Sexual Awakening

Here's my perspective of the Fire Emblem series as a relative outsider - it only became popular after IS incorporated dating sim elements into the game. This proves that nothing sells a product better than a little sex appeal. Of course, it may not be true but ever since Awakening made the series a mainstream success, every time it make headlines is concerning sexual elements like censored images and gay marriages.

I wanted to play the Fire Emblem series as I developed a fondness for SRPG on handheld systems. I'm still pretty noob when it comes to RPG so real-time combat in RPG is always daunting to me. In SRPG, you take turns to fight and move the players around on the grid a bit like a chess game.

To prepare myself for Awakening, I played the last Fire Emblem game on the Wii system - Radiant Dawn. It's pretty hardcore and old school, I was playing for hours and made little progress since the early chapters as I keep failing to survive. I would love to finish that game but I'm not sure if I can without resorting to Casual mode.

When I downloaded the demo for Awakening, I was immediately  blown away by the production value of the game. Radiant Dawn on the Wii wasn't a very good looking game by any means, in fact it looked like a Gamecube game (Hello Star Fox Zero!). Speaking of the Gamecube, its amazing how games these days still get referred to as Gamecube standards, shows you how ahead of the curve that system was at the time. Anyway back to Awakening, it's hard to believe Radiant Dawn and Awakening were released back to back on two vastly different system.

IS went all out when making Awakening as they realised the series was slowly declining and that this might very well be the last Fire Emblem game. They certainly didn't held back on the production value from what I seen from the demo so far. Now if only I can finish PxZ so I can get started on this now that my copy has arrived.