Trivia / Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn

• Acclaimed Flop: The game did fairly well in the review circuit (78 out of 100 "generally favorable reviews" on Metacritic), but it's one of the lowest-selling Fire Emblem titles ever, even setting aside the small print run. Nintendo releasing it in North America a week before Super Mario Galaxy also didn't help matters. Radiant Dawn is the game that first put Fire Emblem on the cancellation brink that Awakening would reverse five years later, and also until Three Houses, it was the last Fire Emblem game made for home consoles, barring spinoff material released in the following years.
• Acting for Two:
  • In the Japanese version:
    • Sothe, Shinon and the Black Knight are voiced by Junji Majima.
    • Mia and Rolf are voiced by Yuu Asakawa.
    • Tibarn and Lay are both voiced by Tatsuhisa Suzuki.
    • Dheginsea and the narrator are both voiced by Takashi Nagasako.
  • In the English version:
    • Shinon and Tibarn are played by Joey Pepin.
    • In addition to voicing Micaiah, Lani Minella also voiced Mist, Mia and Rolf.
    • Dheginsea and Sephiran are both voiced by Ed Bednarzik.
• Cut Song: This game has many songs in its disc that went unused and likely replaced by other songs. Some songs that are remixes of songs from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance like "On Black Wings" (Naesala's theme), Memory of Mom (Mist's theme), and Victory is Near, were also never used in the game. See the soundtrack page in Serenesforest.net to listen to them. Interestingly, one of the songs (Victory Theme 01) is repurposed in the English version of the game where Micaiah destroys the Blood Pact as it was a scene that only appeared in the localization and not the original.
• Dummied Out:
  • Renning is programmed to be able to use the Amiti, as he is Crimean Royalty, which could have made him an actually pretty good combat unit for the Part 4 Endgame that requires no investment. Unfortunately the Amiti is locked into Elincia's inventory, so without modding/cheating the Amiti into Renning's inventory there is no way for him to legitimately use it, leaving him as last resort filler for players that made it to Endgame with few of their trained units alive.
  • Levail is programmed to have personal growth rates unlike other bosses, suggesting it was originally intended for you to be able to recruit him, but in the released game there is no possible way to legitimately recruit him.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • This game has the second-smallest print run, total, of any Fire Emblem in history, with only Thracia 776 having a smaller original run (and no English-language run), and BS Archanea not really tallying. After Super Smash Bros. and Fire Emblem: Awakening made Fire Emblem more popular, and after Fire Emblem Heroes gave the Tellius crew a much greater amount of exposure, interest in the game increased to such a degree that even authentic good-condition discs by themselves can creep up toward $100USD.
  • Compounding this is that the game has, to date, not been re-issued in any format; while Wiis are hardly uncommon, you still need appropriate hardware if you want to play the game (and are unwilling or unable to resort to emulation). And if you want to play Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn on the same system, using the Wii U's backward compatibility is out of the question due to it being unable to play GameCube games.
  • Moreover, as time goes on the more acute problem is that, since the game has 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. Compound this with the game's comparatively minuscule print run, and by the time The New '20s rolled around, more than a decade later, availability of the game in its original format had begun to be a bit of a crisis.
• The Other Darrin:
  • In the Japanese version:
    • Miho Miyagawa replaces Atsuko Enomoto as Mist.
  • As for the English version:
    • Lani Minella replaces Elsbeth Nathanson as the voice of Mist.
    • Lev Liberman replaced Stephan Weyte as the narrator.
    • David Frederick White voices the Black Knight instead of Mark Dias.
• Same Voice Their Entire Life: The English dub has Jason Adkins voiced Ike, both as an adult and (notoriously) as a child.
• Screwed by the Network: Nintendo wasn't very confident in the Fire Emblem franchise at the time, so they decided to short print Radiant Dawn and release it in North America a week before Super Mario Galaxy (one of the Wii's Killer Apps) came out.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • A very persistent gameplay rumour is that Calill receives Largo's Old Save Bonus as well as her own, Largo being the only Path of Radiance playable character to not return in Radiant Dawn. Testers eventually proved this false: Calill only receives her own bonuses and Largo's don't go to anyone, but this information is still listed on many walkthrough websites.
  • Rumors of additional support paired endings in Radiant Dawn such as Stefan/Soren, Meg/Zihark, and Micaiah/Pelleas abound. Serenes Forest has confirmed they never existed.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Radiant Dawn contains data for specific support pairs, but not actual conversations. It's speculated that they were still going to go with the "everyone supports" system but give certain pairs unique conversations for the A rank. Sadly this ended up being dropped.
  • Some leftover bits of data in Radiant Dawn, plus the fact that male Swordmasters are the only second tier class capable of reaching the SS rank in their primary weapon skill, indicates that Stefan was at some point meant to join the Dawn Brigade in the first act.
  • Unused dialogue for Part IV Endgame of Radiant Dawn indicates it was at some point possible to spare the life of Hetzel. His fate wouldn't have been much more pleasant, though, as Sanaki would immediately order him arrested and charged with high treason after the battle.
  • Unseen data shows that Levail has his own growth rates rather than using the defaults for his class. Add that to his Resolve skill and general Nice Guy status, and you'll start thinking that he may have been recruitable at one point in time.
  • This game has many unused music, one of the most infamous is a remix of Alm's Map Theme #2 from Fire Emblem Gaiden, which implies that this game was originally going to have trial maps like Path of Radiance. One of the original victory themes, however, was re-purposed in the English version of the game as it is used in a cutscene where Micaiah tears the Blood Pact.

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