Fire Emblem: Awakening

Thought I'd do another game play blog...

 I've been trying my hand at Fire Emblem: Awakening for about a month now. I gotta say, I felt like I missed out on the previous versions. Fire Emblem is a series of turn-based strategy role playing games and they are pretty damn awesome.

 I tried to figure out why I liked the game so much just like a lot people do. I did so by recalling some stuff I learned by watching episodes of Extra Credits on Youtube. I highly recommend this channel if you like games. They delve into the nuts and bolts as well as the spiritual essence of games and the gaming community.

 Anyhoo, Fire Emblem has a bunch of great mechanics in it's game play. Because I learned, Mechanics is KING. The battles are great. It puts you right in the moment even if it is turn based. The urgency and pressure is palpable. This is mainly due to the "permadeath" feature where your characters can't come back if they get killed in a battle. It's a bit dark, I admit, but hell if doesn't make you invest more into the game.

 And speaking of investment, I love the characters in Awakening. They're so fun and quirky. They tend to make you like them a lot so you wouldn't want to sacrifice any of them for a win. I find myself resetting over and over just because I misjudged a move and wound up paying for it. 

 I guess this plays well with the mechanic. It makes you care about these characters so you have to play better. The story itself does an admirable job of immersing me, as a player, in to the awesome world of the game. They give you amnesia so you can start in a blank state. It's been done countless times before and it's an effective way of introducing someone to a world they probably already live in but just forgot about. 

 The villains are aplenty and are just so annoyingly evil that smacking them down makes it so much more enjoyable. 

 There's more I would delve into but I don't think I'm even halfway through the game considering how much I grind my characters so I can unlock more of their skills and make sure they don't pass away in battle. There's the marriage and creating an offspring between characters which excites my romantic side. The job class advancements also interest me and there's the recruitment of all the characters. 

 But anyway I'm already hooked so I can understand why the game received a lot of hype. It's a well rounded game that gives players an awesome story, lovable characters and challenging but fun gameplay in a large immersive system.

Fire Emblem awakening gets a "DON'T YOU DIE ON ME... CLEAR.... *reset* out of ten".