I bought the digital copy and pre-loaded the game but didn't get to really play until the following day. My wife and I had our second child three weeks ago, Jacob, and he has been taking just about all of my free time lately, plus now that my paternal leave is over and I'm back at work, it's been hard finding time to play.

I have gone very slowly through the game so far playing Classic Hard mode, and I just finished the very second battle of the game (including the tutorial). I spent a lot of time talking to everyone in the monastery once I was free to roam around, and that took most of my time.

I'm terrible at strategy games such as this, but I am persistent. I had to restart twice during that second battle because I made input mistakes, such as telling a character to wait by accident, or attacking the target unintentionally. I wouldn't fault the controls, though. Great game so far; I'm enjoying it a lot.

Going from playing a shit ton of Fire Emblem Heroes in anticipation of this game to actually playing this game has been...an adjustment...a welcome one of course, but wow, I spent way too much time just enjoying the art and modeling when I first started. It's been way too long since we had a proper console Fire Emblem. Like, I know, okay, objectively, there are better looking games out there. But this is Fire Emblem, and I can now zoom into the map to look at the bandits faces, and see that some of the their battalion is made up of women, and little details like that, and I love it. And after getting by with the meager mechanics of Heroes for a couple weeks, suddenly having all this strategic complexity thrust upon me has been great, I love all the little additions since Fates. I can already tell I'm going to need to play this through more than once. Apparently there are four endings, but from what I know of them, there are only two I actually want to get. But with this looking like a 60 hour game at least for even one playthrough, I'm still going to be getting a shit ton of hours out of this game.

I only explore once a month because Im not doing any recruitment on students on my first play through. Then I choose battle for the others. I haven't found seminars useful. Because you can level up their skills  in Battle + get exp and rewards.

But my problem is the motivation. Im doing so much battle that most of my students only have orange faces. I did notice that if Byleth is MVP in a battle they all gain at least 25 motivation. 

Why is metacritic's user score so low?

It got review bombed, largely it appears by people who preemptively wrote it off as "high school anime weep trash " or some nonsense.  I'm sure there are legit negative reviews but I've seen several troll reviews and multiple ones either just saying "BRING BACK MUH FIRE EMBLEM" or blatantly misinformative because again, half of them haven't played it.  The biggest dead give away however is the massively disproportionate ratio of reviews to scores in the negative category.  

You should pretty much always just take people going on about games like that with a pinch of salt, especially when you can read more than a pinch of salt in their comments regarding said titles, everyone is entitled to their opinion but it's when people start to talk as though they are the voice of the fanbase or the voice of the entire population then it's an opinion to ignore.

On the topic of the game and it's score though... that's fairly awesome, the Switch itches another fanbases game series with another solid 1st party title, the number of holes in the argument of "there isn't any games on it I would play" is pretty much completely gone now with all the titles the machine has been getting in the last year especially, the only genre I feel that is still completely unfulfilled on there is a Driving simulator which is a damn shame considering those can use a lot of tricks to look good on weak hardware considering they deal with mostly static 3d models, as in few cars have moving parts outside of the wheels.... and the Veyrons air brake.

Cool reading through the comments here to see so many of the forum goers have given this title a chance and picked it up. Support those titles ya love, that's my motto always.

Yeah, the user review score was higher than the review score at first. That's unfortunate.

Anyways, this is my second Fire Emblem game, the first being Conquest (I think), and I stopped playing near the very last mission of the game for whatever reason. I'm only a little ways into this game (finished the second encounter, the first being the tutorial). When given free time, I notice that almost everyone on the map has some dialogue. Should I be talking to every single person on the map? It seems worthwhile, as many of the conversations reward friendship points, but that can be tedious. Perhaps there won't always be this much dialogue, but for where I'm at in the game it's pretty insane.

Probably Smash fans.

enjoying the game so far about 16 hours in. I started on Normal classic. I kind of wish I started on Hard but I guess I will do that on my second playthrough as the black eagles

Because people are upset that Nintendo is doing so well with Switch.  Stupid console wars.