FE13: Finished. Excellent game! It's just plain more *fun* than many of the other Fire Emblems, as it manages to simultaneously be as tough a strategy experience as you want while clearing out a lot of the meh parts of an FE game. While the plot is usually some shade from "bad" to "ridiculous," I like some of what the plot is trying to do in broad strokes, which is often enough. And of course the vast amount of character work is precisely what the doctor ordered after FE:SD's nonexistent characters & FE:RD's threadbare side dialogue. Hell, even the villain, who is quite standard MWAHAHA fare in most ways, is still effective enough; certainly drives the theme of the game home at least. Certainly above par for a Fire Emblem villain (not exactly mighty competition). And lastly, the music is pleasantly effective. I very much like the way they seamlessly have a single piece of music for a level, but go from subtle to bombastic when fights start.
There is of course one notable flaw, which are ninja reinforcements, but I played on Hard Casual, so whatever. There's another minor flaw, and that's the Counter skill potentially dealing lethal damage, but that can be sort of dealt with via reloading the map at least.
Hard Casual, if played bloodbath style, does kind of ruin the challenge in that the trick in FE comes in doing 0 loss fights (or occasionally 1 loss fights if the loss is sufficiently replaceable). I'll probably follow this up either with Lunatic Casual (and play knowing that deaths are "okay") or Hard Classic. I still mentally noted a loss in my head when I ate deaths that didn't come from ninjas, and I did a full reset on 1-2 maps after sufficiently failing it up to be able to complete it with my head held high (like the lava map...). But yeah, around the time of the lava map debacle, I actually finished getting non-Chrom characters married, started using Pair Up much more aggressively, and did some light grinding in the sense of doing the various kid recruitment maps. With the higher Skill, Def, & Res scores, and the S-Supports, suddenly pair-up attacks and blocks were far more reliable, and the stat bonuses were bigger. The difficulty definitely dropped from there on: was able to handle C18-C22 with no deaths due to non-ninjas, C23 ate a reset for a stupid reason from an AVATAR death of all things (he should have paired up with Chrom!) after the plot section of the fight where he bit off a bit more than he could chew + bad luck, and then C24-25 were clear sailing. 2 deaths in endgame but that's when they're okay to happen even on a death run, and both were "unlucky" (Ignis triggering on someone I didn't bother to heal because I forgot to bring Fortify + an earlier Killing Edge hitting a like 6% of activation and 40% chance to hit against a wounded Vaike. Switching to Berserker for long-term Axefaire is probably good, but in the short term Hero is probably better - more speed, more defense, much more skill to spam Sol constantly).
Anyway. To go more into the "fun" part.
* Casual mode, of course. Stressed by carefully running a battle and getting some good level-ups, and then not noticing the boss was moving and that you activated it? Whatevs. I'm all for good challenge, but learning the game first on Casual mode makes for more "eh screw it onward" and less frustration.
* Restock. No I don't care about doing inventory management, FE:SD's combine was nice but Restock is even better.
* Shop & Forge for whatever you like once you have access to it. No worries about mysteriously disappearing items, except for Anna's shops, which are pure bonus anyway.
* Enemies have enough HP (on Hard) that you can't just 2HKO them quite as easily as it felt like in some other FEs. BUT the existence of decent killer weapons & pair-ups means that you can often kill them with a single Pair Up action anyway. I definitely used / enjoyed the Killing Edge a lot more in FEA than any other FE; I've got 50-60 HP to cut through, and while I'm listed as only doing 17 per hit, with a 30-40% chance of crit per shot, and another 60% chance of a pair-up attack per hit, that enemy is going down.
* The fact that grinding exists, if you want it. I'm one of those people who felt vaguely compelled to play "optimally" through some of Radiant Dawn in the sense of intentionally trying to grind enemies down with more hits rather than fewer, let people get intentionally injured so I could level up healers, etc. I'm not talking boss regen abuse, but just a general "take it slow and be sure to farm some extra XP if possible." And getting MAD when a critical for chipping denies XP to the lower leveled character I wanted to give the kill to, etc. Bonus XP for speed helped tamp this down somewhat, but not enough. Shadow Dragon was even worse: I did the "take more turns to farm reinforcements" trick some, which was just aggravating. Anyway, the existence of grinding means who cares! If somehow a character gets screwed out of experience a bunch, let them go kill a bunch of Risen in a grinding map and catch 'em up.
I'm a little worried that Lunatic might fall into the trap FE games can potentially become about being more about the stats than about the strategy - I hope I'm not reduced to too much "huddle in the corner while they attack me while glugging Elixirs" - but I'll see, I suppose.
