The Emblem of Fire

So I'm back after another hiatus stemming from real life concerns like school.

The game this week is Fire Emblem Awakening for the 3DS

Rating T
Alcohol Reference, Fantasy Violence, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes

Now I have to admit I love the Fire Emblem series which often makes me laugh given my somewhat strained relationship with Nintendo's main franchises of Metroid, Zelda, and Mario. 
Well the game itself is a top down tactical game. You have your units and the usual goal is to eliminate your enemy's units. This is done by picking out the right unit to take them on. Since there are several different weapons in the game they decided to make each one have a strength and a weakness. All the Fire Emblem series do this as well. This system is referred to as the triangle system and that makes sense. Basically it's a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors with swords beating axes and axes beating lances and back around to the front. Obviously magic and bows are exempted from the system which I find I didn't really like. In previous games magic had its own triangle with the one on the GBA having dark, light, and nature. Bows have always been their own thing and that's fine since they can't attack anything that is in the square right next to them they have enough problems.  Another thing about magic that I took issue with is that there are some spells that are classified as Dark and can only be used by very specific units but fall under the same overall heading as other magical tomes. Which brings me to my next little point, weapons have a limited number of uses, excluding your two "lord" character's main weapons. On the heels of this is the limit on more powerful weapons the more powerful it is the fewer uses it has. So a silver sword is an awesome weapon but will break far faster than a bronze one. Alongside the weapon power is the weapon skill ratings. A character must be trained in each weapon that their class is allowed to use. So a first level myrmidon might be a sword wielding powerhouse but he still starts with an E rating and has to train it up to be able to access the more powerful weapons. Because of this it makes slide changes, as I call them, a questionable venture as to what exactly you want to do because no matter how good that class is you have quite a few levels where they'll be stuck with a sword that has challenges with butter or a log.
This brings us to the next point of classes. There are a bunch, I am lazy and will not count them, each one has it's own skills associated with it and it's own specialty in the grand scheme of things. You have ranged specialists like Archers which use bows to attack at a safe distance to melee powerhouses such as the axe wielding berserker. Backing up your combat classes you have support classes like healing troubadors and a dancer who lets your units make another move. In this one she gets a sword so she's not quite as useless as the one on the GBA. You would think that letting a unit move twice could be a mighty skill for the ages but the problem lies with her being about as squishy as a unit can possibly be without deflating so she'll die and be lost forever into the veil and take any story elements attached to her, there aren't many, with her.
Now I'm to characters. The Fire Emblem games have always done a really creepy good job with creating good characters I say creepy here because outside of some support conversations done outside of battle the only characters you really see in the story are the main ones while the rest usually just end up following them around like a faithful puppy. I love the fact that they did this because it gives your units some kind of tangible existence instead of just a thing you move around on a grid. It makes losing a unit doubly painful if it was one that you really liked. The game also tends to load you down with more characters than you can ever feasibly need provided you have engaged in the support conversations and had a few of them hook up. How would that relate to character numbers you might ask. Well it's because the game's story is based on time travel and once a female character in your army gets married a new side mission appears containing their child as a recruitable unit. While I enjoy a good story I'm always leery of time travel stories because the rules never seem to be clear fortunately this one seems to be well done even if the characters accept it as fact rather quickly with all of them accepting their future offspring immediately upon their discovery. Despite that it's easy to overlook that and quickly go back to demolishing enemy ranks with a well placed Hero.
From me Fire Emblem gets a very high score and a serious recommendation if you want to play something other than the garbage of ground so tread that we've created trenches there.

Good Gaming everyone
Hambone out.