Much like anyone outside of Japan, the first time I heard of the Fire emblem was through Super smash bros. melee. In Nintendo's second installment in the famed fighting game series, two mysterious swordsmen named Marth and Roy were included. Like most people back then, I had no idea who they were of what Fire emblem was about. Yet for some reason, I was never to curious to find out.
Years and years pass, and Fire emblem begins to establish itself as a franchise worldwide. Still nothing that caught my interest. I cannot explain why, but the series never once appealed to me. No idea why, it has just met me with complete indifference. To be honest, I was glad that the series got a huge boost thanks to melee, which in itself is very cool, but that doesn't automatically mean I would like it.
Super smash bros. brawl is released, Marth is back for another fight and Roy is now replaced by Ike from the same series. At the time, I remember most people making fun of it due to the fact that Ike shared his name with a character from South park (you probably know whom, I should not have to explain). Even to this day, I think Marth, both in his melee and brawl incarnations, and Ike are very fun to play with. Especially Marth in melee, due to his speed, reach and fairly low learning curve. So what about Fire emblem, the series these two orginates from? Didn't bother to find out.
One of my friends owned Fire emblem shadow dragon, a remake of the very first Fire emblem game, which I got the chance to try out. It was very briefly, so I couldn't really think too much of it. However, I remember I thought it was kind of Advance wars, also a series I didn't bother with until Dual strike came out, but with one major flaw that made me extremely sceptical to the series as a whole: if your characters die, they will NOT return for the rest of the game. To compare with Advance wars, what if you could only build one of each type of unit and they were gone for the rest of the game if they got destroyed?Needless to say, I did not try the game again for a while. I also thought the graphics were odd, a weird blend of realistic and cartoonish that didn't blend well to me back then.
11 years have now passed since I first tried Super smash bros. melee, and I hear yet another Fire emblem game is going to get released. It keeps getting delayed, or so I hear since I wasn't interested in the game at all until two weeks ago or so, and its demo finally finds its way to the Nintendo eshop. I usually try out every new demo they release, and this game's demo was no different. The game was met with near universal critical acclaim, to steal a staple phrase from wikipedia, so my worries were put to rest. The demo was downloaded and I tried it out.
Literally one minute of gameplay later and I'm completely hooked. I made up my mind: I'm getting Fire emblem awakening!
After ordering the game, I played two other Fire emblem games in order to prepare myself; get aquainted with the gameplay and the overall feel and tone of the games. I tried Fire emblem (also called Blazing sword) and Fire emblem the sacred stones. Neither of these games wowed me by any means. They were fun but kind of frustrating due to the permanent character death. One small mistake and all the enemies were all over the weakest member of my legion (yes, I refer to the army I chose for a partucular map as legion sometimes due to the hilarious name that is "Lyndis's legion"). While I still think these two games are very similar to Advance wars but worse, the biggest similarity to me was the fact that they were addicting and overall fun. However, they both had a few common flaws: too many characters and weak (although still fairly enjoyable) plots. Blazing sword also had that weird and sudden protagonist change in the middle of the game, which I didn't really care for. Sacred stones was an improvement, but still not a great game. It was way more difficult (although it might be because they encourage you to move around the map and fight random enemies, which wasn't possible in Blazing sword) and didn't really keep my interest. They both nad fun characters, but way too many of them and they didn't get that much screen time. Also, the plots were ok, but had a few clichés and were pretty predictable. All in all, good games, but not great.
Now Fire emblem awakening arrives in my mailbox and I put the game card in my 3DS and try it out for the first time. What's my opinion?
Once again, one minute in and I'm hooked.
First things first, the series is famed for its difficulty. Now, the difficulty is optional, in a way, not just by difficulty settings, but the fact that you can turn off permanent character deaths. This makes it accessable to newcomers like myself as well as keeping the "classic" challenge for experienced players. I hear Ninja gaiden 3 was panned due to its low difficulty and it couldn't be cranked up to the same lever as the other games in the series. Fire emblem awakening manages to do both, easy enough for newcommers if they wish, hard enough for veterans if they wish. Nothing is forced when it comes to difficulty in this game, it's up to the player to decide. This is something I really like, something a lot of developers tend to forget these days. Video games today seems to really like holding your hand through the entire game and force feed you everything until you get sick. I like having challenge in games, but I want it to be optional. Sometimes, I like having to be put against the wall and use all my skill and wit (the little I have) to try to conquer the game, somtimes I just want to breeze my way through the game. Oftenly, I can't do both in the same game due to the fact that the difficulty might be set or cannot be changed once chosen. Tales games since symphonia has a selectionable diffuculty that can be changed at any time while Kingdom hearts has one difficulty you choose at the beginning of the game and sticks with until the end of the game. Guess which one of those series I enjoy more.
