ShadowAUS

I finished my first playthrough (BE) in about 32 hours (I did pretty much everything other than recruit all the other students as I wanted to save them for their respective house playthroughs) and I definetly spent more time in the campus than in battles. The game is fairly easy so each battle only took between 3 (when I was auto-battle grinding) and 30 minutes (the couple of major large map battles) but the average was about 12 - 15 minutes a map, note that I have animations off. My subsequent playtime has had slightly less time in the campus due to knowing where all the lost items (the biggest time sink) are and who they belong to as well as making more liberal use of the teleport.

The moment I finished Edelgard's route and said out loud "that's it?!" was kind of the moment my honeymoon phase ended. Don't get me wrong, the game is good and it will certainly end up on my best of year end list but despite in a lot of ways being an improvement on previous entries it also is over ambitious without the time/money/manpower/skill required to pull it all off which leads to a lot of both big and little things just not feeling quite right. The biggest of these being the atrocious pacing, Act 2 (especially the endings) overall being a let down despite the story picking up in a good way and game difficulty (you can pretty much blind play Hard without any issues even if you've barely ever played a TRPG before) being somewhat all over the place. You also have some smaller things like the minigames feeling kind of useless and shallow, lost items being tedious and both feeling necessary and not worthwhile at the same time (especially on subsequent playthroughs), quests mostly consisting of shallow fetch objectives, some uneven support writing quality, docked performance wasn't great (at least for me but I played the majority of docked time on 1.0.0 so I don't know if 1.0.1+ fixed this), the recruitment system not being particularly well-thought-out, the class system feeling restrictive, the map design being pretty mediocre etc, etc. Theres more I could list but I think it kind of gets the point across. None of this ruins the game and I'm still enjoying it even coming up on 100 hours of playtime but it also means 3H will probably easily win my award for 'Game with the most missed potential released this year'.

Haha yeah that is pretty quick. Saying that though even doing everything I could possibly do (besides recruiting all the students from other houses as I'm leaving them for their respective playthroughs) it still only took me a little over 30 hours for BE's route even with all the grinding and fishing I did. It really suprised me how short it ended up being. The BL route looks to be longer so far though I haven't finished the last couple of chapters on it yet.

Thought I would also stop lurking and come in to agree with both of these posts. Bit of a ramble/mini review/disorganised brain--fart below with my thoughts. I anyone has any questions about the game (especially the BE and BL routes or general game play questions) feel free to ask. Spoilers, obviously.