 Inori Says: |
| Axel says that Fire Emblem: Awakening is "Holy shit fucking amazing!" He recommends it to anyone who likes RPGs, even if the word "strategy" terrifies you to the point of projectile-vomitting! Here are Awakening's pros and cons: Pros
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| I didn't want to use fan art at first but come on this is perfect... Well, almost. Why is Anna in such a bad corner? |
Actually in all seriousness if you want to get to the review already you might want to skip the next two paragraphs where I talk crap about my "history" (read: Super Smash Bros.) with this series.
Ah Fire Emblem: Awakening, the game I put off for two and a half years before finally deciding to buy it (then another month before actually playing it). My familiarity with Fire Emblem began with pretty much possibly everyone in the West's familiarity with Fire Emblem: finding Marth and Roy on their copy of Smash Bros. and saying, "Who the fuck are these ladies?" Not only did I put off this game for so long, it also turned out that I have pretty much ignored its existence since its launch, which is kinda weird considering how wildly popular it is. I think my problem was that, after seeing what my mind processed to be "What Fire Emblem could look like" from Ike and the pretty lame Castle Siege stage in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, I was kind of turned off from Fire Emblem. Not to mention it was a Strategy-RPG, and if it's anything I can point to most at my once-ambivalence to the series it was that the most. I was never a fan of strategy games in general. I can't play Civilization V for more than an hour (which if you've played Civ V you know an hour is squat), and I tried Advanced Wars (or was it Advance Wars?), I have tried that Mega Man game with the strategy element to it, and I have played like thirty seconds of Final Fantasy Tactics, and none of them did it for me. So of course when I checked out what Fire Emblem was and saw that it was another in the line of games I probably wouldn't like, I ignored it for a good decade.
The year is
I'm not going to bother explaining the concept of the game. It's been out for three years now, the series has been around since 1990, most of us who even care about this review probably know by now what's up. If you don't know what a Fire Emblem is, you probably aren't even reading this. So I'm just going to jump right into the aesthetic/graphics of the game, which probably won't mean much coming from my mouth. To a longtime Fire Emblem fan, who the fuck am I to tell them what I think of this game visually when I've never played another Fire Emblem game, am I right? To a serious critic who for some reason is wasting his time reading my blog, who the fuck am I to talk about the visual aspect of game design when I know about as much as absolute zero about that stuff? Well, here's my counterpoint to all you bastards: I have a pair of eyes, and these eyes in coordination with my brain, as with most human beings in this world, see things and form a reaction to these visual images. I'm telling you right now, if Fire Emblem: Awakening looked anything like Shadow Dragon on the DS (that's right! I actually have played some of that game! Joke's on you guys!), I seriously doubt I would've gotten very far. I'm sorry to say something like that when we're in an age today where gamers are arguing that graphics shouldn't matter as long as the visuals make sense and are up to a decent standard, then they should be ignored and instead other aspects should be focused on. I normally claim to be a part of that camp as well. However, there is no way in Grima's hell that I was going to let Shadow Dragon's visuals on a 3DS game pass at all. No way, I am sorry, nope. Notice I say visuals and not graphics (although DS graphics on a 3DS game is also inexcusable if there is no reason for it). Shadow Dragon's graphics are excusable for the matter of being on a DS game (even though their attempt at 3D modeling, or rather the psuedo-3D-spriting-that-should've-died-with-the-SNES "modeling," is aggravating to me and should've just been left with normal sprites), but for a long time everything is just so drab and grey and for fucks sake why do all of my units have the same color palette? There have been games the colors of rainbows on the Nintendo DS, there is no excuse for everything to be so grey for so long on a DS game.
Alright, let's take deep breaths... Whew. Sorry. I made the mistake of going straight to Shadow Dragon after Awakening, I'm going to put that game down and play Fire Emblem 7 first before going any further. Ahem, now, let's actually begin, yeah?
Visuals
I am no Fire Emblem veteran by any means, but it doesn't take very much experience with the franchise at all to already notice the fairly stark changes in the art style since FE10. Funny enough, 11 and 12 had a new artist who in my mind was completely dropped in favor of whoever is the artist for Awakening, and I can see why. How did we go from the colorful GBA games to horribly drab maps, stiff facial expressions on several character portraits, almost complete monotone on most characters, SNES-style 3D battler sprites that made the GBA sprites look like if Michelangelo crafted every individual character himself, and stiff battle animations (probably the biggest drop from the GBA to the DS)? If they dropped whoever did the art from FE6 through FE10 and deliberately picked up the guy for FE11 and FE12, it only makes sense why he was switched out so immediately. Also, Awakening was supposed to be the last Fire Emblem to be ever made, wouldn't it suck if the last game ever in your over twenty-year-old franchise looked like this?
