As I wait patiently to finally be able to order the nintendo switch, I have been going to my backlog of 3ds games that I either never played or never finished. This game I had started quite a few months ago, but I had never gotten around to finishing the entire main campaign. Now, this game has made me fall in love with the Fire Emblem gameplay style, and I already downloaded Fire Emblem Birthright to continue the series on 3DS.
Fire Emblem Awakening starts off with you being woken up by the prince Chrom. You have no memories, but when you can help them in battles by being a statistician, they recruit you. The kingdoms are at war with each other, mostly over the Fire Emblem, and Faceless are popping up everywhere to attack random villages. You travel throughout the land, defeating tyrannical leaders, saving villagers, and protecting the Fire Emblem from falling into the wrong hands, while also trying to figure out where you come from and how you fit into this new world. As you go on your journey, you will meet a whole slew of characters that will join your army and help you on your journey. One of my personal favorite characters is a 1000 year old dragon that takes the form of a little girl and acts that way most of the time. Another is a boy of unknown age that acts like a brat for some of the time but then turns out to be a very powerful magician.
Fire emblem is good for me because it does not require physical skill but instead mental skill play, it is figuring out where to place the characters on the screen so they attack where you want them to. It sounds simple, but it requires a lot of planning and thought, especially if you play hard mode where if characters die then they die permanently. The game has about 26 chapters, it took be about 10 hours to complete the main story without touching any of the paralogues or extra story or the DLC chapters. If those are added in several hours could definitely be added to the game.
My only true complaint (without spoiling the story) is that the ending seemed to be a bit rushed. I would have liked to see the ending plot stretched out for a bit longer. Another minor downside is that most of the cutscenes are made in 3D and with maybe one or two of the words in the text box narrated, or simply a sound as the narration. The cutscenes that are made as a full animation are very pretty and fully narrated. Altogether I really enjoyed this game and I would recommend it to someone that isn’t ready for a game such as Super Smash Bros that requires a lot of skill and practice, but wants something more challenging than a simple simulation game such as Animal Crossing.
Overall Rating: 4/5