Fortune's Weave is absolutely amazing, I'm completely hooked on it, but it's a very odd Fire Emblem game.
Calling it a strategy game is like calling Persona 5 a dungeon crawler - yes that's the heart of it but there's SO MUCH STUFF around that core that it's almost become its own genre. I'm spending anything up to a couple of hours between story battles doing side quests, training, exploration, dungeons, and all the other time-consuming activities that the game offers - I suspect you don't need to do all this stuff but it's all lots of fun. There are tons of characters in it too so everyone's going to have quite a different experience.
It's quite low on anime boob ladies too, which is refreshing for a series that appeared to be going down that route.
It's very hard to see any sort of future for an industry that thinks there's going to be demand for £1000 consoles, and is banking on people buying £80 games that each take five years to develop (and/or a tidal wave of indie slop). With the major platform holders laying people off in their thousands and consolidating on titles that were hits twenty years ago. Cloud gaming is dead, mobile gaming is an advertising/gacha hellscape, and PC handhelds/living room devices look like they're going to always remain a niche thing.
Increasingly it's looking like Nintendo is the industry's only real hope right now - the Switch 2 is still relatively affordable, they're not chasing the tech in the way the other two are, they're actually releasing platform exclusives at a steady rate, and their games hold their value. I think they'll weather the storm better than Sony or Microsoft, and I'd be surprised at this point if we even see another Xbox.
I’m in the same situation (well probably nowhere near as far as you, how did you put ten hours in already?!), a couple of hours in and it’s been all cut scenes and tutorials so far. I’m sure it’ll pick up. It looks lovely at least, and I remember Three Houses taking an absolute age to get going too.
Bit concerned that everyone is saying it’s really easy though, I started on Normal and I wish I’d gone for Hard now. I think you can only lower the difficulty on an existing game, not increase it.
It's got, from memory, a really bizarre control scheme where half the time you are holding the Wiimote on its side and controlling Samus with the D-pad, and the other half you are pointing it at the screen to aim at stuff. So you're perpetually swinging it backwards and forwards as you try to move and aim at the same time. The whole game was a disaster from the start. It looks like Dread is canonically Metroid 5 and Ravenous is going to be Metroid 6, and Other M has been quietly forgotten about.
Fusion was criticised at the time for being too linear and plot-heavy, but then every Metroid game since then has been the same, so I think it's much more widely liked these days. I remember the bosses in that one being an absolute bastard though.
I'm quite tempted to do a series playthrough in order, I've played all the games to a greater or lesser extent but only ever actually finished a couple of them. I really enjoyed this runthrough of Zero Mission.
EDIT: not Other M though, I do like the way everyone seems to have collectively agreed that game doesn't exist.
Garwoofoo