Unfiltered unapologetic anger of a strategy game fan ahead:
Man this game was just disappointing. The difficulty and strategic depth are all artificial and the people who have been gassing this game up for ages with no complaints definitely haven't made it past act 2. I'm convinced that the majority of positive reviews I've seen for this game are people deluded into thinking it's good because the visuals are well-done and they're desperate to have a proper spiritual successor to the mostly abandoned Advanced Wars franchise.

And no, don't try and insist otherwise. According to the Steam achievements only 2.4% of people have cleared the final act. Only 2.4% of people bothered to get enough stars to unlock and finish the game. Even if we assume that it was too much to grind out, let's take a loot at act 6, eh? Only 4.8% of people have cleared act 6. Oh.

This game is a mockery of the games it copies. It guts out some of the mechanics that made those games so engaging (all commanders play the same, for instance, is the biggest one for me) in order to try and be unique. It loses all of its steam after the initial act 1 when you hit the vertical difficulty spike of act 2 and have to play precisely how the game wants you to in order to achieve S ranks - which boils down to spamming units before the enemy overwhelms you with its inflated gold income and runs you over. You could say, oh but S rank isn't required to clear - and this is true. Yet the game also requires you to at least get enough stars to even UNLOCK the final act. Not a true ending, just to flat out finish the game. There's very little strategy to these S-ranks apart from throwing your units at the opponent until you win in a speedrun # of turns required (with no save states in case you misplay slightly and ruin your whole strategy), rather than wanting you to play strategical, encouraging throwing lives of your apparently incredibly disposable units away. Because the only thing that matters in war is speed.

This continues all the way until act 7 where the game designers seemingly then decide "I'm tired of making Advanced Wars maps, this is Fire Emblem now" and forces you to play NOT around strategically capturing points and building up a nest egg but rather just being a rushdown map where you have to minimize losses versus an army quintuple your size. These maps would be excusable if the VERY FINAL MAP OF THE GAME WASN'T ONE OF THESE, effectively tossing in the dumpster any strategical skills you had nurtured leading up to the climax. Again, picture any castle siege map of Fire Emblem. It's exactly the same. No gold income or unit spawners for you to play with.

Don't even get me started on how horribly imbalanced the Arcade Mode's higher difficulty tiers are, which only make the game harder by doubling the AI's gold income per building. Because that's a fun challenge. Good thing the game requires you to clear Arcade mode on every single difficulty, on every single character, to achieve 100%. I climbed that mountain and I saw its peak. It sucked.

I stuck through the whole game hoping something would click and I would get it, but no, it just gradually got worse. I'm an angrier person for having stuck with this dumpster fire of a game. It was built on the remains of a genuinely good franchise, captivating those of us who wanted a love letter to the same games it copied the formula from, and all it had to do was replicate and improve the blueprint. Instead they just lit the blueprint on fire and made a pale imitation wearing the skin of a better game. Don't get suckered by the pretty pixel art, it genuinely isn't worth your time.

I can only recommend this to people who want to play it strictly for the multiplayer, which the community is active to this day to my knowledge with quite a generous amount of community events and custom maps to play with.