1) Awakening.
Let me just say that I've played them all and did so before Awakening was ever released, and I enjoyed most of the series. I was absolutely blown away by Awakening. It might be easier to list what I didn't like about the game:
- the story felt a little weak, and I want to say it was the way it was told. The whole deal with Chrom becoming king, then the fighting out west, then coming back home to tie up loose ends, then dealing with Grima... it was just weird. Although Risen appeared starting in Chapter 1, you don't really get a huge sense that there's a huge bad guy coming. It just felt like a slow string of events. I feel all the drama with Emmeryn could've been cut out, but they needed to make Chrom's important role... more important?
- no Light magic.
That's about it.
2) Genealogy of the Holy War
The big outlier to the series was by far my favorite ever until Awakening dethroned it. The unique pairing system and skillsets the units had is what made me fall in love with the game. The way durability and gearing was handled in this game was absolutely the best. I'd much rather have a few weapons and magic to pass around than what we got in Awakening, which was honestly still a good deal in its own right if you had the right characters with Armsthrift.
Again, probably easier to list what I disliked:
- no way to mitigate Weight on weapons and magic. This led to some squishy characters being unable to ever do anything but clean up if you were trying to do a ranked run, since they just wouldn't dodge if they weren't using wind or at least thunder magic. (Fire magic had a con of like... 12, so it was a guaranteed -12 speed.) It also meant there was a huge disparity in the difficulty of enemy units, in my opinion.
- Pursuit being a skill. For those not familiar, some classes got skills automatically, and then some characters got skills automatically, with only a few skills able to be learned from an item. Pursuit was the skill that enabled double attacking. Classes and characters that relied on speed often had Pursuit to begin with, but not in every situation. This meant that if you were playing a character who wasn't a) a tank, b) a healer, or c) a dancer, they needed pursuit to not be useless.
This was further compounded because you kinda had to make sure all your big hitters had Pursuit 2nd gen or they'd be useless. Well, you didn't have to do this, but it made a huge difference.
- ranking system was pure cheese. What I mean by this is you were only measured by three things - the amount of experience you got, the turn count, and making sure nobody died. This led to cheesing mechanics to abuse staves and stealing. It didn't promote good gameplay, just good cheddar.
3) Radiant Dawn
An absolutely massive storyline. In my opinion, FE9/10 had the best story in the whole series. Probably because instead of working from rags to riches like some of these royalty seem to do, you're not royal to begin with, and you don't end up royal. You're playing different factions fighting for their own cause, and they come together at the end and fight under a united team to take down the bad guy. Sounds kinda like Awakening, only the story itself took place under a much shorter time period in Radiant Dawn, unless you count three years with Path of Radiance. Thanks to this, it gives the story much more breadth and a much more dynamic feeling.
Another small thing I loved was how capping stats in Path of Radiance transferred into bonuses in Radiant Dawn. That was a nice benefit and I remember spending a fall break in college doing a rerun like four years ago.
Some of the things that bumped it down to #3 for me have been stated already. Mechanically, the support system is amazing. You only support one person, but you can support anyone you want, so you just pair off units who are often close to each other and reap the rewards. It was part of the reason why so many units were so strong or useful - Earth affinity gave the most Avoid, which was the best you could get from supports IMO, and the right units had this and could turn other units into monsters.
However, there was no development on many characters outside of 1-2 chapters, which was bad since this included the newcomers. I can understand the returning units not getting much story, because you can read on their story in Path of Radiance, but not the new ones.
Another thing that hurt the game somewhat was laguz mechanics. In a game where one of the biggest issues the world faced was racial discrimination, you'd think the laguz would be more or less comparable to beorc. In Path of Radiance, they were atrocious. In Radiant Dawn, the difference isn't as stark, but they still couldn't sit in transformation forever, and they all had elemental weaknesses to reflect equality compared to things like armorslayers for beorc. Oh, but ravens/hawks were still weak to bows, cats were still weak to beastslayers, and dragons were weak to wyrmslayers.
Because of the way laguz were implemented, I avoided using them, and although it's just some video game, it kinda makes you wonder when you discrimination in the ultimate "end discrimination" game of the series. All they had to do was do what they do in Awakening or with manaketes in most other games, and give them both permanent transformation and items to boost their stats personally.
Finally, I really, really disliked the way some units got shafted. The unholy trio o horrific units, which may be argued but I'm sticking by, are Fiona, Meg, and Astrid.
Astrid had Paragon for double xp, but you could still take it from her, so she's probably the lesser of the three evils despite being absolutely worthless if you don't grind her in Part 2. No really, she's useless if you don't. She hits mages for single digit damage later if you don't train her. It's a shame too because she was in Path of Radiance and should've grown more than she did.
Meg is stuck in an immobile melee class designed to take hits, but she doesn't have the stats for it and is introduced in a chapter where cats can double attack her and tigers can one hit her. The chapter after, everyone has more mobility than her and she can get picked off by mages. It just gets progressively worse for her.
Fiona is probably the biggest offender, though. Not sure if you guys recall, but you can't use some units on some maps effectively or at all. Horsemen can't be used in swamps, and they can't climb ledges, right? Well, after you get Fiona, you get sent to a prison chapter where she's at a huge disadvantage with the ledges and her crappy stats, then you do a swamp chapter where you can't even select her, then the Micaiah only chapter, then the final part full of ledges and narrow corridors that she's not gonna use because you have the Black Knight and tons of other strong units at this point.
The next time you get her? You're fighting in that Fog of War river with the laguz that give her the Meg treatment. Meg is hard to salvage but it is possible. Fiona just simply isn't.
You might go, "Well Brinz, other units suck in other games!" This is true, but they aren't arbitrarily screwed in a two-part game. Remember Tormod and friends? They enter the prison chapter in part 1 and are pretty damn strong. Then you don't see any of them until part 4, where they're all horribly useless. Tormod got screwed the most of any returning unit. It's funny because one of his competitors in FE9, Ilyana, had THE most screen time of any character in 10, more than an actual main character. It actually kinda made me sad. I
once made a file where I saved all my bonus xp and boosts and boosted him endgame just to use him, and it was fun... but now that I think about it, Tormod's relationship with Muarim and Vika was very symbolic and could've meant more in that game, but they made an excuse so he wouldn't get caught in the center of it. Really sad.
Anyway... while it probably doesn't mean much in the game, to me it did hurt the game big time. Strong stats just carry you through the game (LOL HAAR), but they don't define the game. Still, Radiant Dawn's an awesome game.
... This got much longer than I expected.
![[face_mischief]](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.ignboards.com/styles/ign/ign/smilies/classic/mischief.gif "Mischief [face_mischief]")
) games and provided quite a challenge. They also contained my favorite SSBB character, Ike.![[face_peace]](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.ignboards.com/styles/ign/ign/smilies/classic/peace.gif "Peace [face_peace]")
