Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Mechanically the game has a lot of neat intricacies and the map design is decent enough, but other design decisions annoy me. The stats in maddening are so bloated that it forces you to turtle if you're not doing New Game +. The amount of Divine Pulses you get is overly generous, and the cheap enemy spawns reflect that. There's also an obnoxious amount of map recycling. Plot wise, the first chapter is garbage but part 2 is more interesting... until you realize the payoff was pretty shitty.

Definitely the best entry in the series for a while. A more sandboxy Fire Emblem experience with freedom to interact how you want with whom you want and free-form unit development. Combat is as enjoyable as always and the plot is interesting enough if somewhat tropey.

gutes.

Super emotional, excellent music, surprisingly fun game mechanics too. Strong strategy game. Difficulty curve makes sense, however it is easy to accidentally break the game if you over-optimize. Also some small pot-holes, but overall really really really good:

The main game (story and battles) are engaging, however, the grinding and bad menus mixed in with the weapon maintenance was a pain, at a certain point I had to turn off animations and make the game faster, yet it still felt slow and I couldn't use a lot of cool weapons because of the low durability. There are also a lot of meaningless dialogue options. Got so sick of grinding that for the final battle I had Byleth solo everything but the main dragon and still got Petra killed somehow.

3 bangers

Divine Pulse is BRILLIANT. earlier installments in the franchise verged on outright cruelty; its inclusion alleviates that without making the game necessarily easier. the route divergence is a neat idea and does somewhat effectively capture the painful realities of war; it does not do enough to distinguish each individual path, and as a result, replaying the game for each is less rewarding than it should be. a great new direction for the series. I'm eager to see the next steps forward.