MiaMain

I've only played the Church route so far, but I thought it had tons of problems. First off, there was a little too much foreshadowing with Edelgards supports in part 1.Then in part 2 you are just kind of doing random missions encountering the other lords until you attack Enbarr. You should have fought Edelgard face to face more. If you don't do Petra's side mission, you only see Hubert the once. I don't know why you keep using the Church as a base of operations, and the mission against those who slither in the dark is completely forced and almost random. Rhea was never really exposed either, which was weird considering how bad the things she eluded to doing were.

That’s just rpgs in general though. Part 1 had some iffy times with the month calendar, but part 2 was brutal with it. Talk before release made it sound like gameplay changed in the second half, but it was basically the same. Only this time there was no discernible reason why they are at the monastery most of the time. I think the solution would be to vary the dates so some weeks you have 3 classes, and others there are none so that it feels like you’re just seeing key moments, but that time is still passing. My other main problem with the system was that people don’t recover happiness. So if you don’t explore every week, your classroom sessions are shot (especially at higher prof levels).

It's sort of hard to make a tier list at this point. I've only played one route, and there is a lot of nuance in this game. All characters are growth characters, so some of mine may simply be products of RNG, but I"ll throw it out nonetheless. Crest skills don't have much value imo as they activate so seldom and have mediocre effects for the most part. Main Roster Petra- Top tier. My best unit. Wanted her to be a swordmaster, but changed my mind after I realized you need to have reason to become mortal savant. So I flipped her into a wyvern lord. She was basically untouchable, and was the only one who could go toe to toe with the death knight. Strength was an issue at times, but she could just rush bosses, and that is how I beat Caspar-A tier. Was shitty until I accepted that he wasn't a warrior. Once I taped gauntlets to his hands he became the best offensive force on my team. Not super dodgy, but always fast enough to get 4 hits. The piece that made him good was that despite his strength being fairly low, he would always have a 25-30% crit rate, basically guaranteeing a crit every round. There may be characters who can fill the brawler role better, but I just followed the archetypes this playthrough. Edelgard- Top tier. Basically indestructible from Ch 3 onward. Hubert- Low tier. I was just using him for the -5def spell in most chapters. Dorothea- A tier. Early access to thoron and physic allows her to chip and heal until she is overleveled. She mastered all white and black magic classes plus the dancer class. She wasn't a good choice for dancer, since she could usually do more damage than the person she was dancing for, so I dropped the class pretty quickly. She started every map with two free kills via meteor, and I had to actively work to keep her from stealing all the xp. Not many units resist magic in this game, so she basically ran over everything so long as you kept her out of range, which is fairly easy. Bernadetta- B tier. Had parts in the game when she was really good, but was strength screwed for the second half. Dropped all my energy drops on her, and she still struggled to finish people. Access to deadeye mean she was always chipping someone, but she wasn't very dodgy, and struggled to kill bulky enemies in the second half. Shamir- C tier- When I first got her she was awesome, but she could not keep her speed up and quickly fell to just doing chip damage. Again, even all the speedwings I had didn't get her doubling again. People rave about bow knights in this game, but both of mine were only used for chip damage. Ferdinand - B tier. Just a standard cavalier. He could take a couple hits, and would sometimes kill other things. Super useful in this route with all the squishy characters, but I could see him being pretty mediocre in other routes. Lindhardt - B tier. Early physic gave him a ton of value and xp. Warp let me cheese some late game chapters. He kills everything as a magic user, but isn't durable, and his spells aren't all that good. Byleth - A tier. Struggled in the second half due to being somewhat frail, but was still the wrecking ball he was in part 1. Seteth - B tier- Took awhile to get him lances to go wyvern lord, which is where he shines. Struggled to kill things, but could take a few hits. Just doesn't really do anything well apart from having canto and good movement. Flayn - A or B tier - Started using her in the second half, but it only took a couple chapters to get her going. No physic, but rescue and fortify were super useful. No really good reason spells considering how frail she was. She had high magic, so would kill whatever I asked her to, but she could only attack the last enemy in range. Had to actively work to keep her xp up without physic. I may have actually struggled on some chapters if I didn't have fortify. Adjutants Lysithea - A. Kept her as adjutant for most of the game hoping that roster size would increase at some point. She tore through the chapters she was in, but wasn't a good class, so mobility hurt her. I'm positive she is an S in the golden deer route based on how well she did with so little attention.

