I feel the need to write a review to justify my relatively lukewarm rating of this game, given that I was very positive on VS1 and on the surface this is just "more of the same", but I think there are some changes here that really bring down the experience, even if the map design still features a lot of creativity and there are a lot of fun to use, unique characters (i love bertoulia)

1: I was very disappointed in the replacement of the 5-turn save system with an infinite manual battle save. The former worked really well in both Berwick and VS1, it gives you a natural flow to risk-taking where you take a lot of risks immediately, then as the turns get closer to a save, you play more conservatively, until you get a breath of relief with a 5-turn save. Infinite, at-will saves makes the game a lot easier overall and less interesting, worse still it feels like the game is designed around them, which links into my 2nd point.

2: The spam of chance-based skills here is quite egregious. I'm sure everyone remembers greatshield barons from Genealogy and how irritating they were to deal with. Well, here, almost every generic armored soldier has that skill, on top of a bunch of other examples, it feels like it almost encourages you to abuse the save system (bizzarely since this wasn't a problem with fe4's rng) since reloading a save completely resets the RNG, allowing you to brute-force whatever strategy you want if you have enough patience and aren't facing 100% hit rates.

3: One of the best things, in my opinion, about VS1 was the full deployment. Just like FE4, it allowed weaker units who wouldn't see much use otherwise to contribute their own niche. I was sad to see there are many chapters in this game where that doesn't apply anymore and it makes the bad units of this game even worse.

4: The writing here feels like Kaga's worst ever, I'm not sure if this is me forgetting the quality of the VS1's writing but I recently replayed Berwick and that was fine. In a lot of ways the writing here is Kaga's worst tendencies unleashed. There are not one but two vs1/tearring-style "banquet scenes" where there is a huge dump of character interaction - while this isn't bad per se and I liked it in VS1, the ones here are soooooo long, they are like an hour long, it's insane. The placement, length, and pacing of exposition in this game is also some of Kaga's worst - prepare yourself for very lengthy history lessons.

Kaga isn't a stranger to some "yikes" moments in his writing (e.g. Tearring "milk" scene (if you know you know), Berwick reese/lynette, among other examples), but the ones in this game are REALLY yikes. The two that really stunned me were barzelphon's entire subplot with the maid cafe that was just so gross, not in a way that contributes anything to the plot either, it just feels like Kaga insterting his NTR hypnosis fetish into the game for no reason.
//minor spoilers for the second example
the other is Theodel's relationship with his sister, it turns out they're not actually related! and the FIRST THING theo does when he learns this is he says "I can't wait until she turns 18", he says that about this underage girl who has acted as his sister all these years, this is played completely straight as far as I can tell and theo is a 'good guy' who we're supposed to like, it's very weird.
Having these kind of things in stories is kind of a balancing act between acknowledging that things like this happen (especially in a medieval-style setting) but also providing a perspective not aligned with it or condoning it, and I feel like this one in particular oversteps that boundary quite clearly.

Depending on who you are these might not be problems at all and you might not care, that's fine and ultimately I'm still positive on this game and think it's worth playing if you liked VS1, there are still tons of unique characters and interesting map designs - these two aspects have always been Kaga's strongest and they're just as strong here. My biggest problem is the save system + chance-based skills and if those were gone it would be closer to a 7.5 for me.