This game is pretty messy overall, but still has a lot of good qualities to it.
I think the concept of having multiple routes is interesting, but not executed very well. I takes the classic Fire Emblem mechanic of permadeath and applies it to characters outside your class too, as you have to go to war in part 2 of the game. It's pretty impactful to have to kill one of the students you hung around earlier in the game, you could've saved them by recruiting them or choosing a different path but didn't. A problem I have with the multiple pathways is that you have to choose which pathway you take immediately, before you even know much at all about the characters in any of the houses you can choose. There is a path split later on in the Black Eagle route, but that's the only one in the game and one of the paths is short and ends abruptly while the other is remarkably similar to the Golden Deer path which is kinda lame. The Blue Lion route is easily the best route in the game in my opinion because of the use of characters and seeing some of them develop in interesting ways, the backstory of Dimitri is well utilized and adds a personal aspect to the story. Another problem with the game is that part 1 of each path is pretty much identical to eachother which makes repeat playthroughs drag on for this entire portion.
The gameplay is ok in this game, I think my main problem with it is the map design, which usually is pretty uninteresting, it doesn't help that many of the map are reused in different paths and optional missions too. There's no weapon triangle here which makes the combat feels dumbed down compared to most previous games. There are bigger enemies that occupy multiple spaces on the map and have shields that can be broken, these enemies are actually pretty interesting and add a lot to the game. There's a new type of attack called a gambit that's pretty ok, in my experience it mostly just allows enemies to get a free attack on you without you being able to counterattack and allows the devs to make bosses with stupid stats that you have to use gambits on to weaken without getting killed instantly from a counterattack. The gambits are actually incorporated pretty well to fighting the monster enemies with how they break shields easily but make the monster target you if you use it on them. There's a mechanic called divine pulse that allows you to rewind time to alleviate cheap game design like, enemies suddenly becoming aggro for different arbitrary reasons and they suddenly get the ability to move and insta-kill your healer. The divine pulse also isn't used in the story aside from one scene where you use it once, then give up instead of using the 5 more uses it has, it cheapens some cutscenes when your character could've turned back time and saved a character from death but just doesn't for some reason. Towards the end of the game, it feels like (at least on the hard difficulty) the game just makes enemy units arbitrarily fast and/or tanky to inflate the difficulty, but it's such a lame way to increase the difficulty and makes the game drag towards the end.
I think the progression system is my favourite part of the game, it's really fun to plan out character builds and see them grow over the course of the game. There are some problems I have with it, like how almost every master class requires proficiency in horse riding or something you probably won't want to teach your characters. I also found that the way I played the game never changed over the course of it, I never felt like the game tried to challenge me to change the way I played it.
This game also has obnoxiously long loading times, which detract a lot from the pacing of the game. The monastery exploration sequences have a lot of slowdown, which is mildly obnoxious, but not a big problem.
Overall, I have a laundry list of problems with this game, but I still enjoy playing it for the story and progression, even if the gameplay should be better. The game is also way longer than the amount of interesting content in it can reasonably support. If you ask me, it does a better job at handling the multiple paths than Fire Emblem: Fates though.
I think the concept of having multiple routes is interesting, but not executed very well. I takes the classic Fire Emblem mechanic of permadeath and applies it to characters outside your class too, as you have to go to war in part 2 of the game. It's pretty impactful to have to kill one of the students you hung around earlier in the game, you could've saved them by recruiting them or choosing a different path but didn't. A problem I have with the multiple pathways is that you have to choose which pathway you take immediately, before you even know much at all about the characters in any of the houses you can choose. There is a path split later on in the Black Eagle route, but that's the only one in the game and one of the paths is short and ends abruptly while the other is remarkably similar to the Golden Deer path which is kinda lame. The Blue Lion route is easily the best route in the game in my opinion because of the use of characters and seeing some of them develop in interesting ways, the backstory of Dimitri is well utilized and adds a personal aspect to the story. Another problem with the game is that part 1 of each path is pretty much identical to eachother which makes repeat playthroughs drag on for this entire portion.
The gameplay is ok in this game, I think my main problem with it is the map design, which usually is pretty uninteresting, it doesn't help that many of the map are reused in different paths and optional missions too. There's no weapon triangle here which makes the combat feels dumbed down compared to most previous games. There are bigger enemies that occupy multiple spaces on the map and have shields that can be broken, these enemies are actually pretty interesting and add a lot to the game. There's a new type of attack called a gambit that's pretty ok, in my experience it mostly just allows enemies to get a free attack on you without you being able to counterattack and allows the devs to make bosses with stupid stats that you have to use gambits on to weaken without getting killed instantly from a counterattack. The gambits are actually incorporated pretty well to fighting the monster enemies with how they break shields easily but make the monster target you if you use it on them. There's a mechanic called divine pulse that allows you to rewind time to alleviate cheap game design like, enemies suddenly becoming aggro for different arbitrary reasons and they suddenly get the ability to move and insta-kill your healer. The divine pulse also isn't used in the story aside from one scene where you use it once, then give up instead of using the 5 more uses it has, it cheapens some cutscenes when your character could've turned back time and saved a character from death but just doesn't for some reason. Towards the end of the game, it feels like (at least on the hard difficulty) the game just makes enemy units arbitrarily fast and/or tanky to inflate the difficulty, but it's such a lame way to increase the difficulty and makes the game drag towards the end.
I think the progression system is my favourite part of the game, it's really fun to plan out character builds and see them grow over the course of the game. There are some problems I have with it, like how almost every master class requires proficiency in horse riding or something you probably won't want to teach your characters. I also found that the way I played the game never changed over the course of it, I never felt like the game tried to challenge me to change the way I played it.
This game also has obnoxiously long loading times, which detract a lot from the pacing of the game. The monastery exploration sequences have a lot of slowdown, which is mildly obnoxious, but not a big problem.
Overall, I have a laundry list of problems with this game, but I still enjoy playing it for the story and progression, even if the gameplay should be better. The game is also way longer than the amount of interesting content in it can reasonably support. If you ask me, it does a better job at handling the multiple paths than Fire Emblem: Fates though.