Let's get the bad stuff out of the way. First, like the other games, the plot isn't all that. It's not bad my any means, but it once again suffers from a few clichés I don't find interesting and is pretty predictable. It's not badly done, though, could have been a lot worse. In the end, I like it, but it's nothing special. Second, the soundtrack isn't fantastic. Once again, the music in this game is pretty good, but nothing spectacular. Keep in mind, I said I would start with the bad stuff, and these two aren't exactly bad by any means, just by comparison to the rest of the game. None of these "flaws" ruined the game for me by any means, but I figure I should get them out of the way first.
The gameplay is pretty good. You move around the map and select the location you can start a chapter on (or a random battle) and pick your units, i.e. characters, for the fight. When in battle, you select the unit you wish to move and a field will light up. This shows where your character is able to move and attack. If your character is close to an enemy, move to the enemy, selct attack and the weapon you wish to use and strike. Some weapons have advantage over others; swords beat axes, axes beat lances, lances beat swords. Some enemies are strong against physical attacks and weak against magical attacks, others vice versa. You must use your units in a tactical manner to win over your enemy, although the exact victory conditions varies from chapter to chapter. Some needs you to defeat all enemies, others to defeat the leader. If a unit stands next to another unit, they will recieve bonuses when it attacks or is attacked. For example, attacking next to a unit adds the chance of the other unit also attack, or protect you against damage. By fighting alongside each other, your units will grow closer and will form relationships. You can then view cutscenes that will improve their relashionships, which will increase the chances of support in battle, An important thing to always keep in mind is that the weapons are expendable, they can only be used a limited amount of times. Once they've been used that many times, they break and cannot be used. You need to keep in mind when to buy new weapons before your character is completely defenseless. All this might seem a bit hard at first, but the game has a very low learning curve and it will all make sense once you have the game in hand, so to speak.
As mentioned before, the characters' relationships improve by having them, quite literally, fight alongside each other. Two characters' relationship has three levels from C to A. During the jump from each of those letters to the next, you can view a cutscene which will "activate" the next relationship level. If the characters are of the opposite sex, they can get an additional S level where they get married. Some characters cannot have an S level with certain characters of the opposite sex, but they're not too many of them in the game. Any character can only have one marriage regardless. What does this marriage system lead to, you might ask? Play the game and see for yourself.
To talk briefly about the plot again, it's not all that great and can be predictable. What saves it is that it's mostly well written and the characters are pretty interesting. Although the game might have too many characters and not all of them get their own cutscenes in the story that can be counted with two hands, they're still fun regardless. Half the fun in the game is seeing the characters interact. Although they don't interact all that much, it's understandable since there's quite a lot of characters to begin with. If all characters had extremely detailed cutscenes with every single character, the game might have been a little too big. They kept it at a sufficable amount, and what we get is pretty good. No, I will not list my favorite characters here, I might ruin the suprise for some. I will say this, though: I like that you can custumize one character you use, which makes it more of a solid experience than having the characters look into the screen and call you Mark like a certain other game in this series. For the record, I refer to said customizable character as its default name, not My unit or MU as a lot of people do, I think it sonds silly and unnecessary.
Like I've said, or written, the music is good, but not anything spectacular. This is once again a proof or some of the game's tradition breaking, since they don't seem to use the same recruitment theme from previous games, possibly made famous through melee and brawl. Which is a bit of a shame, since it was probably more famous than the actual main theme, which thankfully is in the game and it's a good version at that, and my personal favorite. It makes up for this, if you could even call it that, by having what I concider to be the perfect level up theme in video game history so far. Forget the victory theme from Final fantasy, this is the tune that means victory to me and always brings me joy to hear, especially when accompanied by the cling of stats rising. Anyone who have played the game knows exactly what I mean, those who haven't will within minutes of playing the game. Speaking of, the sound effects are actually pretty good in this game. It breaks from tradition by not having the "text scrolling sound" and instead having the characters grunt or talk a little. Something I don't mind, and if you do mind it, you can turn it off just fine. I can't think of any sound effect that seemed off to me, and most of them hit their mark. The menu sounds and the stat rising cling I've talked about are probably my favorites in the game (might be a bit contradictionary since I say I don't pick favorites, but I think it's ok when it's something as small as sound effects in one particular video game rather than something as big, to me at least, as a favorite movie of all time) and overall sound really good to me. Might not be important, but something to mention at the very least.
The graphics are actually pretty nice, perhaps not on a technical level. Sure, it's good for 3DS standards, but it's not going to amaze anyone. What I do like is the overall tone and style it has. The cutscenes are "kindasorta cellshaded" and look good and distinguished to me, something I don't usually say. I'm not saying this have never been done before, but it doesn't mean that it's less nice in the end. The 3D effect really work during the maps as well, some maps might be slightly tilted to give more depth and other backgrounds just being overall good looking. Gimmicky, maybe. Cool, yes. I'm not the only one that gets kind of distracted when a bird or some ashes fly by the screen sometimes, right? I prefer not to show the battle scenes because I think they waste time and slow the game down a bit, but when I do watch them, they look really good. The characters' sprites during battle and cutscenes are nice and fairly detailed, but once again, nothing spectacular. All in all, the game looks nice.
