Fire Emblem: Awakening revolves around two things: Complex tactical combat and sweet, sweet romance. It’s a turn-based tactical role-playing game like Final Fantasy Tactics, but with a twist: As your combatants fight alongside one another, they can fall in love. If you keep them paired up, they’ll boost one another’s stats, have conversations (called Support here) and they can even get married and have kids in a weird Back to the Future kind of way.

One of the biggest downside of the game is the story. I still have no idea what the story in Fire Emblem: Awakening revolves around at all. After the first pretty 3D intro I just would skip any story element, and then proceed to just create my own disjointed Game of Thrones like story instead with hookers, blackjack and a journey to get rum and raisin ice cream. So it might have been more a Harold and Kumar meets Game of Thrones like story. Every Once in awhile I did return to the games actually story, only to skip immediately to continue with my own. 

The Support conversations are pretty fun and give a bit of insight into characters. Each one is charming in their own special way although sometimes they border on the cliché. In reality it is just the Fire Emblem hook-up mechanic. After being paired up to a certain character long enough the 2 character decided its time to get married. Then some way in the middle of the game this romance of characters pays off.As the game introduce time travel to the story, you can get special future children. So after spend about 2/3 of the game leveling normal characters you are given new ones with similar stats but at a significantly lower level (which means better everything pretty much as they level up to an equivalent level), so you are forced to level your old characters  a bit or find almost immediately worthless in the coming chapters. I’m looking forward to doing another play through to get to see all the combinations of children that your bunch of romantic time warriors can produce. 

The combat revolves around a pretty a simple system. The usual strategy game rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock kind-of system. Once you really get down to grinding, it's a perfect balance of time consuming and rewarding. I've restarted a fair bit because of permadeath. It's fun, but it's frustrating fun not happy go lucky fun.

Fire Emblem: Awakening is an immaculately designed, rewarding, and difficult strategy game. With all the love and marriage, it offers something fresh and it is one of the best strategy games on any system, and certainly one of the best games on the 3DS.

3.5/5  Future Waffle Children.