In my reviews for TRS, FE9, and Berwick Saga I mentioned that I only played the game recently. The same goes for FE10, I only finished it for the first time a few months ago. As such my opinions aren't as set in stone as the rest of the series. For the record, this is the last time I'll have to make a disclaimer like this. Also, I know there's some interesting decisions that were made when localizing this game but I'm not going to go into them because I really don't think they're all that relevant for the purposes of this review. All I have to say is that not going with the extended script was definitely a choice.

FE10 is the game I feel the most conflicted about. For every high point there's at least 5 low points to match and I feel the best way to succinctly describe FE10 is "tumultuous". So much of FE10 feels like a roller coaster where 1 moment I'll be thinking it's the peak of the series and the next will have me wishing FE had just died after Kaga left.

The story is definitely an interesting experience. I've never seen an FE game with a story that contains so much good and so much god awful. To keep this from becoming a jumbled mess, I'll cover each part individually.

Part 1 contains easily the best story content that FE10 has to offer. The way it conveys the struggle of the dawn brigade through challenging gameplay is really cool and I liked the story for the most part. Granted, Pelleas is an absolute knob and I wish anyone in this story would just grow a spine and kill him and Izuka. There's also the blood contract, which is probably the worst writing decision I've seen in Fire Emblem. I would still say part 1 has a generally good story though and I liked the way it tied into FE9 by bringing back characters who were originally from Daein.

Part 2 is the first sign of things to come. We shift our focus to Elincia. I like the idea of this part a lot. You get to see how Crimea is reacting to Daein's reconstruction and they're understandably worried. Elincia is a coward so she won't do anything and Ludveck takes it into his own hands to stage a coup so they can go and take out Pelleas and keep Daein in its place. This all seems well and good but right at the end there's a conversation between Elincia and Ludveck where he reveals that he was just testing her? He already had a perfectly reasonable motivation to rebel, why change it to something so nonsensical? They had something potentially cool going on here but they screwed it over at the last second for no discernable reason. Personally I would've preferred if Ludveck had won and then marched on Daein, but whatever. After that, we get the greil mercenaries' return. I liked the set up of their reveal but...

Then we get to part 3, which is when I feel the game completely falls apart. Part 3 is the longest in the game at 15 chapters. Despite that, I find this part to be easily the most forgettable and that's not mentioning how it hyper focuses on Ike even though he has no reason to even be in this story. Remember in FE5 when Seliph appeared for 1 scene and then never again? That was cool. In FE10, though, there's this emphasis on Ike that I can only assume was done to pander to people who like FE9. He has no reason to be the main character of any part, much less the longest in the game. So much of this part feels like padding, with only the last few chapters having substantial story progress. Blood pacts play a bigger role here which I still think are the worst plot device Intelligent Systems has come up with yet. The first 2 parts had their fair share of ill-advised writing decisions but I feel it all comes to a head in part 3 which makes it without a doubt the worst part of FE10.

Thanks to part 3, I stopped caring about the story by part 4. The first few chapters are irrelevant. I feel like FE10 is desperate to convey a large scale war, but I just don't think that large scale is a proper replacement for good writing. I was very happy to see Sanaki finally getting the attention she deserves in this story and I liked learning some of the lore behind Tellius. We're also graced with Dheginsea and Sephiran, who are the only villains in Tellius that I found to be all that interesting. There's also this grandstanding about how humanity doesn't need gods, which I felt came kind of out of nowhere. This was never a story about god or the role of religion in society but it's not like it's atrociously written so oh well.

I feel that FE10 focused too much on appeasing people who wanted updates on every single FE9 character instead of focusing on just telling a good sequel story, which I don't believe would even be hard to do given Tellius' world. In FE3 Book 2, you could only recruit some of the playable characters from Book 1. Many who weren't recruitable either didn't appear at all, were antagonists, or were side characters. This made their inclusions feel like they were made with consideration as to what their role in the story was whereas in FE10 characters only appear because they were in the last game.

Even if you ignore the returning characters, the FE10 original characters don't exactly fare well. Pelleas and Micaiah are the only ones given much of any development, with the rest being completely one note. Vika? Lyre? Nolan? I might be able to give you 1 or 2 basic personality traits but that's it. The character writing in this game took a steep decline in quality from FE9 and it makes the cast one of the most forgettable despite its size.

FE10 is interesting because despite everything I've said, I still wouldn't describe the story as horrendous. There are some monstrously bad decisions that go a long way to ruin what good does exist in this game but I'd still say it has a better story than FE6 or even FE7. At the absolute very least I can say I appreciate how FE10 sets itself apart with its unique structure, even if it is occasionally a bane.

I suppose I should talk about the gameplay, too. The fact that this was the very last FE I played probably will show the most here as I found this game to be very easy. In part 1 you can just solo everything with Sothe or whatever super unit they give you (Tauroneo, Black Knight, Nailah). In part 2 the maps aren't that hard to begin with and the amount of strong mounted units you're given makes it even more of a breeze. Nearly every single map in part 3 can be described as "place Haar in group of enemies. Equip hand axe. Win". Part 4 gives you the laguz royals who can already solo the game singlehandedly but the game gives you like 5 of them along with absurdly strong pre promotes which makes it even more of a joke. The only maps that gave me any trouble was the swamp map in part 3 but even that falls victim to FE10's insistence on giving you super units to trivialize the map with.

One side effect of FE10s structure is that training units is a fool's errand. I tried to train Edward, I really did. I heavily prioritized him in part 1 and gave him almost all of my bonus exp. What did I get? A mediocre swordy who only got to achieve that mediocrity in like 2 of the part 4 maps before being benched before the tower. I put a lot of effort into training Ed and got absolutely nothing out of it. He wasn't useless but in retrospect I wouldn't have put in that much effort if I knew it wouldn't pay off at all.

FE10 is a heavily flawed game but I would be lying if I said I disliked it. I have a comparatively bizarre relationship with the Tellius ganes. They're the only ones in the whole series that I didn't play until I was 18 and I was into FE for roughly 8 years before playing them. I spent years hearing about them and how good they are so finally being able to see what they're all about has been both a surreal and satisfying experience.