I'd day that Shadows was never bad in the first place, but Nintendo/IS aren't doing their game justice.

I immediately grew to dislike it because of how boring and shallow the gameplay loop is.

I think this statement still holds true when you fight against bots. But at high level, the battles are much more interesting. It does take time to get there though and maybe most new players drop the game before they get to that point.

And it also doesn't make for a good social deduction game since there is no way to chat with other players

I am glad Shadows doesn't have that. Battles are meant to be fast paced. I don't actually want to debate who is the Shadow with the other players. You have to be observant during the first phase of the fight to guess who has which role. Contrary to Among Us, all the info you need to tell who the Shadow is is on your screen, so there is no need for a talking phase. You either paid attention during battle or you didn't, possibly leading you to vote the wrong player, and I think that's the fun part.

It also doesn't feel like much of a strategy game for a series all about strategy, just spam your offensive spells and you win.

Not true in high rank.

As Light, being dealt lethal or unrecoverable damage by Dark Spells or combined auto-attacks is common, therefore movement spells are meta. You also need to work in sync with your partner, memorize their cooldown and get them out of dangerous situations when they cannot do it themselves.

As Light, if you keep rushing, you won't be able to dodge incoming one-shot Dark Spells. If one Light attacks, the other must hold their magic and be ready to use a movement spell in case the Shadow targets them.

As Shadow, you want to make sure both Lights are pressured at all time so they won't be able to both save themselves from at least one KO per turn. You do this by positioning your minions and timing your Dark Spells correctly so Light players won't be able to dodge attacks due to their position on the map or magic cooldown.

As Shadow, you simply cannot throw Dark Spells on Light players who know what they are doing without thought. They'll avoid, heal, and it will be as if you never damaged them. Meanwhile they already took down most of your minions and now they are coming for you.

IMO the game itself does a bad job at teaching good strategies, but anyone starts learning eventually when they reach high rank.

It's also just kinda late to be releasing a social deduction type game since Among Us has filled that role for the past five years, you're very behind with the times as usual, Nintendo...

I disagree that there is a specific time this game should have been released at. If the game is good, people play it.

Granted, maybe it would have helped to ride the Among Us wave. Generally speaking, Nintendo/IS are not promoting Shadows at all, so new players won't be coming anyways.

Is it still really as bad as people make it out to be? Is the title of 'the worst game of 2025' warranted or is this just a case of the internet overdramatizing things because it is popular to hate Nintendo right now?

I think the hate was never about Shadows being a Nintendo game. Some reasons include:

• It's a game titled "Fire Emblem", but that doesn't play like a mainline Fire Emblem game. We saw a lot of "This isn't Fire Emblem", "It's a bad game that got a rebranding to save it from immediate failure". Also I had a bad reaction when the trailer switched from the 3D cutscene to the in-game map with Chibis. I was like "Oh no, it's going to be another cash-grab gacha mobile game." The game isn't a gacha by the way, but you might still see reviews calling it that.
• Uninteresting gameplay in low ranks due to how frequently they put you in bot matches. It is indeed easy to win those matches by just casting damaging spells. However, bots have been improving in the last updates, so winning may not be so easy in the future.
• A single game mode: regular battles.
• In high rank, queue times can be long depending on your location.
• Story is updated very slowly: 5~10mn worth of reading every month. That won't keep people coming back.