Just beat Engage and have some thoughts.Â
-The gameplay and maps are fantastic, such a good step away from 3H’s Wyvern spam for your units, and overall meh map designs.Â
-The characters, while mostly pretty shallow, are still fun for me. Standouts include: Yunaka, Alcryst, Ivy, and Celine when she’s not talking about tea.Â
-Music’s fantastic, as per usual. All the trial paralogue songs are great remixes. and Brodia and Solm’s battle themes in particular are real good.
-The story’s... fine, I guess. It’s very by the books, bog standard which can be disappointing to those coming off of 3H’s more nuanced and gray story (minus TWISTD of course). I will say, it picks up steam after chapter 10, but even still it’s never great, just servicable.
-Unit balance is weird, especially on Maddening mode. The early game units have such a hard time keeping up with units you get later that it’s hard to justify using them. The easiest example I can think of for this is poor Lapis. Not only is she already competing against your Alear for sword user, but Diamant is introduced in literally the very next chapter, and two chapters after that you get Kagetsu.
-Lack of shared endings for non S-supported units fucking sucks dude. Hopefully they add this later on in an update, but as of right now it’s pretty sad that the relationships I spent the whole game building up don’t lead to anything.
My final team was: Alear (Byleth), Framme (Micaiah), Louis (Sigurd), Chloe (Roy), Yunaka (Corrin), Ivy (Lyn), Fogato (Leif), Timmera (Ike), Anna (Lucina), Pendreo, the last two characters (Marth on V), Seadall (Celica), and Mirran (Eirika).
