A Fire Emblem: Awakening Review

Fire Emblem: Awakening represents a lot of things. For one, it is the rebirth of the Fire Emblem series, which has not had a brand new, non-remake game since 2007. This is excellent news because I love Fire Emblem, just as many people do, and it's nice to have a breath of fresh air for the series. Additionally, Awakening reveals a new direction for the series, taking the classic Fire Emblem formula, overhauling elements that hindered past games, and introducing new elements that expand both the gameplay options and the replay value. It also represents Nintendo's first real first party foray into free and paid DLC. This is a really big step for Nintendo, and will probably influence their future pricing and release structure for DLC for other games, but is this a good thing? Read on and find out!

The Fire Emblem series has existed since the days of the Famicom, however the first title in the series to be translated and released internationally was Fire Emblem for the Gameboy Advance, the 7th game in the series. Technically the series' first international appearance was in Super Smash Bros. Melee, which featured Marth and Roy as playable characters, but even in the international releases they spoke Japanese and were relative unknowns. Even to this day, less than half of the games in the series have actually been translated from Japanese, but the ones that are go on to get excellent reviews and decent sales.

Being the first "new" game in 5 years, Awakening offers significant upgrades to the tired and true formula, the most impressive of which is the new support, pair up and marriage system. By pairing up, two units can occupy once square, and by doing so they give each other stat boosts and help each other in battle. In addition to being a fantastic feature tactically, it also enables the new support conversation system. By pairing up and fighting together, your units will develop relationships, and grow stronger as a pair. This character growth is punctuated by support conversations, in which the two characters interact in small scenes. These scenes are all unique for each pair of characters, so it is no exaggeration to say that there are literally hundreds of possible combinations and conversations. The best part of this is how fantastic of a job the translation team did with this game, and the support conversations keep their humor, charm, and uniqueness.

When two units reach a certain level of support, they can even get married and sometimes have children. The children change based on who their parents are, and inherit elements of their parent’s stats, which adds an immense amount of replay value to the game and excellent depth for the later parts of the game, and the post-game DLC, which leads me to my next point:

The DLC for this game is fantastic.

Here's how it works; there are two types of DLC for Fire Emblem: Awakening. The first style of DLC which uses the Spotpass feature of the 3DS, is free. The Spotpass DLC consists primarily of classic characters from previous Fire Emblem titles that you can summon to your world, do battle with, and recruit. They don't have any dialogue, but they do use their original art for a nice bit of nostalgia. There are over 130 of these battles, featuring characters from every game in the series, and there are also other free things like items and sidequests.

The second type is standard paid DLC we all know and love. These DLC chapters are more varied, some being encounters with classic Fire Emblem characters, while others are all new content, and others still are more for grinding money or experience. They release every Thursday, and are only a dollar or two each. Each one offers something new to the game, whether it's a new skill, a new weapon, a new recruitable character, or even a new class. There are also small bundles available that combine similar missions into packs for a discount. Calling back to an earlier post of mine, this is how DLC bundles are supposed to be done, since you can find out what exactly is going to be in each one (the DLC has been available for Japanese versions of the game for a while) and the DLC launches every week, so you don't have to wait months for your content without knowing how good it will actually be.

I highly recommend Fire Emblem: Awakening, it would not be an understatement to say that it is one of, if not the best game on the 3DS right now. I have put almost 100 hours into it already, and I'm not slowing down. The wide range of difficulty options make it a great game for everyone, even if your idea of a good time is resetting on one mission for two hours (Lunatic can eat a diiiiiiiiiiick).