Beat Birthright yesterday, and I'm feeling like what I suspect a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles X players went through later last year.
Mechanically, I feel like this is the best Fire Emblem. Abolishing the weapon durability took out an arbitrary aspect of micro-management that I feel paid off; it's more about the actual strategy of the game instead of set limits on certain weapons. Bringing back the stat bonuses/negativities is a much better supplement, and does away with the "spam silver weapons strategy" of the past few games. I appreciate the new classes, even if they're new in-name-only, because it did feel like a new separate experience from the titles of yore, and the new weapons that accompanied them were a welcome change of pace.
Although many of the objectives in Birthright were overly simplistic like Awakening before it, the map variety and how you have to approach the maps is miles better than the former, and I suspect this aspect of the game will only improve once I get to Conquest. I also liked how I actually felt challenged in this game, something that never really came out full-force in Awakening. Even with a bit of grinding, many of the later enemies were decked out fully and needed some smart strategy to avoid casualties.
It's just..... I feel like the plot and music are such a step back from the series' past titles and even Awakening (which was already behind the likes of Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn for sure). The plot in particular just seems so simplistic and lacking anything truly interesting. I can't really spoil Birthright, because there's really nothing to spoil - Corrin sides with Hoshido, they march towards the Nohr capital for the entire game, and....... that's it. There's no real twists or turns in the story, and nothing that really brings everything up a notch. Even Awakening had things like Robin's true nature along with the multiple layers of the story in the form of the Gangrel and Walhart arcs. Past stories were even better than that, with Radiant Dawn's continent-wide crisis and multiple sympathetic viewpoints being far, far above this game.
It also pains me to say that the music is a far cry from the past as well. I can name two themes in Birthright that really caught me, and even then, none of them comes close to "Mastermind" from Awakening or "Sorrowful Prince Pelleas" from Radiant Dawn. The final map theme is awesome and the battle them when you face your former family is catchy, but that's really all I can really look back on at the moment. Perhaps it improves with Conquest?
All in all, it's a great game. I really, really like it and don't regret buying it at all. But it seems to me like certain little aspects that have made Fire Emblem one of my favorite gaming series of all time are lacking a little bit this time around. It's just a testament to the high bar of quality that I expect of the series, and this game just doesn't quite reach it in some non-critical categories.