Awakening dumbs down the series significantly. The gameplay introduces mechanics that utterly break and trivialize the game, making early battles ironically harder than most of the fights later in the game. The plot is passable early on, even having some strong moments, but eventually descends into lame (at times, pointless) bullshit once Lucina joins your party. The game has some cool characters and the vast amount of content is great, but it's shallow compared to past titles.

(Playing on hard for what it's worth) I initially found this as gripping as Fire Emblem titles tend to be, but eventually found it getting a little tedious towards the end. A good chunk of the supporting cast not being particularly interesting or endearing didn't help.

Story is not good at all, don't care about any of these characters so permadeath only matters if they're good units. Piss easy, salvaged by hard mode

DNF: played half, enjoyed it