One of the main focuses of recent Fire Emblem games is the possibility to recruit a lot of characters for your army. Fire Emblem: Awakening is not so different in this regard, with a lot of characters available for recruitment. As always, many of the characters can join you automatically but for some others you will have to take specific steps to make them join like deploying a specific character and make them talk with the possible recruit. With the many advanced classes available in the game you may want to recruit as many characters as possible to create the most diverse army: some classes are only useful in specific situations and that’s where the many characters of the game will come in. In this guide we will be listing all the characters available, both automatic recruitments and optionals, with small descriptions for each character: a lot of the automatically recruited characters often have something they’re really good at and I always recommend to not change their class to a different type. You will have plenty of occasions to do so with the optional characters: unlike the story ones, they have some more average features and are perfect to experiment with customization. So save your seals for these characters.
Inigo
Make sure you bring Chrom or Olivia into the battle since they’re required to make Inigo join: just like with other characters just talk to him and he’ll join your unit during the battle itself. To unlock the mission you’ll also need Olivia to have a Support relationship of S. Inigo is a decent addition to your unit: he comes with the Killing Edge and he can be a killing machine if properly trained. The fact that starts at level 10 also makes it possible to upgrade to an advanced class right away. He’s one of the characters most suited to customization but make sure to not stray too far from his starting class: a magic oriented class would just be useless for him since his sword proficiency is decent and most of his stat bonuses will go towards attack power and speed. Just change classes to learn some skills improving his strength and speed if you really want to customize him.