I'll start with the good, which is the fact that this game is absolutely gorgeous, and the gameplay's great. Most of the maps are pretty good, and the combat improvements are wonderful. I liked Three Houses' combat system, but I'm glad they brought back the weapon triangle. Break is also a pretty interesting mechanic and the engage mechanic, while absolutely broken at times, is always fun to use. This game feels like it should the blueprint for FE going forward gameplay-wise.

Then there's everything else.

I have no idea what happened, but in terms of story, characters and writing, this is easily the worst in the franchise (from what I've played) and a huge step back from Three Houses. The main premise of the plot feels like it came straight out of a Musou/Warriors game in the worst way possible, the tone is half saturday morning cartoon half anime political thriller (it's as terrible as it sounds), the characters are incredibly lifeless and unbelievably boring, and the writing is laughably bad. This is all incredibly shocking especially after Three Houses, which absolutely nailed those things imo. I still remember Three Houses' cast (Black Eagles forever). I'm going to be shocked if I remember any of the characters in this game by the end of next week.

As I said, the gameplay's fantastic but the absolutely awful, bottom-of-the-barrel...everything else makes this my least favorite Fire Emblem game I've played.