I'm still in the process of completing this game but I'm writing down what I feel so far.

I was on the same ship as everyone else when it was first shown. "$70 DLC? Come on!"

Yeah so, I was wrong. I was so wrong. This game takes Breath of the Wild, an already amazing game, and addresses every single damn criticism it ever had.

That's all for now. I'll come back when I'm done. It's lowkey on it's way to being my new favorite game of all time.

I had a blast playing this game.
The plot isn't very good. It is mostly lighthearted, simple and clichéd and there are a lot of hammy moments, but it does its job pretty well.
The gameplay is super fun. This is the fire emblemwith the best and most addicting combat, raising up tyour units and using the emblem rings throw a lot of fun complexity into the mix. There are a couple of tasks in the base that get boring (like ring polishing) but most of those are alright_
The soundtrack does have a lot of bangers and I see myselflistening to a lot of its OST on youtube. It is teh second best soundtrack after Conquest IMO
The character design is a bit weird a a bit too animu at first but it kind of grew on me. The combat animations are fun and ENGAGING.

I hope they use this game as an influence for future titles in the series,

Fire Emblem Engage trades Three Houses’ operatic tale of fractured kingdoms for something altogether simpler. Alear is a good dragon. She and her friends have to go fight a bad dragon. Also she’s got some crazy looking hair. That’s pretty much it.

So yeah, the character work and worldbuilding isn’t... great. But I've got a soft spot for some goofy anime earnestness, and Engage eventually managed to win me over once I recalibrated my expectations. This is a story that wears its heart right there on its sleeve. Also, after staring at Byleth’s cold dead face for 170 odd hours, what a joy it is to have a protagonist that thinks and talks and has emotions. Alear isn’t an especially deep character by any stretch, but even a little overt characterization goes a long way.

But Engage’s true raison d'etre is the gameplay. The new break system. The absurdly powerful engage rings. The finely tuned difficulty. Unique maps and objectives. Paralogues that celebrate the series’ history. Stunning combat and critical hit animations. Gosh, the animations. For so long the GBA games were the gold standard for Fire Emblem combat animations. Engage might finally give them a run for their money. I will never get tired of Yunaka flitting through the air like some kind of hummingbird ninja to end some poor guy’s life.

Simply put, I’ve never had more fun playing a Fire Emblem game. Engage throws so many powerful tools at you, and then it builds challenges that push you to your limits. For the first time in the series, Engage feels like it was actually balanced around the turn rewind mechanic. In Three Houses the Divine Pulse all but removed the need for planning or strategy. Here, it's an essential tool in your arsenal as you face down overwhelming odds. I lost track of how many times Engage backed me into a seemingly hopeless corner, only for me to narrowly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. One particular battle featured no fewer than 6 bosses bearing down on my beleaguered army. I remember desperately stalling a pair of powerful enemies on one front while the rest of my army tried—and nearly failed—to take down the nigh-unkillable Mauvier. Dude’s a tank. Overcoming the odds was tense and thrilling, requiring me to take advantage of every tool at my disposal.

Of course not all is perfect in Elyos.

For one, I miss the master classes from Three Houses. It’s a small thing, but they were an exciting late-game goal, giving you something to strive for in the back half of the game, and the extravagant battle outfits were kind of their own reward. It’s a little less fun using a master seal a third of the way into the game and knowing that’s it for that character class-wise.

Absent master classes, Engage’s new skill system steps in to let you customize and power up your units in the late game, with somewhat mixed results. Skills feel appropriately powerful and valuable. Even the less exciting skills that offer a passive stat boost can feel great, turning Yunaka into an unhittable crit-machine or enabling Alcryst to strike even the most distant foes with perfect accuracy.

That said, the skill system has its flaws. For starters, acquiring skills is weirdly tedious. You’ve got to collect bond fragments from the achievement board so you can spend them in the arena to boost emblem levels so you can purchase skills over in the ring chamber, which you can finally equip in the inventory menu, all requiring multiple loading screens as you flit back and forth between various rooms of the Somniel. And at no point in this process will you ever have access to all the information you might find useful, meaning you’ll probably even make duplicate visits to each room if you’ve got the memory of a goldfish like me.

To make matters worse, the cost of the skills makes the entire system unnecessarily restrictive with basically no room for experimentation. SP costs for individual skills feel astronomically high, and with no way to refund SP once you purchase a skill you’d better be dang sure of your character build before investing. This led to me waiting until very late in the game before I really dove into the skill system. A number of the skills are so expensive that they're actually impossible to purchase in the course of a normal run even after playing all main quests and paralogues. [The solution here seems to be taking advantage of the relay trial side activity which can award scrolls that confer SP to your characters. I didn’t mess with relay trials until after completing the game, but I guess it’s there if you want it.]

To play armchair game designer for a sec: I know there’s a careful balancing act at play here, but given that you’re already limited to two inherited skills at any given time, I think Engage would benefit from significantly lowering the skill costs and letting you mix and match depending on your current build or the demands of the map at hand. Heck, maybe you could just automatically inherit skills as you level up your bond with the emblems, rather than waiting until the mid- to late-game to spend your coveted SP on a measly one or two skills (and likely not even the highest level of those skills). This would allow you to mix and match the weaker skills even in the early game, and provide a far greater range of customization. Maybe you’d need to adjust the cost to train up bond levels if this were the case? I don’t know. Just something feels off and I wish it felt a little better.

The gold and ore economy feels similarly unbalanced. I stocked my barnyard fit to bursting with ore hounds, and I still don’t think I received enough silver ore over the course of the entire game to fully upgrade a single endgame weapon. Not to mention that doing so would have cost a full quarter of my gold reserves. The game lets you boost your ore gathering capabilities through charitable donations to each of the game’s four regions, but even the cost of these donations is absurdly high for the meager rewards on offer.

Perhaps Engage wanted me to grind out some skirmishes to pad my coffers, but doing so would have risked upsetting the perfect difficulty curve. Again, not a game designer, but maybe the rewards for completing the game’s many, many achievements could have been a bit more diverse, awarding you gold or weapons or ore or ingredients or items, instead of just bond fragments on top of bond fragments.

It’s just kind of baffling that Engage seems to actively disincentive interacting with these major game systems.

Then there’s the Somniel, where no disincentive is needed for me to completely ignore the various systems on offer. The activities that litter the Somniel become tedious relatively quickly, but to its great credit, Engage lets you ignore them with no lasting consequences. Where Three Houses downtime activities were the key to your characters’ permanent growth, most of Engage’s Somniel activities simply boost a couple stats temporarily for a single battle (or, hilariously, lower them when Yunaka tries her hand at cooking). Doing the activities that provide permanent growths (sharing a meal to raise support levels, three support level-boosting leisure activities, three training battles in the arena) takes just a few minutes, and then you’re onto the next battle.

And that’s where Fire Emblem Engage truly shines. In spite of its flaws, the battles at its core are absolutely thrilling. Bring on the DLC.