Fire Emblem: Awakening Basic Strategies Guide

Fire Emblem: Awakening is finally available in North America and players owning a 3DS should not pass up on this game, especially if they are fan of the series. While the plot may be nothing original, characters are well developed and gameplay is as fun as ever. With a lot of customization options available, even newbie to the series can enjoy the game, turning off some things which may make it hard to play the game, especially the permanent death system, a trademark of the franchise. Before we start getting into the heart of the game, we’re going to go over some basic but helpful tips which are surely going to help newbies and veterans alike in their new portable war.

• Battle Lines Guide

This one option is pretty useful for planning the movement of all your units: at the beginning of your turn press X to turn on a red grid which shows how far the enemy can move and attack. In this way you can keep weaker units safely aways from the enemy’s attack range, while positioning the attackers in a way that they won’t be sustain multiple attacks from multiple units.

• Keep Talking, Please

Sometime during battle, enemy and friendly units will be talking about the battle situation and strategies: don’t skip this conversations and pay extra attention to them. Most of the times, there will be some reinforcements coming in the middle of the battle so you may want to know the info beforehand, to avoid placing your units in dangerous spots and getting overwhelmed by new enemy units.

• Positioning

One of the most important aspects is obviously units’ positioning: what most newbies ignore is that a good unit placement before the start of the battle can really bring some good advantages. If you don’t use the View Map option before the battle, the units that are going to partecipate in battle will be positioned in a standard formation, more often that not placing wizard, healers and archers in the front row. By positioning the characters yourself you can take each one traits in consideration before choosing their position. Melee fighters and tanks are fine in the front, wizards must stay in the back, archers are best placed on higher ground if available and winged units are to placed accordingly to the position of enemy archers.

• Characters Pairing

The Pairing system is actually a good way to overcome some of the classes innate weaknesses: slow characters paired up with winged characters will be covering more distance and be able to attack the enemy sooner than by themselves. Using this trick also allows the winged characters to approach archers without dying in a couple of hits: the character in the fron takes all the damage! The same can be done with pairing a strong tank unit type with healers and wizards. This trick is also very useful to train weaker characters: pair them up to some strong characters and you will see the exp points rack up.