Game Review: Gemfire (SNES)

Gemfire, a game released by Koei for a variety of platforms but most popular on Nintendo's SNES system, is truly a gem. Released around 1992, this is one of my favorite games of all time. The game, of the medieval war strategy genre, involves a harrowing tale of six wizards maintaining peace on the island of Ishmeria. A Fire Dragon later appears and disrupts the peace, resulting in a series of events that forge the story of the game (the story is rather lame, but the game is amazing).

There are actually four campaigns in the game, similarly to that of StarCraft (which has three). You control multiple of a handful of "provinces" with the intention of getting ahead of all others; you do what you would do in many other RTS-style games; things like cultivation, alliance, robbery, attacking, and the like, are commonplace. The game features a "Kingdom mode" that allows you to scale things up, controlling a larger array of provinces at once.

The game is similar to a game I played for the PSX known as Risk (also a board game). Although this game features much more in-depth details, the style is relatively similar (it isn't actually an RTS per-se).

The graphics in Gemfire are terrible, however; I would call them worse even than most SNES games' graphics. Though Gemfire features cutscenes, the rest of the imagery is utter garbage. I can't understand what the developers were thinking in this case.

Honestly, I think that Gemfire was released too early, similarly to many movies that fail in the box office due to being rushed. When you play it all of the way through, it's decent. When you play it multiple times, it flat-out sucks. The AI in the game is easily defeated, leading to a less-than-apt replay value.

All-in-all, I'd give Gemfire for the Super NES a solid B-.