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| Look at that guy, taking that sword like a man! Not even a flinch! And look at that stock background! And that soulless facial expression! I can't believe what I'm about to say, but Shadow Dragon looks better on the NES. |
I don't really have too much to say about this stuff though. Again, I'm not a real visual arts expert or anything, so I can't really give a more detailed opinion about these things. I'll try my best with it though. First off, the battle animations are pretty nice. So are, of course, the CG cutscenes, but I don't feel the need to discuss them other than they are pretty much up to the standard of most prerendered cutscenes. The sort of cell-shading (if it is cell-shading; it looks that way to me but I can't tell) looks very smooth and all, and again there are plenty of colors and good shading done in these. But getting back to the battle animations, I feel like they are done well enough for this game. They are fluid and fun to watch, especially when a character's skills trigger. The models on these battle sequences would very much be right in the camp of generic 3DS modeling, but they were at least able to keep every character's head intact (sounds like a weird statement but then you have Shadow Dragon where nearly all of your units look the same in a battle). Plus, if you're weird enough to keep all of your characters in their starting class paths, they'll each have their own outfits unique to them.
That really brings me into what's probably my main focus with the graphics, which is the character design (visually). A lot of people have complained that the character design has taken a turn for the worse, both in writing and in the artwork. While I'm gonna hold off on talking about the writing, I really don't see what this whole aversion to "anime style" is. You're playing a JRPG, every character is going to be "anime style" in their artwork. Guess what? The older Fire Emblems use "anime style" as well.
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| Artwork of Fire Emblem Thracia 776 |
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| Artwork of Space Runway Ideon (1980-1981). Kind of a weird comparison because of completely different genres of style but the fundamentals of the character design are still the same. |
One example with Awakening that comes very clearly to mind is the whole loli thing with Nowi. A lot of people hate Nowi for being presented as this sort of sexualized child-character. I can't really say much to argue against her visual design, other than her looking like a child is actually something that was already established way back with the original Shadow Dragon's Tiki, and that the reasoning for her clothes are thinly implied by her backstory of being auctioned off by several men (something that doesn't seem to be mentioned any more than once for some reason), and you find her off in the middle of a desert region.
Still at the same time, they don't really do anything with Nowi beyond the clothes that she wears. I don't even think she is fanserviced in the Summer Scramble DLC (which I haven't played, but I haven't found anything with her in it either). Now on the other hand, in Fire Emblem Fates you have Camilla, the pinnacle archetype of anime-waifu bombshell character design. Now that's something I cannot find any argument against at all. If you support Camilla's character design and was hoping that I'd find a way to speak out for you, sorry buddy but you are on your own. In my mind, no amount of justification can nullify how over-the-top her design is.
So now that we've established that yes, Awakening is a JRPG and so of course it's going to use "anime-style" character artwork, just how good is that artwork? I personally think it is, for the most part, fantastic. A lot of the design in the characters is very simple, yet detailed enough to set them apart from other characters, from Lissa's headdress to Kellam's face being nearly buried in his armor to Gerome's fucking Nightwing mask, to Cynthia's pigtails and so on so forth. Hardly anyone looks fashionably ridiculous unlike far too many characters from other JRPG series (most notably Final Fantasy). Even the ridiculous armor that Knights and Generals wear make sense, as they are tank classes that are meant to be slow and take damage. Meanwhile in Final Fantasy a character wearing something like that would be flying through the air with all this ridiculous over-the-top swordplay and choreography.
I am normally not a guy who dwells on a game's visuals. As a result I'm going to leave my input on all that stuff with what I have written, as I'm afraid if I keep writing I am only going to end up circlejerking what I said two sentences ago. However, with all the commotion and--I can't believe I have to call it this--controversy over the game's visual direction, an expanded commentary on Awakening's visuals felt necessary. Overall it is a visually pleasing game with a lot of colors and sound character artwork that doesn't delve too far into anime visual archetypes, as much as you may want to believe it does. Note that I say visual archetypes!
