I'm glad to see they were so prompt about pushing in the proposed changes to the most glaring issues like the readability of the unit chart, and that they didn't go
too overboard in granting stars and ranks to lowered difficulties.
Ryota's Groove change was necessary to make him at all usable, and also intuitively how his power should work from its description, but it does completely (and I mean
completely) break his Puzzle Mode maps, which are among the most fun and satisfying to clear in their current state. I see no sign that the puzzle maps will be adjusted around this, so that is the one piece of content that I would recommend experiencing before the patch goes live.
This might get me to jump back in. The difficulty ramp was off putting when the battles go 30/45 minutes or more
But that's a classic strategy game's average length.
My prevailing theory,
as I wrote in the OT, is that the feeling of tedious/sluggish pacing in the campaign has very little to do with time elapsed per map (which is totally on par with where a Wars-alike should be and significantly shorter than an average map in Fire Emblem), and everything to do with the macro mechanics and map design. Unit-building is so constricted for most of the campaign that you spend a lot of dead time shuffling a drip-feed of pieces up to the front in a non-interactive way, and checkpoints aren't really going to fix this apart from giving you a safety net for careless CO placement (which, to be fair, is the actual losing condition most of the time anyway). It's not surprising that the best maps in the game are consistently the defence and naval maps that don't fall victim to this end-to-end linearity.
So there
is a certain slowness to it all, but it speaks to a structural problem with the game more complicated than "too long" or "too hard", though that will be the sensation it leaves for certain players. Other than that, I do get the sense that many of the gripes about difficulty or pacing are coming from genre shock among players who have never encountered this kind of game before—but to be fair, that's an important audience, and perhaps even the principal audience. I think Wargroove is actually quite a bit better as an intro-to-tactics game than as an Advance Wars nostalgia trip, in the same way that Mario + Rabbids was best suited for neophytes to XCOM and its ilk.
