Somewhere in here, you can see the blueprint for a Fire Emblem series that is accessible to a larger audience. Nearly every character is a one-note stereotype that is, nonetheless, somewhat charming if you don't take it too seriously. It is extremely easy to plow through and encourages you to break the game altogether. You get to ship all your characters and breed hideously powerful offspring to crush your enemies with. The soundtrack goes really hard.

However, it was a mistake to allow every character to have support events with every character because a lot of them are arbitrary and kind of suck. One third of the game's plot is essentially an anime filler arc that has nothing to do with the overarching story. I spent hours of my life I'll never get back grinding on the pirate ship map and I hold it against the game because it was hard for me to get S Rank Supports that felt believable and killing every pirate who has ever lived was the only way to accomplish my twisted goal.

One of these three things is my fault. As it stands, Awakening would be an easy recommendation to someone trying out the series for the first time except that Three Houses exists and is superior in every way. I think most people would be better off playing that, moving onto Path of Radiance, and then just playing any Fire Emblem that matches their personal tastes. I simply don't know what makes Awakening stand out any more except for two of its maps where I experienced genuine emotion.

Persona 4 is the fourth entry in the Persona series. It introduces some nifty features to the Persona formula. Bosses have more traits now than "being Hitler" or "I hate it because it cheats and Atlus was a mistake." You can form deep bonds with your full party instead of "the girl in your party you might feel like dating," "the morbidly obese narcissist who hangs out at the mall," or "Kenji." You get to choose between the boring, conventional system of full party control or Persona 3's patented "yell at your friends to sort of generally do things and start to actually cry" system. There are cool dungeons with striking visual designs and plot relevance as opposed to an enormous skyscraper with seven flavors of obnoxious strobe lights.

I thought it was pretty alright. If you'd like to curl up with a pleasant game about a pretty fun detective romp wherein you befriend a likable cast of memorable characters, this is probably for you. It's almost certainly one of the best RPGs on the PS2. Atlus has rarely ever missed. I'd take Persona 1, 2, and 3 over it any day because my brain was manufactured with defective parts. Phrased less glibly, the theme of Persona 4 rings hollowly enough for me that I can't wholeheartedly embrace it and it was just kind of easy after around what was probably a half hour of getting stepped on by a bird.

Are modern games getting you down? Do you find yourself getting bored by long cutscenes and patronizing tutorials? Do old Zelda games simply require too many buttons? Surely, you think, there must be a better way.

There IS!

Say goodbye to the JRPGs of tomorrow! Why spend three hours meeting all of your party members when you could be spending three hours killing squirrels on the first map so everything doesn't kill you immediately? Why get tied up in pointless, convoluted gameplay when you can just run straight at monsters and pray to the blue haired beautiful angel goddesses that you chose the correct angle? Fighting bats and other dumb, flying enemies is stupid! It would be actually really awesome to fight a boss who is made of at least fifty bats! The final boss of Ys I probably took up nearly two actual hours of my life and that is a dark fact!

That said, the soundtrack is legendary and is easily better than anything made before we figured out how to get the third dimension in a game. The games are very much of their time in a way that is pretty cozy. You can probably beat both games in a day or two and it has neat little touches like how you can transform into a ferret and get a solid chunk of entirely unnecessary dialogue that tickled my particular brand of JRPG autism. Adol is probably one of the only gaming characters who could be accurately described as a "chad." It's a piece of video game history that feels oddly important and is absolutely not worth the undiscounted asking price for it. I liked it. It was pretty cool. If you've played any other Ys game, I think it's sort of essential. If you've played none of them, please play Oath in Felghana instead.