Genre: Strategy RPG
Developer: Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo

During the movement phase of battle, small animated sprites-- not too different from those in the NES-era Fire Emblem games-- represent the various characters on the stage. During actual attacks, the game flips to a detailed, fully-polygonal representation of the action. This "one foot in the past, one foot in the present" is not only a good idea, but Intelligent Systems has managed to execute both sides of the coin exceptionally.

Hiroki Morishita and Rei Kondoh's soundtrack is a combination of somber piano pieces and smashing, dramatic orchestra work. It's all really quite memorable if not a bit pretentious; it does start to wear a little thin by the end of the game. Nonetheless, it'd be interesting to see what kind of response some of the more thoughtful tracks would get in a proper piano concert. Light voice work, used selectively during text dialogues, is very well done.

Awakening takes the best aspects from a variety of familiar strategy games-- the friendship system from Shining Force III and the little movement arrows from the Advance Wars games to name just a couple of examples-- and marries them with excellent stage designs and fantastic unit balancing. The best part is that the game grows with the player's ambition; unlike titles like Disgaea, the player is seldom required to grind just to progress. But at the same time, the expansive character progression system rewards improvement beyond the minimal amount.

Mechanically, Awakening may very well be the best strategy RPG ever made. Stylistically however, the game is a mixed bag; the character designs and story still manage to suffer from the very worst and most overused "shonen" cliches, while the somewhat arty soundtrack and overall presentation may be a bit too ostentatious for the most sensitive. Taken as a whole though, Awakening should absolutely not be missed by fans of the genre.