Fire Emblem: Awakening is the 13th game (overall) and the 6th released in the US of the totally epic, strategy RPG series that is Fire Emblem. This game was released in the US on February 4th, 2013, my Birthday! It was meant to be… It was developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo  This is a great buy if you have a Nintendo 3DS and was the biggest reason for me to stick with nintendo and upgrade my DS to the Nintendo 3DS. This game is like “The Princess Bride” it has everything! Action, romance, war, magic, time travel, good, evil and much much more! Nintendo hit a home run with this title and took all of the best aspects of the previous Fire Emblem games and added some great new features into the mix as well. In this game you are the strategist for the army of Chrom the Prince of Ylisse who needs to take back his kingdom and homeland and battle the evil that is corrupting his world, which brings together peoples and characters across the continent.

This is a strategy game so if you aren’t into that at all then you may not enjoy it as much but it doesn’t feel like a strategy game while you are playing it. You are more involved in figuring out what characters work well and who you want to use and how then the actual strategy of the game and you learn about each different character as the story progresses and how the connect into the story line. Each character has a different class with certain skills and weapons that come with that class. There are swords, lances, axes, bow and arrows, magic and healers as well as some half creature type characters that use their natural weapons. What is great about this game is that your weapons that aren’t magical have limited lives and if you choose the classic gameplay mode a character who dies, ACTUALLY DIES, forever… well you do have a chance to resurrect one person who died previously but you get the point.. But newbies to the series can switch off this option and there is also the classic easy, medium and hard levels. Another great thing about this version of the series and all Fire Emblem games is that most anyone can beat the game you may need to restart if you do move a character wrong and they do end up dying but I have beaten almost every version of the series on medium difficulty at least. So it is a great game if you are new to the series or to this type of game.

Another cool new feature in this game is that you play as your own customizable character on the battlefield and you get to customize their class and stats. Plus there is also marriage in this version of the game to increase the fighting skills if these two characters are battling next to each other. The same goes for normal friendships between characters which strengthen their stats if they are next to each other. The story in the Fire Emblem games and this version in particular are very good, they all have a similar framework for the story but vary in many different ways.Another unique aspect is you can recruit people on the enemy’s side of many of the battles if you talk to them with the right character or in some cases pay them, usually thieves or mercenaries. You can usually tell who these people are because they have actual names and you can tell that they are not the boss/commander for that level. Google helps a lot too! LOL!

But seriously this is a great game that you should check out and if you wanna go old school try one of the Fire Emblem games for the Game Boy Advance, Wii, gamecube or even further back  if you know japanese! If you want to learn more about the series check out this wiki for the series: http://fireemblem.wikia.com/wiki/Fire_Emblem_%28series%29 and this link for Fire Emblem: Awakening: https://fireemblem.nintendo.com/

Craig