I originally wrote a review when I was around Chapter 16, but now I'm finished with the game. I will be echoing a lot of the same points I did the first time, but adding some bits to it now that I have the whole game (under the Normal/Hero setting complete). For reference, I have played the majority of the Fire Emblem series before playing this game, which is where most of my SRPG experience comes from.
This game likely shouldn't have released when it did. It lacks a good deal of polish and the 4 or 5 patches releasing in the game's first seven days were a tell of that. It's good to see the small team of developers working hard to fix their game, but it likely should not have been released when it did and given more time to polish, refine things and make sure they work properly. I played the game over about a month, giving some time for updates and patches to fix some of the early bugs, yet still when I finished it there were still notable bugs (units appearing in spaces they aren't and glitching to other spaces/being unmovable, two infinite chests). There's also a few spots where punctuation or lack of proper capitalization was missed, but those are minor issues and easy to overlook.
I've only talked negative so far about this game, so let me speak about why I actually like this game. Stylistically, this game is great. The UI looks really nice, the spritework is amazing, Astral Seeker is probably my favorite class for animations, the character designs are nice to look at, and the voice actors they got to work on the game all did wonderful jobs at giving the characters life. It's an amazing game artistically.
Gameplay-wise, it was an interesting deviation from the standard Fire Emblem formulas of gameplay. The weapon upgrade system is something I don't mind and am okay with personally, though every new unit coming with level 1 items that you have to rank back up with the money you would be using on units who already have ranked up weapons if you were planning on using them isn't fun. Units should at least get some if not all weapons ranked up during the story when they join depending on their join chapter. The combat was fine with me, weapon type vs. armor type is a neat distinction from the usual weapon triangle though I didn't think as much about it as I would an FE weapon triangle. The map arrows showing positive/negative matchups was good.
One notable annoyance that other people may know is that there is no crit avoid stat in the game that helps you avoid getting blasted by enemy crits. It's good that crits only do x2 instead of x3 damage with this and that enemies doing more damage to you is more of a threat, but also annoying to see.
Like said before, I played on the game's normal difficulty (Hero) and the challenge was sufficient for a while. Similar to most FE games, you can find ways to break it if you know what to do, and there are certainly some classes/characters that trivialize the game's combat. The mounted Dragon Knight and Illusionist classes come to mind right away as strong endgame classes with 9 movement and magic damage. Speaking of classes, I do like the game's class system. Of course there's going to be some classes that are better than others, but the choices are quite fun to play with.
The last gameplay topic that I should mention is Grave Wounds. The game has no permadeath at all, and instead of losing a unit permanently, they lose 10% of a stat depending on the weapon damage done to them. I... don't hate this? But I don't love it either? It does take away stress from restarting entire maps over if your favorite unit just got unluckily hit by a 12% hit, but also sometimes feels like it should be more punishing. I've seen my units with 0 magic lose... 0 magic multiple times throughout my playthrough. The option to have permanent unit death or an ironman mode for those that want that extra challenge would be nice and I hope they can add it in a future update. They do like to keep the characters either story-relevant or able to talk throughout the entire plot, but just giving that option where they are unable to fight for the rest of the game would be nice.
(Last note about gameplay I'll add is that the game runs on 2RN for dice rolls, similar to FEs 6-13 and 16, if you care about that type of thing.)
Story-wise, it's about on par for most FE plots, not that deep or complex and just kinda goes along and gets the job done. The story-writing is fairly basic as well, some of the characters shine better in their support conversations (Bonds), which there are a lot of.
One last major issue I had noticed through the early days of the game were mostly the lack of explanations or clear designations on how things worked. The tutorial section was much more barren when the game launched than it is now, but for example on some maps it's difficult to tell exactly how the map ends or when it ends precisely. I've both had maps end too early because I didn't realize exactly how the map concluded and also had one map end because it was a full-on Escape chapter where every single unit had to escape, unlike the other chapters in the game which were Arrive chapters where only one unit had to reach the destination, even though some of them are also labeled Escape. More clarity would do this game really well.
I don't have much to say on music. Nothing really stuck out. Wasn't expecting FE tier music from this game but you wouldn't go wrong listening to some Genealogy of the Holy War or Echoes music over listening to the soundtrack in this game (I only picked those two games because they're my favorite FE OSTs. :) )
Overall, I found the actual gameplay fun and getting through it to be enjoyable outside of the bugs. I will be playing this game multiple times in the future because of finding it fun and hope that bugs can be ironed out more with time. I recommend getting this game on a sale.
