Fire Emblem Awakening arrived on the Nintendo 3DS at a moment when the series was running out of road. Intelligent Systems built it in 2010 as a possible final entry, a hedge against declining sales. What shipped in Japan in April 2012, and in North America and PAL regions in early 2013, is the opposite of a farewell: a tactical role-playing game so complete that it reset what the genre could ask of a handheld.
Key facts
- Release: Japan, April 2012; North America and PAL regions, early 2013
- Platform: Nintendo 3DS
- Developer: Intelligent Systems, with supervision from Nintendo
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Genre: Tactical role-playing
- Score: 9 of 10
Trailer, via NintenDaanNC.
Chrom and the Shepherds
The setup is a rescue. Robin, an amnesiac with a gift for tactics, wakes in an open field with no memory of the past. Chrom, prince of Ylisse, finds them, and Robin joins his personal army, the Shepherds, after defending a nearby town from Plegian bandits. The player customizes Robin’s name, gender, hair, features and voice.
From there the map opens. Ylisse worships Naga and is ruled by Exalt Emmeryn, Chrom’s sister. Plegia worships the Fell Dragon Grima. Regna Ferox settles its leadership by combat. Fifteen years before the game, Emmeryn’s father, the last Exalt, waged a religious war against Plegia that left both countries bitter.
The Shepherds fight Plegian forces and the Risen, undead invaders, with help from a masked man calling himself “Marth.” The plot is set roughly 2,000 years after the original Fire Emblem and Fire Emblem Gaiden. Grima’s first defeat, by the First Exalt wielding the sword Falchion and the shield known as the Fire Emblem, is the history the story keeps pressing on.
Pair Up and the grid
Combat is the familiar thing done better. Units move across a grid, then choose a weapon and attack. The new Pair Up and Dual systems let allies support an attack from an adjacent square, and those bonds grow with use.
That single change carries the whole game. It turns positioning into a relationship, and it gives every map a second layer of decisions past the obvious one. Battles also shift camera perspective, which keeps a grid from reading as a spreadsheet.
Two modes frame the stakes. Classic Mode kills defeated characters permanently. Casual Mode restores fallen units after a battle. Either way, if Chrom or Robin dies, the battle is over and the player restarts.
Difficulty runs Normal, Hard and Lunatic, with Lunatic+ unlocked after clearing Lunatic. The player picks mode and difficulty at the start of a new game.
Forty-nine characters and a barracks
The roster is enormous. Excluding downloadable content, the player can recruit forty-nine characters: twenty-eight in the main story and twenty-one in Paralogues.
Between missions the Shepherds return to the Barracks, a customizable base where characters talk to each other and the player runs activities. The world map syncs its time of day to the player’s own clock, and previously visited locations hold shops and random skirmishes. The game uses the 3DS’s SpotPass feature.
None of this is filler. The support conversations are the reason a death in Classic Mode lands. You are not losing a unit; you are losing the scenes you had not seen yet.
What the game gets right
Fire Emblem Awakening is the rare strategy game where the systems and the story argue the same point. The Shepherds are a militia, not an army, and the game makes you feel the difference every time a bad square costs you a character you spent hours building.
The masked “Marth” subplot is the one thread that leans on a reveal more than it earns, and the Plegia-versus-Ylisse history is sketched rather than dramatized. Those are small complaints against a game this generous. Emmeryn’s peacemaking, the Ferox alliance, the slow turn from bandits to Risen to something worse — it all escalates without losing the intimate scale of a camp of misfits.
Intelligent Systems designed this as the last Fire Emblem. It plays like a studio emptying every idea it had into one cartridge, and it worked: the series did not end here. For a 3DS owner in 2013, this was the reason to own the system.
The verdict is not close. Fire Emblem Awakening is the best tactical RPG on the platform and one of the best of its generation, and the Pair Up system alone justifies the price of admission.
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