Fire Emblem: Route the Enemy
It's a tough topic to crack every time I work retroactively through a franchise or through the general chronology of gaming, is it fair to review a title based upon how much better its successors are in their respective elements and takes on the formula of games beforehand? My answer to this question is generally, well yeah. This ranges in severity and reason based upon limitations of tech and what was generally accepted within media at the time of release, but generally speaking I critique media that I engage with in the year that I am doing so. If I were to play Pong in the newly minted 2024, I don't think I'd be quick to call it the greatest thing since sliced butter. Therein lies a major qualm with Fire Emblem: Awakening, it's 2019 (eventual) successor did just about everything better.
I didn't grow up an Emblemy-boi, not really touching the series outside of Smash Bros until Three Houses dropped as a worldwide phenomenon in the fresher days of the Nintendo Switch. I mention this to say that the Fire Emblem formula and tactics as a whole was greatly lost on me in my early days of gaming. I played a metric ton of RTS' and shooters, but didn't come pre-booted with the intrinsic knowledge of THE GRID. What Awakening doesn't do well is offer players any real ideology as to why things are the way they are and the way things should be. I had no idea that S ranking my social links meant I was locked in to a marriage, sorry not sorry Sumia but I had to reload a save when I found out you and Robin were tying the knot. I was completely in the dark about the second generation units and the way to obtain them, not understanding if stats were any better or if they were worthwhile as characters to unlock. There were several missions that I missed out on recruitable characters because I wasn't briefed on the fact that Google Chrom had to be the one talking to them. On top of all of this, between missing out on certain powerful allies and offspring of my own militia, the class system made no real sense to me? I got my characters to level ten and then bought advanced seals to upgrade them to new classes, but did that really do anything? I don't know! Maybe I'm spoiled again here by Three Houses, but having one upgrade for each unit made levelling feel almost pointless, I got them to their one spot and then had no real interaction with their well-being outside of sending them off to the frontlines. There's a theme here with all of this, and its a general lack of information to people who were fresh to the game. I was enjoying my time with the majority of the first half of Awakening until its cracks began to show, and the lack of information was the first domino to really fall.
The plot of Awakening falls apart hilariously fast, and I'll avoid spoilers here but as soon as I realized the direction that Chrom and the Funky Bunch were headed into I did an exacerbated eye roll and pounded eight mountain dews. I applaud Three Houses (and NOT Engage) for its ability to create a grounded interpolitical storyline and stick to it, of course 3H has a story grounded at heart in the supernatural, but all the way into the end it managed to keep the Edelgard-centric conflict in its heart. Where Awakening lost me on the story element was trying to do a Final-Fantasy-esque "There's an even bigger bad" and then have you chase the literal and proverbial dragon for a little too long. I don't know, the plot device Awakening uses just becomes pretty tired after the amount of media I've engaged with the literal exact same concept. You can tell the character writers of Awakening got really excited at the concept of having their main villain being an all knowing omniscient who liked to twist his mustache and say "tee-hee" not unlike comic book baddies in the days of yore.
The story was pretty milquetoast, but man the characters even more so... but there is good!!! Robin, an avatar character with actual dialogue... and personality??? It's doable! Wowza! Gee-Willkers! Woah nelly!! I appreciate after Alear and Byleth having a character with actual agency in a story that they were the center-piece of. While Robin and Chrom are effectively equally important to the movement of the narrative, the former matters more to the fate of the world (though Chrom is still yet integral.) Having the two develop a sort of bro-mance relationship was neat, like Claude and Byleth in the Golden Deer route of Three Houses, except this time I heard more direct motivation and general intelligence out of the character I controlled. Unfortunately this is refreshing because silent/player-driving protags in the current gamerspace oft fall victim to becoming boneless. Robin actually being able to debate strategy and plot with Chrom was pretty neat. Unfortunately though they're like the only two characters in the entire game who were really worthwhile to talk to.
