Pros:
- The way they do classes in this entry is pretty flexible, not every character is suitable for as many classes as in Three Houses, but the Emblem system is basically like another class system layered on the base one, and I really enjoyed some combinations
- Listen, the plot's a mess, but half (or more) of the FE games' plots are messes. At least this one has some good moments. The protag saying "no, we don't know what these enemies are, let's retreat" like an actual sane person right at the start was super refreshing and funny for those of us who've played a lot of the series. And the plot twist near the end of the game had me laughing my ass off. Truly, the Fire Emblem Engage was the friends we made along the way.
- Pretty good OST, but get ready to hear Somniel themes a lot...
- Enjoyable characters, up there with Three Houses' cast, easily beating the casts of other recent FE games. Came for Chloé because green(ish) hair and hot, but ended up really falling in love with Lapis because she's just such a sweetheart, she does so many nice things for everyone else, and she can apparently make anything out of stuff she finds out of the ground, so color me impressed. I'm glad they added her to FEH. Also, I'm glad Ivy isn't just "Camilla 2." She has a distinct and likeable personality.
- MALE DANCER, I REPEAT, WE HAVE A MALE DANCER
- Also, black characters who aren't villains! I think it's a series first. They've had lots of brown-skinned characters in the series before, but our black characters are dark skinned in this game, and we love them for that.
- Some of the maps are pretty good

Cons:
- It's made for series vets. It's literally just all fan service, but not big boobie anime women fan service (though there is a smidge of that here too,) no it's fan service in the form of characters from past entries in the series making references to their own games, and seeing them interact with you and your army. Wanna know what Ike likes to eat? Wanna know how Leif would react to getting hit on? Wanna know what Tiki would say in response to Anna trying to sell her stuff? No? Of course not! You have to be extremely FE-brained to enjoy most of this game's gimmicks. It's not a game meant for anyone who isn't already long-time franchise fan. That is not a good thing for a game to be.
- I'm pretty sure they designed Toothpate-chan first and then created a plot based around answering why she looks like that afterward. No, seriously, the person they hired who designed her is infamous for drawing characters with two hair colors and/or heterochromia. So either they had this honestly pretty bad story already planned out and hired the One Person Who Only Designs Characters Like That, or, more likely, they liked that person's work and decided to hire them, and that's how this plot got written. Yikes!
- Goldmary
- Framme
- Everything else about the game, but ESPECIALLY THE MINIGAMES AARRRRRGH STOP MAKING ME FISH I NEED THOSE GEM THINGS BUT WHY IS FISHING THE BEST WAY TO GET THEM

I kind of got bored trying to get all the support convos but I'll finish this eventually.

It had some dull/annoying moments and several crashes, but goddamn was this game still good as hell. They got most everything right about what made the old Doom games work, and they managed to retain a bit of what was cool about Doom 3, too, without letting the stuff that sucked about it taint this game. While I'm not the biggest fan of the arena encounter design they went with, it wasn't the worst option they could have chose. Having exploration and combat be mostly separated is basically how most casual players approached the old Doom games anyway, though there's unfortunately a lot less of the "welp there were a bunch of monsters behind that door" moments from Romero's old sadistic map designs that I miss. The soundtrack helps make up for it a bit. It's got a pulse to it that makes you want more and more. I kinda wanna replay it someday soon.

I really want to give this 5 stars, but they patched it so you can't do the skip that lets you get overleveled in the early game, therefore you have to go through the early game as intended, meaning there's like 4+ hours of gameplay where combat is super boring because you're not at the level where you can start doing what makes this game's combat fun. But otherwise it improves on the original in basically every way, and that game itself was basically a 5 star game bogged down by little QoL flaws. It's a shame that they patched out that skip but didn't rebalance the game to let you experience the better combat mechanics quickly. I played this up to the point where I was basically done with the game and just doing challenge mode, since I didn't need to actually go beat the game since I've seen the ending of the original already. In my heart, I have completed it, but technically I haven't. Maybe one day I'll go do that so I can watch the ending in HD, who knows.

Holy hell this game is overrated. Like, it's decent for sure, great artstyle and presentation, but it's full of some of the most tedious backtracking EVER in the series, and has the Dark Souls mechanic of taking your money away from you if you die, and if you don't get back to your place of death, you're permanently stunted on stats and you'll truly lose that money forever if you die again. Couple that with tough as nails bosses and it's just brutal. I got like 90% of the way through and just had enough. Didn't want to bother finishing the game. I might go back later but I really don't feel like it. I discovered Rabi-Ribi and got my "tough-as-nails Metroidvania" fix from that because unlike this game, it respects the player's time and lets you quick reset back to your last (very frequent!) autosave point with a short button combination. I like hard, challenging games, but they need to meet me halfway and agree to put me right back in the action instead of wasting my time like Hollow Knight does. I will die on this hill: this game is MID.

I'm being serious when I say this: this game's only flaws are specific rooms being super annoying to navigate and yet you're required to backtrack through them several times unless you're doing speedrunning tricks; Thardis' heath pool; a little too many Chozo Ghost encounters; AND Magmoor Caverns' music getting annoying after hearing it over and over and over and over. Otherwise, this is game is lightning in a bottle. It's SO good. Best played on Dolphin with lots of upscaling and HD texture and forced widescreen and such. With that said, even vanilla looks good to this day. It has to lose half a star becaue those aforementioned problems are kinda a big deal, they just make parts of the game really un-fun. Also I'm gonna be honest, the analog triggers on the original Gamecube made this game a delight to control. I know speedrunning this game means those controls are really finicky but as a casual player I LOVE them, way more than dual stick controls in the remaster. People who played this and then went on to say they prefer the dual stick controls in the remaster need to see psychologists, because something is wrong with them.

I liked it better before the 2nd DLC pack basically ruined it. Although I really love the dopamine hit of doing Mythra combos, basically everything else about that DLC pack was so bad for the game it's not funny. Palutena (my main from Smash 4) being top tier at the beginning was fun, but then they nerfed her kill confirms almost completely out of the game and now she's just a pure fundies character having to fight characters with touches of death. If I'm being honest, this game should get 2 stars, but I give it a bonus half star because I enjoyed it a lot before the first DLC pack, and a bonus star because they made Palutena good. If they make another Smash game, they should just admit Project+ has the best physics and use that, and put all the character from this game into that, except for Steve, Kazuya, and Min Min. Then it'll be basically the perfect Smash game.

Joseph Anderson was basically right about this game. I think he was a little too harsh on it, but yeah, it's mostly uninspired, shallow, and full of reused content. Sure, Mario 64 reused content as well, but that was 20 years before this game's release. There's no excuse for it in this game. It took me a while to come back to this game and finish it. I didn't go for the extra levels, because I was very bored of it and only trudging on because I like to complete games when I can. For me, seeing the ending cutscene was enough.

For what it is, it's basically perfect. It has a few moments of unnecessary tedium, but for the most part, it has a great momentum to its story, enjoyable gameplay, many likeable characters (even if not all of them are,) fun secrets, and lots of jokes, many of them funny. If it were a $60 game I would give it 4 stars, but at its actual price, it's pretty much perfect. I still get goosebumps when I hear certain tracks. If you rate this lower than 4 stars you are a contrarian that hates fun, sorry but that's the truth.