I played off-and-on over a long period from it's physical release on the Switch until XXX (not yet finished)
This is a pretty acclaimed game, and overall I really liked it. I like tactical RPGs and strategy games, so I knew going into it that I would enjoy it, and talking about what I liked in games is generally less interesting than what I disliked, so most of this review will be about the parts of the design that I'm critical of. But to start with what I liked, the writing is great (even in spite of its very purple prose), the voice acting was really good, the characters are well-written, the pixel art is very good. I think overall the narrative caught me about midway through the game, though never quite to the level that FE4,5,9, or 10 did. Still, I like stories of political intrigue over shounen anime of most JRPGs, with characters that feel human.
The game also brings in a lot of very cool unique mechanics to the TRPG space. Battles are representative of small-scale combat rather than large scale war, basically like using tactical combat as a replacement for JRPG battles. They thus brought in JRPG mechanics, characters have a host of abilities they can use based on their class and gameplay is about smart, tactical usage of these skills. I appreciated the focus on micro-management of position to catch beneficial AoE spells or avoid having multiple characters be affected by harmful ones, and I also liked that line-of-sight and height differentials play a strong role in combat. For example, you can intercept certain enemy ranged attacks by positioning a unit in-between the enemy readying the attack and that enemy's target, or you can avoid magic by moving before the enemy mage casts, or you can even begin preparing an AoE buff spell and then run another unit into range before the cast goes off.
The gameplay and story aren't incredibly well integrated, but it's done well enough through the map design that I really can't complain. My one story/gameplay gripe is, given the flexibility of the job system and the small party size, I would have liked if they just gave you a fixed party rather than relying on generic units.
I greatly appreciated the map and encounter design. Early on, almost all battles are all effectively just "defeat all enemies"; some have a "defend X unit" objective, but that's just another loss condition like Ramza dying - the only way to win those maps is the same "defeat all enemies." So they start off somewhat uninteresting. That said, some maps have effectively interesting objectives like separating Ramza from Gaffgarion for a 1v1 at the end of Chapter 2, which reminded me of Ike vs the Black Knight at the end of FE10. I also liked the Orbonne Monastery battles. In most Fire Emblem games, "defeat boss" maps are usually quite easy because bosses aren't that much stronger than normal enemies, and often times it's easy to take your time and rout the whole map for experience. In this game, however, bosses and enemies are extremely strong and it's not really possible to go slow, you have to work out a strategy to focus down the boss quickly.
One huge bit of props I'd like to give to this game's gameplay is that they somehow managed to make Movement not the best stat as it is in Fire Emblem, XCOM, etc. The reasons for this are: 1. small map size combined with the relatively large range of ranged attacks and spells allows for even low-movement units to cover a large percentage of the battlefield, 2. lack of "enemy phasing" combined with relative equal footing of player and enemy units means simply reaching the enemy isn't the win-condition as it is in FE. Speed instead takes the role of best stat, primarily because it allows for a unit to take more turns which is a multiplier on everything else, and partially because it grants more and faster EXP and JP. Still, I don't think speed is quite as centralizing as Movement is in FE, and I commend the designers for this.
At first, the small party size and small maps (in comparison to other turn-based tactics games) made me feel very claustophobic, but over time I started to appreciate the game for what that enabled in encounter design. FFT's mechanics allow for satisfying single boss encounters like the one at the end of Chapter 2, which absolutely clear the design of these kinds of encounters in any Fire Emblem. Similarly, the parallelism between the player's party and the enemies (in terms of party size, classes, and abilities) also made most non-boss fights very tense.
Despite the art being beautiful, I found the isometric view to be overall a detriment. The game is far too reliant on terrain height differentials to ever have the player need to fight the camera - often times something would be obscured by a tree or a cliff at all angles and the best way to see what was happening was to adjust the camera and try to get a glimpse of the tiles of interest while the camera was moving. There's a "tactical overview" that lets you view the battlefield from directly above, but this mode prevents input actions so it can only really be used to check cursor alignment. I never struggled with the view in FFTA so I think they learned this lesson from this game to the next.
