Fire Emblem: Awakening

Strap yourselves in - this is going to be a long one. Having read the other reviews on this site and others, I felt obligated to add a review to this site written from the perspective of a hardcore Fire Emblem superfan to discuss the many design decisions that Awakening brings to the Fire Emblem series rather than simply compare it to other strategy games. More simply put, I want to review Fire Emblem: Awakening as a Fire Emblem game rather than a strategy game. This is important because in my mind, no other strategy series comes close to measuring up to the best of what Fire Emblem has to offer: Excellent level design, characters you are invested in, gameplay systems that are intricate yet rewarding once understood and mastered, stylish art and the list goes on.

FIrst, a quick background on my credentials with the series. The Fire Emblem series is my favorite series ever. I have and would gladly purchase a system (both my Wii and 3DS) just to play a new Fire Emblem game. I have played and beaten every single game in the series (both English and Japanese). I have poured hundreds of hours (maybe thousands, but who knows) playing these games, completing my favorites upwards of 10 times. Needless to say, when you play a series that much, you notice the little things. I want to discuss both the broad gameplay/design decisions that Awakening makes as well as some of the minor details that a casual fan may not have noticed if you haven't played the rest of the series to death.

I'll start by saying that FE 9 and 10 (Path of Radiance for the Gamecube and Radiant Dawn for Wii, respectively) are in my mind the pinnacle of the series. While both have some areas that needed improvement, notably the minor load time between battles in FE 9 and the scaled back support system in FE 10, these games pretty much got everything else right. Needless to say, when I heard that FE Awakening was coming out for 3DS and it seemed like Nintendo was going to put some marketing muscle behind it, my excitement was through the roof. The prospect of a portable Fire Emblem that improves upon 9 and 10 was almost too good to be true. Having played through the game 3 times now, I believe that there are certain areas where Fire Emblem: Awakening is indeed the best in the series. Unfortunately, there are also some critical areas where Awakening takes a significant step back. The rest of this review will be in bullet pointed form to allow for easier navigation of the key points, but I'll start with my conclusion before diving in. Fire Emblem: Awakening delivers all the bells and whistles of an amazing Fire Emblem game, but gives you poorly designed levels in which to enjoy those bells and whistles. By the end of it, I couldn't help but wish that I could take all the amazing content (characters, supports, art, etc) and drop them into the FE 9 or 10 levels so I could actually have some fun and challenge.

The Bad

• Boring Map/Level Design - At its core, Fire Emblem is a series in which you start with weak characters, march through a series of maps defeating enemies and completing objectives, level up and equip said characters, and have out of battle story sequences. If I had to reduce the series to its key elements, that's it in a nutshell. Since this concept is so simple at its core, the key to making a great Fire Emblem game is making sure that each one of these elements is done exceptionally well. A major complaint of the Fire Emblem series from 1-6 was that all the maps felt the same. The objectives all involved beating all of the enemies in the level including a boss character. FE 7 (known in the US as Fire Emblem for the GBA) was revolutionary because it introduced new mission objectives such as guarding characters or surviving for a certain number of turns or reaching a certain point on a map. This breathed a lot of new life into the series and is, in my mind, the reason why so many people regard FE 7 as the best in the series. FE 8, 9 and 10 continued this tradition and continued to deliver new and interesting map types and level designs. Even the standard "beat all the enemies" levels became much better. The last levels of FE 10 are truly unmatched in the series in my mind and are a perfect example of this. You are given the freedom to choose any characters in the game to take through a series of 5 battles/maps. You want the overpowered Laguz Royals? Sure - have all of them. You want custom weapons with crazy, absurd stats. Got it - have lots of them. You're going to need them to beat the challenge that lies ahead. The point is that all the cool stuff you'd done over the course of the game: leveling up/protecting certain characters, building supports, saving your best items, etc. lead up to a point where it mattered that you had worked so hard. You got an endgame that was truly worthy of all your effort and you felt rewarded for all the intentional decisions and tight play you had put in to get to that point. I never got that feeling with Awakening. This is perhaps the most crushing feeling imaginable for a series in which the character promotions, maxing out of supports and endgame were always the reward moreso than the actual story. I think that all this stems primarily from the fact that almost all of the FE Awakening maps are wide open, flat levels that do nothing to reward tight play.
• Pair Up System - This may be controversial, but after playing through multiple times I have concluded that the Pair Up system is indeed a step backwards for the series. The concept of the support system has always been the same even the the gameplay mechanics of how you get those supports (whether having characters stand next to each other for so many turns or having them be on the map at the same time) has been different. The basic idea is that if two characters spend more time together, they make each other stronger when they are close on the battlefield. While this seems simple in concept, the execution of this in the series is one of the high points of the series
• Lack of Magic Triangle
• Removal of Bonus Experience System from FE 9 and 10
• Handling of Classes
• Story

The Good

• Dual Attack/Guard System
• Support System/Conversations
• Production Value
• Experience System
• Reintroduction of the Marriage System
• DLC
• Balance of Accessibility vs. Challenge
• The player character