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.

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.

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.

Most Fire Emblem games I've played have forced me to reach this point. Basically, you would have to focus on certain soldiers, as you don't have unlimited time to train them all. Awakening was more liberal in allowing you to grind, but I still found the huge cast to be far too unwieldy to focus on everyone. Normally I would just focus on around ~20 units, and achieve the rest of the support conversations in side-chapters, with characters I didn't intend to bring into my endgame party. 

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

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.

I also noticed how easy it was to break the game, though I tried to avoid that whenever I could. The "Team Up" system made it incredibly easy to dominate entire armies, and, some units, especially the 2nd generation characters, had absurdly high growth rates, and could be recruited long before the endgame (as oppposed to the Est archetype of previous games). I think the key for me was to maintain a continuous focus on my ~20 main team units. One of my biggest gripes with the multiplayer on Shadow Dragon (FE 11/DS) was how my focus on a large army wouldn't let me compete with other players' overpowered 5 unit team.

I guess my only argument against that would be that you could simply avoid breaking the game as much as possible, in order to enjoy the game the way I did. This game seemed to be much more customizable that any of the previous games in the series. You could literally take any unit you liked and grind them and continue reclassing until you had another demi-god in your army, and focus on certain units. Or...you could focus on a larger army. Whatever way feels best for you I guess...

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.

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.

I guess these are both matters of personal preference. I loved the story and most of the characters, though a fair amount were archetypes. I thought the main cast was excellent, at least.

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.

Another preference, though I'd personally say that the Renewal theme ("Don't Speak her Name") was one of my absolute favorite video game themes. So much emotion in that chapter, it was all could do to keep the manly tears from flowing XD. So really, that one track really made up for every other level theme.

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.

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

I've played one of the GBA ones for a little bit a long time ago, but FE: Awakening is my first proper entry into the series.

I didn't add a score partially because I'm not sure how I would score it.

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.

more stuff

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.

Well, no, because I enjoyed the last several JRPGs I played, including Tales of Graces F, Dark Souls, Demon's Souls, SMT IV, Resonance of Fate, Valkyria Chronicles (much better SRPG), and Tales of Xillia. Hell I even liked Star Ocean 4 more than this game too; that one has a better combat system, soundtrack, and even the core story is better (still not that good though). I just didn't think FE was too hot the more I played.