Trivia / Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

• Acclaimed Flop: The game got high critical praise upon release (85 out of 100 "generally favorable reviews" on Metacritic), but it also bombed in sales.
• Acting for Two: Greil and the narrator are played by Takashi Nagasako in Japanese and Stephan Weyte in English.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The game is infamously difficult and expensive to get hold of legally these days. After Super Smash Bros. and Fire Emblem: Awakening made Fire Emblem more popular, interest in the game increased but the game itself became extremely hard to find; the game having one of the smaller print runs in the series exacerbated the problem heavily. With the advent of Fire Emblem Heroes and all that exposure for Ike & co., prices for mint condition Path of Radiance copies routinely go into the hundreds of dollars as of The New '10s and beyond.
  • Compounding this is the fact that the game has, to date, never been re-released for another platform. This isn't the biggest deal, since the Wii has back-compatibility with the Gamecube (and used Wiis are everywhere) so finding hardware to play it on isn't terribly difficult, but if you're a newer FE fan and you don't currently own a GCN or a Wii (and you don't want, or don't have a strong enough computing device, to resort to emulation), it's one more hurdle.
  • The bigger problem is that, since it's never been re-released, simple attrition and the ravages of time are steadily decreasing the number of "legitimate" discs in overall circulation, never mind collector's markets, making it even harder for new or young users who got into the franchise via Three Houses or such to get their hands on the game at all without resorting to outright piracy, via emulation or otherwise.
• Milestone Celebration: Path of Radiance was released on the Fire Emblem franchise's 15th birthday.
• Non-Singing Voice: In the game's international release, Mist's singing is left in by her Japanese VA, Atsuko Enomoto.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Several S Rank weapons, like Urvan and every ultimate magic tome except Thunder and Light, as well as the Beacon Bow, a light magic-based bow that would've been able to attack from melee range, are among unused weapons in Path of Radiance. Urvan would eventually become usable in the sequel, and Path-era Ike using Urvan (and his father's cloak) became the gimmick for his "Choose Your Legends" version in Heroes, giving us a more in-depth look at what that could have been like.
  • Path of Radiance has unused data for a playable incarnation of Greil, complete with a set of new base stats (much higher than what he has in the Prologue), growth rates, and even his own animations for Aether. A common theory is that he was supposed to be a Trial Map unit as well as to make sure that, in the case he somehow was used after the tutorial, the game wouldn't crash.
  • The story was originally quite different in the initial states. For example, Ike and Mist were actually intended to be nobility rather than Ike being the first Fire Emblem protagonist that's a commoner, and Mist was a Lord character who could use magic. Both ideas weren't fully discarded, however, as Ike and Mist learn their father was a former Rider of Daein, making them technically nobility, while Mist using magic was slightly changed to her being able to use magic-based swords once promoted.
  • There are a ton of unused support pairs; most notably, Elincia and Volke were meant to have a lot more support options (Volke only has one in the final game) and Zihark has unused dialogue in the epilogue that was supposed to show if he had an A Support with Ike.
  • The art book has a bit of concept work for an adult, or at least adult-ish, Sanaki with a more confident vibe than the little girl who made it into the game proper. This idea apparently was explored to a decent degree in development, as there is in fact a map model that is clearly based on this earlier concept Sanaki and is largely functional, with animations for movement, attacking, etc. albeit in a somewhat less polished state than the release characters. However, it isn't associated with any character data, and there's no fight scene model for adult Sanaki, so the turn toward younger Sanaki evidently happened before a full prototype for the older concept could be assembled. Playable, fully-functional, older Sanaki would of course be explored in the sequel, but still not with the exact tack that the prototype Sanaki took.
• Word of God: A Q&A from the Japanese Path of Radiance website gives the average lifespan of each type of laguz. 5-6 times the beorc average for the beasts, ten times the beorc average for the hawks and ravens, a thousand years for the herons, and two thousand years for the dragons.
• Working Title: This game began development before Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, and as a result both games are internally named Fire Emblem 8.

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