Story is easily the weakest of the franchise and given how FEs story quality isn't the best on average this is saying a lot. The reason for this mediocrity is largely due to its presentation: There barely happens anything for the first two thirds of the game, its just characters running around trying to accomplish their goal and being stopped by obstacles which then forces a battle to happen. Around the two third mark, a major event happens which causes the story to actually move and be somewhat interesting. By the time this happens its a little bit too late, as the game basically goes from 0 to 100 with how much it wants you to care about the story all out of a sudden. This is best examplified at emotional moments: the game really wants to make you feel emotional at certain points of its endgame. This fails however, due to the game not being able to make me invested in the story or characters enough to care about these scenes. Emotional scenes must be earned to feel impactful, and Blazing Blade sadly fails to give the foundation for that narrative impact to work.

Gameplay is decent. It is GBA FE and that foundation is solid enough so it cant go wrong even in its worst incarnation. Most of the infamous bullshit maps aren't THAT bad, with only one of them really deserving its infamy. The idea of dancers being able to buff their allies is really cool and I wish more games in the series did that.