After 17 hours of gameplay. Heres my thoughts.
Still about halfway through Hoshido.
1. The gameplay is quite fun. If you're one of those people who only care about strategy. This game will give you a moderate challenge. I think it's on the easier half of fire emblem games, but if you play it without save scumming, it's fun. The weapons triangle has been updated to add thrown projectiles, arrows and magic now.
The level design in this game is interesting because you can now change parts of the map by standing your MC on a sparkly spot. You can erect bridges, flatten mountains and create healing zones. It's important to do this at the right time though. I ended up killing my team a few times by flattening the wrong mountain, which led to berserkers slaughtering my healers because there was nothing in between them.
The lack of weapon durability is not missed. You can now upgrade your weapons using ores and extra weapons. Instead of purely linear weapon lines, weapons have more unique upsides and downsides. Upgrading your iron sword might end up worth the resources, rather than buying the best one from the store. Picking the right weapon to synergize with your skills is important.
2. The fort management aspect of the game is fairly interesting and has a bit of depth. You can ignore it completely if you aren't a minmax stat freak, but if you are, it will take up a lot of your tine. Watching your fort grow and seeing your units loiter around is pretty satisfying. There's a lot of stuff to do. You can spin a lottery wheel, use foodstuff to make a meal that gives temporary buffs, farm, feed your dragon buddy, shop for items, train, buy accessories and some other stuff. None of this is that important.
You can invite characters into your room for some skinship, but it feels more like a "reward" for a mission completion rather than a task you want to grind. All it does is raise support levels, so I only did it to characters I liked.
3. The story and writing is weak at times. The game suffers from shallow writing and anime cliches, but the characters themselves are enough to carry the story. Something that bothers me a lot is the MCs general cluelessness and naievity. Awakening avoided that by having an outsider as the MC, but in this game, your MC. is central to the plot, so you better start liking him/her or else you wont enjoy it.
A lot of characters die in the story. No playable characters have scripted deaths though. You end up killing a ton of cool people throughout the game.
The plot suffers from serious mood whiplash because of the way the game is structured. It's hard to go from a dramatic cutscene where an important character dies to rubbing your waifus cheeks at Mother Base a few minutes later, or fucking around with side quests instead of doing the super urgent task you have to do.
Verdict:
Overlook the dumb moments in the story and pick a waifu you like and you will enjoy this game. Under all the anime bullshit, there's a fun campaign in there and tons of side quests to do. If you are too much of a fucking normie to not fall in love with a fictional character and think story matters, you might get bored quickly (although the Nohr route is rumored to be a lot different and more challenging. I only played the first chapter of it, but it does seem much harder.)
The replay value in this feels immense and I could easily sink a hundred more hours doing the other two routes. This game is a lot better than I expected and I already feel like I got my moneys worth (bought the 2pack for 60 USD)