A game that deludes itself into thinking it's a return to form to some completely imaginary past, and ends up just removing a lot of what made Zelda what it was, now replaced with quantity over quality. This philosophy permeates throughout the entire game, with tons of really bland puzzles that never fundamentally change because the game wishes you to always be able to take everything on, which only removes a lot of sense of progression and variety. There's never any new ways to do anything, solving puzzles is always the same, and for enemies you just use your strong weapons if you're having trouble. Main dungeons have never been this bland and lifeless before, as, again, you don't come across any new mechanics and all bosses are a joke to ensure you can beat them no matter the order you took them in. The overworld is huge but really uninteresting to explore, and exploration itself is a pain, with rain, an entirely pointless mechanic, coming down every time you ever try to climb something. The game is alright if you just to play by shutting down your brain

The game has lost basically all of it's intuitive design it had in it's alpha and beta days. Mobs and the night are no longer a threat at all, you can just be a killing machine and run around at night freely and the game is now just some mediocre adventure game that isn't able to decide whether there is some point to it or not. Whereas old Minecraft's point used to be self fulfilling (build and claim as much land as you can so you can avoid monsters at all costs), that has left the game long ago as the player no longer even needs shelter at all and building a house is pretty much done only for the sake of building a house, and so is expanding your territory

Extremely disappointing gameplay that has regressed almost entirely from the intuitive design the series was starting to build, not surprising seeing that the team literally has never made a Fire Emblem game. The gameplay is mostly tedium and the most fun to be had is figuring out how to skip and break everything, which is incredibly easy because the new dev team seems to be like actually awful/complete noobs at FE. There's just so much wrong with the map design and balancing that I'm just getting depressed thinking about it. I still found it alright cause I could just LTC every map and it was kinda fun developing those strats to beat most maps in 1 or 2 turns. The story and the writing was also pretty gripping, though glaringly flawed at times.

So good yet so glaringly flawed, and it's a shame that most casuals mostly pick up on the flaws and decide it's a bad game, because it's one of the most solid FE games with it's excellent difficulty and map design. The game is basically just a huge escort mission to get Roy to the throne, and yes, unit balance is terrible, and yes, hitrates are awful, it's a pretty janky game at times but it's otherwise so goddamn solid and genuinely challenging. As a strategy game, this is one of the better FE games.