This game is so fun that despite putting over 100 hours in a playthough in such a short amount of time I already want to start fresh on a higher difficulty, try to play with my friends, and try a few mods. I love the sense of accomplishment and the feeling of options opening up each step of progression, I love fighting the bosses, I love my movement capabilities expanding to a degree I never imagined they would, I love exploring the world and being surprised by things dozens of hours in. I played on the smallest world type and despite my dozens of hours mining there’s still large chunks of my world I never had the chance to experience. I love the variety in weapons which feels wrong to say because I almost never touched any magic weapons and I still felt like I had a lot of options throughout my playthough, and I absolutely want to amend that my next one because I really felt like I was missing out. Was there some dull periods? Sure. I think there’s a few points where progress feels sluggish and I wish things were done a little differently. But the fact I’m still having fun during those few and far between moments speaks volumes to how well thought out this experience is. I don’t know how I slept on this game for so long, but it’ll be a keeper.

Didn’t care much for the story, Zenos didn’t have enough of a presence for me, the rest of the main cast has good moments but I still found a lot of the pacing poor. Story picks up a lot in patch content and even utilizes some previous characters in new ways that kept me more engaged. Omega raids are awesome, great fanservice and just fun fights all around. I would fight and die for Alpha. Really most of the dungeons and trials in the whole expansion I thought were pretty fun, but the story just dragged everything down to me which was disappointing coming from Heavensward.

This game is like 10x better than I thought it would be I made this my first FE on a whim and it was just really fun. Great production value, fantastic story, and a fun lineup of characters. The dialogue and voice acting all felt extremely natural and made the story that much more enjoyable. Some of it just made me laugh too that’s always a plus in my book. The map design was really the only dated part of the game that I felt even without the context of the rest of the series I can tell some of these reek but I wouldn’t say it made the game worse, however I had to pace myself at points (if the insanely long time it took me to beat this game wasn’t obvious yeah I did get burnt out mainly thanks to Celicas route of swamps and terror hell). Was this a great starting point? I can’t say for sure but I greatly enjoyed it and plan on playing other games in the series so I say it did something right.