Fire Emblem Engage almost won me over

First, the elephant in the room: The game is visually... bizarre. I won't even say it looks bad, because it doesn't! The graphics are colorful, the combat animations are flashy, the presentation is solid... but the character designs, man. I feel like half the cast looks like standard FE fare, if a bit more colorful, but the other half looks like Vtuber designs. It's such a strange choice for a game meant to celebrate the history of the series. That said, the atrocious writing meant I was skipping cutscenes (this horse has been beaten to death and more, but the game genuinely got much more fun after an hour in when I just started skipping cutscenes and dialogue) and not seeing much of these characters anyway.

That said, I think FE Engage has the strongest gameplay in the series for me; the variety in rings and classes allows for deep and strong character customization, and the ability to rewind turns makes sure you don't spend the whole game building someone only to lose them to a 3% crit.

The revival stone, a returning mechanic from Three Houses, is probably my favorite to the game. Whereas stages in earlier games can be beaten by simply rushing the boss down and killing them as quickly as possible, Engage's bosses have two to three health bars and can often snag a kill on your units if you let them get past your frontline. At the same time, Engage is quite good at forcing you to move forward, often spawning enemy reinforcements around the map after a certain number of turns or once the boss is aggro'd. This means that the end of each stage becomes almost puzzle-like in finding ways to deal with the boss -- whether that's using a combination of buffs and special moves to destroy them in one turn, surrounding them with tanks and healers while your mages whittle them down from afar, retreating to a chokepoint, or using certain abilities to block off the boss' movement. This was by far my favorite part of the game.

The first 90% of each stage, however, felt like a slog in comparison. I played on Hard and Classic (permadeath) mode, so most enemies were a decent threat until about the midgame, where very few non-boss enemies pose a real threat but can still take multiple turns to die; the optimal strategy at this point was turtling up and moving through stages as quickly and safely as possible (although still relatively slowly) until I could get within range of the boss. Now, the game has (I googled it) 26 chapters, each taking a bit over an hour, but on top of this, if you want to improve your Emblem Rings --they can only get up to half of their maximum levels without doing the paralogue!

I played up until Chapter 23 on Hard/Classic mode, so I would say I beat most of the game on the "intended" difficulty, but Chapter 23 was my breaking point. I didn't even play it. I enjoyed the challenge of Chapter 22's boss but I took a look at the long, winding map of Chapter 23, thought about how long I would have to absent-mindedly move tiny knights on my Switch screen before I would get maybe 10 minutes of gameplay that actually required my brain, and decided, I had my fun, I probaly won't get any more enjoyment out of the last few chapters.

If anything, this game has taught me that I much prefer shorter, more engaging (pun intended) strategy battles in the vein of Into the Breach, if anyone has recommendations for games like that.