Fire Emblem: Awakening

2022-08-04
More Fire Emblem goodness. It's odd having a history with Fire Emblem that starts with 7 on the GBA when I was a kid and then skips alllll the way up to Three Houses in 2019. Especially because I can see (and have read) that the core of what made Three Houses so good and addicting is nailed down as a formula here.

You got your likable characters, different classes, class changing, characters that develop into power houses, and the typical tight FE combat. Uniquely you also have the children angle--which, sadly, was spoiled for me long before I started playing--and the min-maxing that comes from that.

Ultimately I was a little "Eh" at first because the game does present a LOT of options to you up front and you also have the looming impact of "What if I do the wrong thing now." That's something that Fire Emblem 7 taught me: every decision you make now can basically back you into a corner later on. So even the game presenting me with two choices at the beginning as to whether I should play Normal or Hard or whether I should play with permadeath on made me spend some serious time researching the impacts of those decisions. Overall I'd levy that as a solid criticism for this game and any game that does that: let me switch the difficulty whenever I want. I don't want to play too hard and get stuck and be forced to use a guide. And I also don't want it to be too easy and not enjoy myself. Why lock us in?

[As an addendum to that, I think permadeath is played out. I think it's a vestige of the series and series stalwarts will hold on to it like any sacred cow of any other series but I don't think it makes sense a lot of the time. You're telling me through an entire war campaign that the main characters are all personally involved in combat and never die? Really?]

The great thing though I found was that a lot of those decisions don't matter because they have grinding. I did have to spend a couple bucks to get some grinding maps but having those made it great. I was able to experiment with different characters and classes and if I wanted to make myself OP so I could just kind of truck through the maps I could. That sort of freedom is a wonderful thing and I love that they ditched the old-school "It's got to be hard" mentality that plagues a lot of series.

So why not a 10? Well, honestly the story was a bit blah. While I liked the characters, Marth and the main character actually having a personality and plot point in the story, and Chrom and the rest of the gang-- the actual reason why they are there amounts to little more than: Gotta Kill The Evil Dragon. It's almost laughably cliched. It has a couple twists like the main character actually being the evil guy's son and/or the evil dragon ooOoo but it's whatever.

But overall absolutely amazing game I couldn't put down after I got through that early game slump.