yeso a more focused, challenging tactics game
This is the critique I just don’t get - this much, at least, is absolutely in there, certainly compared to the other non-remake _FE_s of the last decade.
Are you expecting something that’s exactly on the level of the pre-10s games in terms of leanness? What difficulty setting are you playing on? Have you tried just ignoring all or most of the Somniel content if you aren’t stuck? It really sounds like you’re engaging in a bunch of sub-mechanics under the assumption that you need to when you actually don’t - they literally all amount to a handful of min-maxing number boosts to make the game easier, and with the rate you’re progressing through maps it doesn’t sound like high difficulty is an issue. What challenge level is good enough in the challenge department? I have not been stringently min-maxing every possible thing and I’m finding Maddening difficulty largely very well balanced.
Like… you seriously don’t have to do the fishing minigame! Or any of the minigames! I’m pretty sure there’s no crucial hidden content locked behind them! The game is definitely not balanced around the assumption that you will do them all the instant they become available! You can go back and do them later at any point if you change your mind! They’re just alternatives to grinding! They’re about as essential to this game as they are to something like Zelda, only in this one you can access them all from a menu.
I know HowLongToBeat.com is a bit infamous for lowballing completion time estimates, but I think it should be pretty telling that even in relative terms this game is listed as being shorter than the SFC games, shorter than the Wii one, and a whole lot shorter than the previous Switch game. If you ignore the Somniel (which, I want to repeat, you are allowed to do!) it is straight up just funneling you directly from map to map, no different from the classic titles. You can skip each and every “walk around the battlefield after a battle” segment and the consequences will be trivial (a couple random loot trinkets on the ground that you could get more reliably through other means). Probably the most important thing you can get from side content is bond points… which the game also throws at you in much larger amounts just for playing it normally. There is so much in there you just never need to encounter if you don’t feel like hitting the menu icon for it, because it is all extraneous to the core experience which is clearly delineated from the side stuff and, yeah, pretty focused! And challenging!