There's also very little opportunity cost to class changing. Classes have growth rates which grant additional stats upon level-up, so some classes are better to level in for some roles than others, but the difference seems very small over the course of the playthrough, especially if you don't know enough to really optimize it. On one hand, with the hybrid ability system allowing a character to equip the ability set of any class they know, this opens some cool design space. On the other hand, the class and ability balance doesn't seem good enough to justify this - many times when leveling as an undesired class, I would play them as though they were in some other class by equipping that class's skills (for example, thief is a weak class, but you need to level it to get into Ninja and to get Movement +2 - so I would level my thieves with Monk abilities equipped and just play them as though they were in Monk). Really the problem here is that it just highlights the imbalance of the classes - certain buffs are too good not to have, so you need a user of those skills on your team, but other skills are so situational that you rarely have them equipped.
One of the fundamental flaws of this game is the leveling and experience system. It is, sadly, far too easy to overlevel. Even accidentally - because all actions that a unit makes grant JP and EXP, many strategies, even strategies which would seem pretty standard for a tactics game, let you rapidly gain levels and JP in a "win-more" sort of way. Just as an example, Ramza has a powerful ability in Tailwind, which grants a target unit speed for the duration of the battle. Speed is awesome because it's tied directly to the turn counter - the more speed you have, the faster your turn comes up and the more you can do. This should naturally have some tradeoff, as you have to spend a turn now to get additional turns later; furthermore there's opportunity cost against using your turn to apply some other buff. And within the scope of a single map, this is a decently interesting decision (though imo the compounding effect of speed makes going for it almost always the correct choice). However, because taking more actions lead to gaining more exp and JP, using Tailwind strategies to win one map also means you'll go into the next map much more powerful than you otherwise would have.
A side component of the issues described in the previous two paragraphs is that the designers can't know what a player's setup will look like going into battles, and thus balance becomes quite difficult. For example, I completely breezed through the entire game up until the first battle against Wiegraf in Chapter 3. Wiegraf is fast enough to always act first against similarly leveled opponents and he has a powerful AoE ability that is guaranteed to be able to hit two targets on the first turn. He's also tanky enough that even with the survivors in the highest DPS setups I had, I couldn't take him down before he could act again. The first time I reached this fight, he was able to use his attack to instantly KO one unit and bring the other down to very low HP, and my team just wasn't set up to recover from this state. I could see a few strategies to victory but all were reliant on skills that I didn't have unlocked on any of my units - for example, stealing or rending his sword would neutralize his AoE spell so I could stabilize the fight, Auto Potion would also help to stabilize and recover, but those skills weren't available to me just by chance of how I built my units. In the end, I backed out of the battle and went to grind these skills in random battles, but in the process I gained a few levels which in turn made subsequent chapters much too easy.
I almost love the crystals system. There's some interplay between trying to finish battles safely, vs going for the boss first when they have better skills (and risking getting overrun with enemies). As with most of the other systems, as there's no real penalty for taking infinite turns in a battle, so this remains somewhat theoretical (it's always easy to frog one random enemy and wait for the boss to crystallize). Furthermore the RNG of whether they turn into a crystal or a chest puts a damper on this. I can see a version of this game where gems are guaranteed and are the only method of gaining abilities, which could have been a fantastic baseline progression to learning new abilities in each class rather than the JP system.
Party inventory management was extremely tedious. Spending JP was just an annoyance, it would have been better if abilities were just auto-learned through leveling a class. Gil was essentially limitless after Chapter 1, and the best gear was almost always available from a shop, so every few chapters I would feel obligated to go through and upgrade my main party's gear. Part of the issue here is there seemed to be no input buffering in the equipment menus so the actual physical act of going through all of this menuing was a slog.
The Walled City of Yardrow: First time I got here, the guest unit died before any of my units could act. The 1v1 against Wiegraf in Riovanes castle: I could not come up with a non-cheese strategy to beat it, in the end I won with Mettle Tailwind + Auto-potion + Arithmetics Wall/Haste Ramza up to being able to take 2 actions for every 1 of Wiegraf's. The Tailwind, specifically, was a boring way to do it, but because of the balance I genuinely couldn't figure out another route to victory.
In spite of all these criticisms, the game remains fun throughout. I think anyone interested in tactics game design owes themselves to play through FFT at least once.