Awakening is actually really good. Some of the issues I had with the previous games have been addressed in this game and it's still a tough cookie to beat. The game plays a little like pokemon with hard strengths and weaknesses and you really do need to focus on having a good varied team. I like the fact you can pair units up together (either a tile next to them or join them together on the same tile) to give your units a slight boast in accuracy and dodging. Sometimes the team up characters will cancel out all damage and even give a 2nd support attack by the paired unit. The problem I've so far is I have permadeath on normal mode and it's kicking my butt on mission 19. I think I'm going to start my game over so I can actually finish it on easy because I think I hit a huge difficulty spike.

The game really makes you question every decision you make. I like the permadeath option because you really need to be careful of where you place your units. It can be terribly frustrating to be near the end of a mission, only to carelessly leave one of your units in a spot where there is no way to save them. You can avoid this by checking all the unit's attack range. You can turn permadeath off if you want but only at the start of the game. Also with weapon durablitiy means you need to save your best weapons for the right times. With extra battles, it gives you a chance to level up your characters and get additional gold so you can purchase new weapons so durability isn't a big issue. I love the fact you can upgrade your weapons as well but its very expensive.

A neat thing I noticed is there is two upgrade items for your characters. One will rank them to the next special class that makes them really powerful at level 10 (like evolution in pokemon) the other will change their class to something else. Each class I believe has at least 2 special ranks to choose from and again repeats the theme of hard choices.

Story is actually pretty good. A little predictable but I haven't gotten to the 3rd part of the game yet which I want to. Each mission takes about 30-60 minutes to complete with 30 story missions. This doesn't include the dialogue and other planning phases. I haven't even touched the additional DLC. So you are getting a game with at least 30 hours of gameplay and maybe much longer depending how long you take to finish each match.

I'd get Awakening as soon as you can because Fire Emblem games tend to disappear and rise in price. I think there might be an eshop purchase so it might not be that bad but if you want a physical copy then you need to grab it while you can.

What I'm excited about the next game is online battles. It would actually give more reason to play the game because now you can compete with other players. Also I hear it will have two separate stories which means you need to play the game twice to fully enjoy everything.