This was my second Fire Emblem game. And I’m pretty glad that I played it when I did because my god. I don’t think I could play it anytime after.
It was a fine game when I played it; the animations were fine, the gameplay was pretty standard, sometimes lackluster but it was pretty fine, the story was fine which is expected considering it’s a remake of the first game.
But having played Fire Emblem as much as I have now, this game certainly looks dull, animations are ugly (My god, those portrait skin colors make the characters look like they’re corpses who’ve undergone rigor mortis) and for the DS they could’ve TOTALLY popped off more in the visual department (The portraits) and I’m sorry but the art style for the artwork of this game is not my cup of tea.
But otherwise, the pros of this Fire Emblem is that it is incredibly customizable to your units, the reclass system offers lots of options, forging weapons can be busted but that always comes with a pretty penny, and the difficulty settings of the game offer lots of replayability (Eventually though the difficulty becomes straight-up unbalanced).
The story writing takes a massive improvement, gone are the days of looking at a manual to know what’s happening and the NES game dialogue just saying, “We’re in Macedon now! Where is that? IDK but we’ll be in Gra the next time!”
Marth, Princess Nyna, Princess Caeda, Tiki, General Camus, and the Macedon Royals receive a lot more writing and investment. Princess Nyna especially stands out as one of the most tragic characters in Fire Emblem history and they do an especially good job of showing how horrible her life is.
If you look past the ugly 3D (The…. PORTRAITS) animations and lackluster visual department this is a good Fire Emblem game that makes a good first step into the world of Archanea.

the only bad thing about I can say about shadow dragon is that it's ugly, and that's unfortunately a kinda damning thing. if you look past that shadow dragon (and by extension dsfe) offers the best implementation of reset prevention (having save points will always be better than the turnwheel purely because intsys seems intent on designing maps poorly with the turnwheel as a crutch now), pretty good reclassing that doesn't totally sacrifice unit identity and some genuinely fantastic characterisation and writing of marth and nyna that none of the other versions of fe1 offer. honestly might be one of the closest games to thracia in terms of pure design since it showers you with broken weapons and items to make hard 5 doable (after the first few maps bc those boss stats are NASTY) and having the exact same support system. sound design and soundtrack are awesome and the concept art and cg's during chapter opening narration are at least really good. very deserving of a remaster alongside fe12.

Wyrs looks identical to my father. Like down to the last minute detail. What the fuck fire emblem.

An unremarkable game in all aspects and its most noticeable with its disgusting pre-rendered mobile game graphics. That being said I still found myself going back to it because of how addicting the gameplay was.

It was fun micro managing my units and making sure they got a good amount of EXP every chapter so they could continue to be useful, though I’m sure that holds true for every single SRPG. It’s a pretty short game and I think it’s worth playing if you don’t go into it expecting greatness.

I'm sorry, but I just really can't with this game. I really tried to give it a chance, but it just feels really sloggy?
It's ugly as sin and it's just not very appealing. Dropped it at Chapter 24. Yes, I know I'm literally at the end but I just can't anymore man.

Gameplay Rating: 4/10
It's Fire Emblem, sure, but it's just really boring. I guess I can't be too harsh on it because it's a remake of the first game, but it's just so drab compared to other games. I feel like they had the perfect chance to spruce up and make Archanea's gameplay feel more modern but they kind of just didn't.
No Rescue, no Shove, no Capture, no Canto, no Skills??? I guess I'm asking the game to be less faithful, but it feels like they could've done a lot more with this game armed with the years of stuff they've learned from and could've pulled from.
Now, is it all doom and gloom? No, because there's something I like that Archanea does: encourage you to ironman. This leads to really unique team compositions by the end and leads to people getting attached to the random character with 2 lines because they pulled through in a tense moment (for me, that was my man Darros. Norne was cool too).

Story Rating: 7/10
It's fine, nothing egregious but nothing that interesting, y'know?
Marth's characterization is probably the thing that stands out the most, his whole "prince before a brother" line is one of the series' most iconic quotes, probably up there with Dimitri's "kill every last one of them", Sigurd's "you must learn the sorrow of the common man", and Ike's "make peace with whatever gods worship" (or his "i fight for my friends" i guess).
Nyna is also somewhat interesting, and I can definitely trace the roots that Elincia and Guinevere sprouted from. On that note, I definitely appreciate this game for retelling the game that established pretty much every "archetype" in Fire Emblem.

