I’ve now finished Fire Emblem: Awakening’s punishing ‘Lunatic’ mode, including getting almost all the characters (one died without me realizing what I was meant to do to recruit her, but oh well), and while the rest of the absurd ‘Lunatic+’ mode will probably tempt me back sometime and the replay value is kept high by all the possible relationship variations available, I don’t think I’ll be playing any more for a while, so it’s time to write up my impressions.
Fire Emblem’s demo was one of the most impressive I’ve played on the 3DS and I was very keen for the full version on the back of it. The aesthetic – despite weird lack of feet – was great, the character designs very cute and the gameplay easy but addictive. I’d never played any Fire Emblem before, but I’d played the similar Final Fantasy Tactics, so I took to it quickly. On the other hand the demo was much too easy so I began the game in Lunatic Mode…and while I don’t regret it because Hard is clearly too easy, that was really chucking myself in the deep end.
You see, the difficulty settings are a bit odd. There really needed to be some intermediate difficulty, because it jumps from so-easy-that-you-can-just-skip-turns-and-the-enemy-kills-itself-trying-to-kill-you to oh-God-if-I-don’t-get-lucky-with-criticals-and-misses-I-die-over-and-over-again-on-turn-one-of-level-one. There are a very narrow set of possibilities that need to happen, some of them based on random number generators, to get you to level 5, where really you need some DLC to make the game playable and to stop you having to just use Frederic for every single turn forever, especially as in classic mode, everyone who dies stays dead forever so you need perfect runs. Luckily I’d got the game as a gift and fancied trying out paid DLC on the 3DS for the first time, so I didn’t mind too much. But normally that’s the sort of thing that puts me right off a title.
Typically of Nintendo – Kid Icarus being a notable exception – the world is strong, the characters are great, the set-up is very interesting, but then the story meanders and ends too abruptly, leaving it to be a bit unsatisfying at the end. This is largely why I don’t think that playing again and again to see how different characters interact will be enough of a pull to be a completeist here. Plus my strategy at the end, when things got even remotely difficult, was just to throw Manaketes at every enemy, who just tore them all apart, two of them even able to heal 50% health just by killing an enemy when their turn came. For a strategy game, it ended up rather lacking in strategy, and it’s not just because Lunatic mode was very unbalanced.
I very much enjoyed playing through the game, and as its real heart is making characters like each other a lot (straight relationships only, I’m afraid, but I can accept that to be part of the depicted medieval-style society and it would muddle the genetics concept to have gay adoption), I grew to regard some characters with great affection. My own avatar Wren was great with his Manakete bride Nowi, their daughter Nah made me smile every time, and I wanted to see Ricken paired with everyone just to see how those relationships could work out. True, my army ended up consisting largely of absurdly powerful kids (and ancient creatures who looked like kids), but that’s J-RPGs in a nutshell.
But ultimately, I liked the game rather than loving it. I want to unlock everythingand surpass all the challenges on Kid Icarus (eventually). Getting every single S-rank conversation in Fire Emblem seems an absurd task and to be honest, managing to get through levels 3,4 and 5 of Lunatic+ mode seems enough of a drag with the enemies getting random priority or counter or damage mitigation, so for now this one’s shelved. It is good enough to get down again at some point, though. Just…after a whole lot of other games are done with.
Although I must say some of the other paid DLC is tempting…!
