so over-designed
frankly I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be looking
Yeah, one character surely is representative of the entire game. Sure, that character is not overdesigned, but that's just one. I'm sure there's a few characters that aren't particularly overdesigned, but the majority is. You want examples? Here, take this one:
Spiky hair with typical anime-styled locks to each ear. Super unpractical armor pieces - the collar would restrict arm movement tremendously, especially in sword fighting, and actually would present an absolutely great way to lead a sword towards this lady's neck, making it easier to decapitate her. What is that weird half gauntled she's wearing? And those leather straps on her legs would heavily restrict her movement (leather is not as flexible as you'd think). The boots/greaves also don't help the matter. I also wanna say the armor would likely be very restrictive, especially how little it actually protects, but I'm gonna give it the benefit of the doubt. The only truly simple design choice on this character is the sword.
Want another one? How about this one:
The ... unique spear design aside, the chest piece isn't too bad (aside from the boob armor, but a lot of fantasy stuff does that, so I can't hold it against this game either), neither are the gauntlets. But except for the ribcage and arms, nothing on this character is armored. She wears those little wing headpieces, which are great for leading weapons right into her skull. She also has pretty damn high heels, if I am seeing that right - truly a perfect fit for a knight-like character who need to thrust her weight along with her weapon to actually do any damage. Also, belts everywhere. Even the boots have little belts! That big cross-shaped belt doesn't even hold anything in place. It's just hanging on her hips.
And so we're not only talking about girls, here's another one:
I know tower shields exist, although I don't think they're usually shaped like this, as their main reason is to be used with other soldiers using tower shields to create a wall of shields. For plate armor, this design is super great for decapitating the user. The huge shoulder pieces can be used to slip a blade right across them against the head. Even if you slip off the other side, those little nubs can block your blade from sliding off too far from the armor, phew. The hip parts have way too much open space - the whole idea of plate armor is to offer no weakspots to the enemy, that every piece of your body is armored. The enemy could slice this gentleman's legs right off. There's even little spots a blade fits in right between the hip armor and the breast plate. The bracers and greaves are okay.
And here, let's compare a character that appears in Awakening and another game. I already showed Micaiah, but let's check out someone else. How about Celica?
Original:
Awakening:
I don't think I'll even have to say anything about this. You can't tell me that
a lot of Awakening's characters aren't overdesigned. And it's typical fantasy anime trope designs, to boot.
Something I always liked about the Fire Emblem series (although I never played them, I only read up on them and checked out a lot of the characters) was that the character designs were, for the most part, realistic. There's always been the occasional crazy design, but that was occasional. In Awakening, it's the other way around - the vast majority of the characters have a crazy anime design, while there's only a few characters that aren't super over-designed.
I'm not saying that Awakening is a bad game by any means (I never played it, after all), I'm just saying that the character designs fall right into the stereotypical Japanese fantasy game designs. Hyrule Warriors has, in my opinion, the exactly same problem, much more so than past Zelda titles.