Iridium

With the exception of Hector this is one of the safest guesses you could possibly make. This being a Musou game, Tharja and Tiki would... not be surprises in the least, and Takumi is more-or-less the closest male equivalent in terms of the fanbases those two cover. I'd be honestly surprised if we didn't get most/all of these characters purely by coincidence.

Changing any ages, including but not limited to the age required for alcohol, would be dumb. Gaiden does not take place in the United States. American law does not apply. There is data in the game for "Falchion" (locked to Alm), "Exalted Falchion" (locked to Marth), and "Parallel Falchion" (locked to Lucina.) Alm's Falchion is effective against monsters, eyeballs, and can kill gods. Marth's Falchion is effective against eyeballs but not other monsters, and can kill gods. Lucina's Falchion has no special qualities.

This is correct. In other words, female villagers can become Clerics, and both male and female villagers can become Mages that get access to a healing spell of some kind after promotion. Male villagers cannot become Clerics, though.

It is unfortunate that the game leaked so far ahead of time, but I'm hesitant to say it's going to make much of a difference. I feel like most of the people who were going to buy the game are probably still going to do so, and most of the people who are planning to pirate the game without buying it probably always were going to and the early leak wouldn't change much. Enabling piracy on a 3DS is not particularly difficult, but it's extraordinarily tedious and it's not something I see most casuals going out of their way to do.

i'm not sure if i'm happy or sad that they nerfed the angel ring i mean for gameplay's sake, jiminy cricket it needed to be done, but that thing was so hilariously and mindbogglingly overpowered that i almost miss it

I'm not particularly bothered with the low class variety because every class serves an important purpose with relatively little redundancy. Modern games have a lot of classes that are basically just arbitrary weapon combinations plus or minus a mount. You don't really need every permutation of weapon a, weapon b, and unmounted/horse/flier/armor; it sounds nice on paper, but it makes for a lot of redundancies and classes that just aren't great. Who uses Blacksmiths when you have Heroes and Berserkers? What would you need a Griffon Knight for when you have Wyvern Lords? Why should you bother with Mechanist over Bow Knight or Sniper or Master Ninja? Every single class in Gaiden is totally unique in purpose and excels in one specialized role. Mercenaries are fast and useful for doubling, and eventually excel at taking on mages. Soldiers are strong and resilient, and eventually excel at taking on most melee units. Archers are middling on their own, but eventually excel at picking off stragglers or assisting units in training. Cavaliers are solid all-around, and can use their movement to quickly reach problematic areas or get into the action. Mages are costly and risky, but with proper use are extraordinarily powerful and strategic, and can bypass terrain effects. Female mages take a bit more time to raise and don't regain HP upon promotion, but can safely defend at 1 range without HP loss and equip Swords. Pegasus Knights are fragile and somewhat weak, but can annihilate monsters like no other. Clerics fulfill all of your healing and support needs. Yeah, you can add classes if you want, but in general every important need is covered by what we already have. Without a weapon triangle, you don't really need axe users or every type of Paladin under the sun. Without a magic triangle, you don't really need other types of magic.

This is correct. Physical classes are requires to wield a weapon to gain that weapon's effects (with the exception of the generic sword, lance, or bow), while magical classes can use any spell that they know regardless of what they are holding.

Cavalier is probably his worst class, honestly. In the original Gaiden it was "good" because getting your only Cavalier was basically the only justification for actually using Atlas, but now that that no longer applies, there's no reason to make him one over something that either fixes his biggest issues (speed with mercenary, defense with soldier) or lets him be bad from further away (archer, mage).

It's a spell unique to Cleric Faye, but yes. Also, since you mention Stamina, it's worth pointing out that Valbar -- as far as we can tell -- has the highest Stamina in the game.

What has been censored so far? There's nothing in the original Gaiden that's even worth censoring.

Warp, Again, Physic, and Fortify exist to resolve the movement problem or otherwise let them act somewhat separately from the army. Barons are otherwise really good in this game, taking trivial damage from almost everyone that isn't a mage and dealing out solid chunks of damage in return. The only reason I didn't use them more often in the original was because Alm, the Whitewings, and the Clerics did everything on their own after a certain point; still, there was definitely a point where Lukas was critical to my army.

