Fire Emblem: Awakening; like Pokemon but with shipping

With multiple residency interviews coming up, an rotation through the pediatric emergency room, and a cold, I haven't had much time to write. Or read. Or the energy to exercise. Basically, I've done little that can be called productive all week. I haven't even played videogames, though I've been eyeing the game systems scattered throughout my apartment, all of them collecting dust.

Being a videogame fan is expensive. I own a PS3, a 3DS, and a PSVita. All of them I bought for like one specific game. I made each purchase in a moment of impulsivity, with my frontal lobe screaming you don't have time for this anymore the entire time. The 3DS I bought to play Fire Emblem: Awakening. 

I started playing Fire Emblem when I was a freshman in high school after a recommendation from my childhood BFF. I played with my brother and our favorite character was a little mage called Erk. At every sequel, the game mage was always "the Erk". We played the sequels religiously, usually saved pennies to buy them and begged our mother for money when they came out to the store. We couldn't afford pre-orders and they were usually sold out by the time we got to our local Gamestop. Ah, the early 2000s.

I like to think of the game as chess for people with short attention span. It's easier (unless you play the game "seriously"), and it usually has pretty funny characters keeping you engaged. It's divided into chapters that take place in a big board like this:

You pick a unit, move it up close to a enemy unit, and engage in a one-to-one duel. Whichever unit is stronger wins. There are several rock-paper-scissor type games within the game: sword beats axe, axe beats lance, lance beats sword; a magic thing with thunder, wind, fire that I don't remember off the top of my head; special units with bows, special support units that help other units move twice in one turn, and special flying units riding pegasi and wyverns.

Terrain and movement also play a big part. Horsed units can move much father than units on foot, unless it's a desert or mountainous map. Mages aren't perturbed by difficult terrain, but they usually need armed units to defend them. Archers can attack from more than one space, but they cannot defend themselves from close-up attacks. Also, units can form support relationships with each other that increases their defense and evasion.

And the more I talk about this game, the more complicated I realize it is. Still, it's simple enough that children can easily play it. Awakening, especially, is very welcoming to new players. Older entries in the series were unforgiving about letting units die in battle. If your favorite swordsman got ambushed by a cavalry of lance-armed horsemen, then you either restarted that map or accepted that the swordsman was dead forever. In Awakening, there's a casual mode where characters only retreat until the next map (barring death of the main character).

Awakening also lets you marry almost any two units, then they have babies which travel back in time to join you in a battle against zombies and an evil dragon intent on universe destruction. It is as awesome as it sounds.
That marriage mechanic is what makes me compare this game to Pokemon, another series where I wasted unspeakable hours during my teen years. Except this is better because Pokemon are all about stats while this game is like a storm of romance novels/novelas cliches. For instance, you can make a swordsman who's terrified of women (as in gynophobia, which is apparently a common trope in Japanese games?) marry a mage with videogame Asperger's. Or a princess.

You can also make an aristocrat marry the shady thief who robbed her father because said shady thief was secretly trying to save her life. Or something. And you can make a circus dancer marry the prince, then king of the land, though it happens mostly off-screen because the pacing of the main plot needs to get underway. 

My favorite of all the children characters is Owain, son of the king's sister, because he's a walking internet meme and I'm easy to please. Second-favorite goes to the archer from the future with TV Dissociative Identity Disorder. The children are tied to their mothers, so there's not much story difference about who gets to be their father, but I like to make the special player-unit the dad for maximum stat potential. 

That's another awesome aspect of this game. The second-generation characters are more powerful because they get stats and abilities from their parents, which is hand-waved as left-over from their being raised in a zombie apocalypse. 

Despite all that apocalypse stuff, Awakening is still a very laid-back, hopeful game. The characters are quirky and their angst is played for laughs, which is a breath of fresh air in the hurricane of dark pessimism in most franchises nowadays.   

Of course, this is a videogame and I'd be remiss if I didn't warn about the two creepiest characters before wholly recommending it. And I don't mean intentionally creepy, I mean basement dweller, thinly veiled illegal sex fantasies creepy.

Behold: Nowi. Yes, that is a kindergartnerer wearing a bikini and garters and yes, you can marry her to one of the adult males in the cast. Don't worry though, she's secretly seven-hundred-years old and only acts like she's five for fun (and boy, does she act like she's five). You can always choose to marry her to one of the little boys in the cast, except the boy is going to physically grow up and she . . . isn't. Even though there are other members of her species in the game that do seem to get older.

Anyway, I just pretend she doesn't exist because it's too freaking creepy. That means I miss out on the dragon shapeshifters of the game, which sucks, but not as much as pedophile fantasies.  

The other character I find creepy is Tharja, a dark mage who stalks your main character and tortures her every love interest. And apparently, her daughter from the future. Tharja is at least an adult, though. I don't outright ignore her, but I can't chase away my distaste at her general existence. 

Besides those two hiccups, Awakening is one of the most fun games I've ever played. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes strategy, anime, romance, and simple, undiluted fun. In fact, I'm going to play some of it once I post this.