The majority of the rest of the roster falls victim to "type-cast" disease which is a fate shared by many a Fire Emblem character. You can boil down a resoundingly large amount of your allies to their one gimmick or shtick, giving me as their commanding officer no real reason to care for them or keep them around. Maybe I'm spoiled by games that have done party-driven casts better like Mass Effect or Persona, but man it's harder and harder with every Fire Emblem I play to care even a smidgen about half my roster, especially in a game where they don't really interact outside of the poorly written supports. It's like that meme of Patrick coming home in Spongebob and lifting up his rock-house to say "WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE." That's how it felt when I'd scroll through the roster to add members to fight in my mission. Half of the characters I legitimately forgot about (I had no idea who Stahl was in the postgame credit sequence for example,) and then the rest were simply employed just because of their combat ability.
The laundry list would be too long if I went through them one by one but there were a few so hilariously poorly written that I have to name. First is Tharja, who I thought about romancing with Robin because a friend told me she was neat. She was not neat, she begins her first support link with Robin informing him that she watched him sleep through the night and counted his breaths. RED FLAG. I gave up on her and romanced Olivia thereafter. Kellum wanted you to remember in every single opportunity that he was easily forgotten. Lon'Qu was scared of women, because tee-hee haha, women scary!!! If he wasn't a good unit I would have cast him aside. And seriously, who the f*** is Donnel??? For the first time in my experience with a Fire Emblem, and this is as someone who has beaten Three Houses eight times, I got up during the credits sprawl when it informs you of the post-game happenings of your party and went and got some water and used the restroom. Even with a mobile console in my hands I couldn't be asked to care about this cast. Character writing in this game felt half-baked at best, giving us a cast of one dimensional "friends" who felt like they came out of a gimmick-generator rather than a team trying to put together a memorable roster of allies.
I have smaller qualms with Awakening that have effectively been fixed in the titles (that I've played) since this release. First is the most apparent and biggest issue I had outside of the absent depth of the characters, and that was the lack of any sort of hub zone with your party. What Three Houses did with Garreg Mach, and even Engage with Somniel, was create a place for you to soak in and exist with your party. I'm all for moments in games that lend you time for character exposition and events that humanize the cast outside of its main characters. Three Houses having areas that allow you to dine, sing, train, garden, and even sip tea with your peers was a great way to make them seem important and give weight to the downtime in between pivotal moments within the narrative. In Awakening you're jumping from one big story moment to the next, no real time in between, with the only exposition you get being the supports and barracks moments you get from pairing people up on the battlefield. The bottom line is that I wanted to find reasons to care about my fellow soldiers, even if their stories and personalities were half-baked, but I wasn't given the real room to do so.
I have other issues with things like weapon-repair being fiscally unrealistic and the Predator-like AI that hunted your healers/support units as if they were a hawk finding mice on the open plane, but those pail in gravity with what I've written above.
I did like the game though overall, but I don't see what makes it so "special" after playing an infinitely better game within the franchise. Though the 3DS is a flawed system in that it's mobile and can only push its processing power so far, I liked how Awakening's movies pushed it to its limit. The little moments that you get seeing Chrome and Lucina within the game's CGI was pretty dang cool, a maneuver I'm sure wasn't easy but I felt paid off pretty well. Tactics games existing on a grid only allow the in-game engine to tell certain levels of story through actions built into the game itself. Taking short spots to act out certain integral plot elements within the mini-movies gave these short events within the narrative some extra weight.
Outside of Chrom/Robin being pretty great characters and the neat use Intelligent Systems got out of the 3DS, I liked the ability to play without permadeath as I understand that was mostly foreign to the series beforehand. Call me a noob if you want, but I'm glad I got to retain my entire roster throughout the random 2% hit crits by the enemies, I still played long battles and powered on against the odds, I just did it in a realistic use of my time. On that note, I felt like the levels were appropriate in length, though the win-conditions were hilariously limited (route the enemy versus defeat the commander,) I felt like I didn't spend an egregious time on any map or have to navigate through unscrupulous environments.
While I am glad I've played Awakening and I'm even more glad it "saved" Fire Emblem, which gave me one of my all time favorite titles, I don't think it's really the bees knees. Three Houses is just a better game (in my opinion, because this is my review) overall and I can't foresee any reason to crack open Awakening in favor of it. While my first-half experience with it was pretty great and I had it temporarily ranked as a 4.5/5, that greatly waned as the plot moved along and the narrative suffered from its lack of legitimate ambition. I can't recommend anyone play Awakening, but if you have a 3DS I imagine this is a game you may already own.
