Fire Emblem: Awakening

The Fire Emblem series is a group of fantasy tactical RPGs with 13 games, 2 of which are remakes. It is set in a Western medieval-type world with a strong emphasis on magic and mythical creatures, such as manaketes (dragons), griffons, and shape-shifters. The titular Fire Emblem is always an important object in the game, although it changes form between games (in one group of games, it was a shield that could summon the power of a divine dragon, in another it was a medallion that imprisoned a goddess of chaos).

Fire Emblem: Awakening is set on the continents of Ylisse and Valm, which, by shape and other hints, are inferred to be Akaneia and Valentia from previous games. The story focuses on Chrom, the prince of the country (not continent) of Ylisse and his tactician, a player created character that will be referred to as the Avatar for this post. During the story, the characters go through wars with the neighboring country Plegia and the Valmese empire, and have continued conflicts with bandits and an army of the undead, with a larger evil plot that connects these events and, of course, threatens to end mankind.

The series has many different gameplay mechanics, so this post will only compare the completely or mostly new ones. Like the previous game, Awakening has two separate modes, classic and casual with the difference being whether or not permadeath (a mechanic in which your soldiers that die in battle stay dead afterward) is turned on, in previous games you could only play with permadeath even though some enemy generals had a tendency to survive their first battle with you for plot purposes. Awakening introduces the Pair Up system, which allows two of your units to pair up and act as a single unit on the battlefield so that they can support each other, both by attacking the enemy and blocking the enemy's attacks and by providing the active one stat boosts. Manaketes and laguz (now "taguel", but still humanoids that can shape shift into giant animals) are reintroduced with manaketes still using dragonstones to change forms, but taguel use beaststones now instead of transforming after a certain number of turns. Aside from that and the removal of light magic, the gameplay mechanics haven't changed.

Like all other Fire Emblem games, each character is separate (instead of being part of a group or team) and has their own personality and backstory that can be learned through their interactions with other characters. The game also has support conversations like in most of it's predecessors, and those conversations can be obtained and seen after two units spend enough time adjacent or paired up (having these conversations provides backstory and higher stat increases when adjacent), and there's even a marriage system after a boy and girl achieve an S rank support (having certain characters be married is necessary to obtain other specific characters).

Awakening is a very good game, but it can feel like a simplification if compared to games like Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. Turning off permadeath is a good option to have, but doing so causes victories to seem less rewarding, while keeping it on could cause you to have difficulty later because you lost characters (specifically, there is a level early in the game which you can only bring 6 characters into, all the enemies are comparatively strong or at least decent, and the enemy leader should capable of quickly killing all but one of your characters at that point). The Pair Up system also replaced the Rescue system, in which a character could pick up another although the suffer a speed penalty, and the character who is picking the other up is the one who fights, while in Pair Up, the character who goes to the other to Pair Up is the one that doesn't fight, making it harder to protect someone using Pair Up. I also find the taguels using beaststones to be pointless, and think that the original laguz system was better, as the stat boosts that came with transforming more than made up for the time it took, and there were items to speed up the process. Also, many of the characters in Awakening seem shallow and easily fit into stereotypes (this mage is very intelligent and scholarly, this fighter is an unintelligent brut, etc.), and the backstory that is gained from their support conversations does very little to fix how simple their character appears to be. The story is also disappointing, as the "only you can prevent the end of the world" idea has been so badly overdone across almost all types of fiction and storytelling that it's almost funny. Overall, Awakening is a good game, but the other Fire Emblems are much better both in gameplay and story.