The one area where I felt this game shines above other FEs is certainly the characters. At first, they all seem like generic anime tokens, but in every support conversation, I learned something new about them. It definitely gives me the incentive to replay in order to get all the support conversations I missed. Many people say that the game had too many supports, but I strongly disagree. There may be one or two characters I'm not particularly fond of, and the villains (aside from maybe Gangrel and a couple of minor bosses) weren't too great, but I still consider the Awakening cast to be my favorite.
And yeah, definitely the "difficulty" was the worst part of the game. Success in Lunatic+ is not dependant on tactics, skills, or preparation, it depends on how many Luna+ enemies the game decides to throw at you.