Writing
Hopefully I can be more specific and sound more intelligent here than in my Visuals section. When it comes to this game, I notice there are really mainly two things to talk about with the story: the plot of the game and the characters. Because I have way much more to say about the characters than I do about the plot, I am going to start off with the plot of the game first.
Oh yeah, and spoilers by the way. I find that I cannot properly write about a game's story without getting into spoiler territory. So if you've somehow still haven't been spoiled yet with this game, be careful from here on until the end of this segment.
To put it bluntly, the plot of this game is meh at best. It starts off well enough, with your created avatar killing Chrom and suddenly you wake up and you see Chrom is alive, but your avatar doesn't actually know who he is and can't remember anything about his past. Okay, this is great, plenty to work with for the beginning of the game. Unfortunately from there, it doesn't get much better. Lucina comes in from the future, but she runs around pretending to be Marth, and I guess if I hadn't known already that she was Lucina, that would have also been a very interesting plot point. Honestly, the first act of the game isn't too bad (well aside from the really boring first few chapters. I especially do not forgive the gateway into Regna Ferox for being pretty ridiculous. "Halt, none shall enter Regna Ferox." "Oh you're Chrom! How didn't I notice when you were slaughtering all of my soldiers? Come on in, buddy!"). But beyond that, it was fairly serviceable, especially in the encounters with King Gangrel. Some parts, still, left me scratching my head. Chapter 7 is completely pointless in having Emmeryn come out all the way to this mountain for safety and nearly getting assassinated in doing so, only then to return back to Ylisse and get captured very much immediately after.
The rest of the first act was fairly serviceable though. It's kinda funny because I almost thought that I finished the game already. Then the second act comes and it's mostly downhill from there. When Validar came back after the characters clearly cut him down in Chapter 6, and nobody recognized him, I let out a deep sigh of disbelief. Come on Chrom, I fucking had you stab the guy with Falchion, how is he just vaguely familiar to you? Then let's not forget the rest of the act being so underwhelming. For some reason nobody seems to listen to Lucina at all, and instead people go on about how they can control destiny and how your bonds with friends will save the day. Meanwhile all the same actions that led up to Lucina running away from Grima destroying the world still occur, and still nobody listens? Then you have how grossly underdeveloped Walhart is. It makes his entire subplot feel purposeless. Like, the whole time I'm running around with no idea who this guy really is, then you kill him and he says he's trying to stop Grima from returning. Even that had little impact whatsoever because that was one line amid hearing endlessly about just how horrible he is and stuff.
The worst thing about the second act is how it's so drawn out it leaves little breathing room for the last act. There are some things I like about it, like the final encounter with Validar (kinda felt epic to me, besides I had Cynthia finish him off by shouting "Here I cooooommmeeee!" like an eight-year old. That was priceless). I just wish he was harder and that he was better developed as a character. All I got out of him was just some typical evil JRPG asshole. At least he looks a little bit like Jafar so that felt cool, I guess? The worst part of all this though has to be the ending which the avatar kills himself to kill Grima. Maybe the other ending is much better (haven't seen it yet), but honestly the logical decision to make is to kill Grima. I specifically made that choice because why would I pass that chance just to keep the avatar alive? But then after you kill Grima, the feels cut short very abruptly since guess what? Your bonds with your friends brings you back to life! So not only is the emotional impact gone, but now picking the choice where Chrom keeps the avatar alive is utterly pointless and stupid. Also why does every character in the game have to give the same two lines stating "I'm sure Robin will come back to us!" There are like a hundred characters in this game, why do I have to hear that line from every one of them?!
And then to make it even more strange, for some reason all the CG cutscenes just seem to end about after Emmeryn dies. Yeah there are like one or two more toward the end, but it still doesn't make any sense. I'm not saying there should've been more cutscenes, but they should've either spread them out evenly across the game or they should've at least for the love of god given a better cutscene for the avatar ending. What I would've done was have Morgan doing some sort of daily routine when she notices somehow that her dad might still be alive. Then she runs off, alerting Chrom and Lissa and other characters in the game, and it shows them running out to the field where the avatar was sleeping in the beginning of the game. THEN they could've ended it the way they did, because the way it is now just seems to imply that there is some sort of cycle going on, but that theme is hardly present at all in the rest of the game. Unless it's supposed to be some sort of allusion to starting a new save over, but I just doubt that, or I just find that too dumb. Sorry to go off for a while here, I just really hated that avatar ending. The game has its epic moments, hell especially with riding around on Grima's fucking back even though my Morgan rofl-curbstomped Grima in one round, but the avatar ending was a huge letdown.
