I think it's very clear to see how Fire Emblem: Awakening ended up being the first major stepping stone on the road to Fire Emblem becoming one of Nintendo's most beloved series today. There's a reason why so many representatives of Awakening are present in Smash more than any other Fire Emblem game, and that is because of how good the core cast of Robin, Lucina, and Chrom are.

Till now, I've only played Three Houses so getting the go back and play Awakening was honestly like fresh air. I have to admit that around the end of Three Houses, i was getting sick of the life-sim aspects of exploring the monastery and waiting a month for the next main mission. I like how Awakening handles the core mechanics more of letting you simply go from main mission to mission. The monastery really proved to run me thin after a while so just being able to immediately jump into combat whenever I want really kept the game fresh for what is ultimately, the same kind of gameplay.

I do think that Awakening's core mechanics suffer somewhat from the genuine necessity of pairing units up. It feels as if you just can't win any battle unless you have all of your units paired up for stat boosts and potential attack blocking, a mistake i learned far too late in the game. It's an interesting idea, of taking the social links with each unit and allowing them to give each other stat boots the higher the link, but I believe that Three Houses proved to implement the system better when they just add the extra stats to the units once the link is complete rather than forcing you to half your army with pair ups.

I think that Awakening may prove to become my favorite of the two Fire Emblems I've played thus far, depending on the day. It certainly has my favorite characters and in-game cutscenes of the two thus far, the only thing keeping this from being perfect for me, is the unfortunate pair-up system as i explained.