How does a low budget porn game manage to shit all over Nintendo's most established Turn-Base Strategy franchise?
So I finally got around to playing Awakening, and I'm around halfway through it, and my impressions on it thus far are very 'meh.'
It's an ok game, but nothing stellar, and certainly not what everyone hyped it up to be.
Path of Radiance had a better story.
Radiant Dawn had better maps and was far more difficult, AND it had the best units in the entire franchise.
I'm playing on Lunatic, and the game is piss easy compared to previous FE games, since you can cheeseball the game by grinding out your characters, which you will do in order to marry them, and by doing so they all wind up massively overpowered.
I preferred the way it was before, where each campaign basically designated a set amount of experience, so you really had to plan out your army as you played, and each run differed considerably based on how you played. Now you can max out your entire army by killing Risen and doing the DLC.
Also, the pair-up mechanic breaks the game.
Finally, the romance, which is why I brought up Rance. It's very bare bones. The best part of the romance is the character interactions. But they fall in love way too easily and quickly. As a player, I don't feel like I earned getting two characters to pair up, and we get very minimal interaction between them. Only 5 scenes in between battles and that's pretty much it. No hidden events, or scenes, and the rewards are basically how you affect their children's stats.
It's really sad that a game that's mad to wank to managed to create more convincing romantic interactions between characters than FE, and not only that, but the affinity mechanic in Rance was much much better than what Awakening offers.
