I’ve been playing this game nonstop for two weeks, constantly thinking about how I want to get my thoughts out on this one. Radiant Dawn gets a fair amount of distaste these days because of what it does wrong, and it’s totally fair, but I can’t get myself to dislike this game even with the myriad of problems.
For every stupid thing RD does, it does three other things that are pure genius. The sheer scale of everything makes this the largest and most ambitious FE game to date, even outdoing Genealogy of the Holy War. There’s a huge amount of map variety, with objectives and units constantly changing to help tell the story. It’s far from being a boring FE game because the game never stops mixing things up every chapter or so. While it can be very hectic both in gameplay and story, I can’t help but admire what was done here. Every single map, even the ones I disliked, made me go “wow, that was a neat concept for a map and it feels unique compared to everything else so far!” The gameplay-story integration is also up there with the Jugdral titles, especially the finale of part 3 which is one of my favorite maps in the whole series. When in tandem with the fantastic Tellius mechanics such as shove/rescue and BEXP it also creates an immensely fun gameplay experience.
The story is mixed overall and i think PoR had a more solidly constructed narrative, but RD has a lot of interesting concepts and plot threads that are thrown around, and when combined with the ludonarrative aspects of the gameplay, makes it super engaging. There’s definitely a lot of “huh” moments closer to the end, though, and the final part is a really odd curveball after the very dense political drama the rest of the game was, but the themes it uses are probably the best use of said themes in the entire series.
I dunno man, I adore Radiant Dawn. There’s like 800 problems you could pick at with this game and I still wouldn’t give a shit. It’s the quintessential Fire Emblem game in my eyes, it has something for really any fan of the series. Maybe not the whole package will jive with someone, but I think you’ll get at least one section of the game that appeals to your tastes. Radiant Dawn is messy, ambitious, and maybe tries to bite off more than it can chew. But at the same time, I almost wouldn’t have it any other way.

Engage's Fell Xenologue DLC feels like the complete opposite of the base game and not in a good way.

It has worse maps, a completely broken difficulty curve and being forced to always repeat the side story on future playthroughs for the additional characters is a terrible and questionable decision.

The new characters are fun though and provide atleast some incentive to play through this mess, but I would not recommend it.

>incestual pairings
>eugenics
>child murder
>patricide
>immolation
>jihad warriors
>dense politics

Yeah, I'm thinking five stars.