Actually, there's not why I judge the older FE games over Awakening. Sure, I have a bias towards Awakening for being my first FE game and what not, and sure, the vast character development was appreciated, but that's not why I find it difficult to play the older titles in the series. Awakening spoiled me as a player with the insane amount of options, beautiful presentation, musical score, character interactions, and the large amount of content. And for me, what I loved about Awakening wasn't just the vast character development, nor do I find the dating sim portion to be what was most compelling. It was the deep strategy, the deep, emotional connection with the characters who were expressive, interesting and full of life, in conjunction with the pairing system that made relationships between characters meaningful to me, the outstanding music, visuals, and endless replay ability, among other such variables. All of these pieces we're mixed together with such mastery that it ultimately spoiled me as a player. I've tried to play FE7, and while it still can hold it's own, I find myself having a difficult time getting invested into everything the game has to offer and I feel a large part of that is because Awakening was the culmination of the best of FE mixed together.
But that's not to say that I think the older FE games are bad or terrible by any means. Many of older FE games do things better than Awakening, such as map and objective variety, better stories and perhaps are more strategic than Awakening. They are amazing games in their own right and are loved by many fans of the series for bloody reasons too. However, because of how spoiled I was through Awakening, it's been difficult for me to properly play through the older FE games without feeling kinda "meh" about it unfortunately. As I've said before in the past, I suspect that if I were to start with either FE7-9, I'd probably have a different perspective and outlook on Awakening and the older games as a whole, but alas, I started with Awakening. And honestly, I don't regret that I started with Awakening either. ^w^
and prove that Robin is a worthy foe to fight against.