On the other hand, the characters are really nice in this game. Well, most of them are. Before I go any further, I will acknowledge that yes, the depth on these guys isn't exactly incredible, but most of them are fairly unique from each other and very much likable. Even Tharja with her cringe-worthy creepiness and dialogue wouldn't be half as lively without it. Sadly this means that yes, most of these characters rely perhaps a little too much on a defining trait. But since you hardly ever actually see them in the main cutscenes of the game anyway, I don't mind it. Plus I think it affects their support conversations fairly well. I enjoyed most of the support conversations I have seen so far. I really do get the sense of how two characters would talk to each other with most of these, and that they wouldn't say these same exact lines to someone else (though there are a few exceptions I guess. As much as everybody seems to fall head-over-heels in love with Cordelia, I really don't find her that interesting. Maybe I should look at more of her supports I guess). Some of what my personal favorite characters have to be include Inigo (hands down), female Morgan, Nah, Olivia, Donnel, Henry, and Owain in terms of their conversations and dialogue. Chrom is also a fairly decently made character; not the greatest of protagonists but certainly a lot more interesting and personality than sadly Lucina, who only seems to care about saving the world from Grima. I saw one set of support conversations with Sumia as her mother, where she wants to go in to town to buy a dress... But that's really about as much variation as I got. To be fair, no, I have not seen every support conversation in this game, but I doubt every single one of them is truly that much more unique than the other. So at the end of the day, Lucina is fairly bland as hell, which I guess is part of why it's so funny to see people swapping out her lines with lines Laura Bailey has spoken in other games, notably Saints Row 3.
But anyway, it's funny that I thought I had much more to say about the characters but really I don't think I actually do. They mostly don't really evolve beyond their personality archetypes, but that's okay, there's like a million characters in this game. This isn't like Game of Thrones where you have thousands of pages to expand on hundreds of characters, this is just one self-contained game. Perhaps other Fire Emblems did a better job of fleshing out the characters, which I can't vouch for or against as I've never played them, but I'm certainly going to remember like about at least eighty-five percent of the cast. Many people complain, though, that all of these characters are very reliant on typical anime tropes for personalities, but you know what, I really don't think it's that bad. Yeah, Severa is immensely tsundere, and sure, Anna might not have that much more depth to her than Wario (but really though, how can you not love Anna? Shame on all of you, your waifu is shit!) but honestly I don't think any of these characters are as lifeless as a wooden plank. Well, aside from Lucina, maybe; if Laura Bailey hadn't voiced her I really don't think there would be anything salvageable about Lucina. After being in the writing camp for approximately seven to eight years already, I've seen all manners of characters and trust me, these are far from the very bottom of the barrel. Not the most incredible, memorable characters in the history of video games, but fairly distant from being bad. Now as for how they compare to other characters in the Fire Emblem series, I'm just going to have to go and find that out for myself!
Gameplay
And now for what probably matters most about Fire Emblem: Awakening. After all, I used to be completely uninterested in strategy-RPGs, so it meant quite a bit that I was actually interested in playing this game. However, if it's anything I'm going to give to people who like to tear this game a new asshole, I didn't really experience that much strategy at all.
First of all, I want to start with the beginning of my time with this game: the first few chapters. If I feel like I am getting really tired and would rather put the game away and fall asleep while playing, that is a very dangerous sign. That is exactly how I felt in the very beginning, in the first few chapters of the game. Granted, it's only the beginning of the game, so you're not going to have access to a lot of units or marriage or anything like that. However, I still wouldn't treat that as an excuse for how lackluster the first few chapters are. Even on my second playthrough, or rather I would say especially on my second playthrough, I was having a very hard time trying to get through these chapters because they are so boring and I just wanted to marry Anna already (made the "mistake" of marrying Tharja instead of Anna on my first run. When I first played the game, I'm going to be brutally honest, my mind was immediately set on Tharja. But then, I guess as most marriages go in real life, I grew very annoyed with this spouse, met Anna and saw just how wonderful she was, and regretted my life choices and wanted to escape from this commitment. Well, if it's any consolation, Tharja made two damn-good kids... okay I'm gonna stop now with this weird, failing parody of marriage). I'm not sure what it really is about the first few chapters, but I think it may just be because too many of them feel like very basic tutorials with the same objective of killing all your enemies. Like maybe if they mixed things up with special objectives or something, I wouldn't feel like falling asleep instead of playing the game. Thankfully, this wore off once I really started to run into the Paralogues and gather up a variety of units.
