i love fire emblem games!! i always know before playing that these arent games that will blow my mind or do anything too unexpected, but when i pick one of these up i just know i'm gonna have fun and be addicted for a while..

it's pretty obvious now that i've played a bunch of them how the games' focus has shifted throughout the years to be centered more on characters and supports, but personally i enjoy (mostly) the whole range of the series. i really love the gameplay so i don't mind playing games like shadow dragon, where the secondary characters literally have 1 dialogue line in total, and spending hours just killing dragons and such. but if the game also lets me marry the cool guy with a sword on top of that then that's fine by me too u know...

awakening is, in my opinion, a pretty good balance between the "early" and "new" fire emblem and the support mechanics. i mean yes the units can get married and have kids BUT i think the supports are integrated into gameplay in a really fun way, and the social sim side of it doesn't feel as forced or shoved in your face as in newer games. there are a ton of supports and pairings for people who like that part of FE, but supports and pairings are also fucking broken in this game and you can basically make invincible units with that system so i think there's something in it for everyone...

while playing i was reminded of my three houses playthrough a bit, except awakening is kinda what i would've liked three houses to be in many ways... one thing i loved is how robin (the avatar character) has an actual personality lol the supports just make a lot more sense when there are actual conversations happening instead of only one side talking and the avatar replying with "..."

but personal dislike for silent avatar characters aside, i just never felt like this much effort and care was ever put into any other FE game. i think they did a really good job at making each player's playthrough feel unique and personalized... there is a lot of reused dialogue of course, but i think it's insane that there are around 25 first gen characters with a bunch of S support options each, and each pairing you choose will have a kid, who has support conversations with their parents... the amount of possibilities is crazy... AND it gets even crazier when some (well maybe only a few) of the choices you make pairing wise can affect certain events in the story... i won't spoil i'll just say that the robin/chrom pairing is superior and canon in my books

so this section is when the review turns into me yapping about chrom and robin for a bit because I LOVE THEM!!

i think chrom is my favorite main character in the series lol i know he's a bit silly sometimes but i like how that kinda sets him apart from other FE lords... he's not a perfect leader who could never make a mistake, or a legendary hero with unshakable conviction and courage, he's just a guy that suddenly had a big responsibility fall onto him one day and he's trying his best to save the people he cares about (i like lyndis from blazing blade a lot for the same reason :P) he's just a kind of awkward dude who gets nervous when he's near his tactician that he is in love with and i think that's cool...

as for his pairing with robin i legit think it makes the story better!! chrom is the prince and the leader of the army and robin is the army's tactician, so ofc robin plays an important role in the main story and they're always travelling, working and going through all kinds of stuff together. it could be a great platonic relationship as well, but i personally love how much of a power couple they are LOL. during all of the war they're always there for one another, they trust and count on each other, and they make an amazing team together. so cute!!! them being a couple also makes it a lot more interesting lore and character development wise... i love to think about the bizarre outcomes it has for the awakening universe :P yes their supports are the worst kind of cliche anime humor but they go through enough awful stuff during the story to make up for it so i don't mind... AND THEIR KIDS!!! i love their kids so much i need them all to always be a happy family i'd write a whole other paragraph but this would go on forever okay back to the review

one thing i didnt like... this game is way too easy... it might be because i chose normal difficulty (i never know wtf to choose because difficulty depends a lot on the game... learned that when i started a new mystery of the emblem run on normal and i got absolutely demolished in chapter 1) but either way, it was way too easy to get insanely overpowered units, or even, it's hard to not do that... even when i chose lower level units so i could somehow make it harder it would take just a few chapters to have them oneshotting everything so it got kinda boring towards the end. and it sucks because there's a lot of cool mechanics like skills that i never paid much attention to since it was too easy for that to matter much anyway... definitely play this on hard if you have any FE experience lol

overall... i liked this game a lot! other than my issues with the gameplay towards the end i had a lot of fun. the cast had a lot of people in it that i did not gaf about but the characters i did like make up for it because i like them a lot :P good maps, good OST and good story (maybe it's because i wasn't expecting much but i liked it a lot actually). i think this is my favorite fire emblem! we'll see if that changes in the future when i play more of these silly games...

