After nearly a month working on this very challenging game, I'm back with another handheld edition of What I'm Playing! For this spin on the handheld wheel of delight, I selected Fire Emblem Awakening for the 3DS. A strategy, grid-based RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Shining Force, Fire Emblem Awakening is a critically acclaimed and beloved game which many credit with saving the franchise, as well as making it a big money maker for Nintendo and developers Intelligent Systems.
I adored Fire Emblem for the Game Boy Advance, which was the first Fire Emblem game I played (also the first ever released in the U.S.), and also enjoyed Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, the next game in the series, although not a sequel. The characters were just so richly written and beautifully animated on the GBA that it was very difficult to not absolutely fall in love with the series, and I think to this day my favorite Fire Emblem Character will always be Lyn, one of the three Lords in Fire Emblem.
She's adorable, but she's incredibly strong too!
The game primarily follows the dual stories of Chrom and the Avatar (whom you can name and assign gender however you please). Chrom is the prince of Ylisse, and the leader of the Shepherds, a group of soldiers dedicated to defending Ylisse, and finds the Avatar sleeping in a field, eventually discovering his (your) talents at battlefield strategy. In a tale fueled by endless twists and turns, Chrom and the Avatar must save the day along with their friends.
The Fire Emblem series has a few features which are worth noting. The first and most defining feature is, I think, the system of permadeath, in which allowing a character to die means that that character is truly written out of the story, and cannot be used again. Just like in Final Fantasy Tactics, this makes strategic decision making extremely important, as characters take a tremendous amount of time to train, and replacing them is nearly impossible. While this may seem harsh, it actually encourages a more iterative approach to the game, as you will simply turn your game off after a death, and move on to try and make better decisions next time.
Each character is given a certain class, which has certain skills and tendencies, and the ability to use different weapons. Characters can be leveled up to level 20, and can be promoted to an advanced class once level 10 has been reached in their basic class. So for example, my personal favorite character Kellam begins the game as a knight, a heavily armored character that can use lances, but upon promotion can turn into a great knight, getting better mobility and the use of axes and swords, in exchange for a bit of armor, or a general, which gets lances and axes, and gets even harder to kill.
Also of note is the weapon triangle, which determines which unit will have the advantage in a fight. In Fire Emblem, swords beat axes, axes beat lances, and lances beat swords. This makes it a strategic decision that encourages you to have a broad set of units who can be flexible enough to tackle a wide range of enemies, and makes it challenging to rely on just one type of unit.
In Fire Emblem Awakening, there are several new additions to the game that change up the formula substantially (professional note-I don't know if these were introduced in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, or any of the Japan exclusive games, as I have never played them). The first of these is the HUGE role that supports now play in the game. In the past, you could build up support levels by fighting near each other, and boost stats between particular characters. You could also overhear conversations between the characters, in which their stories would be built together. If certain characters met a high enough standard of support, they could feature different endings, including occasionally getting married! You were strictly limited, however, in how many supports you could have between characters.
In Fire Emblem Awakening, supports are hugely important to completing the game, and characters have access to many more supports. Most importantly, however, is that people can get married in the middle of the game and have children, who can then join your party! These new characters inherit the strengths and skills of their parents, and makes for a lot more interesting support decisions, as the choice of parents directly determines the type of character the child will be.
The other huge change in Fire Emblem Awakening is the introduction of Second Seals. These new and incredibly powerful items allow you to reset your characters to level 1 in a class, but also to change to a completely new class, while keeping access to the skills and stats they built along the way! This gives the game a tremendous amount of replayability, as you now have an unprecedented amount of options along which you can take your favorite characters. Take Kellam, for example, who starts as a Knight. I quickly turned him into a Great Knight, and after maxing out his stats their, turned him into an Assassin to increase his speed and skill stats to go with his already massive HP and armor bonuses from his time as a tank! There are so many options when reclassing, however, that it is only your imagination that will be limiting you in training up your characters.
This is getting long, so let's move along! Fire Emblem Awakening is a true master class in building an engaging modern RPG. The characters are very good and well written, although perhaps not to the extraordinarily high levels set in Fire Emblem. It probably has the most excellent humor of any game in the series, however, with my favorite character Kellam setting the bar high in this aspect. I won't spoil his gimmick for you, but it's almost worth the 30 bucks just for the comedy he brings. The plot is also very good, but the character development and relationship building is what sets this game apart.
Between levels, it can feel much like a dating sim, but charmingly so. You get to watch these characters to whom you are building an attachment build relationships, which could feel cheesy and forced, but it never does. The writing is excellent, and that's saying something, as there's a HUGE amount of writing in this game. The translation is beyond superb, and they work everything over in a very engaging way that will make you want to play this game over and over again, marrying different characters to each other, and enjoying the different spin that puts on the story.
The RPG mechanics of building and developing your characters approach the extremely high bars set in my favorite systems, Final Fantasy 5, 7, 10, Tactics, and Tactics Advanced. You feel completely in control of your characters, and have so many options to take that you can feel like your version of your favorite character may be the only one out there, as opposed to the cookie cutter characters in other RPGs.
The graphics and animations make me a bit conflicted. I know that they are good, but they just don't feel as good as the GBA games. In those games, they had absolutely gorgeous hand drawn sprites. They're the best looking GBA games ever, and only Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age can really put forth any contest in that respect. While the graphics are about a million times better than that graphical train wreck Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon for the DS, Fire Emblem Awakening still can't get back to a level that they reached nearly fifteen years ago, and could easily replicate again. I will say that the cut scene animation is really excellent, though.
The sound is excellent, and the music is good. They have nice voiceovers for all of the characters, and it doesn't feel like they skimped much in this department, especially considering how much dialogue is in the game.
The difficulty feels like it's just about right, in that it feels too hard at times rather than too easy. This is in keeping with the difficulty of the series, but Fire Emblem Awakening does try at least to make things a bit more customized to your desires, in that you can turn off the permadeath if you want, although I wouldn't recommend it.
All in all, Fire Emblem Awakening has a few warts, mostly notably the visuals, but on the whole it's a fantastic trip to a beloved world, and makes most of the right changes along the way. I'd highly recommend it to almost anyone. I'll give it a 9.5/10.
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