I got to the hanging gardens and I kind of just don't care anymore. This game is way too long, I'm not enjoying it enough and I don't care enough about the rest of the plot to see what happens

To be honest, this one has been a bummer. I really thought I would like it more, and at first I was really enjoying my time with it, but the game is so slow and there are just too many samey battles that you have to do. I can't explain enough how poor I think this game's pacing is. I understand that it's an issue that tactical role-playing games often face, but so many of these fights feel like total filler.

The plot is interesting and there are a lot of moving pieces in who you can recruit, who lives, who dies, what path, etc., but as a plot for just one playthrough? I don't know it's just not particularly satisfying and the last thing I want to do is play MORE of these fights when I'm already bored to tears. A lot of these are issues that carry over from the original game, the big thing being lack of variety in what you're actually doing on these maps beyond "Kill all the enemies" or "Kill one enemy". Some of the maps try and spice it up, but most of the time in these late game fights, you're just better off sending a squad down the middle of the map, and getting some units close enough to spam finishers to kill the enemy leader fast enough. It's not especially enjoyable, and even with the animations set to speed up it's slow.

The music is good, but the fights last so long that I'm sick of most of the OST at this point. Which really is just the way I feel about the whole game. Other RPGs can justify their length by having really interesting stories or at least the stories have good enough pacing, or cool bosses, or getting to know characters. Here (and this is a symptom of it being a remake of a remake of a SNES game), there just isn't anything left that makes me want to sit here and get all the equipment needed to take on what is apparently a big difficulty spike final boss.

It's a hard one for me to rate because if I look at it as a SNES remake, there is a lot to like, and it is an extremely influential game. Mechanically, it's mostly good still (Though the level cap they chose to go with is just stupid), it's well written, etc., but pretty much since chapter 4 started I wanted the game to wrap itself up, and it just kept going. I guess the lesson is that you can have too much of a good thing and it feels like to really experience the whole story, you have to play way too much (and it's rare that I find JRPGs that I think are way too long so I think that says something)

Thank god for Metroid Dread

Structurally, it’s far from my favorite in the series and gameplay-wise obviously it was a big step up following Fusion, but the 3DS was not the best place for a game with controls like these. It’s rare that my hands get crampy playing 3DS games, but some of the bosses are so involved and require some pretty quick movements which can be a little hard to pull off

The counter system works so much better in Metroid Dread, where as here the minor enemies get more annoying than anything else

But it’s still a great Metroid game above all else

Easily the biggest slog of a video game I've ever played. For as perfectly fine as the mechanics of this game are, I find it impossible to actually appreciate for more than very brief moments because the actual mission structure is awful.

There are very few actually interesting segments in this game, with most of them being copy-pasted "follow the person in stealth mode" or "chase a dude on a bike" or "kill some guys in a camp". It happens over and over again, and the game doesn't even have the decency to not tie what should be bonus side content into the main story, so you have to do some of these regardless.

And the game offers next to nothing to compensate for this. The narrative is painfully mediocre. In a game with decent pacing, it would have just been a bit forgettable, but instead the entire mid-act of the game drags, and the way the game fragments its open world makes the 2nd act feel disjointed from the first in many ways.

The only redeeming parts of the game are the mechanics being pretty smooth and the hordes, which are mostly just thrown in at the end of the game save a few moments where you see them roaming the world (which is cool). I honestly just could not get over how repetitive the game was. The game took me around 30 hours for mostly just main story content This game doesn't need to be even half that length. This plot doesn't justify it. The gameplay doesn't justify it. I don't know what they were thinking

Dropped it at the Wily capsule fight. Awful boss. If I was playing this on SNES with no checkpoint saves and I had to go through all the Wily stages just to get my ass kicked by that boss again, I would have been infuriated

But even if that boss was great, I'm just not feeling this one. I don't like how large Mega Man is relative to the stages. They feel cramped, and I think the level design in this game is okay at best, with some stages being straight up bad. It was a little easier to get away with this in the earlier games because the stages aren't all winners in the earlier games, but for a 7th entry in a series, it's just stale, and granted I feel 5 and 6 are a bit stale as wall.

Really interesting game. I think I appreciate it for being experimental a bit more than actually playing it

It was pretty frustrating having to use a guide to get the best ending, and some of the dungeons are more irritating than anything else. I also think the game has some issues with difficulty scaling

But you won’t find another game that’s really like this, and the atmosphere is so unique with its vignettes

I'm not sure if I kept playing because the game is particularly good at making you want to try one more run or if I just wanted the game to be over by the end of it

There's a lot of stuff in the game, and it's worth the generous price they're selling it at, but it's also pretty damn boring. It's just engaging enough that you have to pay attention in most early runs, but you're really not doing much other than moving a character and the game doesn't really function as a bullet hell once you're powered up, so by the end it's literally just about watching the numbers go up and unlocking new things to make those numbers go up and have a different character to move around while the numbers go up

I don't like "Number goes up" criticism because it's at the heart of most RPGs in general, but outside of one or 2 maps that change up the flow and the way you have to move around (Ex: Only horizontally), the gameplay just isn't changing in an engaging way. The characters don't play especially differently other than the starting weapons, but you're unlocking so many weapons anyways that they just feel samey 5 minutes into a run.

It's frustrating. I've played a lot of games that are worse than this, but it's rare that I feel like I got almost nothing out of a game. It feels like a total waste of time, and I feel bad because I know there's more to it than that and there's some cute little references, but nothing in this game feels its own, and the aspects that are unique like the gameplay, I don't think really culminate in anything

Definitely a mixed bag and definitely stuck between two eras. The story, while probably excellent for the NES, ends up being really boring today and compared to other DS titles. The characters are also just pretty much by default worse than most other Fire Emblem games because the dialogue for most supporting characters is few and far between (Or basically non-existent). As an NES remake, it's good. As a DS game, it needs some work.

I was surprised how well some of the maps held up though, and I think the core gameplay of Fire Emblem is solid enough to carry the game