I've played up to Chapter 18 on hard, but accounting for paralogues played around 25ish chapters.
Story is dumb as shit, so if you're here for an epic realistic mature badass Fire Emblem experience where the characters aren't exactly what they say on their marketing tin, I'm sorry to say that you are too smart for this Nintendo game. I like it, though. You have multiple encounters with the villains which gives the pacing a nice push/pull feel, and makes early-midgame (?) victories more satisfying than when you beat Grug the Bandit Captain VIII or Commander Fuckface of Munster Mansion instead of the villains you actually want to beat and care about.
Somniel hasn't mattered much at all. I don't bother with much of it anymore except occasional fishing just for fun and meals for faster supports, which are generally just boosts to hit, avoid, and dodge. Support quality feels like GBA to me, though comparisons to Fates aren't unreasonable. Did a few forges but they haven't made the game way easier or anything, though the boosts can get really strong. That's kind of the Somniel in a nutshell, you can totally pick up all the garbage and micromanage and grind everything to probably break the game in half, or you can just switch rings around depending on the map and go on your merry way. Maybe it's different on Neurodivergent difficulty.
Maps feel a lot like good GBA to me where there's no same-turn reinforcements or things that suck ass and waste your time like fog, trudging through the desert, trudging through the desert in the fog, and overly winding castle layouts. Conquest this most certainly is not, but Engage frequently throws some anti-turtling and anti-deathball incentives at you. Bosses often get pissed and decide to aggro to you which is cool, and can cut down what would otherwise be unnecessary downtime. Armors are fucking scaaarrryyy units to deal with a lot of the time because you can't break them and they hit like a truck, they're hilarious. One thing that kind of sucks is that there's a lot of units I want to play with, but it's not common for you to get more than 10 deployment slots. So if you can only tolerate looking at around a quarter of the cast for an extended period of time, you're in luck in that regard. It probably also has to do with one of your emblems letting you dance for fucking 4 units simultaneously.
The break system and engaging and the game's balance as a whole are very different from anything I've played in Fire Emblem, and I'm not going to lie and act like if I know for sure yet that they are or aren't totally overcentralizing, or if that's even a bad thing. There's not really much of a basis for comparison to other Fire Emblems outside of rom hacks. I will say though that with how late you get some of the characters and rings, that a randomizer for join and ring order sounds like it has a lot of potential, unless this game has a Karel that it's still hiding. If for some reason you read all this shit some handy QoL to know is that you can skip individual unit's animations by holding ZR before combat, and you can switch a unit's held weapon just by selecting them and pressing L/R. Maybe 3 Houses had that too, but I don't remember.
