Man, this was a let down.

The new units are...fine. It's nice to have a manakete again, I guess, but Nel isn't really anything special. And the other units aren't either. And the maps, on normal, are almost insultingly easy. I had issues in the main game with how basically every boss has multiple health bars (which wasn't particularly fun and was clearly trying to compensate for how utterly broken engage attacks could be), but this time around, most bosses don't, making them hilariously underwhelming fights. A lot of the maps also suffer from just not being all that fun to play -- you're forced to deploy Alear, Nil, and Nel, sometimes with as few as two other units, and as mentioned, Nel (and Nil, for that matter) aren't great. Combine this with the DLC setting your characters' classes, levels, and inventory for you (which is a fun idea in theory, but obnoxious in practice) and you're left with levels that just aren't interesting. To top it off, the last level is gimmicky and dumb, in a game that had mostly avoided gimmicky dumb levels.

The story, at least, is enjoyable. It's not great, but it's at least a little better than the main game's story, so that's something.