From: NeoElfboy | #032
FE10 has clearly better gameplay than most of the series... in general, aside from the occasional step back, the gameplay in the main series has only gotten better! FE10, in particular, made you effectively use a large number of characters (instead of the usual 10-12, then ignore everyone else) in efficient play, had a skill system in which you actually had to make decisions ("do I move this skill to another PC and incur a CP cost, or not?" etc.), and in general had FE9's gameplay with a whole bunch of polish improvements: being able to see things like the WExp gauge, AS actually shown in the status screen, S/SS-rank weapons actually being in the game.
I'd rather strongly dispute that. Actual chapter design plays a bigger role than anything else in good gameplay in this series, and while FE10 isn't bad in this area, it's still not the best. Also, hard difficulty makes some pretty silly changes. Plus the multi-part structure ends up making the game insanely schizophrenic in its difficulty and leaves a lot of characters pretty terrible by the end because they're simply never going to be able to get the levels to matter in part 4 without abuse.
The last bosses with their tricks and multitarget attacks were also way more epic than anything in any previous Fire Emblem (lol at FE6-9's final bosses) although still easy enough with a powerful team obviously.
Those multi-target map attacks are kind of silly, really. It's something that doesn't really fit in Fire Emblem. It was one of the ideas Gaiden had that should have been left dead. And really, only the dragon chapter is particularly cool. The one after that is pretty dull, and the final one is rather stupid. I much preferred the "defeat the other bosses to get at the real boss" routine when the other targets were actual bosses like in FE5 and FE7 instead of inanimate objects that just lazily reflect damage back at me.
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