don't let anyone poopoo you for enjoying awakening, the game is fine even if it's on the easier side. none of the fire emblem stories are particularly good anyway so the only thing that matters is if you personally find it entertaining or not. i personally enjoyed the story to awakening because i like it when stories monkey around with time and parallel worlds.
My issue with it was it didn't know where it was going until the very end. Well, that and Walhart. His battle theme is fantastic. Funny enough though, I think I enjoyed Awakening more than Fates simply because of the characters, music, and... idk. General production of it. It gives me the old FE games feel with the map. Something about it. Fates is just really not that amazing to me.
I think the core cast just isn't as interesting to me as Awakening's were.
Spoiler
i thought it was kind of obvious that the point of the story was to avoid Lucinas future. the whole grima thing takes everyone by surprise in her timeline so she slides into yours to prevent it from happening. there are several events throughout the game that go differently because lucina is there to alter them and because of this the scene you see at the start of the game ends up playing out differently and grimas chapter ends shortly after it begins instead of progressing into the Future Past timeline where the 1st generation of characters is dead and the children have to survive in a doomed world.
walhart is one of those road to hell is paved with good intentions characters. his goal is to unite mankind behind him so he can take on grima, but he's going about it entirely the wrong way. this leads to chrom being heavily injured in lucinas timeline and it's a key reason as to why grima is able to rise virtually unopposed.
well awakening was pretty much everything IS wanted to do in a fire emblem game. they were told that it was probably going to be the last game in the franchise so it really became a passion project for them as they were under the impression that they'd never get another chance to do some of the stuff they had always wanted to do
Probably. I just felt like it was three different archs to an anime series where you have a mad king you gotta beat, then suddenly another nation out of nowhere is there just because you need to bridge the gap between that and the final act, which is what you mentioned in the spoilers.
It felt like since it might be their last game, they just threw in the three generic plots they've used from Fire Emblem games into one, without really any real reason for them to be connected, and were simply there just to be there. I usually like a grand overarching plot, and Fates does it better. It's just that the characters aren't nearly as interesting to me. Though honestly, only one character from Birthright (Setsuna) is the only interesting one to me for that faction. The rest come from Nohr, so that's probably why I don't enjoy it as much.
I'm currently going through Revelations, and it's okay I guess.
We've got trouble!