It's a little thing, but it might be worth noting that Tatiana can't learn Recover as a Cleric/Saint. Or at least it's not mentioned on the Magic Levels page and she didn't get it in Gaiden. The description implies that all Clerics, Sages, and Priestesses can learn it, and while Tatiana is teeeechnically not any of those things, I'd imagine it would still apply if you somehow rolled her over back into Cleric. It's weird, but presumably it's to make up for the fact that she gets Physic as a base spell and Fortify only a short while afterward.

I'm a little concerned that it will change the dynamic of the game substantially, as Gaiden was balanced around promoting as soon as possible because the growths weren't worth fishing for for most characters. Now that the growths are actually good, people have a valid reason to hold off on promotion, and the gains from promoting are generally going to be worse. I'm not too upset, though, because I understand that this was a real point of contention for many people since the abysmal growths are a bit hard to swallow at first. To that end I understand that the change was probably for the best in the short term; I'm just hoping that the long-term consequences aren't so bad.

Base conversations are essentially conversations where characters react to what is currently going on in the story, typically the next or previous chapter. They allow for characters to develop somewhat more organically because they are tied to plot events rather than arbitrary friendship levels, and consequently only happen at set points instead of needing to account for the possibility of them happening at any time. As a side-effect of this, they are also generally easier to obtain; instead of forcing players to have Tethys lap-dance Gerik in the corner for 250 turns and locking it out forever if you chose to have him get with Marisa instead, you can usually get most if not all of them in a normal playthrough. Unlike support conversations, they don't necessarily provide consistent bonuses to gameplay. Whereas support conversations reward players with some trivial proximity-based stat boost, base conversations are a bit more diverse: sometimes they provide no reward at all, sometimes they provide the player with new items, and sometimes they can even provide the player with new characters. But their primary purpose is largely the same as supports: character development and world-building. Base conversations are present in Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, and New Mystery of the Emblem. The latter case is a little bit different, though, as support conversations are somewhat combined with them in that game -- but that's not really important right now.

these boss portraits are so gosh-darn cash-money holy crackers magnum and badess are still two of my favorite boss names in the series

Yeah it turns out I read too fast and there were actually a decent few.

strength and magic are the same stat in this game; celica, mae, and delthea have higher strength than alm does, while sonya isn't far behind and faye shouldn't be here ahahahahaha ahahaha aha ha jiminy cricket why

but why there are only five women in the game who can even wield swords without shenanigans, and all of them are mages, with the only one who can use it before promotion getting a personal sword now anyway

isn't parthia only 1~3/1~5 range i mean christ 8 range parthia would be some jugdral-tier weapon ridiculousness

I wouldn't go that far. Map design is probably the most important element as far as the actual game is concerned, and neither Gaiden nor its remake is winning any awards in that department. I do agree, however, that this game seems extremely refreshing to me. Unlike most recent datamines, this one has actually made me more excited for the game, and I'm liking just about everything I'm hearing from little details to big ones. There's a strong chance this game will be good -- and in fact a very strong chance it will become my favorite -- but I dunno if I'd go so far as to say it will be the best or that it fixes everything the other 3DS titles did wrong. I'm just content to know that Gaiden might finally become the cult classic it's always deserved to be.

Combination of the character pastebin and class pastebin, both of which ultimately being either from the first page here or here. Regarding the delicious redheaded boy:

I believe the answer to all of these questions is "no". Classes seem to be pretty much the same.

in the case of lucina and the falchion, i've always just sort of assumed that it prefers a male descendant when one exists but becomes less picky if one isn't available elice can't wield falchion because marth is still alive, but in lucina's case chrom is dead so it was her or nothing i'd like to imagine that the sword isn't dumb enough to let the world end over sexism, and that those making it would implement a failsafe in case some descendant over the course of the next few millennia only had daughters (this ignores things like inigo but we're probably working off the assumption cynthia is canon anyway so whatever)

7-Eleven is a chain of convenience stores that for some reason is much broader in scope, and consequently much more popular, in Japan. They have had numerous crossovers with video game properties, including for example an entire furniture set and a unique character in Animal Crossing. In the west, they are known almost exclusively for the Slurpee, a partially frozen beverage also known as an ICEE.