I no-lifed this game for a week. Here are my thoughts.
Teambuilding
This shit is addictive and easily the best part of the game. Most of my gameplay time was spent in menus just selecting equipment for my guys and deciding the moves they would use in the tactics menu, figuring out which composition of 2-5 units was coolest/most OP, most thematic, etc. The guy above who said the tactics menu doesn’t matter is absolutely wrong and choosing how your unit tactics pan out is basically the main gameplay loop (the RTS stuff is just a confirmation/refutation of your choices imo). Out of class skills and extra actions being gained through equipment with limited slots allows for a lot of fun in setting up your units, even if there are more than a few optimal choices.
Unless you grind overworld enemies a lot, which I’m not sure you can do but kind of assumed you could, Honors (the currency used to promote units, gain more squads, and increase individual squad sizes) tends to come just slow enough to feel like a throttle throughout early and midgame, which I personally liked a lot. Having to decide when you want to be able to field another squad or make your current one fatter or promote a unit is neat, but it is slightly railroaded by the fact that certain options only become available as you progress further into the game and gain more renown.
Unit Balance vs Unit Leader Balance
Individual units are balanced via their combat capabilities: some units dodge well, some have perfect accuracy that pierce evasion, some tank well, some are tankbusters. On the squad to squad combat level, there are very few comps that can do everything in early to midgame, as strong attackers/defenders all have at least one hard counter of some sort, with bows being good against flying in FE style, flying units doing bonus damage and guard-breaking cavalry, mages vs armors, etc.
Later on you can put together some pretty gross combinations to safeguard all your weaknesses, and it’s possible to juggernaut your way through the latter third-ish of the game pretty safely if you have one unit that fights fliers well and one unit that fights basically everything else well. Stamina, which limits units to only fighting X times until they need to rest and become vulnerable and unable to counter for a bit, helps mitigate this very slightly, but there are various abilities and items that can overcome this barrier.
Unit leader balance is non-existent. There are a variety of leader types with minor applications like “reduce damage from enemy assists”, “rest faster after running out of stamina”, “break down doors easier”, but they all pale in comparison to just being able to fly. Sticking just one flying unit onto a squad and making it your leader allows the entire squad to be able to fly, making it possible to safely bypass a lot of considerations on the map. Squads of all cavalry are also nice for having huge mobility and being able to move at lightspeed across the map while ramming through everything that isn’t flying or heavily armored. The one bad thing about this is that you can’t make units you like the leaders and hear their leadery lines without giving up significant mobility benefits.
Plot
This game’s story exists. Every once in a while it’ll make a random leap and assume you know something you might not, but otherwise there’s nothing spectacularly bad about it, it just lacks any particular merits. I don’t remember it being at any point so terrible that it made me go “man that detracted from the gameplay”, but if you’re a story-focused guy, this is not high praise lmao
Character Design/Art Stuff
This game has a variety of female designs focused entirely around sex appeal. If you dislike that, this game will be distasteful for you. It was honestly to the point that even I, a consummate hornyposter, felt that it was just kind of stupid at times. The Author’s Barely Disguised Fetish from Symphony of War also makes an appearance but the big lady is a very cool unit to field and is not central to the plot.
That aside, I found the animations themselves enjoyable enough. Each class gets a separate unique animation for its martial attacks, stuff for getting hit, blocking, being low on HP, etc. Some of these have a lot of charm to them, and I particularly enjoyed the crossbow unit’s reload animation which always plays after they attack, sometimes while they guard or while other units are fighting. It’s good that these are reasonably enjoyable, because…
Watching Combats
Until you’ve perfected your unit comps, this is a game where watching each individual squad fight play out is actually valuable. Only by watching a fight go down can you see whether you messed up your tactics load out for a unit somehow. For example, default healing does not specify how to prioritize between valid targets, so your healer might heal a unit only missing 1 HP instead of the unit on death’s door. You need to set a secondary tactic to prioritize lowest HP or lowest % HP in order to fix that. These things can get missed when you do your party compositions only to get exposed on the battlefield. Luckily, you can update tactics on the fly, but it does mean that optimal play involves watching more of these combats than most people might be accustomed to.
Stupid RNG
The way this game handles its RNG is extremely goofy. The battle forecast you see before you enter combat is more or less perfect. It preordains whether your units will hit or miss, the order in which things happen, crits, the consequences of revival, etc. You can’t see all that; you only get told how much total HP each squad in a combat gains/loses, but it does allow you to do really dumb stuff like have another combat go first or toggle assists on and off to advance RNs. Notably, having your archers/casters assist a fight might decrease your damage dealt/increase your damage taken by shifting RNs such that your attacks miss or the foe’s attacks hit, which feels super weird.
Accessing Cool Guys
This game is really good about giving you cool units shortly after you see them. Your jagen is a baller that dumpsters on everyone and allows other units in his squad to still gain EXP as normal. Cool angel that indicates she’ll join your party? Actually does reasonably early on if you find her sidequest stuff. Unique elf? You get one almost immediately upon entering elf territory, then another for good measure later on. Unique class enemy arc boss? You actually do get one of those. Other than very obviously final villain guys, the game is not stingy about named characters that do cool shit or just look cool.
Music
It’s, like, OK? There were some cool tracks but I didn’t remember most of it.
The Localization
I don’t know how so many people care. I play FFT: War of the Lions and liked it, so this could just be me being an outlier. It’s fine, the flowery language is fairly consistent so it’s not that bad to get used to outside of people who are platinum ranked or above professional complainers, and no one’s busting out thees or thous or anything.
More FE Than Tristat?
I mean, yes, absolutely. This game has archers that beat fliers and cavalry that’s OP. Tristat had a good plot. It should be obvious which one is more like Fire Emblem.