i had been wanting to play xenosaga for a long time ever since i found out it existed. i was a bit scared of the length because i've played long jrpgs before but three 50-hour-long games sounded like a whole commitment (and it was lol). still, around april this year i was really missing the feeling that playing xenoblade games gives me. i love xenoblade SO much, i think the characters, the plot, and the worlds monolith soft creates are wonderful and immersive and unique... so i played xenosaga (the saga that came before xenoblade) and it was as amazing as i expected, if not more. but i think that nothing, not even playing the xenoblade games, prepared me for the experience xenosaga is...

i had heard and read before playing that xenosaga was a very ambitious game given its budget and resources, and that the lore was quite complex and extensive, but oh my GOD there are truly not enough words to describe how insanely detailed and intricate the lore and worldbuilding in these games is.

tonnns and tons of interconnecting subplots, characters with insane backstories, a whole galaxy of planets with its political and economical system that runs it, and a timeline that goes all the way from the birth of JESUS to the year 4768... im not kidding LOL whenever i played i had my notepad app open to take notes of what was going on and with one of them (i have one for each episode) I REACHED THE CHARACTER LIMIT!! I DIDNT KNOW THAT COULD HAPPEN!

something that felt really refreshing in xenosaga (even though it is a 20 year old game) was the fact that it has no problem being very in-your-face in many aspects. theres a lot of social and political criticism, graphic violence and flawed characters. i'm not saying you can't find things like these in other JRPGs (the xenoblade games do have that in more moderate ways) but i don't think i've ever played one that gave less of a shit about anything other than telling the story it wants to tell and conveying its message like xenosaga does, and i absolutely love that...

xenosaga episode 1 was released in 2002 and i think it is a very "Y2K" game in many ways other than visually (every time someone uses kosmos as their y2k nostalgia icon without having played the games a fairy dies... its true...) i'm not really an expert on the topic but i think that this kind of ultra futuristic setting and pessimistic view on capitalism, individualism and technology was something that could have only been released around this time. i think we all get the idea that people were insanely supportive and optimistic about technology in the 2000s, but such drastic changes in everyday life also had people wondering how would such things affect the future in a negative way. i think xenosaga is a beautiful piece of media that represents every reason why people were scared of the future of technology. a story written before the online world started belonging less and less to the people that created it and slowly transforming into the dystopian world that was only a "what if" back then. (maybe it's not that weird that the third and last game before the saga was cancelled was released in 2006...) that is why it feels nostalgic even when i'm playing it for the first time 23 years later, but at the same time, its themes, topics and discussions are so relevant to the state of the world today that i forget it's an old game sometimes. it's such an insane experience lol

i think one of the things that make me think that xenosaga was miles ahead of any other videogame plotline at the time is the fact that there are cyborgs in the xenosaga world (and i wouldn't know for sure, but i feel like they were one of the most common ways to represent "the future" in media in the 2000s) and in this story they are absolutely outdated and thought of as antique, since AI and genetic manipulation has advanced to the point where it's possible to basically create human beings, with artifical personalities and intelligence, from scratch. and they don't just leave it at that, but they discuss the social consequences of it as well. there's constant conflict in the society and the government regarding whether the new "people" should have rights or not, or if they can be considered people at all, not to mention the role that businesses in charge of making the new "people" play in all of this... i don't want to spoil too much but i think you get the idea this game is crazy...

i havent talked about any other aspects other than story LOL but in general, even though the gameplay dragged on a bit sometimes (listen episode 2 had a Lot of potential but man those battles took way too long for my liking lol) i really loved this game. it was a wonderful experience and i'm very glad i decided to play through all three episodes even while being in college and barely having time to play lol

something i really wanted to add, without spoiling, is that i don't usually get emotional with any media, even if i really enjoyed it, idk why... but the ending of this game absolutely broke me lol i couldnt believe it but it made me cry... i was just telling my bf a few days before finishing ep 3 that i never expect too much from endings because they never end up living up to what you expect from them, and xenosaga made me swallow my words COMPLETELY oh my god i really don't think i'll see an ending more beautiful than xenosaga's... this game has earned a place in my heart forever... i love you xenosaga!!

this is where i am EXTRA annoying about my interests and dedicate full entire pages to them :P warning!! there are a ton of gifs and animations on these!! i will figure out how to make a "stop gifs" button at some point lol