I played this game for the first time through a draft format and had a good bit of fun with it! I think the last few maps can be especially draining if you don't know about micaiah + warp/rewarp to skip through them quickly, but once I found how broken that was the experience got a lot better for me. There's a lot of cool options and plenty of units to play around with and throw them on, so maybe a draft wasn't the ideal starting point, but regardless I think the emblems are a great system to keep any units relevant and ensure you have the power to get through any map!

While I do think there's better written entries, I don't think the writing is all as bad as people say. I'm not gonna lie as an FE4 fan and say I was fully engaged at the end of the day, but it still has some nice moments and I think the characters in supports manage to not be as reliant on their One Trope as some other entries when you get them to higher ranks. That being said, there are a few that from the random C ranks in arena fighting I got to check out who make it seem like it's a bit of a roulette on how hard they rely on their weird personality trait, so it could be a tiny bit of a grab bag.

Running around the somniel is fun, but for your own sanity unless you're a minmax freak don't partake in every activity after every mission, it gets so tiring.

While I think the story of this game took a long time to grip me, and it has a few issues that stem from general otaku culture, the gameplay is some of the best in the genre. It's so much fun to learn hidden techniques and traverse to parts of the map you've never been, and learning you could the whole main game and non-dlc post game without even picking up the hammer was extremely cool and exciting! I think the combat and boss fights are super interesting too, there's a couple of nitpicks I have, esp with how only a few shot types feel useful outside of puzzles, but overall I think this game is an extremely fun time if you can get past its few glaring issues with presentation and dialogue that keep me from giving it a full 5 stars.