It's a tough topic to crack every time I work retroactively through a franchise or through the general chronology of gaming, is it fair to review a title based upon how much better its successors are in their respective elements and takes on the formula of games beforehand? My answer to this question is generally, well yeah. This ranges in severity and reason based upon limitations of tech and what was generally accepted within media at the time of release, but generally speaking I critique media that I engage with in the year that I am doing so. If I were to play Pong in the newly minted 2024, I don't think I'd be quick to call it the greatest thing since sliced butter. Therein lies a major qualm with Fire Emblem: Awakening, it's 2019 (eventual) successor did just about everything better.
I didn't grow up an Emblemy-boi, not really touching the series outside of Smash Bros until Three Houses dropped as a worldwide phenomenon in the fresher days of the Nintendo Switch. I mention this to say that the Fire Emblem formula and tactics as a whole was greatly lost on me in my early days of gaming. I played a metric ton of RTS' and shooters, but didn't come pre-booted with the intrinsic knowledge of THE GRID. What Awakening doesn't do well is offer players any real ideology as to why things are the way they are and the way things should be. I had no idea that S ranking my social links meant I was locked in to a marriage, sorry not sorry Sumia but I had to reload a save when I found out you and Robin were tying the knot. I was completely in the dark about the second generation units and the way to obtain them, not understanding if stats were any better or if they were worthwhile as characters to unlock. There were several missions that I missed out on recruitable characters because I wasn't briefed on the fact that Google Chrom had to be the one talking to them. On top of all of this, between missing out on certain powerful allies and offspring of my own militia, the class system made no real sense to me? I got my characters to level ten and then bought advanced seals to upgrade them to new classes, but did that really do anything? I don't know! Maybe I'm spoiled again here by Three Houses, but having one upgrade for each unit made levelling feel almost pointless, I got them to their one spot and then had no real interaction with their well-being outside of sending them off to the frontlines. There's a theme here with all of this, and its a general lack of information to people who were fresh to the game. I was enjoying my time with the majority of the first half of Awakening until its cracks began to show, and the lack of information was the first domino to really fall.
The plot of Awakening falls apart hilariously fast, and I'll avoid spoilers here but as soon as I realized the direction that Chrom and the Funky Bunch were headed into I did an exacerbated eye roll and pounded eight mountain dews. I applaud Three Houses (and NOT Engage) for its ability to create a grounded interpolitical storyline and stick to it, of course 3H has a story grounded at heart in the supernatural, but all the way into the end it managed to keep the Edelgard-centric conflict in its heart. Where Awakening lost me on the story element was trying to do a Final-Fantasy-esque "There's an even bigger bad" and then have you chase the literal and proverbial dragon for a little too long. I don't know, the plot device Awakening uses just becomes pretty tired after the amount of media I've engaged with the literal exact same concept. You can tell the character writers of Awakening got really excited at the concept of having their main villain being an all knowing omniscient who liked to twist his mustache and say "tee-hee" not unlike comic book baddies in the days of yore.
The story was pretty milquetoast, but man the characters even more so... but there is good!!! Robin, an avatar character with actual dialogue... and personality??? It's doable! Wowza! Gee-Willkers! Woah nelly!! I appreciate after Alear and Byleth having a character with actual agency in a story that they were the center-piece of. While Robin and Chrom are effectively equally important to the movement of the narrative, the former matters more to the fate of the world (though Chrom is still yet integral.) Having the two develop a sort of bro-mance relationship was neat, like Claude and Byleth in the Golden Deer route of Three Houses, except this time I heard more direct motivation and general intelligence out of the character I controlled. Unfortunately this is refreshing because silent/player-driving protags in the current gamerspace oft fall victim to becoming boneless. Robin actually being able to debate strategy and plot with Chrom was pretty neat. Unfortunately though they're like the only two characters in the entire game who were really worthwhile to talk to.
