Fire Emblem: Awakening

Anyone who spends time with me regularly and/or observes my gaming habits will know that I have been playing the crap out of Fire Emblem: Awakening. I'm not a big tactics RPG girl (mostly because I am terrible at them), but I did rent the game while it was impossible to find and play a few hours so I could check out the hype. And then, months later, while I was sick, I bought it for myself so I could play the whole thing, mostly because there was a trade deal, and Luigi's Mansion was sold out.

Let me tell you.

Fire Emblem: Awakening has destroyed my life.

The story is pretty good. If you're just playing straight through (and you're in wuss mode so you don't have to worry about your characters dying permanently), it takes about 15-20 hours to get to the end. Like with most JRPGs, though, they packed in a bunch of bonus characters and extra stuff to find and unlock.

Ok, gonna be honest, mostly writing this post because it has spoilers, and I figured out how to do page breaks. Check this out:

Sweet, right?

Ok, so, the game introduced a system where your fighters get bonuses from fighting next to each other. The more they fight next to each other, the stronger the bonuses get. Basically, through doubling them up, you go from having twelve adequate soldiers to six awesome soldiers. In typical JRPG fashion, you "level up" your people's social links by watching little cutscenes.

Here's where it gets weird.

Your male and female soldiers can marry each other. (No gay marriage for you, hippies!) That's fine, right? WRONG. As soon as this happens, their adult child will come back in time from the future and join your army.

I mean, what? Really? The whole plot hinges on the prince's daughter coming back in time to change the future, and apparently they took that idea and just ran with it. And kept running.

Each kid is exactly like their mother, except that they have their father's hair color. (This is even lampshaded in one of the father-son cutscenes: "So, uh, did you inherit anything from me?" "Of course I did. My hair color, for one." "It's just that you look like your mother, and you talk like your mother, and you act like your mother...") Apparently, male genes don't express themselves very well in Ylisse. Regardless, everyone is shockingly cool with meeting the adult versions of children they haven't even thought about having yet, because they're in an army in the middle of a war.

Now, I am the sort of person who will play games like this more than once and make different choices to see how the outcome changes. So, yes, I did play the game a second time and make everyone marry someone different. I was expecting the kids to be the same (but with different colored hair, natch!).

What disappointed me is that the cutscenes are the same, too.

No matter who, say, Owain's father is, they will always have a series of cutscenes about how Owain's father died in the future. No matter who Kjelle's father is, they will always have a series of cutscenes about how Kjelle can't cook. No matter who Laurent's father is, they will always have the conversation about how Laurent didn't inherit anything from his father. The dialogue is even the same, unless they had to change minor details or edit in the father's weird accent.

I mean, really, people? You couldn't pay the writers for a couple more weeks and have them write a couple dozen more different scenes? They'd already written several times that many, and it's not like they're long. Maybe they figured no one would play the game more than once. This is a problem with most games that emphasize "choice"- the choices are usually completely meaningless in the structure of the game. It makes the experience less "You can do whatever you want!" and more "Eh, do whatever you want."

I'm also surprised that everyone was so eager to reveal themselves to their parents in the past. The princess who started this whole time travel debacle doesn't reveal her identity until after she's been born in the present. But everyone else? I mean, the whole game is about having the power to change your own fate. What's to stop your parents from being like "Oh, God- I can't believe future me gave birth to such a total fuck-up. Thanks for warning me not to make that mistake again." Only one of the future-babies is at all concerned for his own well-being, and so stalks his father and won't let him talk to other women, because he's terrified that his parents will break up. (That series of scenes, naturally, is the same no matter who the father is.)

The best part, though, is that your character is an amnesiac, and you don't discover your real identity until the climax of the game. So on the second playthrough, I just gave my character his real name. Unfortunately, this didn't clue anyone in early on, but it did make for some hilariously confusing and ridiculous dialogue.

I took these pictures off my 3DS screen with my phone. Don't judge me.

Someone named Grima saying the words "...Wh-what?! I'M Grima?" Amazing.

"Therefore, slaying Grima would also cause the end of Grima's life." You don't say!

The moral of the story is, don't play Fire Emblem: Awakening more than once back to back. You will experience only disappointment and regret.

Take it from someone who knows.

Use all those hours you spent unlocking cutscenes that don't change to do other things, like clean your room or do dishes or whatever the fuck grown-ups do.

But how about that Luigi's Mansion, huh?