Everyone knows the story is bad. But the gameplay is bad too. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to make a 3D action game where the only controller option is the literal equivalent of an NES controller. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to give Team Ninja the Metroid IP. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to do any of the things this game does. Such a unique and intriguing disaster in every possible way.

The graphics are good for a Wii game, at least? I like that there's a secret boss that's a 3D version of the best boss in Fusion? I don't know man, I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. This game is better off forgotten.

People are way too forgiving of this game's flaws. The level balance is ATROCIOUS. It actively punishes the player for using a full team of 6 as it insures you will stay far behind the difficulty curve, even if a graph of this game's difficulty curve looks like a graph of like, I dunno, bitcoin prices. That is to say, it's extremely inconsistent. Unfortunately this remake does absolutely nothing to fix the glaring flaws with the original's balance.

Still, Johto is a charming region with great music and lore, Pokémon following you is great, and there's a lot to keep you occupied after you beat the main story.

The pacing holds this game back hard. I'm a huge Fire Emblem fan and there's a lot to love here but I absolutely hate having to spend hours in between story maps doing nothing but wandering around and watching bars go up. I didn't mind it on my first playthrough, but it made subsequent playthroughs an absolute slog. The game's also obscenely ugly. This is probably one of the worst looking big budget games I've seen in a long time.

Beside those two key flaws, generally it's solid. I can see why a newcomer to the series would really love this, especially if you don't mind the slow pace. The characters are great, far more in depth than Awakening or Fates and the English dub cast does a great job, especially in the case of Dimitri. Speaking of Dimitri, this game's trio of lords are all phenomenal characters. It's good that they hinged the game's conflict on such likable characters, unlike a certain 3DS game I won't mention by name. The structure of the game into the two arcs was another solid choice. Classmates in the first act turn to bitter enemies in the second, creating a poignant feeling that I hadn't felt in a Fire Emblem game before. And I absolutely adored how the story changed in the second arc to accomodate what characters I did or didn't recruit to my house in the first.

Despite all my praise for the characters, the story has a terrible case of telling and not showing. The engine doesn't feel all that capable of telling a story like this. Whereas the 3DS games at least had itheir models for the story sections in a 3D environment, this game has them standing on a flat, weird looking, fucked up panorama that vaguely resembles the location it's supposed to represent. It's weird. Even worse, key story sections are rendered less effective by the poor presentation, as they all have this sort of plasticky quality about them. There's an abundance of moments that hit, of course, but there's a few oddball moments that don't hit the necessary beats due to the presentation.

Gameplay is about what you'd expect from Awakening or Fates: Birthright. Most maps are defeat the commander/rout the enemy, and aren't particularly complex, which isn't too awful, just not as compelling as I'd hope. There's a few maps (particularly in the first arc) that try a unique mechanic like warp tiles or switches and they all fall flat. Outside of map design, the freeflow character building of Awakening and Fates has been taken to a logical extreme, and while on paper more freedom is good, in the end characters end up feeling homogenized and sometimes there's no clear path for characters, as far as classes go. In general the sense of satisfaction you'd get from raising characters in past games (raising an early game cavalier into a busted paladin, or a frail mage into a versatile dark knight) is pretty much missing here.

Overall there's a lot I love here and some that I'm not so keen on, but it's a solid first FE game on the Switch; following the current trend, we'll probably see another Fire Emblem in 2021. Maybe that one will fix the graphics and general story presentatio problems I had with this one. I sure hope so. I'd say this is an about average Fire Emblem game. Doesn't come close to the heights of some other installments but it's not insulting in the way Fates was, and it does enough I like to put it above some of the more middling entries.

Edit: I didn't mention the soundtrack! It's excellent. The vocal main theme is amazing and so are most of the map tracks. I can see why some people might be bothered by the strange fixation on adding dubstep elements to some tracks, but it doesn't bother me all that much.