in my opinion the series's best attempt at a large-scale story, it recontextualises almost everything you knew about this world coming into it from path of radiance and expands it a ton with not just new lore and crazy story beats but also good new characters and closure for those that return
when it comes to the gameplay this game is a great step-up from its predecessor, with more interesting mechanics and plenty of truly challenging maps along the way, there's a couple of bad ones but what fe game doesn't have them
another significant upgrade is the music, much of fe9's ost didn't really strike me as all that memorable but to my surprise this contains some of the most catchy and heavy-hitting tracks of the entire franchise
path of radiance of course laid most of the groundwork for this game but it uses that to its full potential, it's a great sequel with the most amount of maps in any game in the series but it's somehow almost never exhausting, and when everything clicks (and that happens quite often) this game can be pretty amazing, and as I'm writing this I feel more and more confident in calling this my favourite fire emblem game to date