ambitious often to a fault, is missing a lot of quality of life features present in more modern entires, can be a bit of a chore at times due to map size and the characterisation of its cast is frequently kind of lacking
that being said, the way this game makes its gameplay and story work in tandem with each other and the many other things it did to push the series forward makes me respect it a lot even if it doesn't always succeed at what it's trying to do, and I think overall the story is not half bad especially considering all the hardware limitations that made the game rely on exposition a little too much sometimes
can't disagree with people who say that this deserves a remake

pretty fun experience overall, this game isn't as difficult as it might seem at first since many of the bullshit tools that the enemy has are also available to you if you can play your cards right, the (mostly) tight map design, more pleasant visuals and just a generally nicer game feel (the fan patch might have helped) make it clear that this game has learned a lot from its predecessor
I do however think that I prefer Genealogy's story (although this one is still nice in its own way)
a wild ride with a few missteps along the way but it's okay cuz we got a movement star to get to our destination anyways

massively overhated, it's no conquest obviously but the map design is still mostly nice save for a couple of stinkers, fates game mechanics do a lot of heavy lifting but it's still a fun time, getting characters from both armies is neat and opens up a lot of possibilities for interesting builds and strategies even if unit balance in this can be absolutely horrendous lol, so despite everything I enjoyed my time with this and unlike birthright this game is rarely ever boring
oh and the story is complete garbage but like, you've played the other 2 at this point, I don't see how this is unexpected

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

a fun time for the most of it but held back by being shorter than it maybe should have been, the story definitely suffers because quite a few things feel underdeveloped, (for example the worldbuilding) and certain characters and story beats end up feeling neglected especially when you look at the route differences
the gameplay is alright, there's some really good maps and a handful of bad ones (like in any fe basically), the enemy quality (and the incentive to only use your strongest units as a result) felt a little too high towards the end of the game but it never got anywhere near as bad with it as something like Awakening
I enjoyed this for what it was but it's not the deepest fire emblem experience out there by any means

okay so we got this kinda fun combat right
that encounter you just went thru was kinda cool wasn't it? getting into the flow of things got a good groove going right? lol lockpick this door first idiot, fuck pacing
oh what's that the story almost seems like it's picking up? do this tailing section. do this mandatory substory we put in here just to pad out the game as well while you're at it. fuck pacing
I should also mention that the killer's reveal was lame, how a lot of the seemingly more important fights were lame, and how hard it was to care or buy into the plot itself in general, and how little opportunity it gave most of the actually likeable characters any time to shine or develop at all
this game feels so unfinished and prototypical that the whole experience just seems more like testing grounds for Lost Judgment rather than something they actually had confidence in

okay so we got the most compelling protagonist/antagonist dynamic in this developer's entire catalogue, a great mystery surrounding it and easily the best combat system they've ever put together, oh and don't forget the soundtrack being absolutely top-notch as well
I am genuinely struggling to think of many things this game didn't deliver on, I guess some of the cast get sidelined and the sneaking sections are so-so? but it's really whatever
it's so surreal to go from an utter snoozefest that was Judgment to a game that had me excited for every next fight and story development all throughout

not sure if I've ever done a harder turnaround on a game than this
when this game was first revealed, like many others I did not like the look of it one bit, it felt like fire emblem straying away from what really makes it fire emblem, chasing trends and whatnot in an attempt to become more relevant which granted wouldn't be the first time the series has done this, but after becoming a fan of these games over the course of last year it was all the more disheartening to see
as the release date was drawing closer and closer, a lot of the footage released for the game was starting to pique my interest, the new mechanics seemed fresh and interesting, the old ones were returning with a vengeance, the battle animations looked slick and refined, a lot of the music I heard was great and hey even the ensemble of these ridiculous-looking characters was starting to partially win me over
and then the game actually arrived, and all my initial worries were completely wiped out. this is a real-ass fire emblem game and a damn good one at that
yes the story is mostly whatever and the gameplay is great like many have expected but there's also so much more, yes the story is sort of bland but there's so much good gameplay-story integration in here that it was at the very least always (har har) engaging, yes a lot of the characters are gimmicky but there's a lot of great supports and by the end I had a quite strong band of favourites, yes the gameplay is great as I sort of expected it to be but also had a ton of surprises I was not expecting like really good anti-juggernaut mechanics that prevent mindless enemy phasing of all that moves at you and strong enemies that really take time and effort to take down, yes I often found myself spending a lot of time in the base but most of it was spent doing stuff I actually enjoyed like watching supports and building my characters and if you don't want to bother with extra stuff like workouts or wyvern riding and whatnot you really don't have to because this game really does respect your time
if I had to find negatives I'd say that yeah the story could have been more interesting I think, for example I think there was a great opportunity to make the protagonist become an arrogant spoiled brat after all the constant praise and adoration they receive with a perfect place in the story for them to get humbled and learn to be better but I suppose they just wanted to play it safe and make Alear more inoffensive, some of the music tracks I wasn't super fond of even though largely the soundtrack still stands tall, and several paralogues had me tearing my hair out and not for the good reasons like the main story map design did
I played this on hard and I certainly wouldn't mind coming back to this on maddening, I was going through a bit of a game burnout and Engage was a lovely way to break out of it