Something that might be both great and terrible about the game is the fact that it's the first Nintendo game that uses the term "DLC". New super Mario bros 2 was first outside of japan, but Fire emblem awakening came out first in japan, making it the very first game to have downloadable content and call it DLC on a Nintendo console. At least to my knowledge. People seems to be either very against DLC or for DLC. Personally, I'm pretty much only against first day DLC, as it feels like they just took some parts of the game and gave it its own pricetag. I understand it can be done as preorder bonuses to encourage people to actually buy games and now illegaly download games and the like, but in the end, despite that I don't like first day DLC too much, I guess I'm indifferent. There's good DLC out there for sure, but some has too big pricetags and might not be worth it in the end. Even worse is on-disc DLC, where you pay for something that's actually already on the disc (hello Capcom), which I actually do despise, but might sometimes fall for if it's something I concider cool or funny enough to bother with. I admit, I'm probably the demographic for DLC; someone with money and happens to be bored and willingly enough. Sometimes buying things as a joke, like swimsuits for the males in Dead or alive 5, and sometimes because I have nothing better to do with my pathetic life. It's not like I can donate to cancer research or something, right? Honestly, though, DLC is the way of the current generation of gaming, and might live on for some time. I'm glad Nintendo is starting to catch up, proving they're usually a generation behind in hardware and sometimes one generation ahead in game making. Having consoles with graphics one generation behind and gameplay so sweet it makes it feel like a game from the future. Quite an odd combination. Like I said, I'm glad they're doing this, if they treat DLC well and not be lazy about it, it might make them quite a few extra bucks. Fire emblem awakening's DLC, at this point in time, in my personal opinion, is actually kind of worth it. It's not vastly expensive and are all funny and entertaining (once again, will not spoil it, buy the game and look up the DLC yourself), even if a bit short. It makes me wish they would release a new mini-campain, or map at least, once a month or so, but that's probably just me. Mostly because I want to be able to go back to this game from time to time. A huge disappointment some DLC were sloppily and unnecessarily "censored", I hope that won't ever happen again. Seriously, that was very lame.
I'm not going to give too much details here, but to me, there's not replay value in this game. To compare to Advance wars once again, aside from the story mode, you had plenty of other modes to choose from, buy more maps to get even more stuff and have fun with. Fire emblem doesn't have much of that, though. Thankfully, the DLC does give it some replay value, but I wish I could get a little more extra if I wanted to play through the game again (once again, I'm intentionally being vauge). It's not terrible, though, as I've picked up the game plenty of times after I've finished it, so I'm not saying there's no replay value whatsoever. I'm just saying it could be even more. Admittingly, probably because I'm used to a certain game similar to this one, but others might find this a bigger issue than me.
I'd like to personally ask Nintendo and Intelligent systems something: Please, do NOT milk this game. Let it stand on its own. This is a great game that doesn't need unnecessary sequels or tie-ins, or some stupid anime or movie to try to promote it. I thought Persona 4 was a game that was self-contained and didn't need some lame anime adaptation or fighting game spin-off that's pretty much a palette swap of another fighting game for no good reason. Treat this game with the respect it deserves. I know I said I won't mind more DLC, but so far, all DLC has felt tounge-in-cheek and felt like an obvious way to have fun with the game without being disrespectful. A lot of times when I play really good games, it ends up getting milked so bad that it's hard to even return to the original, let alone enjoy it. This feels like it's going to be a flagship title for the Fire emblem series, for both good and bad, and I ask of Intelligent systems and Nintendo not to let this go through their heads. Some classics are just better left untouched. Treat this game with respect, not greed. We have a great game called Fire emblem awakening, and we're happy with what we got. Please let it stay that way. I might be asking for the impossible, but I'm asking it nontheless.
Before ending this, let's be blunt. In my years, I have played plenty of games of many categories. A lot of good ones, a lot of bad ones. If you're thinking of getting a 3DS but can't come up with even one worthwile game, look no further. Fire emblem awakening is the finest game for the 3DS right now, and it's one of my all time favorite games. It is worth to get a 3DS just for this game, in my opinion. What are you waiting for? Go visit your local video game store and pick up a copy of this game right now! So what you can't afford it, I'm sure you'll be fine without food for a month! In all seriousness, though, despite this being a great game, I still do NOT look forward to the megami tensei crossover.
Summary: This game is simply fantastic, everything from its gameplay to characters are really well done, and well worth your time and money. If you want a solid reason to get a 3DS, look no further! Buy this game!
Grade: 8/10
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