Awakening is honestly a very middling entry in the series despite "saving the series", with the only real thing to its name being the amount of content, which is pretty considerable for a tactical RPG. Unfortunately its faults mainly lie in telling a story, having even just likeable characters, and making a fun engaging game, all of which are honestly so "its not terrible but its not good either" that its frustrating.

They have a good mechanic in the pair up system but that just goes to shit when you realize there is absolutely no reason to not just pair up for the whole game. Once you start pairing units up the game is so braindead easy it's almost unreasonable to ask the player to stay awake while they play the game.

The characters are as one note as they come, characters like Stahl literally can be summed up by "i hungry". This isn't a bad thing to be fair, plenty of incredibly basic Fire Emblem characters are likeable, but Awakening feels like they just threw darts on a board with personality traits and ran with it. The personality traits are amplified to the point where it is the only thing the characters talk about and every single conversation must revolve around said trait.

The story is just middling and uninspired not much else to say lol

holy shit lets not even talk about the lore the lore makes no fucking sense why is priam canon