Like any good old JRPG, Awakening offers a great amount of characters and classes to control. I was especially pleased with the ease and fair simplicity in the reclassing system, allowing excellent control over not just what you want your characters to be but also how their stats develop, as well as the further amount of customization you get from skills. Unfortunately, not every character is good, and some classes, to me at least, were utterly useless (looking a you, Archer, as well as your lame-as-hell promotions). And then there are the child characters, who are as far as stats go ruthless, adorable killing machines. Once I started recruiting children I quickly found my first-gen characters getting outclassed and benched. So while I enjoyed having Nah reach nearly a rating of four-hundred and watching the hope drain from the eyes of her enemies, I found it lame that I couldn't use whoever I wanted to use. Anna may be decent, but at the end of the day if you want a wonderful, glorious super team that will slaughter the people you StreetPass with, you are better off using someone else. Still at the same time, character unbalance has been as old to me as Final Fantasy VI, so it wasn't something I found hard to adapt to. Besides, I like Nah, so I didn't mind relying on her nearly all the time to wipe the battlefields clean of my enemies. This starts getting into the whole strategy-lack of strategy thing I alluded to, so let's delve into that.
I want to make it known that I indeed played the game on Normal mode (I also set it to Casual because I'm a filthy-casual who's just not ready to experience the pains of permadeath and resetting just yet). I never tried Hard or Lunatic, and I probably don't intend to. People say Hard isn't really that much of a challenge at all anyway, and Lunatic is pretty much broken because of very bad design choices in the battles. I cannot say anything about those difficulties, but I will say that Normal mode was pretty damn insanely easy. This probably has to do with the fact that I grinded and stat-capped most of my child units, so it makes sense, and as a result, the strategy element pretty much became lost on me since I could just run around obliterating anything. Still, I didn't think this was really a bad thing at all, it was just another way of playing this game. The child characters are OP as hell, yes, but I think the thing with them is that it takes a lot of time to grind their parents up to the skills you want to pass on, grind the children up for the rest of the skills and stat caps, and so on, that rather than feeling like it's cheap that Morgan can completely dismember Validar with a Brave Sword, it feels very satisfying because you put in a lot of time and planning to make her indestructible. However, I would agree with anyone, even without having played any of the older Fire Emblems, that this didn't feel like I was playing a strategy-RPG. I guess if I wanted to do that, I could play on Lunatic, but I don't think that you should have to play on the hardest difficulty setting (especially considering that many find it broken and unfair) just to experience what the game is supposed to be. I don't know if the strategy would've been more present if I hadn't gone off and grinded, but really I don't think the game would've been that hard if I hadn't done that. It also doesn't help that every objective is either kill everyone or kill their leader, aside from the occasional battle where you have to defend an ally as well.
Still, though, I really didn't mind the grinding. It may just be that I enjoy WoW, which is the ultimate pinnacle of grinding and is either one's heaven or one's Hell with that, but the grinding in this game is optional, it's not that ridiculous (can you hear me say Pokemon IV breeding?), and it pays off extremely well. I really enjoyed the marriage feature in this game and being able to pair up your units according to how you want them to be paired up (I may be doing it very wrong but like for example I liked having Inigo as a General paired up with Morgan as a Swordmaster, with Inigo serving to defend and cover for Morgan while Morgan dished out the bloody dismemberment of my foes with a nice smile on her face). I enjoyed the skills and being able to have kids and make them pretty much how you want them to be depending on the fathers you choose. And sure, I even enjoyed completely annihilating my foes with the killing-machine children I spent so much time to put together. So even though I might not have really experienced any real strategy, I did get quite an awesome experience from this game that made it hard for me to put my 3DS down. I wouldn't even say that I'm even finished with this game yet; on the contrary I feel like I am just getting started, and now I want to see what other possibilities will arise from the decisions I make in my next save.
