Playing through Fire Emblem Fates (the Birthright Route), and I'm not liking it as much as Awakening.
Part of it seems to be because the cast feels forgettable - outside of the royal family, I can only remember a handful of characters. It likely doesn't help that many of them don't seem to have a lot of story relevance. It's likely better that the game focuses on the royal family, but a big reason why I enjoy playing RPGs is because of the story and characters. I like how most of the cast gets focus and their time in the sun, like in Final Fantasy 7, where everyone has a story arc during the second disc. Here, characters just show up, say they're from Hoshido, and join the party, only to do nothing of note beyond that point.
It likely doesn't help that the cast seems implausibly young. I'm on chapter twelve, and out of the entire army that I've built up, there are only two, maybe four, of the characters that look over eighteen (Saizo, Kagerou, maybe Azama and Reina), and it doesn't help that a lot of the others look generically "cute", for the lack of a better word. There's nobody like Fredrick, Gregor, Basilio, or Miriel in the entire group to stand out in a visual sense. People like Oboro and Hinata just blend together for me.
I'm also not a fan of how many of the benefits of teaming two units up seem to have been removed. In Awakening, pairing units up meant that they could both fight in a battle, allowing both of them to gain experience. In Fates, this only seems to be the case when units are beside each other, and given that certain units travel much further than others, or can travel over terrain that others can't, it makes it harder to level up my party and build up their social ranks.
I'm hoping that the other routes, or Fire Emblem: Three Houses, have more variety in terms of character designs and gives the supporting cast more to do. In Awakening, I liked the unexpected significance of characters like Virion, and the way that the team-up mechanic was handled made it much easier to build those social links and grow attached to those characters.