Summary: War doesn't end for a witty tactician or duty-bound princess. But when swords break and armor fails, bonds stronger than fate or time remain.
Pairing: Robin/Lucina
Genre: Romance/Adventure
Word Count: 116k
Link: https://m.fanfiction.net/s/11690435/1/From-Ruins

Retelling of Fire Emblem Awakening that sticks fairly well to plot of the game but takes a little artistic licence. This licence though is what sets it apart from most of the FE fics in the fandom. The biggest selling part of the story for me, or what makes me keep reading though is the humor and characterisation. Robin and Lucina are done great in terms of their exchanges and dialogue but also their characters. The two are generally very wooden, generic people that it's tough to breathe life into but the author does it superbly.

I'd give it a 4/5, solid writing, great dialogue, great characters but it doesn't scream 5/5 for me. Minor issues with the pacing perhaps, at this point it's likely to stretch into the 300-500k mark if it's ever finished due to the sheer amount of plot left to come.

 

So do you need to have played the game to understand what's going on though? I remember very vaguely playing a fire emblem game way back in the day.

 

Having a quick read-through again, I'd say yes, unfortunately. There are some parts that aren't explained without at least some knowledge of the game.

 

I disliked a great deal about this fic, and dropped it three chapters in. The dialogue felt really awkward and clunky - as well as being smothered by rapid one-line dialogue with no descriptive writing in between to pad it out or lend it pacing. Characters played adverb leapfrog, going from laughing to frowning to chuckling every other line. It felt as if every character was an American teenager. I wasn't especially fond of where the author chose to open the fic, and I didn't ever get any attachment to the characters. In fact, I hated most of them quite a bit, even if I liked them in the game.

So, that's all I can really say. I got to the end of chapter three and can't stomach any more. Chapter one was the worst by far, and although it did get better, it never salvaged it. First impressions and all that, I suppose. But subsequent chapters were also bad on their own merits.

2/5

 

That was...weirdly entertaining. I can't really say that it's a good fic or even that I'll bother following it in future but I somehow enjoyed reading it nonetheless.

Though I'm not sure it can be called a retelling when it skips nearly half of the game's story. Considering that it doesn't really feel like much progress has been made since the story started, I suppose it wouldn't have gotten very far if it had started from the actual beginning.

And I think 'a little artistic license' is something of an understatement. It's been a while since I played Awakening - which made the name drops of characters I barely remember in the first chapter a bit frustrating - but it feels like there are more than a few changes to the story that make a very loose 'retelling'. Not that said changes were bad such as the complete change to how Tharja joins which actually makes her crazy obssession with Robin a lot more understandable. It's just that I find myself remebering bits of game and not often seeing where it connected to what I was reading.

This one felt like a textbook example of a guilty pleasure to be honest.

3/5