The biased poll made me vote terrible when in reality I just don’t think it’s good. Should have probably been more actually negative options than… 1.
Idk what arc was great or not, I have no interest in replaying the game, but I remember getting bored in the middle so I guess the beginning was the best part?
This game is essentially inflation emblem. Fe10 pales in comparison by far. Combined with the absurdly broken skills like galeforce, counter, and armsthrift, balance gets thrown out of a window. I will say it takes a bit before the train goes off the tracks, but when it does, it does.
Robin and Frederick aren’t the issues on their own, they exist normally in this space along with everyone else really. Everyone except maybe idk vaike has the potential to be insane.
Put galeforce on a cooldown. Once every 4 turns? Sure. But as it stands it’s one of the best skills as it basically determines who is the most viable at any point in time: can they use Galeforce?
Reclassing doesn’t really cause the issues stated earlier either, which is why I don’t think they need to be changed. However, being able to keep restarting from level 1 is extremely silly. Takes grinding to a new level. Imo with a system like this, the three houses route of a static level cap of 100 would have been fine just make the cap lower like 60.
Pair up is broken. Get rid of it. Three houses system adjuncts were fine but restrictive, which is probably the right direction if you keep them.
Fate’s weapon system is easily the worst weapon system in the series. Nerf or remove armsthrift, but don’t suddenly give random debuffs to a steel sword.
As somebody that voted “terrible” let me explain my biggest issues with Awakening and why it’s my least favorite FE game from a gameplay standpoint:
The core issue is that statnumbers are so inflated that core FE gameplay just doesn’t work and the ways to deal with it aren’t fun (lowmanning, pair up abuse, broken builds like Nosferatutanking etc.).
Your best solution is to focus on a small number of units, typically Frederick in the early game, while feeding as many kills as possible to Robin so he can take over. Every design decision in the game seems to be aimed at making lowmanning better than fielding a full army and that’s the worst direction for a strategy RPG imo, you don’t need to make choices anymore, just send in your overpowered Robin and watch them Nostank everything to death, whereas if you field multiple weaker units you’ll likely get immediately punished by ambush spawns with massive mobility and stats.
Add to that mostly extremely boring maps and I just don’t see any redeeming factors on the gameplay side.
Awakening is just not a good game to base a project off of without major tweaks. There are so many opposing design decisions in the game by itself. Add on to the lategame genuinely being the worst experience I have had with vanilla FE, being that the maps were very large, with often times enemies of varying weapon quality, which just encourages you to juggernaut with Robin. Its just not fun.
Generally the things that I would carry over from Awakening with some changes are just Fates features that got their start in Awakening. I find Awakening to be a fun time but it’s definitely one of the weaker entries in the series but at least it’s not as braindead as genealogy.
Just remember, you could always be worse, you could be Genealogy.
i would prefer if there had been an option to say dislike cause well i dont feel terrible on the game, i would definitely say my feelings arent neutral on awakening. that said if your looking for direction on what to do for an awakening project my advice on that would be ‘implement changes in systems from fates cause fates is just better awakening’ for those who enjoy awakening and fates. port awakening into fates engine? idk but it might be cool to see.
opinions in general on awakening itself though…:
stat inflation in awakening isnt quite as egregious as i think people tend to make it out to be, the numbers themselves are high sure but otherwise stats are balanced in an equivocal manner as your gbas or snes’s before it [unlike say houses which will have ridiculously lopsided stat builds for its classes which invalidates any of its mixed classes more average spreads or severely punishes classes like the armour line]. id say awakenings problem more so lies in how easy it is to get so much stronger then your opposition on non lunatic difficulties. say’ri with her base stat spread who you get in ch15 can theoretically take on and win against algol the ch21 boss on normal mode and isnt that far off from it on hard mode either, and her growths are very solid for a prepromote with plenty of opportunities between ch15 and 21 to make her even stronger. that speaks to me that theres a problem where player growth is exponentially higher then the rate at which enemies increase in difficulty. unless you go on lunatic in which the opposite is more so the case.
awakening has a pretty boring weapons roster when ya get down to it, atleast in terms of the weapons youll actually see enemies use. theres more exciting options in the spotpass weapons for instance, but in terms of swords the only ones youll really see your average enemy use are the bronze to silver sets, brave sword and maybe a levin sword or killing edge for enemies like tricksters or swordmasters [even then its rare from what i remember and i dont even remember seeing a wyrmslayer or armourslayer on a generic enemy]. comparatively unique weapons like armourslayers, wyrmslayers or zanbatous were more prevelant and youd also see things likes lancereavers the blades set or poison swords. same goes for the other weapon types, which suggests to me that a good thing to bring into an awakening project is more unusual or new weapons to deal with.
i think the reason story wise the ‘valm arc’ falls down for a lot of people is that it feels more like needless busy work then an actual continuation of the story beats established in the first part of the game. a filler arc essentially that has to be awkwardly worked into the main one with aversa offhandedly mentioning how they had a hand in excellus or whatever. not helped by how valm as a location feels like an amorphous blob compared to ylisse and its more defined plegia ylisse ferox countries conflicts and history. the most we get in terms of insight to valm is that virion came from a small country there that got yeeted by walhart, [a country we dont even know the location of let alone visit] that the country of valm used to be smol before walhart conquered the continent of valm, and that chon’sin is awakening japan for some reason [and is also somewhere on valm, presumably near where ram village was on valentia since their family tomb is located near/on the thieves shrine, but again never really specified]. it either needed to be fleshed out more or saved as like a side thing to do or even a post game challenge and or dlc campaign.
Too many of the poll oprions are under the assumption you played Fates. The title of the topic should reflect that or the poll options should explain the Fates change or just have a “I never played Fates option”.
I think Galeforce is really only broken in the context of a playthrough where the player is stopping to grind and optimize children. In a more normal playthrough where the player goes from chapter to chapter without grinding, you maybe get Galeforce on one or two units towards the end of the game (at least that’s how it went when I played without grinding). Galeforce really only exists for people who are actively trying to break the game.