Colorblindness Rating: A
Despite how ugly the game is, I don't think I had complications with color. By god is it ugly though.

Replayed this for the sake of a video I'm making ranking every Fire Emblem, half-expecting to discover that my love for it was wrong the whole time but no, it's as great as I remembered it being. I could go on about how much I love DSFE's distinct feel of being player phase focused with extremely limited options in comparison to say Conquest or Engage, the interesting way having a meta based around forging affects resource management, and how the game it's a remake of is purposeful in a way that the overwhelming majority of subsequent FEs aren't but I think what makes this game hit different to me is my unique relationship with it. Maybe it's just because it was my first experience with the series when I was 12 but FE11 represents the weird mystique surrounding Fire Emblem prior to Awakening where it was spoken in hushed tones as this frictional experience where a character losing all their HP means they're gone for good. I'd liken it to Earthbound/Mother where being in the best selling party game of all time means you're inherently going to have a mythical specter built around the games from people who haven't played them, although in FE's case, that specter revolves moreso around its difficulty as opposed to weirdness in Earthbound's case. This reputation is of course exaggerated, as out off the five FEs with a stateside release (Blazing Sword, Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance if we're not counting the Japanese exclusive Maniac Mode) are easy to get the hang of regardless of which difficulty you're playing on and the remaining two only become uniquely hard if you play them on higher difficulties.
But as a 12 year old playing FE11 on normal as my first experience with Fire Emblem, this might have been the hardest game in existence. I could never get past Chapter 8 then. Still, something about the game was compelling to me. Shortly after the point where I threw in the towel though, Awakening would come out with this nifty little feature called "casual mode" and I would become fully obsessed with it, constantly starting new files in a foolish attempt to unlock every support conversation. At some point in this obsession, I tried to give the game another go and got as far as Chapter 20 before once again throwing in the towel. However, my Awakening obsession would eventually wear off. Fates and Echoes: Shadows of Valentia just didn't compel me in the way that Awakening did (to the point where I didn't even play past Act 2 of the latter) and getting into anime helped me realize just how tropey the game's writing is. I wrote off my love of the series as a juvenile one that only existed because casual mode Awakening was one of the few-non Pokémon games I was able to beat for the longest time.
However, in the summer of 2019, something would change. I watched the two episode Fire Emblem OVA on a whim and while I found it as cheesy as its reputation made it out to be, there was a charm to it that made me want to play a Fire Emblem game for the first time in two years. I remembered that I had all three of the Fire Emblem games available on the Wii U virtual console and started with Sacred Stones, the only one of the three that I hadn't touched beforehand and became enamored with it. Upon finishing it, I wanted more and booted up Shadow Dragon, aiming to conquer my childhood fears once and for all. While finally beating the game on normal mode really isn't that much of an accomplishment, finally emerging victorious against the demon that tormented me as a child felt like a transition to adulthood for my 19 year old self.
As corny as this story is, Shadow Dragon may very well have had a profound impact on the way I see games. For a long period of my life, a game's value was dictated by how much it stimulated me on a superficial level. Games I loved were ones I beat and if I couldn't beat a game, it probably didn't have that much value. But Shadow Dragon opened me up to the idea of more frictional experiences being worthwhile. It's probably not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of games that I'd list among my favorites are ones that I played after the floodgates that this one opened. I don't think it's an understatement to say that my current tastes in games would not have existed without the one that most FE fans write off as "bad and ugly."

If you, like me, are spoiled rotten by all the extra mechanics (skills, supports, and so on) in modern Fire Emblems, then playing this one might bore you to death. Add in the art style, which most people either hate with a passion or learned to tolerate over time, a fairly basic story, shallow characters - and you might see why a lot of people tend to skip this one.
I'd argue that Shadow Dragon is still worth a play, if only to see the roots of this franchise without having to suffer through the NES version.