![]() ![]() Relationships get deeper through characters fighting together, as well as the odd chat between engagements, and you can tell this because of the hearts. ![]() Whether on attack or defence, a unit with a nearby friendly will be boosted, and the deeper the relationship, the bigger the boost. The greatest of these is undoubtedly the relationships characters now form on the battlefield, a system built around placing units adjacent to each other or pairing them up on the same square. This matters because Fire Emblem is a strategy game where the units, rather than being disposable copies, are characters in a story, and Awakening introduces several new mechanics to make personalities more central to the strategy than they ever have been. It's an odd little mix of meta-mechanic and practicality a coin you keep flipping until every one's a winner. In other words, if you play this without resetting fairly regularly to reverse fate, you're either tactically brilliant or not playing it right. If the 3DS didn't already have a soft reset (L+R plus either start or select), then Awakening would have implemented one. Though your characters can die, you're not expected to accept it. I posed the above contradiction to a friend and his answer was simple: "srsly don't let characters die." I mention this not to take a cheap shot at developer Intelligent Systems but because it illuminates something that's at the core of Fire Emblem and always has been. (Which didn't stop her playing a central role in the ongoing storyline.) Chrom and the player character (here named Robin) are the main acts throughout Awakening - the red wisps around their avatars indicate that they're supporting each other on attack and defence. Yes they are, except you're dead my love. I lost a main character on the third mission, yet up she pops in the next cut-scene talking about how well things are going. If you're playing in Classic mode, where units die forever, their last words will often be about retreating. This leads to a wealth of contradictions. If you do, defeated units retreat from the battlefield but are right as rain afterwards. When your defining feature is permanent death, but when all that really means is a restart, should the game's structure change or turn a blind eye?įire Emblem: Awakening doesn't just turn a blind eye, it practically admits defeat by allowing you - for the first time - to turn the whole thing off. It is an inspired revision of a classic design, and one that is riven right through the middle with a problem the series can't solve. There's a theory that what makes something truly beautiful is a single, noticeable imperfection.
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