First impressions before release? [possible spoilers]

[nyainou]

How did you think the plot would actually go, or what kind of people the major characters would be, based off of advertisements and pre-release information?

When I was reading Leo and Elise's support and learned that Garon had actually been a nice father, I imagined that he still was when Corrin was around, at least for a bit. And that Garon actually did have some sort of fatherly role in Corrin's life before suddenly doing a 180 and 'becoming' evil. I didn't even think that Corrin was Rapunzel'd, either. I also figured Hinoka and Sakura would have slightly more prominent roles. Honestly, how I thought things would go down were completely different from how things actually went down.

Also, I thought Niles would be straight, so I was 100% prepared to play as a girl to marry him. Glad I was wrong.

[Book Bro]

From the first trailer I thought Xander, Ryoma, and Azura would be the main characters with Azura being the main lord. Expected some supernatural elements because of the golems and dragon, but thought the story would mostly grounded and less fantasy-based. I thought Azura's pendant would be the Fire Emblem and that it would be like Lehran's Medallion Lite.

The second trailer made me think this was going to bring back several armies participating in one battle like in FE4 and FE10. In fact I convinced myself the game would draw from those two for its themes and story. :c and yes I liked RD's story so I was hyped.

[Noma9]

I was convinced that they scrapped whatever they had done for the FE and SMT cross-over game and re-purposed it for "If". I assumed the Faceless and golems were part of an invading demon force and that there would be multiple in-game paths based on moral decisions you could make, like in Tactics Ogre or something based off the Chaos/Neutral/Lawful routes in the SMT series. You would have different characters and classes available to you depending on the paths you took and the over-all tone would be very dark. That. . . is not exactly what we got.

[Azure Sen]

I suspected from the beginning that there would be a third route, simply from pattern recognition; in any game with multiple routes and endings, there is generally a "Best" route/ending pair, and at the time Birthright and Conquest didn't seem to fit the bill. I did expect it to be a little more Shin Megami Tensei Neutral-esque, and involve a lot of dead royals on both sides.