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

[Super_Boom]

Soriku said:

Simply devising a "good strategy" isn't going to get you to win with the result you want. Your units are able to die far too easily. I didn't want to lose anyone, so again I just decided to use a few reliable units and that was that. The problem was that there's no challenge when doing that...yet at the same if I wanted to make anyone viable, it just took too much time, and it's not necessary at all. So I don't see why I have to make things harder on myself for no good reason. The game doesn't penalize you in any way for only using a few units.

The only reason I skipped a lot of the character development is, again, it takes too much time. This is a recurring theme with this game---it just takes too much time to do certain things. I was feeling burnt out by the battles so I didn't want to unlock more support conversations which force you to fight multiple battles. There's like a gazillion conversations too, doing all of them would take well over a hundred hours. There's no way I could stomach that many boring battles, especially when I don't like the characters much to begin with.

It's true that units die easily, but permadeath, was, at least up until the 2nd DS game, a staple of the franchise. You really have to be careful with your units, giving them enough exposure to improve them, while still protecting/supporting them enough to keep them from dying. It might not be necessary, but, at least in my opinion, there's something extremely satisfying about taking an initially pathetic unit and watching them grow into an awesome 2nd tier. The Est archetypes are usually the best example of this; every game features a weak character introduced late in the story with high growth rates, and the potential to become awesome if you put the care into training them.

Though with this particular game, part of the reason this game was praised so much was due to how accessible it was. If perma-death is such a concern, I think it might have been a better idea to start your first playthrough in "Casual" mode. You can still set the game difficulty however you want, but you wouldn't have to worry about your units dying.

As far as your complaint about time, there's actually a little adage in the FE fandom: No one hates Fire Emblem as much as Fire Emblem fans. XD Obviously it's an exagerration, but it's the true that the games really require massive time committments if you want to get everything out of it. Especially with regards to support characters, who really don't contribute too much if you don't care to listen to their support conversations. In a way, the game makes it so you can choose if you want to learn more about the characters in your army.  Some characters grow more confident or less cold the more they speak to comrades, so you're also missing out on character development if you don't care to watch the support conversations.

Though, it is understandable if this sort of style of story-telling doesn't really appeal to you. It does take some getting used to. I guess I've played a lot of these games, so I've grown to love it. You can basically do the bare minimum, and listen to the basic plot and the development of the main cast, or you can put the time into getting the full value out of the game.