Fire Emblem Awakening Part 2 - The Characters and Gameplay

Characters: I’ll start off with the negatives before proceeding to the positives. This game had some really lame villains. None of them had properly fleshed out motivations, only Gangrel actually did something that had an impact on the plot and it felt like they were evil just to be evil. Only Fates can claim to having worse villains.

                        Now to the main cast: Believe it or not, I actually like a significant number of characters. Lucina is my favorite non-Tellius female character, Owain is hilarious and as I was watching Steins Gate last night I couldn’t help but think of Kyoma as a mad scientist version of Owain which made me instantly love him as a character. So yeah, I still love Owain. Inigo might just be the best characterized of the “manwhore” archetype we’ve ever gotten and I particularly enjoyed his interactions with other characters. Noire and Henry are wonderfully crazy, Female Morgan can be a wonderful sadist while also being adorable when she’s having her daddy-daughter moments. Gregor is great and I still really like Basilio. There’s also Brady who’s pretty cool and I get the occasional kick out of Frederick too. If I’m being frank here I like way more Awakening characters than I do Blazing Sword or Sacred Stones. In fact, the only games I can think of where I like THIS much of the cast are Holy War and Path of Radiance, aka my Top 2 favorite Fire Emblem games.

                         That being said, there are also plenty of characters that I simply don’t like either: Severa, Miriel, Tharja, Panne, Yarne, Kjelle, Vaike, Gerome, Sumia, Nah, Sully, Kellam and Donnel. I used to like Chrom, but now I agree that he’s boring. Robin of course is also one of the biggest Mary Sues in the entire franchise (Robin was the biggest Mary Sue up until Corrin came along and stole the crown) and while I still maintain that Robin has the best personality of the three My Unit characters that still doesn’t mean that Robin has an interesting personality on their own merits.

                       Overall Summation: So in the end this is a cast of extremes for me. If I like a character here, I very likely will enjoy them. If I don’t like a character, chances are I’m really not going to like them. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a more polarizing cast than this one. For me Fire Emblem casts are either boring, awesome or lame. This cast on the other hand gives me a variety of personalities to choose from with mixed results. While it’s true that they may be “gimmicky” I still don’t give a crap since at least these characters are actually memorable. This game did a better job at getting me to care about more than 2 or 3 of its characters and that’s by no means an easy feat so I have to give Awakening some measure of credit for that. On the other hand, there are also a lot of characters that I really dislike which hurts my enjoyment of the game overall. Also, the fact that this game had some of the worst villains in the series really hurts this game for me.

Gameplay: Oh boy here we go. This game is one of the most poorly designed games in the series. Many of its design choices make the game less strategic in general. For example…

• If I made a “Top 5 Fire Emblem Games with the Worst Map Design in the Series” list you can bet that Awakening would be on here alongside Birthright and Revelation. No thought or effort went into enemy unit placement and rarely does the game ever place terrain in a way that actually helps the strategy of the game. Because of that movement, positioning and tactics don’t really matter as much which is bad for a strategy game. The strategy for the majority of the game remains the same and Awakening doesn’t require as much thought and effort on the player’s part as other Fire Emblem games do.
  
  
  
  
  

• Pair Up is way too powerful. I can’t think of a reason not to use it and the stat bonuses it gives are insane. This means that having higher stats is more important than good tactics which means that this game can easily turn into a Robin solo. It’s also way too RNG reliant plus it gives the player a massive advantage over enemies. I’m really, really grateful that Fates fixed this. In fact, it’s hard for me to go back and play this after playing Fates. The Awakening version of Pair Up seems so poorly implemented and boring after seeing what Fates did with this.

• This game holds a neon sign that says “GRIND FOR 1,000,000 HOURS!” Between the way that the second seals and reclassing work to the way that this game handled DLC and the world map mechanic this is pretty obvious. I loved this aspect once upon a time because it was fun getting different combinations of skills but from an objective standpoint it screws the strategy the game.
  
  
• This game has the worst difficulty scaling in the history of the series. The jump between Hard mode and Lunatic is ridiculous and Lunatic + is too RNG centric and comes across as fake difficulty. I find this baffling because Fire Emblem 12, the game that came before it, has the best difficulty scaling in the entire series. Did these guys learn nothing from the design successes of Fire Emblem 12? This is one of my least favorite aspects of the game. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• The Einherjar as a concept disappointed me. I still think that we should have been allowed to fight the real characters from previous games. Still, I got a massive nostalgia overload as I listened to the music from previous games. Even with all that said I still appreciated the fact that we at least got to fight the previous characters in some sort of way.

• I wish that S rank supports were more limited and that there would be a greater variation between how the kids would turn out between different parents. It feels like your choices don’t matter as much in this game, which is the main reason why I like Holy War’s execution better. Plus having Robin be the best parent for every kid is not a good design choice. It’s more fun when there are pros and cons that each possible parent can bring with them. Also, Robin being able to bang the second generation is kind of weird. I’m just saying. 
  
  
  
  
  

                              Overall Summation: Objectively speaking, this is one of the most poorly designed games in the franchise. The design choices make the game less strategic. That being said, there are still enjoyable elements to be had if you’re like I was 2 years ago and you simply want to breed different Pokemon characters then this game will be enjoyable. It’s really easy to spend obscene numbers of hours playing this game but that doesn’t mean it’s a well designed game.