TL;DR: I found the game fun, it's kinda buggy still but not to an extreme point, doesn't exactly play like any Fire Emblem game, it's its own SRPG. 6.5 or 7/10.
This game likely shouldn't have released when it did. It lacks a good deal of polish and the 4 or 5 patches releasing in the game's first seven days were a tell of that. It's good to see the small team of developers working hard to fix their game, but it likely should not have been released when it did and given more time to polish, refine things and make sure they work properly. I played the game over about a month, giving some time for updates and patches to fix some of the early bugs, yet still when I finished it there were still notable bugs (units appearing in spaces they aren't and glitching to other spaces/being unmovable, two infinite chests). There's also a few spots where punctuation or lack of proper capitalization was missed, but those are minor issues and easy to overlook.
I've only talked negative so far about this game, so let me speak about why I actually like this game. Stylistically, this game is great. The UI looks really nice, the spritework is amazing, Astral Seeker is probably my favorite class for animations, the character designs are nice to look at, and the voice actors they got to work on the game all did wonderful jobs at giving the characters life. It's an amazing game artistically.
Gameplay-wise, it was an interesting deviation from the standard Fire Emblem formulas of gameplay. The weapon upgrade system is something I don't mind and am okay with personally, though every new unit coming with level 1 items that you have to rank back up with the money you would be using on units who already have ranked up weapons if you were planning on using them isn't fun. Units should at least get some if not all weapons ranked up during the story when they join depending on their join chapter. The combat was fine with me, weapon type vs. armor type is a neat distinction from the usual weapon triangle though I didn't think as much about it as I would an FE weapon triangle. The map arrows showing positive/negative matchups was good.
One notable annoyance that other people may know is that there is no crit avoid stat in the game that helps you avoid getting blasted by enemy crits. It's good that crits only do x2 instead of x3 damage with this and that enemies doing more damage to you is more of a threat, but also annoying to see.
Like said before, I played on the game's normal difficulty (Hero) and the challenge was sufficient for a while. Similar to most FE games, you can find ways to break it if you know what to do, and there are certainly some classes/characters that trivialize the game's combat. The mounted Dragon Knight and Illusionist classes come to mind right away as strong endgame classes with 9 movement and magic damage. Speaking of classes, I do like the game's class system. Of course there's going to be some classes that are better than others, but the choices are quite fun to play with.
The last gameplay topic that I should mention is Grave Wounds. The game has no permadeath at all, and instead of losing a unit permanently, they lose 10% of a stat depending on the weapon damage done to them. I... don't hate this? But I don't love it either? It does take away stress from restarting entire maps over if your favorite unit just got unluckily hit by a 12% hit, but also sometimes feels like it should be more punishing. I've seen my units with 0 magic lose... 0 magic multiple times throughout my playthrough. The option to have permanent unit death or an ironman mode for those that want that extra challenge would be nice and I hope they can add it in a future update. They do like to keep the characters either story-relevant or able to talk throughout the entire plot, but just giving that option where they are unable to fight for the rest of the game would be nice.
(Last note about gameplay I'll add is that the game runs on 2RN for dice rolls, similar to FEs 6-13 and 16, if you care about that type of thing.)
Story-wise, it's about on par for most FE plots, not that deep or complex and just kinda goes along and gets the job done. The story-writing is fairly basic as well, some of the characters shine better in their support conversations (Bonds), which there are a lot of.
One last major issue I had noticed through the early days of the game were mostly the lack of explanations or clear designations on how things worked. The tutorial section was much more barren when the game launched than it is now, but for example on some maps it's difficult to tell exactly how the map ends or when it ends precisely. I've both had maps end too early because I didn't realize exactly how the map concluded and also had one map end because it was a full-on Escape chapter where every single unit had to escape, unlike the other chapters in the game which were Arrive chapters where only one unit had to reach the destination, even though some of them are also labeled Escape. More clarity would do this game really well.
I don't have much to say on music. Nothing really stuck out. Wasn't expecting FE tier music from this game but you wouldn't go wrong listening to some Genealogy of the Holy War or Echoes music over listening to the soundtrack in this game (I only picked those two games because they're my favorite FE OSTs. :) )
Overall, I found the actual gameplay fun and getting through it to be enjoyable outside of the bugs. I will be playing this game multiple times in the future because of finding it fun and hope that bugs can be ironed out more with time. I recommend getting this game on a sale.
TL;DR: I found the game fun, it's kinda buggy still but not to an extreme point, doesn't exactly play like any Fire Emblem game, it's its own SRPG. 6.5 or 7/10.