>>20348231It was poorly designed when compared to any other game in the series. The classes are imbalanced and the differences between them are almost pointless, where in other games classes were extremely important while also being diverse. The story is convoluted while also being stupidly simple, with the most forgettable setting in the series. Nothing anyone does in the story makes any fucking sense when you think about it. Instead of writing an interesting story with believable characters, the script is almost entirely made up of support conversations, which make the units seem like they're roommates or neighbors in an apartment complex instead of fellow soldiers.
My biggest problem with it is that instead of being campaign based like the other games in the series, Awakening allows you to grind endlessly. This allowed them to sell overpriced and overall poor DLC packs for months after release. Since the game is the first in the series with an endless progression and the first with DLC, it's a safe bet that one decision influenced the other, to the detriment of the gameplay.
So yeah, it's shit. I've played every game in the series (the ones with a western release too) and did speedruns and ranked runs of almost all of them, and Awakening is just awful.
