According to my game save I just hit twenty-eight hours on Fire Emblem: Awakening. I know this is a lie, because I restarted a number of battles where I screwed up something fierce and lost a character that I just wasn’t willing to part with. If I go into my Nintendo 3DS activity log, it will tell me that I’ve been playing much closer to thirty-five or thirty-six hours, possibly even longer.

A lot of that restarting may have been more easily avoided if I dug much deeper into the game’s User Interface.

Unlike other Nintendo games of recent years, Fire Emblem: Awakening doesn’t exactly hold your hand. If you’re only mildly familiar with the franchise, as I am, then you’ll find many of the opening chapters to be quite difficult. This is primarily because you’re not only just learning how to properly play, but your opponents are on an equal playing field in regards to equipment and levels. While the game is naturally slanted in the player’s favor, it really counts on the player doing two things.

Exploring classes thoroughly and teaming your characters up.

For the most part I’ve done an alright job with the former. There are generally two tiers of classes, your group of basics and then more specialized master classes. Each time you start a new class your character is “set back” to level one, but their previous stats and gains carry over. So even though you can swap to alternate classes around level ten, you may want to wait a few more levels. Thus a fifth level master class can actually be much closer to a level twenty-five character, and could easily be stronger than a fifth level foe of the same master class that is effectively level fifteen.

It’s kind of like dealing with evolutions in Pokemon, really.

The only downside seems to be that master classes are so specialized that trying to swap from one to the other will actually deteriorate a good chunk of your statistics. So once you pick a master class, you’re probably going to want to stay with that class. It’s an interesting system that simultaneously encourages exploration early on, whilst forcing the player into more careful decision making hours further into the game.

In fact, that seems to be the real core of the Fire Emblem experience. I’ve played a good chunk of tactical role-playing games, but Fire Emblem: Awakening is much more reminiscent of board games to me. A part of that could simply be due to the presentation, with small tiled battlefields decorated with tiny little sprites representing each character. It’s like moving pieces upon a chess board, and if you remove your fingers from that piece you are locked into that decision, even if you realize you just screwed yourself over.

Other tactical role-playing games have these features as well, but the presentation feels much more like a video game, or at the very least like Dungeons & Dragons, as opposed to a board game.

The relationships are the one element that would not translate well to the tabletop. The basic idea is that placing characters beside each other will grant a bonus to combat, and the stronger the relationship the better those bonuses will become. All you need to do in order to improve character relations is to simply place them next to each other in combat, and any time an action is taken when confronting a foe, be it attacking, blocking, or simply supporting, the chemistry between the characters will improve. This will be indicated by hearts displaying over each affected character. If you surround one character with several others, then their relationship will improve with all of those characters.

This changes the nature of teamwork and character placement. Standard tactics such as flanking enemies are actually detrimental, as it will keep your units separated. Instead you want them clustered together, chaining as many compatible units together as you can, spreading along the battlefield as a cohesive whole or as tightly knit squads.

The game provides a basic rundown of this information within the first chapters. It doesn’t go into detail, just that you want to place characters beside each other so they will develop a relationship and provide more significant bonuses.

Yet until twenty-five hours in (according to my save file) I had developed only a handful of character relationships and didn’t really know why. I started to believe there was some prerequisite in combat that would trigger these character relations, but try as I might I could not spot the pattern. It wasn’t until I selected the “Support” option, where, on the world map at least, you can have the different units speak with one another once they’re ready to achieve the next ranking in their relationship (C, B, A, and in some cases S). On the battlefield, however, during the planning stages where you can rearrange your characters and select which units you want to use, you can instead use this Support option to see which characters are compatible.

For weeks I had been playing this game under the impression that any character could be compatible with any other. I never really looked too closely at the silhouettes of other characters, as when I first explored that option the majority of them were completely concealed in shadow. I hadn’t unlocked those characters yet. I merely assumed those were all the characters within the game.

Twenty-five hours in I check one of my new characters, to try and improve their relationship with another, and discover that they are only compatible with two of my other units.

This changes everything.

Okay, not everything, but it certainly made me realize that I had been playing the game wrong this whole time. I was simply selecting units based on what sort of units I needed for that stage and then placing them with fighters in front, support second, healing last. Once you realize not all characters are compatible, that they can’t all work together, it completely changes who you select and how you arrange them on the battlefield.

It’s an intimidating and yet valuable new dimension to how combat is approached. I don’t know how long Fire Emblem has operated like this, but it certainly sets Awakening apart from any other tactical role-playing game I’ve ever played. Previously my enjoyment of the game was strictly dictated by challenge, where every choice I made needed to have a risk component or else I was simply too bored. Now, however, it’s not merely about wiping out nameless and faceless foes.

Now it’s about building a stronger, more unified team.

Fire Emblem: Awakening just went from being “pretty good” to “friggin’ excellent” for me. Now the game truly feels rich, with every move having multiple components to consider. There are no hasty decisions now, not ever in easy battles intended to grind for money, experience, or now, relationships. I not only have to consider the enemy’s choice of weapons, the odds they’ll be able to strike my character, and which units have extra effective equipment on them, but now I must consider who is placed where and whose relationships are strongest or I want to improve.

I’ve lost a number of characters to perma-death in Fire Emblem: Awakening, a fact that I’ve since learned to cope with. Now that I realize each character has a limited number of units they’re compatible with, seeing those names of the deceased on the support list makes my brow furrow and my lips curl into a frown. No longer am I emotionally invested in these characters due to cut-scenes or combat prowess, especially since many more of similar classes are frequently being provided. I am now emotionally invested because that could be a potentially valuable character to a number of my other units.

It’s a shame that I only become attached to characters through raw mathematical mechanics, but it allows each of my units to stand out that much more.

Fire Emblem: Awakening is a truly surprising game, and I can only wonder how else I’ve been screwing up my approach to playing.