I really don't like how Lunatic was handled.

[Magikarpador]

The first few chapters were amazing, I really had to think about every single move I made and exactly how I was going to get through. It was tough, but not too punishing. But from my experience that falls apart in multiple ways in Chapter 5. It's a huge difficult spike, dealing with Wyvern Rider reinforcements, unusual terrain, and a recruitment really bumped up the difficulty, I almost feel that if you didn't level up specific characters to certain margins it could be near impossible to get everyone through alive. The other thing is that the Outrealms open up at the same time, so you could grind through it, but then it defeats the whole purpose of the run.

With Lunatic already being several degrees harder than the previous difficulty, I feel like they didn't take much time at all to balance the difficulty curve for it and it ultimately just lead me to abandon a run that I really was enjoying prior to it.

[eclipse]

You're free to no-grind Lunatic. Just because it's there doesn't mean that you have to do it!

Anyway, there's a lull from Chapter 7/8, presumably to give your underleveled units a chance to catch up. However, the difficulty will ramp back up starting from Chapter 12, and it won't let up.