Great production values, lackluster gameplay.I haven't played a whole lot of tactical games, but the one I hold as the standard is the first Final Fantasy Tactics (and its improved version on the PSP). For the last couple of years, I've wondered about the Fire Emblem games, which have always come up in discussions about similar games, but I never got around to playing any of them. A few months ago I finally gave in and used some of my trade-in credit towards Awakening. For the first 5 or 6 hours, I was in. I liked the visual style, the story seemed typical but nothing terrible, and when I saw just how much you could boost your character's stats, I saw that I could really have fun exploring all the different classes.Unfortunately, as the game went on, I got tired of a lot of what it had to offer. There wasn't much strategy to anything, enemy units often just made a beeline for my most injured units, almost every map was the same in that they rarely had any obstacles, and the worst thing was that the story got very lazy halfway through. Fire Emblem: Awakening has everything it needs to be a great game, but the developers played it safe and instead made a game that's better off for beginners or people new to the genre. For anyone who's played games like this before, this is going to be a walk in the park.I won't go into detail about the story because it's so typical and becomes a mess in no time. There are a lot of small plots that lead to a bigger one, and you get tons of characters as the story progresses. The big problem here is that it's hard to care about any of the characters after about chapter 10. Sure, you'll get a cool character or two later on, but when new characters literally appear in a battle where you can recruit them, and never have anything to do plot-wise again, it's hard to care if anything happens to them or not. On the flipside, one of the selling points for Awakening is the support system, in which if two units are paired up or fight side-by-side, they'll get little heart icons to show a growing support level. While on the world map, you can go to the Support menu and view a conversation with those units (provided they're compatible) and learn a little more about them, and even have them get married. It's a cool addition, but completely optional. You can ignore the support stuff and you'll be ok. It does make things interesting though, since you have tons of possibilities with couples and their kids. I liked this, but it would've been better to have put it in the story here and there, rather than just having it be in a menu on its own. As new characters appear later on, there's no investment in them- they just show up, and what little you get through interactions just isn't enough to make me really care. It didn't help that many of them are typical anime/JRPG stereotypes. When can we get past these and actually progress with character types?Combat is ridiculously easy most of the time, and trust me when I say that if you've played and Ogre Battle, Final Fantasy Tactics, or similar game before, you're better off starting out on the hardest difficulty. Early on in the game, I was a little worried, because your weapons can only be used a certain amount of time before they break and you need to buy new ones. Here's another part where the game could've been made a little harder, but they played it safe: you can level grind. There's an item you can buy in the towns that lets enemies respawn wherever you are, starting up another battle. You don't get any gold from fights, but certain abilities you learn through classes can net you gold when you defeat an enemy, and you'll often get weapons from defeated enemies. You almost never have to worry about being broke, especially later on when enemies are dropping good weapons left and right, and you can just sell them off. I was also downright disgusted by how stupid-strong some classes are with the abilities they get. Remember the cheap move from the samurai class in Final Fantasy Tactics, Blade Grasp? The move gave you a high chance of dodging physical attacks based on your Brave level, making you practically immune to weapons if you maxed out your Brave. Well, here there are skills that let you strike first, even when being attacked, and if you have other abilities that up your defense, critical rate, or anything else, chances are that you're just going to mow through enemies before losing any health.What's worse, your party and the enemy take turns...as groups. All of your units do stuff, then all of the enemy units do their thing, and it's back to you. Rarely is there anything that needs to be saved on the map, like a village or special character, so you can essentially just move all your units somewhere one after the other, if needed. There's no sense of urgency. 9 times out of 10, your objective in story battles is to defeat the enemy commander to end the battle.Oh, and for a really dumb reason, none of the character models have feet. And despite the cutscenes having full spoken dialogue, characters only grunt and gasp, or utter short sentences when you read their text.Fire Emblem: Awakening isn't a bad game though. There's a lot I didn't care for, but it was honestly just boring in the end. Even with all the DLC and side quests, I don't care to go through it again, even to try out new relationships with my characters. Hopefully the next new Fire Emblem games can take some big steps forward in the gameplay.0
Skip to main content
Copy Link
Edit
Delete
