A difficult FE entry to rank to be honest.
For starters i don't like open map FE because it completely takes away the careful planning and managerial aspect of this series. On the other hand it has a much better story than other GBA titles, albeit very short. Minor characters are more present in the story than other entries and there's also unexpected reveals and hidden dialogues for them too that really enhances the narration. Cool classes are unique to this FE too, like the Summoner that can almost break the game by creating expendable pawns that can move onto ANY tile. The music is also very good, which is probably the only thing that is common to all the FE games.
Other aspects are not fleshed out however. The pacing gets really fast towards the end and the quality of the story depends on which route you pick. Ephraims is much harder but has a worse narrative experience in my opinion than Erikas, Cormag for example has a more satisfying personal story in Erika's route but is barely useless because he joins very late. The trainee units are just bad in general to use except Ross, who is the only one to join at the start of the game and has a reliable distance weapon.
Training them is more of a pain in the ass than a fulfilling objective, but then again, in open map FE you can just ignore all of this and train everyone to your heart's content (dungeons are also super boring). So you either destroy the pacing by making everyone super strong or play normally and suffer.
All in all it's not a bad game by all means, but it depends on what you prioritize for an FE experience, personally i liked it despite the open map system, for me the story more than made up for it.
P.S. Probably the greatest crime of this game is that Amelia doesn't have unique sprites.
For starters i don't like open map FE because it completely takes away the careful planning and managerial aspect of this series. On the other hand it has a much better story than other GBA titles, albeit very short. Minor characters are more present in the story than other entries and there's also unexpected reveals and hidden dialogues for them too that really enhances the narration. Cool classes are unique to this FE too, like the Summoner that can almost break the game by creating expendable pawns that can move onto ANY tile. The music is also very good, which is probably the only thing that is common to all the FE games.
Other aspects are not fleshed out however. The pacing gets really fast towards the end and the quality of the story depends on which route you pick. Ephraims is much harder but has a worse narrative experience in my opinion than Erikas, Cormag for example has a more satisfying personal story in Erika's route but is barely useless because he joins very late. The trainee units are just bad in general to use except Ross, who is the only one to join at the start of the game and has a reliable distance weapon.
Training them is more of a pain in the ass than a fulfilling objective, but then again, in open map FE you can just ignore all of this and train everyone to your heart's content (dungeons are also super boring). So you either destroy the pacing by making everyone super strong or play normally and suffer.
All in all it's not a bad game by all means, but it depends on what you prioritize for an FE experience, personally i liked it despite the open map system, for me the story more than made up for it.
P.S. Probably the greatest crime of this game is that Amelia doesn't have unique sprites.