Bit half and half on this game overall. Parts I enjoyed, parts I did not enjoy. I do not think I enjoy the type of strategy this game provides. I do not care to use the items a whole lot in strategy games I play, and they really make a huge difference. I also do not like grinding battles to get better gear, characters, skill levels and the such. This game prevents you from grinding levels, which I am fine with, but expects you to grind Palace of the Dead and the Phorampa Wood place to get better items and gear and characters to make the story battles easier or trivialize them. Feels contradictory. May as well take the level cap off the game then. Now, I beat the story of this game by doing about no optional stuff at all because the game bored me and I just wanted to see the story. No Palace of the Dead, Phorampa Woods, other side battles to recruit characters, nothing like that. Just the main story. I did chaos route on this blind playthrough, so I am not sure if that is the easiest route or hardest, i'unno. The Oz and Ozma battle I saw people complain about online was not really hard like people said it was, and the final boss of the base game was not really hard either. I just kept hitting the final boss and did not have any issues. When you have 12 people against 1 person, you just end up out-actioning the person and beat them, even if they 1 or 2 shot every person on your team. I'm surprised people said you should do Palace of the Dead before beating the final boss or else it would be too hard or something. I did not feel that. Now, yes the final boss does have a difficulty spike, but if you wail on him you can pretty much brute force through him in both his phases. I read online about ways to cheese him and no I did not use those ways. I did not lob shots, use dragons, solo him with Denam with lord phalanx and first aid, and spam debuffs on him. All I did was hit him with everyone and healed or revived people up when needed. When I stunned him with the two white knights it just happened to happen, and even then I was not lucky with him stumbling a lot. He only stumbled like 2 times the whole fight and kept hitting people.

Pros:
1. This game has a lot of game in it, so if you end up enjoying it you really get your money's worth. A lot of replay ability.
2. When you end up doing an attack that does a butt ton of damage man does it feel good in this game. That, or you end up knocking an enemy off an edge and one shot them as a result.
3. The story in this game for at least the chaos route is good. I do think the story is better than most Fire Emblem games I have played. I do not know exactly why I found myself not to be immersed or caring a whole lot about it except if I saw someone die somehow. I guess the long boring battles took me out of the game.
4. Being able to time travel after you beat the game is really cool to see different events, although I'm sure I will not revisit this game, unless how my brain operates becomes different later down the road.
5. Velocity shift and boost of swiftness is a godsend in this game and I love those two abilities. It made the battles faster for me and made me able to stomach it more.

Cons:
1. The gameplay in battles is too freaking slow, even with the fast-forward option on. I cannot imagine playing the older versions of this game, I would lose my mind. There's too much darn waiting involved.
2. Passive abilities are too strong in this game and may not proc. It's dumb. Passives for everyone should always proc, or they should have been re-balanced to not be as powerful. For the player and the enemy if either procs their passives it makes a huge difference in the tide of the battle. Feels like I'm gambling at a casino rather than playing a strategy game.
3. The blue cards are cool but again are so random on what spawns and how frequently and where. I do not think they should exist. Basically more rng and only strategy is using them if they spawn and are not out of your way to go get in a battle.
4. The level cap is dumb because you reach it so fast with just doing the story battles that it makes the experience you gain useless. This is nothing about wanting to grind exp to make the game easy, I beat the game no problem with some frustrations how it was with no optional stuff. This game is not crazy hard.
5. The volume for at least the English voices were all over the place with earbuds or with a surround sound system. Some people you could hear fine, others were whispering like they were in their Mom's basement trying not to wake anyone in their house up. Combine that with the loud volume of the battles and you will end up having to adjust the volume of this game a lot.
6. The end story dungeons having edges you can be knocked off from out of nowhere and instantly killing your party is dumb as hell. It just causes a reset if it happens. The only counterplay is to not be on the edge of the map or have a character that can equip an ability that can prevent them from being knocked back, which not everyone has.
7. Some dialog choices that impact the story in this game are a bit weird. It says Denam will say something and you choose it to see him say something different that has people reacting differently than what they would have reacted if he just said what the game told you he would say.
8. It's fine to have the story bosses be strong and even 1 or 2 shot your allies, but it's weird that the vast majority of the battles have it where if you kill just the boss you can ignore the fodder enemies and beat the battle faster. Feels like you are ignoring part of the game when doing that, but with how tanky enemies get at varying parts of the story I found myself just killing the boss and being done with it. I feel like you should have had to kill at least majority of the enemies on top of the boss. Feels like you're cheesing the game when you do that.

The game mentions the Ogre Battle a few times that happened in the past, and it makes me want to play the game that had it, because it sounded epic, but apparently that game does not exist because it just has not been made, and probably never will. Weird how the timeline of this series is with there being like 4 episodes or stories that have not been made into games yet, but are referenced in the games from episode 5 onward as games.

A game that on paper I should absolutely enjoy but just has never clicked with me. Dropped after a little over 20 hours, with this version being my third attempt to play this game.

There's some slight remixing that I felt were for the better. Character progression has been sped up significantly thanks to how leveling works now. Magic users for example now get access to crucial skills like Meditate much earlier than before making the beginning of the game much quicker. Buff cards are added into the battle that add a great random effect and can make battles quicker and more exciting.

Some other changes are a bit more puzzling. I'm not sure why the level cap is in there or what purpose it is supposed to serve. It feels especially egregious because the difficulty of this game felt quite brutal compared with the previous version. Some of the fights feel unreasonably hard - especially the castle fights where bosses start out with an insane amount of buffs in addition to their stats. Even when you hit the level cap the enemies are still 1 to 2 levels above you. I'm not sure exactly how much of a difference that makes but often times I was getting crushed so easily that it felt like I was playing the game wrong in some way. I don't know why the game took away the option for me to brute force my way through if that's how I chose to play it.

My other gripes with this game haven't changed. I felt like the game gets repetitive pretty quickly. I don't feel like there's much diversity to the level design between missions and maps seem big for the sake of being big. Some maps get replayed multiple times and the enemy layout becomes quite monotonous.

The class system here didn't do much for me either. I've never liked how classes operate in the Ogre games and this is still the case here. I didn't feel like there was much individual build variety with characters. Give or take swapping out a few contextual skills I didn't spend a whole lot of time tinkering nor did I feel like I was rewarded for the times when I did do it (again, what's going on with this game's difficulty?).

The plot in this game I've always really wanted to like, but while the world is interesting I just found the story itself boring. I felt like the game lacks a human anchor to help me care about the world politics. Dialog became a tiresome listing of factions and families while I was wishing for a little emotion from a character.

This is definitely an excellent game but just not one that I could connect with. I probably would have finished it if it wasn't so frustrating and repetitive.