Yeah, go fucking figure that I read everyone's impressions of this and everybody talks about the so far non existent story and everybody talks about which high school kid theyre gonna rail but nobody mentions that the game now tells you when your units are going to be attacked and which enemy unit is going to be doing the attacking.
No wonder everyone says "well the game is a bit easy", I'm like four hours in and the first two fights basically played themselves. Just keep your units out of the big red no no zone and you're perfectly safe because the game accounts for everything else without my input. It would not feel at all out place for the game to have a popup that says "you are going to kill that unit with this move. Are you sure you want to do that? Y/N"
The risk of engaging safely is such a big part of Fire Emblem and it hasn't added anything else so far to make up for what is now a nonmechanic aside from gambits. It annihilates any sense of advancing strategy when the best option in literally all scenarios is "line up your soldiers so they split up the aggro". Theres no nail biting moment where you hope your strategy works or you take a desperate risk. You just safely split the damage by fucking around with the red no no lines untio they are a configuration you want, then the enemy phase is a relaxing few seconds as the game simply acts out what its already told you it'll hit you with.
I cant believe i read all these fan impressions and nobody mentioned this. Nobody plays these fucking things for the gameplay at all or somebody would give a shit. Christ.
How is that different from the previous games?
Fire Emblem is always: Press A on enemies, watch their area of attack, position your units outside of the borders, pound them with archers, spray them with magic, send in the lances and swords to finish the job.
Later on the difficulty increases I suppose.
It's basically just streamlined; I do wish they'd not show which units are getting attacked by which enemy units. But otherwise it's fine. Not sure but to me the AI feels very much more "I know I'm not going to beat you so let's just try n kill your units lol" but I'm playing on normal for first playthrough, so.
Stayed up until 4 am. There's a lot of good gameplay improvements they've made, magic chief among them: your magic users are now basically D&D style, and their spells/heals replenish between battles, so no need to keep buying tomes and staves for them. The game is also very good about ALWAYS GIVING YOU SOME KIND OF PROGRESSION each week for all your characters with the school shit.
Raise your professor level as quickly as you can.
The Black Eagles are honestly probably the trickiest house to play early on because you have so many magic users, and one of them's growths (Dorothea, aka hat girl) suck so unless you get lucky she's probably gonna end up being a dancer much later on in the game. My progression was fucking weird- Dorothea's progressed great, Caspar and Ferdinand (two of my frontline options) sucked and I had to carefully babysit them until level 6 or so. They juuuuuuust started being useful last battle. I keep training my avatar in heavy armor so I can eventually recruit Raphael's burly ass to tank for me, but I think it's gonna be a while.