Oh man, I almost forgot something else about this game too, and that's the
Music
This is actually going to be very short, ha. I would normally include this with Visuals and name that section Aesthetics instead, but it felt strange to tack this on to the end of several paragraphs of me complaining about people complaining about the game being Japanese in art style. Fire Emblem Awakening has what has to be hands down one of the most incredible orchestral scores I have ever heard in any video game. As a matter of fact, I rate this game's soundtrack as the best video game soundtrack I have ever heard since Final Fantasy XII, which was fairly a long-ass time ago. There have been plenty of great soundtracks between then and now (or, uh, 2012 rather), but none have ever truly captured what Final Fantasy XII captured for me in an RPG, which is that sense of an epic adventure of the ages. If Fire Emblem Awakening was a straight up RPG like Final Fantasy XII (and with a story that was close to being as good), this soundtrack would've had the same effect on me. Songs like Divine Decree (especially that song), "I mean it! GO!" and hell even Id (Purpose), which I used to really dislike until I heard it in its appropriate context (the last chapter of the game), are going to remain in my head for possibly the rest of my life. I can't really explain in detail why this music is amazing, as I am no real musician, but I mean I don't know, like with Divine Decree the choir is on point with how strong they come out, the trumpets are great and really bring out the heaviness in the song's tempo (really the brass in general makes that song amazing), it has what I think is a really awesome key change toward the end of its loop, and is just all around such a badass song. It must have been really fun to write and play for the recording.
Fire Emblem: Awakening probably has done very little to change my view of strategy-RPGs, but it was still an amazing experience and because of that, it has certainly opened up my interest in the rest of the franchise. I know, certainly, that the rest of the games (aside from Fates once that comes out) are hardly anything like it at all, but I believe that I will enjoy at least most of the ones I intend to play and if the combat retains anything of the basic, core aspects of Awakening's combat, which I'm sure it does after playing Shadow Dragon for a bit, as well as the good characters and all, I will love the franchise just as well. For now I am definitely planning on hitting up Fire Embem 7, Sacred Stones, Shaow Dragon (in spite of how rough that ride seems), possibly FE9, and of course Fates when it comes out, but I am sure I will be interested in the rest of the games as well if I find the time for it. After putting it off for so long and being incredibly doubtful that I would get into this game, I found Awakening to be an excellent game for just about anybody who loves RPGs.
Update: Oh yeah and a word on the DLC for this game. Some people, for some reason, think that Intelligent Systems is EA now for putting DLC in the Fire Emblem series. Look, Awakening is a complete, functional, finished game. I put sixty hours into my first save alone, and this was without any DLC at all. It's the way how DLC should be made: small little bonus extensions to your game for an extra bit of money rather than necessary for a complete experience. If Awakening had, let's say, the rest of the child characters as only obtainable through DLC, or the Paralogues only available as DLC, then that would be a tremendous problem. But that's not the way it is. If you live in the middle of nowhere without an Internet connection of any sort, you can play this game beginning to end, sink hundreds of hours into it, and never know that there was ever a single DLC made for it. That goes to show how inconsequential the DLC is for this game. Call me a scrub who hasn't played any game in the series but I don't even have to look at another Fire Emblem to tell you that DLC did not "ruin" this series with this game. Because Fates has yet to be released, I cannot place judgement on it yet, although I do find it kind of lame that you cannot get the third path as its own game like the Nohr and Hoshido paths. Oh well.
But anyway, it's funny that I thought I had much more to say about the characters but really I don't think I actually do. They mostly don't really evolve beyond their personality archetypes, but that's okay, there's like a million characters in this game. This isn't like Game of Thrones where you have thousands of pages to expand on hundreds of characters, this is just one self-contained game. Perhaps other Fire Emblems did a better job of fleshing out the characters, which I can't vouch for or against as I've never played them, but I'm certainly going to remember like about at least eighty-five percent of the cast. Many people complain, though, that all of these characters are very reliant on typical anime tropes for personalities, but you know what, I really don't think it's that bad. Yeah, Severa is immensely tsundere, and sure, Anna might not have that much more depth to her than Wario (but really though, how can you not love Anna? Shame on all of you, your waifu is shit!) but honestly I don't think any of these characters are as lifeless as a wooden plank. Well, aside from Lucina, maybe; if Laura Bailey hadn't voiced her I really don't think there would be anything salvageable about Lucina. After being in the writing camp for approximately seven to eight years already, I've seen all manners of characters and trust me, these are far from the very bottom of the barrel. Not the most incredible, memorable characters in the history of video games, but fairly distant from being bad. Now as for how they compare to other characters in the Fire Emblem series, I'm just going to have to go and find that out for myself!
