Time for my thoughts on Fire Emblem: Awakening. Be forewarned, it is long, and it kinda goes into the story, although I did my best to not talk about it too much.
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I beat Fire Emblem: Awakening, the latest entry in the Fire Emblem franchise, back on Friday, much to my satisfaction. Since I started the game roughly in early August, playing it on and off, that means I have spent a lot of time with the game, its story, and its cast of characters. Indeed, I put in around 70 hours worth of time into this game, and as such I feel as though I should put all of my thoughts down while everything is still fresh.
Now, Awakening is not my first experience with the franchise (that would go to Blazing Sword, or simply known as Fire Emblem in the West), but I am also not by any means an expert on the series. I haven't played any of the games that weren't released outside of Japan, with the exception of Binding Blade (and even then I have only played a small portion of it). For that matter, I am also not an expert on SRPGs, as beside Fire Emblem, I have had very limited exposure to the genre.
That said, let's move on to the actual analysis of the game, shall we?
The premise when Intelligent Systems designed Awakening was to prepare for the possibility that this game was, in fact, going to be THE final Fire Emblem title. The series overall had been in a decline in recent years, and it was determined that if the next game failed to sell a certain amount of units, the franchise would be retired. Due to this, IS decided that the next game should be a celebration of the entire series, and therefore did its best to incorporate nearly every gameplay element from all of the previous games, and have bonuses that involved fighting characters from the previous FE characters (in a place that is known as the "Outrealm"). Now, there are a lot of gameplay elements that were unique to the previous games, and seeing some of these features return is really neat, such as the map from Sacred Stones, the skill system from Genealogy of the Holy War, and so on and so forth. While it would seem that throwing all of these features into one big pot would call for something decidedly messy, IS somehow managed to make it all work together. One new thing they added that I liked was the inclusion of a choice between a "Casual" and a "Classic" mode. In Casual, your units will not die when defeated in combat, but in Classic you got your typical permadeath set in place. It's a nice choice for those who want the classic FE feel, and for those who just want to have a nice and easy time. For the record, my run was on Classic/Hard.
The story is standard fair for the series. The main character is Chrom, the brother to the Exalt of Ylisse and commander of a ragtag group of warriors known as the Shepards. Although the Halidom of Ylisse promotes peace, their neighboring country, Plegia, is ruled by the Mad King Gangrel, who wants nothing more than to start a war and destroy the Halidom, because of the wrongs Chrom's father commited years ago on Plegia. The biggest difference compared to most other Fire Emblem games is the inclusion of the "My unit" character--a character that you create and name at the beginning of the game. This is a feature similar to the avatar character you name in Blazing Sword, only in this game this character actually plays a large role in the story, and can participate in battles. While it's cool and all, I don't really like it. Personally, I feel that too much of the game went out of its way to make the story into the "Chrom and My Unit Show" with the other characters kind of thrown into the background. Even Chrom's sister, Lissa, and his right-hand man, Frederick, get reduced to some sparse lines toward the end of the game, which is... kind of pathetic really.
Overall, the story really isn't anything to write home about. Not only does it follow the same path that the previous games paved, it also suffers from feeling very disjointed by being broken up into three very obvious story arcs, with the second arc feeling like total filler. Seriously, does anyone know how this empire just sprang up, conquered nearly the entire neighboring continent, and no one seemed to know about it until they were literally RIGHT at their doorstep? Never mind this whole diversion has
nothing to do with the rest of the game, so why are we wasting 9 chapters on this? Couldn't they have at least foreshadowed these events in the first arc?
Then you throw in some wiggidy-wackness involving time travel and everything just gets lovely. The pacing is incredibly fast, too. Even in the first arc, which is probably the best of the three, everything moves so quickly. Immediately in the 1st chapter, you have the dead falling out of the sky and a few chapters later you have Plegia trying to start a war. I think it would have been nice if the game at least spent one or two chapters at the beginning, where you just perform some oddities as a Shepard, protecting the citizens from bandits and the like, in order to help build better purpose to fighting for Ylisse, and maybe even flesh the world out better. I'm thinking of something like Path of Radiance, where the first couple chapters are spent with Ike and his group simply working as mercenaries (which reminds me, I should totally replay that game).
