This review contains spoilers
Whoo boy. This is gonna be a rough one.
The game makes a very promising start, with an interesting butterfly-effect premise and some welcome expansion on the world of Three Houses. However, I find that by the end of the game it squanders a lot of that potential. In Crimson Blaze and Golden Wildfire, the events of the plot feel largely like filler, with progress in the war being prevented or undone at every turn. Agartha still isn't very well explored despite the protagonist coming directly from it. Despite the extremely promising move of Edelgard expelling the Agarthans from the Empire immediately, she fails to meaningfully deal with them later, despite regular teases like the Edelgard/Lysithea/Hapi paralogue - Cornelia doesn't even show up outside of Azure Gleam. From my perspective on the Church of Seiros, Claude turning on the church is nice... but now his route is basically just a carbon copy of Edelgard's instead of Rhea's.
As for Azure Gleam - defending Rhea after the last two routes is distinctly uncomfortable, Edelgard being hollowed out into an empty shell by Agartha removes any potential nuance from the notion of a war against her, which is an absolutely cowardly way to make the player not feel bad about their choices, and the fact this is the route where we deal with Agartha the most, when Edelgard is no longer a character, is just unbelievably frustrating.
I've heard that in interviews, the writers talked about not wanting to make the plot of this game "obsolete" Three
Houses in the sense that the outcomes are entirely better for the world. I understand what they're going for, but it's extremely awkward in practice. From a "state of the world" perspective, every ending is just "wow they sure did keep warring forever, life sucks huh", and this is "not better" than Three Houses but it's just empty nihilism in the form of a text crawl, robbing the endings of being at all interesting. To complicate matters, the timeline does come off as better from a character-driven player's perspective unless you kill Byleth, because many characters like Monica, Rodrigue and Jeralt no longer die as they unavoidably do in Three Houses - some enemy combatants die, but a surprising amount survive and then disappear forever anyway because the game's almost over.
As far as the gameplay goes - Musou is Musou, mashing buttons and mowing down hordes remains fun, but man there were too many damn battles in this game, and only the end-of-chapter ones had anything going on. In an average late game chapter you have 8ish map squares, 1-3 bonus battles, and 0-2 paralogues, with only the paralogues being remotely interesting. The time on my first playthrough was over 40 hours, and halfway through my second I got sick of it and started spamming Vanguard Whistles to skip any battles I could. Musou doesn't hold up for 120 hours.
The class system is... bleeeegh. I want to like it, but the fact classes can't wield multiple weapons really ruins it. There's only one magic capstone class, stuck on foot, and the theoretically-hybrid cavalry classes are physical-based and down an entirely different class tree. Every axe user has to pick up a mount, because War Master is only for brawlers. Trickster, a class visually designed to be an extravagant, showy magic hybrid, is now the capstone to the stealthy, dexterity-based Thief line. It's all really incohesive. This class tree system is potentially really good, but it needed to have classes designed from the ground up to work with it, and character archetypes who fit with those classes, instead of trying to retrofit it to Three Houses' class selection, which was designed for a completely different class system.
Even the music was kind of disappointing. The soundtrack tries to distinguish its arrangements from the Three Houses originals by, in many cases, adding electric guitar, in a way that makes it all blend together into an indistinct attempt to be "cool".
All-in-all I'm glad I played it - Musou is still very fun in moderation, and the opening hours were extremely interesting, but man. I don't know if I'd have enjoyed buying this day 1 even if it didn't snipe AINI's release date, so I'm glad that circumstance ensured I didn't.
The game makes a very promising start, with an interesting butterfly-effect premise and some welcome expansion on the world of Three Houses. However, I find that by the end of the game it squanders a lot of that potential. In Crimson Blaze and Golden Wildfire, the events of the plot feel largely like filler, with progress in the war being prevented or undone at every turn. Agartha still isn't very well explored despite the protagonist coming directly from it. Despite the extremely promising move of Edelgard expelling the Agarthans from the Empire immediately, she fails to meaningfully deal with them later, despite regular teases like the Edelgard/Lysithea/Hapi paralogue - Cornelia doesn't even show up outside of Azure Gleam. From my perspective on the Church of Seiros, Claude turning on the church is nice... but now his route is basically just a carbon copy of Edelgard's instead of Rhea's.
As for Azure Gleam - defending Rhea after the last two routes is distinctly uncomfortable, Edelgard being hollowed out into an empty shell by Agartha removes any potential nuance from the notion of a war against her, which is an absolutely cowardly way to make the player not feel bad about their choices, and the fact this is the route where we deal with Agartha the most, when Edelgard is no longer a character, is just unbelievably frustrating.
I've heard that in interviews, the writers talked about not wanting to make the plot of this game "obsolete" Three
Houses in the sense that the outcomes are entirely better for the world. I understand what they're going for, but it's extremely awkward in practice. From a "state of the world" perspective, every ending is just "wow they sure did keep warring forever, life sucks huh", and this is "not better" than Three Houses but it's just empty nihilism in the form of a text crawl, robbing the endings of being at all interesting. To complicate matters, the timeline does come off as better from a character-driven player's perspective unless you kill Byleth, because many characters like Monica, Rodrigue and Jeralt no longer die as they unavoidably do in Three Houses - some enemy combatants die, but a surprising amount survive and then disappear forever anyway because the game's almost over.
As far as the gameplay goes - Musou is Musou, mashing buttons and mowing down hordes remains fun, but man there were too many damn battles in this game, and only the end-of-chapter ones had anything going on. In an average late game chapter you have 8ish map squares, 1-3 bonus battles, and 0-2 paralogues, with only the paralogues being remotely interesting. The time on my first playthrough was over 40 hours, and halfway through my second I got sick of it and started spamming Vanguard Whistles to skip any battles I could. Musou doesn't hold up for 120 hours.
The class system is... bleeeegh. I want to like it, but the fact classes can't wield multiple weapons really ruins it. There's only one magic capstone class, stuck on foot, and the theoretically-hybrid cavalry classes are physical-based and down an entirely different class tree. Every axe user has to pick up a mount, because War Master is only for brawlers. Trickster, a class visually designed to be an extravagant, showy magic hybrid, is now the capstone to the stealthy, dexterity-based Thief line. It's all really incohesive. This class tree system is potentially really good, but it needed to have classes designed from the ground up to work with it, and character archetypes who fit with those classes, instead of trying to retrofit it to Three Houses' class selection, which was designed for a completely different class system.
Even the music was kind of disappointing. The soundtrack tries to distinguish its arrangements from the Three Houses originals by, in many cases, adding electric guitar, in a way that makes it all blend together into an indistinct attempt to be "cool".
All-in-all I'm glad I played it - Musou is still very fun in moderation, and the opening hours were extremely interesting, but man. I don't know if I'd have enjoyed buying this day 1 even if it didn't snipe AINI's release date, so I'm glad that circumstance ensured I didn't.