Most Fire Emblem games are pretty hard. This one is just an asshole. Weapon durability is a thing, as (almost) always, but the only real way to maintain your army is to capture enemies and take their weapons, which is significantly harder than just killing them. The game throws reinforcements at you in massive quantities in order to whittle away at your durability. The bosses are built like brick shithouses, your lord character is trash, enemy crits are more of an issue than ever, recruiting one unit in particular is a living nightmare, and the way the game uses enemy staff users feels like you must have died in your sleep last night because you are clearly now in hell. The story won't give the player much motivation to overcome the gauntlet either, since this game is just a side-story that takes place halfway through Genealogy of the Holy War and has relatively low stakes.

For the fanatics who want that sadistic gameplay crunch and care for nothing else, this'll do just fine. For the rest of us? Not so appealing.

A great game that is reduced to a being a "good" game by a few bad decisions. The draw system is interesting and certainly has positive points, but often results in players unnecessarily grinding for magic or refusing to cast any of it, just because of the psychology that's now in play. Making several GFs only obtainable by drawing from unmarked bosses throughout the game is either cool or cruel depending on who you ask. Level scaling every enemy in an RPG is just... pretty much always a bad idea. The game's whole difficulty curve can be annihilated early on just by buying a few select items on the cheap, and while it's easy to say "well don't do that then," it still speaks to ill-considered balance. Many players including myself find themselves confused about what is and is not supposed to make their party more powerful, and that sort of confusion just doesn't speak well of the game design. Several story beats are conveyed in ways that make them feel too absurd to be taken seriously, even if upon close inspection their internal logic is relatively sound. Flaws aside, FF8 is just fucking cool, and it's worth experiencing. It's far from the best FF, but it certainly isn't the worst.