Fire Emblem Dark

Holy shit.  I've decided to type this out, hoping to calm myself.  I just had a rather disturbing experience.

To start, I was an intern at a company my uncle owned.  Now, you see, my uncle and this company worked closely with Intelligent Systems.  You may recognize them as the developers of Paper Mario, Fire Emblem, and Advance Wars.

Today, however, we will only be focusing on Fire Emblem.

You see, there is an unreleased Fire Emblem game!

It's known as "Fire Emblem Dark" and was being developed in 2010.  Apparently, it was scrapped and a lot of the characters were reused in Awakening.

Now, the only reason I know about this is because I worked closely with people who worked closely with employees from Intelligent Systems who worked on the game!  According to my associates, the game was apparently supposed to take on a darker tone.  It was intended to be more bloody and violent than previous games in the series, so as to attract a larger audience.  The main character was apparently supposed to be Owain, not Robin.  In fact, Robin appeared to be missing from the game entirely.  This meant that the game had no avatar character!  This wasn't too weird, considering most of the games don't.

Anyways, after hearing about this game, I just had to play it!  So I asked one of the Intelligent Systems employees to smuggle a copy of the game to me.  You see, the game was finished and they had actually already produced copies of it when it was scrapped for unknown reasons.

After recieving the game and heading home, I examined the cartridge itself.  The sticker on the cartridge was unusual.  It was simply a black background with "Fire Emblem Dark" written in white text.  The font was normal and unassuming.  Like I said, unusual for a video game cartridge.

I popped the cartridge into my 3DS.  The first thing I noticed was that the icon was pure black!  This was weird, as icons usually resemble the game in some form.

Ignoring this, I decided to start the game.

The first thing I noticed was the title screen.  It was weird and ominous looking.  It was simply the white text "Fire Emblem Dark" on an almost entirely black background.  Owain could be seen below the text "Fire Emblem Dark."  It didn't really look like Owain though.  Something was wrong with it.

The bottom screen simply had the white text "Press any button to begin" on a black background.  I waited for a bit on the title screen, to see if there was any demo gameplay or an intro, but there was none...

Finally, I pressed the "A" button.

What happened next was a bit strange, though.  There were no options like "New Game", "Casual or Classic", or difficulty options.  It just sent me straight into the game.

The prologue began with no cutscene or dialogue whatsoever.  It instantly began with Owain in the middle of what appeared to be the first map from Awakening.

This felt weird to me.  Like I said previously, I thought the game was finished.

There were no enemies on the map, so I just ended my turn.  As soon as I did that, however, I heard a voice speaking to me.  It didn't sound like it was coming from my 3DS however.  It sounded like it was coming from behind me.

"You must stop playing." it said, in a low, menacing growl.

I was spooked, but after examining behind me, there was nothing there, so I continued.

I looked back at my 3DS and noticed that there were some enemies now.  They all appeared to be dark variations of various Awakening characters.  You had Dark Chrom, Dark Lissa, Dark Frederick, and... Dark Owain.

They were all level 20 master classes, so level 1 basic class Owain didn't stand much of a chance.  He was killed immediately by Frederick.

Owain's normal death dialogue played, but when it finished I found myself now in control of the Dark units.

Normal Chrom, Lissa, and Frederick then appeared on the map.  I quickly killed them using the Dark units.  After Frederick's death dialogue played, another unit appeared...

This unit looked exactly like me.  It had all of my features!

This freaked me out, but I just had to see where this was going.  I attacked the new unit with Dark Owain.  Dark Owain killed him rather violently by stabbing him in the chest with Mystletainn.  After that, the game booted me back to the title screen.  I turned my 3DS off and took the game out.

Just then, the voice from earlier was back.

"You will suffer the same." it said.

This freaked me out, so I decided to type this out hoping to calm myself.

I think I feel something sticking out of my chest.

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