Guest Blog: Meagan Talks Death in Fire Emblem: Awakening

Meagan talks a bit about her experiences with the woes of death in the Nintendo 3DS RPG Fire Emblem: Awakening. She also has her own blog about emotions and music here.

Fire Emblem: Awakening is a great role-playing game that really takes character death to a whole new level. If none of you have played the game, you are pretty much going through a great story line and using tactical strategies to take down your enemies. At the beginning of the game you get to design your own character and choose the difficulty, casual or classic. In casual, if one of your characters dies, they simply are taken out of that battle and return again for a different battle. You have two main characters, you and Prince Chrom and if one of those two characters were to die, it's game over and you have to restart that level. In classic, if the character dies, he/she dies for good, which means you can never use them in combat ever again. Fire Emblem calls this kind of death permadeath (an amalgam for permanent-death). If one of your characters die, they are gone for good and the plot-line or sub-plots will be altered or sometimes even non-existent. Even so, these characters are eventually replaced by another, each with their own personalities and stories.

Fire Emblem takes death seriously which makes this game have unique gameplay. You work hard on building the stats of these characters which makes losing them so much harder. Most players, if they have a connection with their character, they will just restart the game to get back their lost player. It can be frustrating to lose something you put so many hours in to which can cause some major game rage. Why would someone want to go through all this just to keep restarting and getting more frustrated? Most people like the challenge and you can pay more attention to your character’s health and stats because you don’t want your character to die on the battle field. You also move around the battle field more carefully.

So if you want a bit of a challenge, play Fire Emblem Awakening with the classic difficulty on and get your rage on.