The story and characters are nothing special really. Nobody exactly blew me away as a character, and the story was pretty predictable for the most part. Not that this is new or anything.
That probably sounds liked I hated everyone, but that's not the case, they were a mostly likeable bunch. Suppose that happens when you fight through a bunch of shit with your little group(s) of friends. I just have a bit of a high standard for story and characters these days really. I have to give the game points for, at least some of time, not being hella black and white about things like a fair few games or even the previous 2 Fire Emblem games are. Black and white stories tend to be so shallow and boring and unrealistic. It sort of establishes this from the very beginning by portraying neither country as purely good or bad, unlike what they did with Nohr and Hoshido in Fates, and that neither Mila or Duma's philosophy was entirely right or wrong. You even see it a bit in some characters, like Clive for example, where he's a good guy but occasionally struggles with his own belief that deeds>birth status.
Part of it though I think is that I had rather high expectations for Fates' story and characters (and then it kind of didn't deliver) but low expectations for this one's. Wasn't really expecting much out of the story of a remake of a 90s FE game.
I feel like the lack of weapon durability being balanced out by stat debuffs was done better in this game than it was in Fates. I suppose part of this is that speed is the only thing that usually ever gets decreased by equipping more powerful weapons, but I never really liked using most of the higher end weapons in Fates because they would tend to decrease so many stats and, coupled with debuffs from enemy dagger/shuriken wielders, was so not worth it to me. A unit can only carry one item at a time anyway in Echoes, so there's that.
I kind of like magic in this game. When I first heard about HP magic cost I thought I was going to hate it and practically not ever want to use my mages, but the HP costs turned out to be pretty reasonable (especially when you factor in rings and that magic ignores the unusually strong terrain bonuses in this game) and having a varied arsenal of black and white magic at each mages' disposal was nice.
Armor units were pretty nice too, actually bothered to use a couple of them in SoV. With the exceptions of Gatrie in Radiant Dawn and Effie in Conquest (and the Black Knight in RD, but the BK isn't an armor unit, he is destruction in human form), I never liked using armor infantry units. The low movement, speed, and Res was rather unappealing to me in those games and felt like their high physical bulk often never made up for it enough. Also Awakening armor units were kinda fugly. But here they actually seemed worth it and looked good too. Archer range in this game was also really nice, even though Gray and Python were kind of disappointing as archers for me (Leon was pretty good though).
Though while I actually wanted to use armor units in this game, that brings me to the point that there was--or at least it felt like--a lack in unit variety. Alm's path gets no less than (and possible more than depending on villager promotions) 4 lance cavalry units. Mycen is cool and all, but hardly necessary when you have Mathilda and Zeke. Then meanwhile Celica's group is hogging all the mercs but gets one lance cavalry unit, and a bit late at that. Could've spread them around a bit. Also, where are the axe units in this game? Also would have nice to not have to wait until you can promote someone to a Dread Fighter to have an anti-mage units, given how potent it is in SoV (while I said it's balanced before, it's more so on the player's end).
Cantors suck, they're basically "fake difficulty" or meant to just drag shit out for no reason and are unbalanced nonsense.
Map design is....well, it's better than Awakening's because
it's not hard to have better map design than Awakening there were a handful of decent maps+stronger terrain bonuses, but that's about it really. If you're not dealing with a map that's just basically a big open field, it's cantor bullshit in the swamps, or you're fighting a boss with asinine skills and/or magic. The final map was really a combination of all the bad parts about this game's map design: FOUR summoners, swamp tiles on the chokepoint, Jedah's Duma's Gift skill is a load of crap on a unit of his strength, Upheaval, Witch Teleportation, and all while you have to fight a fell dragon god. Also would've liked to see more map objectives than 90% Rout Enemy and 10% Defeat Commander.
Praise be Turnwheel.
Dungeons were, while pretty basic and the last two started to get annoying for me, fun and something that I hope returns in (all) future Fire Emblem titles. Dungeons were the one thing I was legitimately interested in pre-release and it was nice I was not disappointed with them, can't wait to see how they improve them.
....not much else I can think of to say about gameplay, it's still Fire Emblem at its core and so is good.
Music there's not much to talk about, one generally expects the soundtrack to be good in a major title and SoV does that. My favorites would probably be:
The game's dialogue being fully voiced was also super nice and I hope that it can stay like that.