Characters are good, for the most part. Some of them I feel tend to fall into cliches pretty badly, however. There are also characters that I feel suffered from it. Take Gaius, for example. He's your typical thief that you recruit in Fire Emblem. Now, don't get me wrong, I like Gaius. But I guess IS felt he was
too typical, and so they gave him a personality quirk in the form of an addiction to sweets. Therefore, expect him to constantly make sugar puns, such as: "Sweet." "Like taking candy from a babe!" "What a cupcake!" "Piece of cake!" "Su...gar..." Oh wait, that last one wasn't even a pun.
Some of the characters need to die in a horrible fire, however. Namely, Nowi the loli dragon. Although I did find it to be amusing that her daughter ends up far more mature and actually belittles her mother on her childish nature.
Music is all well and good in this game, I have no complaints that I can think of. Some of it is really nice. Might be kind of an obvious choice, but one of my favorite pieces in particular was
this one. The composers did a great job.
My biggest issue with the game is that it is
very easy to break the difficulty, making any semblance of balance non-existant. For those who are familiar with Sacred Stones, you could probably understand why, since you can easily just stop what you are doing and grind in skirmishes. What's more, you can also fight Spotpass teams, or participate in the DLC to raise your troops. To make it even more pathetically easy, a new feature they introduced in this game is the ability to pair up troops in battle. While technically the ability to pair up was present in previous games, never before could they actually fight side-by-side in the same battle. A paired up unit can attack enemies for additional damage, protect allies from incoming attacks, and also provide passive stat bonuses. And if the two units have a support rank, then the higher it is the more likely the paired unit is to assist in the battle. It really begs the question of, unless you are doing some kind of challenge run, why would you NOT want to use it? It doesn't even help that the AI is dumber than bricks and just mindlessly run to their death against the killing machines you trained.
For those who don't know, supports are conversations between two units who have fought side-by-side for a certain amount. They have been in the earlier games, so it's no surprise to see them return for the latest installment. The big changers are that you can have an almost unlimited amount of supports, compared to the previous games which imposed a limit of 5 support convos per unit, and the marriage system, which was a feature that was taken from Genealogy of the Holy War. As you build up your support between two units, the bonuses they receive by standing side-by-side in battle increases, and if you get two units married, they obtain an "S" rank support, which basically guarantees that they will help each other in battle. They also have babies. And the babies fight. Oh, do they
fight. If you play your cards right, the children become some of the most horrendously broken units in the game. And then, you can pair the children up with one another and then they also build supports and fall in love and get married, making them even more horrendously broken than they were before. Thankfully, they don't have kids as well... unless you decide to marry the "My unit" character to one of them, because apparently you don't give two-shits that you might be marrying your best friend Chrom's daughter or whatever.
Also, the maps are bland as can be. Why is is that all of the mission objectives now boil down to, "Rout the enemy" or "Defeat the commander"? What happened to the ones where you had to defend yourself for a certain amount of turns? What happened to the chapters that had extra incentives to go above and beyond the requirements to fulfill, like bosses that were optional to fight? The map design is really weak in this game, too. Too many chapters take place in open fields, with some random forests or whatever strewn about. There's not even many indoor chapters, and even then they tend to be pretty spacious. What happened to having chapters that would be plagued with fog, that would limit your perception, or the maps with bottlenecks or breakable walls that the enemy would at least try to take advantage of? The next FE really needs to step up its game in this deparment.
All in all, Fire Emblem: Awakening isn't a bad game per se, as I most certainly did get my money's worth out of it, and I did enjoy playing it. The game, however, does have many undeniable issues that plague it, which really brings the whole experience down. If I were to recommend someone to the series, I would still possibly recommend either getting Blazing Sword of Path of Radiance over this game, but it isn't by any means a
terrible starting place. The game just feels rushed, and it shows in various areas, most noticeably with the story. That said, the game did manage to accomplish what it set out to do, and broke sale records for the entire series, no doubt saving the franchise from jaws of death. I can only hope that when IS releases the next mainline FE game that they take the elements that made Awakening fun to play and improve upon them, while also improving upon the weaker elements such as the story and map design. Awakening is simply lacking the polish for me to consider it as a worthy contender as the best game in the franchise.
