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.