Azure moon

Playing this has made me appreciate the older games in the franchise more. Map design or objective variety are elements I didn't really pay attention to until I noticed playing this entry just how much I missed them. While not every map here is 'rout the enemy' or 'kill the enemy commander', I missed more chests and thieves, or villages getting burned by raiders, and I hated some map designs, like the Manuela and Hanneman paralogue that lock most of your units to only half the map, unless they take the long route which takes too long and you’ll be finished by the time they get to where you want them to be.

But for this Fire Emblem, the battles are not the whole game, as now there's also a social aspect to the game in the monastery, and while I think Fire Emblem has always had a social segment to the games that was a bit underdeveloped, so working more on it is a good idea, the Persona formula used here is definitely not perfect. Towards the second half of the game, I started to get really tired of talking to everyone in the monastery and waiting another whole month before I could continue the story, and I maxed everything I wanted months before the end of the game, so it was a slog to go through. In the Persona games, if you do everything perfectly timed you end up with like 2 weeks at most. Still, it's a balancing issue, and there's a lot of room for improvement on a future game iterating on the idea, so I can excuse these issues to the first game trying the format out.

As for the story, the main selling point of the Blue Lions house is Dimitri, if you like him and enjoy his character arc then you'll most likely enjoy this route. The thing is that I really don't know how good this route is for a first run, because there are so many points that are left unexplained and even after beating it I feel like I barely know about the plot. And of course, I just played one route, so there's a lot explained in other routes as well as things exclusive to this one, but I can't shake the feeling that I didn't choose the correct house for my first run, a lot of the story setup in the first half is dropped and never brought up again. It's weird because a lot of the events that occur in the first half are connected to Blue Lions characters, like chapter 3 or 5, so there’s even a personal reason to investigate why things are unfolding this way, but no, it gets dropped for Dimitri, play another route if you want anything other than Dimitri lmao.
Even after all this criticism, I still feel positive about this game, it’s the juxtaposition of the two main gameplay aspects that enhance the experience, even if those elements by themselves aren’t great. I will keep playing the other routes, and will probably update the score once i see the full picture. Hopefully the story is good.

Azure moon

Playing this has made me appreciate the older games in the franchise more. Map design or objective variety are elements I didn't really pay attention to until I noticed playing this entry just how much I missed them. While not every map here is 'rout the enemy' or 'kill the enemy commander', I missed more chests and thieves, or villages getting burned by raiders, and I hated some map designs, like the Manuela and Hanneman paralogue that lock most of your units to only half the map, unless they take the long route which takes too long and you’ll be finished by the time they get to where you want them to be.

But for this Fire Emblem, the battles are not the whole game, as now there's also a social aspect to the game in the monastery, and while I think Fire Emblem has always had a social segment to the games that was a bit underdeveloped, so working more on it is a good idea, the Persona formula used here is definitely not perfect. Towards the second half of the game, I started to get really tired of talking to everyone in the monastery and waiting another whole month before I could continue the story, and I maxed everything I wanted months before the end of the game, so it was a slog to go through. In the Persona games, if you do everything perfectly timed you end up with like 2 weeks at most. Still, it's a balancing issue, and there's a lot of room for improvement on a future game iterating on the idea, so I can excuse these issues to the first game trying the format out.

As for the story, the main selling point of the Blue Lions house is Dimitri, if you like him and enjoy his character arc then you'll most likely enjoy this route. The thing is that I really don't know how good this route is for a first run, because there are so many points that are left unexplained and even after beating it I feel like I barely know about the plot. And of course, I just played one route, so there's a lot explained in other routes as well as things exclusive to this one, but I can't shake the feeling that I didn't choose the correct house for my first run, a lot of the story setup in the first half is dropped and never brought up again. It's weird because a lot of the events that occur in the first half are connected to Blue Lions characters, like chapter 3 or 5, so there’s even a personal reason to investigate why things are unfolding this way, but no, it gets dropped for Dimitri, play another route if you want anything other than Dimitri lmao.
Even after all this criticism, I still feel positive about this game, it’s the juxtaposition of the two main gameplay aspects that enhance the experience, even if those elements by themselves aren’t great. I will keep playing the other routes, and will probably update the score once i see the full picture. Hopefully the story is good.