The majority of the rest of the roster falls victim to "type-cast" disease which is a fate shared by many a Fire Emblem character. You can boil down a resoundingly large amount of your allies to their one gimmick or shtick, giving me as their commanding officer no real reason to care for them or keep them around. Maybe I'm spoiled by games that have done party-driven casts better like Mass Effect or Persona, but man it's harder and harder with every Fire Emblem I play to care even a smidgen about half my roster, especially in a game where they don't really interact outside of the poorly written supports. It's like that meme of Patrick coming home in Spongebob and lifting up his rock-house to say "WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE." That's how it felt when I'd scroll through the roster to add members to fight in my mission. Half of the characters I legitimately forgot about (I had no idea who Stahl was in the postgame credit sequence for example,) and then the rest were simply employed just because of their combat ability.
The laundry list would be too long if I went through them one by one but there were a few so hilariously poorly written that I have to name. First is Tharja, who I thought about romancing with Robin because a friend told me she was neat. She was not neat, she begins her first support link with Robin informing him that she watched him sleep through the night and counted his breaths. RED FLAG. I gave up on her and romanced Olivia thereafter. Kellum wanted you to remember in every single opportunity that he was easily forgotten. Lon'Qu was scared of women, because tee-hee haha, women scary!!! If he wasn't a good unit I would have cast him aside. And seriously, who the f*** is Donnel??? For the first time in my experience with a Fire Emblem, and this is as someone who has beaten Three Houses eight times, I got up during the credits sprawl when it informs you of the post-game happenings of your party and went and got some water and used the restroom. Even with a mobile console in my hands I couldn't be asked to care about this cast. Character writing in this game felt half-baked at best, giving us a cast of one dimensional "friends" who felt like they came out of a gimmick-generator rather than a team trying to put together a memorable roster of allies.
I have smaller qualms with Awakening that have effectively been fixed in the titles (that I've played) since this release. First is the most apparent and biggest issue I had outside of the absent depth of the characters, and that was the lack of any sort of hub zone with your party. What Three Houses did with Garreg Mach, and even Engage with Somniel, was create a place for you to soak in and exist with your party. I'm all for moments in games that lend you time for character exposition and events that humanize the cast outside of its main characters. Three Houses having areas that allow you to dine, sing, train, garden, and even sip tea with your peers was a great way to make them seem important and give weight to the downtime in between pivotal moments within the narrative. In Awakening you're jumping from one big story moment to the next, no real time in between, with the only exposition you get being the supports and barracks moments you get from pairing people up on the battlefield. The bottom line is that I wanted to find reasons to care about my fellow soldiers, even if their stories and personalities were half-baked, but I wasn't given the real room to do so.
I have other issues with things like weapon-repair being fiscally unrealistic and the Predator-like AI that hunted your healers/support units as if they were a hawk finding mice on the open plane, but those pail in gravity with what I've written above.
I did like the game though overall, but I don't see what makes it so "special" after playing an infinitely better game within the franchise. Though the 3DS is a flawed system in that it's mobile and can only push its processing power so far, I liked how Awakening's movies pushed it to its limit. The little moments that you get seeing Chrome and Lucina within the game's CGI was pretty dang cool, a maneuver I'm sure wasn't easy but I felt paid off pretty well. Tactics games existing on a grid only allow the in-game engine to tell certain levels of story through actions built into the game itself. Taking short spots to act out certain integral plot elements within the mini-movies gave these short events within the narrative some extra weight.
Outside of Chrom/Robin being pretty great characters and the neat use Intelligent Systems got out of the 3DS, I liked the ability to play without permadeath as I understand that was mostly foreign to the series beforehand. Call me a noob if you want, but I'm glad I got to retain my entire roster throughout the random 2% hit crits by the enemies, I still played long battles and powered on against the odds, I just did it in a realistic use of my time. On that note, I felt like the levels were appropriate in length, though the win-conditions were hilariously limited (route the enemy versus defeat the commander,) I felt like I didn't spend an egregious time on any map or have to navigate through unscrupulous environments.
While I am glad I've played Awakening and I'm even more glad it "saved" Fire Emblem, which gave me one of my all time favorite titles, I don't think it's really the bees knees. Three Houses is just a better game (in my opinion, because this is my review) overall and I can't foresee any reason to crack open Awakening in favor of it. While my first-half experience with it was pretty great and I had it temporarily ranked as a 4.5/5, that greatly waned as the plot moved along and the narrative suffered from its lack of legitimate ambition. I can't recommend anyone play Awakening, but if you have a 3DS I imagine this is a game you may already own.