The weaving begins

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weaveactive

Oddly futuristic. UI elements look so good. Read a helpful tips and tricks thing that says it's better to play the characters serially instead of in parallel.

I've decided to play as Cai first, the character I care about least, since if I fuck up any of the systems as I'm learning I won't care so much. His start feels very not Fire Emblem and just kind of bog standard jrpg stuff. I like the lords and ladies and the military paegentry and all that jazz.

Cai's story is really just fucking wild and random. His party members seem not very good so far or maybe he's just very strong. It's hard to keep a balanced party, they just don't deal good damage.

Settings wise I really like the Mediterranean/Romanesque vibe.

The turn based dungeon battles haven't really justified themselves to me so far. Mechanically it's very shallow and before I used to get all the stuff I needed via battles and the monastery and now I have to do this other second thing which seems bolted on and largely filler. Maybe they'll get better.

I'm also getting like...Triangle Strategy levels of nonsense between the actual story battles.

It's fine right now. I feel like there are so many systems and yet they don't bother to go very deep on any of them in explanation, even when some of the systems are actually deep. I'm not sure what to equip on who.

Alright I really don't know how I feel about this. The main battles are so good and there's SO MUCH FILLER between it. I wish it would just let me sim the overworld battles. They're extremely boring and sometimes you have to do them multiple times. Same battles, same map. Same boring.

And it's so easy. I'm playing on hard and it's still easy. But I also wouldn't want it to be harder because then the stupid repetitive overworld battles would just take longer.

I think I might have to let go of what Fire Emblem was/what I want it to be and evaluate my relationship with it now based on what it is. Which I'm fine with that. I don't want to come across as someone who fears change and wants stuff to be the same. I can evaluate it without the baggage of my hopes or what it was as a stand alone unit.

But I'm not sure what it is what I want out of it. Or at least not large chunks of it.