Fire Emblem Awakening was the first Fire Emblem title to truly take the series in a new direction. Rather then focus on a linear story, Fire Emblem Awakening gave players a bit of wiggle room to create their own tale by allowing characters to be matched up, giving your tactician a bigger role and by just being filled with missions and side missions to really take up your time…but in a good way. Fire Emblem Awakening might have gone a bit nuts with its matchmaking system—the amount of kids you could make and see their stories unfold was surreal—but it felt like you had more freedom than past entries. Finally, you could ship characters and wouldn’t need to argue online why they needed to be paired together. Though, if you read the Fire Emblem forums, you’ll see people still do this regardless.

Intelligent Systems—the developers of Fire Emblem—have always given their titles a lot of depth when it comes to narrative. Fire Emblem Awakening though was a tale we loved playing even to this day. Chrom, his party of interesting heroes/heroines and you—the Avatar—left their tales in your minds well after investing dozens of hours into this lengthy RPG. We loved seeing how characters met on the battlefield and how friends/foes were made. Fire Emblem Awakening was a truly engrossing story that even today we stand by as saying it was one of the best in all of the Fire Emblem games.

Fire Emblem has always been a tough franchise that rewarded gamers with patience and smarts with success. Those who entered Fire Emblem expecting the run of the mill type turn-based tactical title learned the hard way what happens when a character dies due to their bad decision making. That’s right folks, we’re talking of the infamous permadeath in the Fire Emblem games. Many gamers were turned off by possibly losing their favorite—and strongest—character which meant many couldn’t enjoy the idea of entering the world of Fire Emblem. Thankfully, as a way of gaining more fans, Fire Emblem Awakening gave players a new difficulty called casual. While causal mode was still tough as nails it removed the permadeath system and allowed a unit killed in battle to return in the next mission! This accessibility gave more gamers a new reason to enter Fire Emblem Awakening and was a brilliant idea to keep the series alive even now!

Games having downloadable content—DLC—isn’t a new element by any means, but for those who love Fire Emblem, this was a godsend to see in Awakening. Long after the credits rolled, players could enjoy more missions, more characters and new challenges all offered as DLC. Yeah, you had to pay a bit extra but some of these missions—especially the beach one—were fun to play and offered some much-needed extra content. DLC might seem like a means of getting more cash out of a gamer’s pocket but for Fire Emblem Awakening, it was money we didn’t mind shelling out.