4/5 ★ – Pencil_Nexus's review of Fire Emblem: Awakening.

As one of my favorite games, I wanted to actually do a full second run. I still love this game, it's still one of my favorites, but I will try to be as critical as I can, so I'll start there. I played on Hard mode, I would say that for the most part, it is fair in terms of challenge. Where frustrations come about is the RNG nature of the hit percentages, as it sometimes can be quite unfair when a 20% change of hitting move strikes, when the player can miss something better like 65%. It might be more favorable to the enemy on higher difficulty, but I don't know for sure. Pairing units, especially children units is just broken. 95% of battles are just a steam roll, as they get the best aspects of the parents, on top of pairing just being objectively the best strat, it destroys most encounters. It might be different on Lunatic, but I'll save that for the lunatics. Other than that, everything else is great. Beautiful soundtrack, lovely visuals for 3DS, very satisfying gameplay, amazing character writing and dialogue. I'll need to view the overall story again to see if the narrative is tight, but it does hit great story beats with amazing cutscenes. Also, the ending and after credits are beautiful and heart felt. I highly recommend.