genealogy of the holy war is, like gaiden before it, an attempt to emphasize the RPG in SRPG. to that extent it does an excellent job; genealogy has a more interesting and diverse cast of characters than prior installments, the plot has genuinely compelling thematic ideas, denser worldbuilding than can even be conveyed in it's runtime, and the gameplay interweaves with those thematics very well. genealogy blows every prior fire emblem story completely out of the park, it really is not close at all. i had trouble believing that this game was even written by the same person, though part of that is probably that the quality of the modern fan translation for genealogy is much much better than the translations for 1-3. also like gaiden, there's lots of big experiments for the franchise; the entire structure of how chapters play out is rethought, abilities have been introduced to freshen up combat, the famous generation gap exists, weapon rank has been introduced, the weapons triangle has been introduced, it goes on and on. the majority of these additions are really interesting and add a lot of depth, which is definitely welcome after fe3 felt a bit like an fe1 expansion pack. the biggest defining characteristic of fe4, to me, is that the game just feels HUGE. you're going through huge maps on a huge story with a huge army that has huge stats... and it takes a huge amount of time. 4's achilles heel is that it's a very padded game, the emphasis on the revamped arena system means that you can often spend over an hour optimizing and grinding units before a chapter even starts, and the chapters usually are equivalent to about 4-5 standard fire emblem chapters crammed together, most of them taking me anywhere between 1-4 hours to complete. the scale shouldnt be an inherent dealbreaker, but unfortunately these maps are just so large that much of the time spent in them isn't really in meat and potatoes SRPG stuff, instead you spend a lot of time walking across countries and maybe grinding out relationships on the way. when combat does happen, you're incentivized to finish it as quickly as possible, because fe4 has a habit of putting large blocks of enemies together and having them all swarm your units at once. the end result is a game where you're spending much more time prepping for a very intense 1-3 turn battle than actually fighting, which is definitely a bit disappointing. i get what they were going for, because elements like the arena grinding are interesting power fantasies at first and it does feel exhilarating to watch your stronger units go up against a swarm of soldiers like it's no problem, but it definitely wears on the player after 40+ hours of it. the weapon rank system is also very rough here, again leading to the issue i mentioned earlier where strong units get stronger and weak units get weaker over time. it is an absolute struggle to get some of your early game units (looking at you alec and noish) to be on par with your stronger units because they're locked to bad weapons. on the other side, your good units will often have more weapons than they know what to do with. once i get a brave lance on erin or a brave axe on lex, why would i ever use anything else? the other main issue i had with genealogy is more of an inherited issue from the games that preceded it, i felt the story was often told in too abstract a manner to connect with it emotionally. a lot of key plot points happen off screen or are portrayed through map sprites, and i found it hard to feel personally invested in the stakes of the story as a result. it also often felt to me that the story's dialogue being limited to castle seizes and the beginning of chapters meant that some of the more interesting topics (child hunts, radicalization, persecution, poverty) couldn't get explored as deeply as i would have liked. i can't fault them too much, because obviously they were simply using the format that they had used for 3 games, but considering how radical of a departure FE4's gameplay is, i wish they had been more willing to experiment with the way the story is delivered as well.