Gameplay
And now for what probably matters most about Fire Emblem: Awakening. After all, I used to be completely uninterested in strategy-RPGs, so it meant quite a bit that I was actually interested in playing this game. However, if it's anything I'm going to give to people who like to tear this game a new asshole, I didn't really experience that much strategy at all.
First of all, I want to start with the beginning of my time with this game: the first few chapters. If I feel like I am getting really tired and would rather put the game away and fall asleep while playing, that is a very dangerous sign. That is exactly how I felt in the very beginning, in the first few chapters of the game. Granted, it's only the beginning of the game, so you're not going to have access to a lot of units or marriage or anything like that. However, I still wouldn't treat that as an excuse for how lackluster the first few chapters are. Even on my second playthrough, or rather I would say especially on my second playthrough, I was having a very hard time trying to get through these chapters because they are so boring and I just wanted to marry Anna already (made the "mistake" of marrying Tharja instead of Anna on my first run. When I first played the game, I'm going to be brutally honest, my mind was immediately set on Tharja. But then, I guess as most marriages go in real life, I grew very annoyed with this spouse, met Anna and saw just how wonderful she was, and regretted my life choices and wanted to escape from this commitment. Well, if it's any consolation, Tharja made two damn-good kids... okay I'm gonna stop now with this weird, failing parody of marriage). I'm not sure what it really is about the first few chapters, but I think it may just be because too many of them feel like very basic tutorials with the same objective of killing all your enemies. Like maybe if they mixed things up with special objectives or something, I wouldn't feel like falling asleep instead of playing the game. Thankfully, this wore off once I really started to run into the Paralogues and gather up a variety of units.
Like any good old JRPG, Awakening offers a great amount of characters and classes to control. I was especially pleased with the ease and fair simplicity in the reclassing system, allowing excellent control over not just what you want your characters to be but also how their stats develop, as well as the further amount of customization you get from skills. Unfortunately, not every character is good, and some classes, to me at least, were utterly useless (looking a you, Archer, as well as your lame-as-hell promotions). And then there are the child characters, who are as far as stats go ruthless, adorable killing machines. Once I started recruiting children I quickly found my first-gen characters getting outclassed and benched. So while I enjoyed having Nah reach nearly a rating of four-hundred and watching the hope drain from the eyes of her enemies, I found it lame that I couldn't use whoever I wanted to use. Anna may be decent, but at the end of the day if you want a wonderful, glorious super team that will slaughter the people you StreetPass with, you are better off using someone else. Still at the same time, character unbalance has been as old to me as Final Fantasy VI, so it wasn't something I found hard to adapt to. Besides, I like Nah, so I didn't mind relying on her nearly all the time to wipe the battlefields clean of my enemies. This starts getting into the whole strategy-lack of strategy thing I alluded to, so let's delve into that.
I want to make it known that I indeed played the game on Normal mode (I also set it to Casual because I'm a filthy-casual who's just not ready to experience the pains of permadeath and resetting just yet). I never tried Hard or Lunatic, and I probably don't intend to. People say Hard isn't really that much of a challenge at all anyway, and Lunatic is pretty much broken because of very bad design choices in the battles. I cannot say anything about those difficulties, but I will say that Normal mode was pretty damn insanely easy. This probably has to do with the fact that I grinded and stat-capped most of my child units, so it makes sense, and as a result, the strategy element pretty much became lost on me since I could just run around obliterating anything. Still, I didn't think this was really a bad thing at all, it was just another way of playing this game. The child characters are OP as hell, yes, but I think the thing with them is that it takes a lot of time to grind their parents up to the skills you want to pass on, grind the children up for the rest of the skills and stat caps, and so on, that rather than feeling like it's cheap that Morgan can completely dismember Validar with a Brave Sword, it feels very satisfying because you put in a lot of time and planning to make her indestructible. However, I would agree with anyone, even without having played any of the older Fire Emblems, that this didn't feel like I was playing a strategy-RPG. I guess if I wanted to do that, I could play on Lunatic, but I don't think that you should have to play on the hardest difficulty setting (especially considering that many find it broken and unfair) just to experience what the game is supposed to be. I don't know if the strategy would've been more present if I hadn't gone off and grinded, but really I don't think the game would've been that hard if I hadn't done that. It also doesn't help that every objective is either kill everyone or kill their leader, aside from the occasional battle where you have to defend an ally as well.
