for the weaker allies with potential. In turn, though, that means that, while Holmes’ stages are technically the easier ones, you’re fighting mostly with characters who aren’t nearly as powerful yet, upping the challenge level that way. They’re also not receiving princely gifts from kingdoms they’ve helped save from Zoa’s grasp, so you have to rely more on shops and remembering to stock them when you get the chance to combine and swap inventories and forces with Runan’s, on the occasions where they meet up.

Fire Emblem Gaiden, the second game in the series, also had split campaigns, but it was a bit different since those were concurrent but separate, without the kind of intersecting that occurs in Tear Ring Saga. Things are separate here, too, but Alm and Celica have their own campaigns and their own forces, rather than the occasional mingling and swapping that goes on in Tear Ring Saga between Runan’s army and Holmes’ band of privateers.

Certain recruitable characters will be locked out if you don’t have the proper ones in the proper party at the proper time, but Tear Ring Saga also has so many characters that you’re not going to even know you’re missing someone if this happens, other than maybe seeing them on a given map and not being able to figure out just how to talk to them so you can bring them onboard. You have enough characters here to fill out two different parties at all times, and real early, before you get control of Holmes’ group, you’ll feel the squeeze brought on by the limited maximum party size on each map. It’ll feel like you’ve got too many characters already at that point, and not enough maps or foes to bring them all up to speed, level-wise, but it’s because the game is building up for you needing two of them.

While not a Fire Emblem game officially, in the most technical sense this is the series’ introduction to 32-bit systems — hey, if Nintendo can pull the “if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck” theory in court, then we can agree on this point, no? Intelligent Systems would move the sequel to Thracia 776 to the 32-bit Game Boy Advance following the cancelation of Fire Emblem 64. And while Kaga certainly kept up the reputation Fire Emblem had, and found a different way to present the story progression with the dual-and-separated protagonists model, the game, like Intelligent System’s own first post-Kaga attempt at Fire Emblem, is not quite as ambitious as what came before. Which isn’t a bad thing, in the sense that simply more Fire Emblem (even by another name) is a good thing, but there’s a reason that The Binding Blade lags so far behind for me compared to its prequel — and the first internationally released Fire Emblem — The Blazing Blade, and the difference in ambition is part of it.

Tear Ring Saga’s overall design, though, is superior to that of The Binding Blade, a game that I described at Paste as having “The worst tendencies of the Game Boy Advance era of Fire Emblem games are all contained within, which makes some poor decisions in terms of pacing, roster size, and how long Roy, the protagonist you’re forced to use in every single level, remains weak and un-promoted from his starter class for narrative purposes. Babysitting weaker characters until they can be stronger wasn’t new for Fire Emblem, but required babysitting of the non-optional character that the game revolves around? It’s not a bad game… but it’s clear that Intelligent Systems was still figuring out what Fire Emblem was even going to be after Kaga departed the studio.” Kaga didn’t need to figure out post-Kaga given, you know, that’s who he is, but it did, similarly, take him a game before he was able to more comfortable dive in and separate his new work from his old, just like Intelligent Systems in their own quest to do the same.

There hasn’t been a ton of discussion of Tear Ring Saga’s actual gameplay mechanics, but that’s because they’re just Fire Emblem’s. If you know Fire Emblem, you know Tear Ring Saga even without having ever played it. Specifically, the Game Boy Advance era of Fire Emblem, or the DS remake of the original, titled Shadow Dragon. You’ve got your weapon triangle — sword bests axe, axe bests lance, lance bests sword — as well as archers being a terror for knights on a pegasus or wyvern, and magic users being a problem for armored units, while the pegasus knights are more resistant to the attacks of mages. There are healers, there are those who can cast both offensive and healing spells, there are thieves who can dodge attacks while inflicting little damage, but hey, they can open up doors or chests without keys.

There are character interactions, but they mostly happen in between levels after two characters who can match up together survive the same stage together. There are romance options, but they aren’t producing future children, like in Genealogy of the Holy War, or children from the future, like in Awakening. It’s just another mechanism for personalizing the story a bit, adding in depth both from your own perspective and from the game itself. Learning more about these characters and liking them for reasons other than “is strong in battle” makes the prospect of losing them that much more difficult for the player and all. Seeing a love story unfold is that but doubled, in more ways than one.

There are some minor complaints to be had that are a bit specific to this game. You can speed up battle animations or skip them almost entirely — the almost is because the game forces you to watch battles play out against characters who are key to the story somehow, as well as bosses. Which, given that the Playstation has load times before every battle cinematic, can be pretty annoying when you’re just trying to get out of a map before a full hour has passed you by, never mind if you’ve replayed it a few times or loaded a save up. It’s not gamebreaking or anything, just annoying and one of the few points that the first 32-bit effort from Intelligent Systems came out clearly ahead on, since that was a much smoother experience.

The one thing that drives me up the wall, though, is that, for some reason, your characters who can heal with a staff don’t have that option as their top one in the list of actions, with “Wait” instead put up there. No other class does this! A character in position to attack does have not “Wait” listed as a command before “Attack,” but the ones who can heal do, meaning, there was more than one occasion where a sort of impatient button press kept me from healing a character who needed it, since I’d accidentally ended the turn by doing nothing. Muscle memory can be a real pain sometimes.

These are minor things, however. Tear Ring Saga isn’t quite as ambitious as its Fire Emblem predecessors, but it’s a superior game to Intelligent System’s first post-Kaga title. If you’re a fan of the Game Boy Advance Fire Emblem titles but wish they were a bit ruder and asked a bit more of you, than Tear Ring Saga can deliver what you feel you’re missing. Of course, the only way to play it is to emulate it, since it’s never received an international release nor a re-release, but at least there’s an unofficial translation out there for you so you can at least play it in English. Maybe, with Vestaria Saga I and II officially releasing in English and bringing back the old-school Fire Emblem style, Tear Ring Saga will see an official localization and release down the road. But given that Kaga is already 75 years old and he got sued the last time he did that, maybe not.

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