My Sh**ty-A** Review of Fire Emblem: Awakening

[F0X]

Soriku said:

 

Since several people have decided to start their own type of review threads on here, I thought I'd start one with a game I thought was notable enough to review. I call my series of reviews, "My shitty-ass reviews". The difference between this review series and the other review series is that I doubt I'll be writing reviews that often.

Anyway, the game. I've wanted to try FE: Awakening for a while now since I liked the demo, as well as because of the game getting some pretty good reviews, but the game was always stuck at $30-40 and I didn't want to get it at that price. Which is why the $15 price point at Best Buy earlier this month was a good opportunity to get it.

I started playing on Hard/Classic, and I found the game to be pretty tough earlier on. This was because I always sent out some of my lower level dudes every now and then to gain levels, but they'd always die quick and I reset when I lost a unit. So once I realized that most of my units were too hard to level up on the chapters, I just sent out Frederick to take care of a lot of enemies as well as my Avatar and Chrom quite frequently so I could gain levels for them too.

Hate to toot my own horn, but I didn't have that problem early on in Hard mode. The only think I used Frederick for was to Pair Up and enchance a particular unit's defense. Otherwise Frederick is just a big XP hog, and one of the worst in the series. Lunatic difficulty practically requires him, though. Which is why I don't even bother.

By the time I got to chapter 5 I was able to unlock the Wireless features and fought some lower level Bonus Box Teams to grind a bit. I was able to increase the number of units I was safe to let out, and things were going well. But then I realized that I was getting too many units, and most of them would just take too long to get to acceptable levels for them to be viable in battles, and things would get harder every chapter.

Avoid Pokemon like the plague. The game forces you to focus on picking and choosing a select amount of units (and is pretty generous in that regard), and part of the replayability factor is to use different units on different playthroughs, as it can open up different strategies. All FE games have been like this, and I'd say Awakening is the least stringent thus far because grinding is possible. Although, it natually comes at the price of in-game money and player fun.

Since I couldn't be bothered to level up all these units, I just kept sending out a few units each time to clear the map. This is one of my main complaints about this game: you need to grind too much to use a good number of units, but what's the point when you can just use a few elite units to win every battle? The 13 unit maximum (in most battles, not all of them I believe) is laughable because it's overkill, and if you do use 13 units most of them will likely die if you sent them out and haven't leveled them up much.

If you focus on training/grinding a few units, then it becomes easy. But what did you expect? This can be applied to pretty much any RPG in which grinding is an option. It's just one of Awakening's measures to make sure that most players can cross the finish line. Whether or not it's necessary or preferable should depend on the individual player (for reference, I know people who can hardly beat Normal/Casual without grinding). You sound like someone who uses the Super Guide to "beat" Donkey Kong Country Returns.

The units I'd mainly use (Avatar, Chrom, Morgan, Lucina, Donnel) generally had very little trouble with the majority of battles. They'd be dodging most of the attacks that were lobbed at them and kill enemies within one or two skirmishes. Since this was the case nearly every battle, and because there isn't much variety in the battlefields (almost all of them are just spacious battlefields with no defining features. They just look different.) it made things get very repetitive really quickly, especially when the defining feature of the game is the battles.

Disagree about the battlefields altogether. It's probably easier to see how good the battlefield design is when you actually make use of it, good sir.

Later on in the game, I made my Avatar and Morgan Sorcerors and gave them Nosferatu, a type of tome. This weapon is ridiculously overpowered, to say the least, and you can buy it for cheap. It's powerful, and every time you hit an enemy it gives you half the damage you dealt to the enemy in HP. So it takes a lot of effort to kill you. Towards the end there is this Paralogue map where it's your army vs. like 50 dudes. I just sent out Morgan paired up with my Avatar and wiped out the map with no thinking and no effort. This is a strategy game but there's no strategy involved. It's just mindless, and you can deal with every battle in this way. Forget 13 units, you can break the game with just one or two.

Avoid Final Fantasy Tactics like the plague. It's like this, but infinitely worse.

Moving on, the story is pretty much nothing to speak of. The writing is good, but it's a pretty generic "war" story. All the villains are archetypes and unmemorable. The only cool part of the story was the twist near the end, but the story is nothing notable otherwise.

Very subjective. Although I agree about the villians (doesn't help that FE seems to use the same archetypes over and over), you're glossing over much of the plot by calling it a generic war story.

The characters are...OK. Some have interesting personalities, but they're nothing notable either, and 99% of them have very little to do with the story. You'll get more insight into the characters if you grind their dialogue with other characters by pairing them up, but this takes too long and too demanding for most people. The characters might've been a bit better if there was a good amount of voice acting, but this game has very little of it. All the characters have a few voiced lines at most. It's better than nothing, but they ought to step it up.

So subjective that it feels almost wrong. Suikoden comes to mind when discussing the issues of RPGs with large casts. By the way, I wouldn't be so hasty to judge the characters without seeing their support conversations first. After all, they are one of the most lauded parts of the game!

The soundtrack is also just OK. There are a few decent tracks (recruitment theme, chapter 10 theme, Chaos, and like one or two other other tracks), but the soundtrack gets repetitive. My favorite random battle track is "Chaos" for anyone who wants to know. Not much else to say here.

I don't know how to respond to this. Awakening's OST is more than just OK. :/

I finished the game today while downloading something after taking a few days break between plays for a while. I planned on beating all the Bonus Box teams, but again, things got too repetitive. I couldn't even be bothered to grind the support dialogue to marry characters to unlock several Paralogues that I haven't done. The ending was just whatever. I just wanted to get it over with as I got bored of the game a while ago.

The game started off well but simply got too repetitive to play (and gets broken too easily), the story never held my interest much, neither did the characters, and the soundtrack is just alright. The high reviews are rather surprising as this game has some serious issues. I didn't find it to be that good. At least I'll be able to sell it for twice the price I got it for since the price of the game won't budge.

It's not hard to see why the review scores are high, provided that you read the reviews.

I hope you enjoyed my shitty-ass review of Fire Emblem: Awakening.

The review title seems about right.