Still, though, I really didn't mind the grinding. It may just be that I enjoy WoW, which is the ultimate pinnacle of grinding and is either one's heaven or one's Hell with that, but the grinding in this game is optional, it's not that ridiculous (can you hear me say Pokemon IV breeding?), and it pays off extremely well. I really enjoyed the marriage feature in this game and being able to pair up your units according to how you want them to be paired up (I may be doing it very wrong but like for example I liked having Inigo as a General paired up with Morgan as a Swordmaster, with Inigo serving to defend and cover for Morgan while Morgan dished out the bloody dismemberment of my foes with a nice smile on her face). I enjoyed the skills and being able to have kids and make them pretty much how you want them to be depending on the fathers you choose. And sure, I even enjoyed completely annihilating my foes with the killing-machine children I spent so much time to put together. So even though I might not have really experienced any real strategy, I did get quite an awesome experience from this game that made it hard for me to put my 3DS down. I wouldn't even say that I'm even finished with this game yet; on the contrary I feel like I am just getting started, and now I want to see what other possibilities will arise from the decisions I make in my next save.
Oh man, I almost forgot something else about this game too, and that's the
Music
This is actually going to be very short, ha. I would normally include this with Visuals and name that section Aesthetics instead, but it felt strange to tack this on to the end of several paragraphs of me complaining about people complaining about the game being Japanese in art style. Fire Emblem Awakening has what has to be hands down one of the most incredible orchestral scores I have ever heard in any video game. As a matter of fact, I rate this game's soundtrack as the best video game soundtrack I have ever heard since Final Fantasy XII, which was fairly a long-ass time ago. There have been plenty of great soundtracks between then and now (or, uh, 2012 rather), but none have ever truly captured what Final Fantasy XII captured for me in an RPG, which is that sense of an epic adventure of the ages. If Fire Emblem Awakening was a straight up RPG like Final Fantasy XII (and with a story that was close to being as good), this soundtrack would've had the same effect on me. Songs like Divine Decree (especially that song), "I mean it! GO!" and hell even Id (Purpose), which I used to really dislike until I heard it in its appropriate context (the last chapter of the game), are going to remain in my head for possibly the rest of my life. I can't really explain in detail why this music is amazing, as I am no real musician, but I mean I don't know, like with Divine Decree the choir is on point with how strong they come out, the trumpets are great and really bring out the heaviness in the song's tempo (really the brass in general makes that song amazing), it has what I think is a really awesome key change toward the end of its loop, and is just all around such a badass song. It must have been really fun to write and play for the recording.
Fire Emblem: Awakening probably has done very little to change my view of strategy-RPGs, but it was still an amazing experience and because of that, it has certainly opened up my interest in the rest of the franchise. I know, certainly, that the rest of the games (aside from Fates once that comes out) are hardly anything like it at all, but I believe that I will enjoy at least most of the ones I intend to play and if the combat retains anything of the basic, core aspects of Awakening's combat, which I'm sure it does after playing Shadow Dragon for a bit, as well as the good characters and all, I will love the franchise just as well. For now I am definitely planning on hitting up Fire Embem 7, Sacred Stones, Shaow Dragon (in spite of how rough that ride seems), possibly FE9, and of course Fates when it comes out, but I am sure I will be interested in the rest of the games as well if I find the time for it. After putting it off for so long and being incredibly doubtful that I would get into this game, I found Awakening to be an excellent game for just about anybody who loves RPGs.
Update: Oh yeah and a word on the DLC for this game. Some people, for some reason, think that Intelligent Systems is EA now for putting DLC in the Fire Emblem series. Look, Awakening is a complete, functional, finished game. I put sixty hours into my first save alone, and this was without any DLC at all. It's the way how DLC should be made: small little bonus extensions to your game for an extra bit of money rather than necessary for a complete experience. If Awakening had, let's say, the rest of the child characters as only obtainable through DLC, or the Paralogues only available as DLC, then that would be a tremendous problem. But that's not the way it is. If you live in the middle of nowhere without an Internet connection of any sort, you can play this game beginning to end, sink hundreds of hours into it, and never know that there was ever a single DLC made for it. That goes to show how inconsequential the DLC is for this game. Call me a scrub who hasn't played any game in the series but I don't even have to look at another Fire Emblem to tell you that DLC did not "ruin" this series with this game. Because Fates has yet to be released, I cannot place judgement on it yet, although I do find it kind of lame that you cannot get the third path as its own game like the Nohr and Hoshido paths. Oh well.
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