I might be an outlier, but I used the rewind all the time. If there was a death I rewinded to the beginning, but for all the times where I was mindlessly clicking and attacking the wrong enemy, or discarding items accidentally, it was super useful. Maybe other people play more under control than me. There's always been a degree of self control with fire emblem games. BEXP abuse in the gamecube games, and arena abuse in the handhelds being the major examples.

I hate this map. Was just waltzing through this game, until this. Level recommendation was also way lower than it should have been for the map. Hubert shows up and 1HKOs someone with meteor. Special place in hell for this map. Probably harder with the church route, since my best tank was afk, and my stud mage was picking me off from across the map. Plus all the trees keep you super slow, so you're mages have trouble keeping pace to take out the heavy armoureds that are everywhere. Meanwhile theives and swordmasters are ripping through the bush to kill any stragglers. And after dropping 5 heavy tanks literally on top of you, the game sends several pegassus knights to kill you in a couple turns.

Dorothea because it fit her personality. She’s a great mage though, so I rarely actually used her as a dancer and ended up leaving the class behind. Flayn probably makes more sense, but small roster with a ton of good characters made dancer kind of useless.

I just got to part 2, but haven't had any problems so far. I'm on hard mode, so hopefully lunatic is more of a challenge. Didn't read any of the instructions, so was lost on how to manage my army for the first several chapters, but now that I have the gist of it, I think I would breeze through the game on hard. Even with poor management at the beginning the only snag I hit was the first Death knight battle. Other than that I haven't even had a unit die and need to rewind. Thought the demonic beasts would be scarier after the first encounter, but they are mostly just tedious after about the third map with them.

My two favourite games. Both have their flaws, but they don’t have the same flaws for the most part. My favourite part about these games is that the story is the focus. No mycastle, no reclassing, no weird waifu bs. I’d want to keep the spirit of the games the same. POR needs improved models like the ones in radiant dawn. Some other minor gameplay tweaks like skill reassignment, staff and laguz counterattacks, and automatic occults upon classing up (not tied to this one). Paladins need a slight nerf so that non-mounts are viable. Laguz were usable in this game, but could use a bit of tweaking. A couple more supports to finish some loops, but I liked how supports were limited. A couple new maps at the end during either the Daein or Crimea battles would give some late game players a little more useability. From a gameplay mechanics perspective radiant dawn might be the best in the series. Support system needs to be made to mirror path of radiance because the one sentence supports are trash. Story is pretty good, but will need to be lengthened to compensate for it’s major issues. And boy does it have issues. It’s hard to do much more than be a couple levels into promotion, which puts you in a tough spot for part 3. Too many prepromotes who disappear for most of the game and then come back shitty. Every dawn brigade member save maybe Nolan is the worst unit in their class. Almost all part 2 characters are unuseable due to availability issues. Part 3 dawn brigade is awful but GM is pretty good. Ike’s team might even be too good since he they can almost all solo every map. Part 4 suffers from the fact that many characters weren’t set up right with availability in previous parts. It also becomes hard to turn down all the insane units thrown at you (laguz kings). For such a long game it seems stupid to say, but it really needs another 15-20 chapters in the middle to properly handle the two/three stories going on and the number of characters. Also 3-13 archer should be recruitable. My personal add would be to put another 3-4 chapters in part 1, with more of a focus at the beginning so that you get to know the new characters better, 3-4 chapters in part 2 (a couple of Ike in Gallia as in the next paragraph, and a couple to build Elincia's character arc better), and have another 10ish chapters in part 3 that revolve around elincia looking for the Apostle in Beignon which the empire is distracted by Ike. This could have her and a small group of crimean knights sneaking around beignon (disguised as mercenaries) looking for her. She could run into Tormod while there. Maybe have some skirmishes with Daein and small time senators before freeing Sanaki. Then she has to race back to be queen because Valtome is advancing into Crimea. She and the royal knights race back to protect random village from the Marauders map, then she races to lay down her sword to buy time for Sanaki to arrive. So basically everything else can be the same. I'd also like a little more screen time for Ike's group, since the game's story basically relies on POR. Without POR it's just Zihark's and Jill's showing up with virtually no backstory. People complain about the Ike show, but he is the most popular lord for a reason. Give the people what they want. Maybe give him a place to be during the civil war. Ike is too impulsive to just sit by as the kingdom is killing eachother. Maybe he is in Gallia caught up in the buildup to the Laguz Alliance war.