Anyway. Kill count was Avatar > Sully > Chrom > Vaike > Sumia > Tharka > Cordelia > Lon'qu > Virion > Lucina > Anna > others. Last maps were a little too easy as noted, so maybe I accidentally overleveled? That or embracing "always be paired up at all times" broke the game too much.
Claudius 20/20/4 - Male avatar, RES asset, HP flaw. RES worked out really well combined with a bit of good luck, especially in the mid & early game - Claudius galloped ahead in levels, so he was still easily awesome on offense anyway, but he also could tank on the front lines to draw in enemies. His HP ended up even worse than it "should" have been, but his DEF & RES better, and I know what I want most of the time. (Only C23 really made him pay for it, and even then, that was because I foolishly hadn't paired him up.) Married Lucina for better Morgan stats & abilities, for all that he should have married Anna. Devious social climber marrying the nobility & all, I see.
Chrom 20/20 & Sumia 20/20 - Yup, they're good, you know this already. Went Falcon Knight for Sumia to get Lancefaire for her somewhat suspect strength, plus it seems like she'd be the one to ride a white pegasus while Cordelia rode a black one. By endgame, Chrom paired with Claudius while Sumia paired with Cynthia.
Sully 20/19 & Virion 20/16 - Paladin & Sniper. Sully was really bad at first, but then became more and more awesome as time went on; she eventually was the best at tanking if I needed someone to go out and draw fire (okay, along with Tiki). My Virion was strength-blessed and *still* a questionable addition to the team at first; he eventually made himself okay, mostly via S-Supporting Sully and letting her slaughter infinite flyers with a Javelin since Virion would just Pair-Up shoot them.
Lissa 20/16 - Sage. Healbot, and alone, all alone, not enough fightin' males to marry her, and it doesn't really make sense to pair up the clerics unless you're fighting swarms of enemy mages (whom the RES-twinked Avatar can slaughter anyway). (Okay she A-supported Chrom and B supported Vaike & Maribelle, but eh.) At least she could take a damn hit though.
Cordelia 20/20/1 & Vaike 20/20/1 - Dark Flier & Hero (changed to Falcon Knight & Berserker after hitting 20 for the last map, pointlessly). Cordelia was actually below par for me and had some meh level-ups, and was still perfectly fine as a unit. Vaike was a good team up, as she speeds him up while Vaike makes her Spear hurt. (Not quite as good a team as Vaike / Lon'qu which I used earlier and A-supported first, but once the marriages happened, eh, sorry bros.) Vaike actually has a more sensible pair-up than I was expecting, as he snaps her out of constantly lusting for Chrom. A bit. And Vaike is hilarious anyway. This was skill-blessed Vaike, so especially when Paired Up, he spammed Sol activations what felt like ~45% of the time while he was a Hero or some ridiculous amount.
Lon'qu 20/16 & Tharja 20/20/1 - Swordmaster & Sorcerer. Tharja started off with meh level-ups, but Dark Magic is indeed awesome, and Lon'qu ensures she doubles everything with Nosferatu to never die if you need someone to tank 8 incoming cavalry or something.
Tiki 30/6 & Anna */20/2 - Kept Anna a Trickster. (I guess maybe she wants to spend time in Assassin if you're using her for postgame stuff to get Lethality? But meh, I want my heals, so.) Not much to say, Anna is hilarious & awesome and I even blew a Hammerne on her Levin Sword, and Tiki tanks everything and threatens to enroll Anna in a new career in, uh, food services after Anna calls her a job-killing socialist.
Cynthia 20/13 - Dark Flier, usually paired with mom. Brains of a brick - it's nice they rewrote the recruit scenario a bit for Chrom is her dad, but she still calls Ruger father and doesn't notice anything amiss with that scenario? Good thing her stats, especially with the Chrom / Sumia inheritance, are totally godly, even better than her sister's.
Lucina 20/18 & Kjelle 20/13 - Great Knight for Kjelle, who is weirdly limited on support options, so stuck around Lucina so she can prove that she is the toughest ever and will totally beat your face in, or something. Kjelle was kind of unkillable by physicals that didn't hit her weakness.
Morgan 20/4 - Didn't use too much outside a bit of Risen grinding 4kidz & the final mission. Seemed like she'd be pretty broken if caught up though what with the Aether, and can spam Rally Spectrum otherwise.
Severa 20/6, Noire 20/6 - Didn't use outside Risen grinding. Noire is kind of hilarious though, she's got one schtick but does it well.
Maribelle 20/12 - Used her most of the game, but she got dropped for kids around C20. Probably unusable in a sane Classic playthrough, she's doubled by everything and OHKOed by everything, too much violin practice not enough dodging practice. Laura-tastic, except fewer chokepoints than RD Act 1.
One question, though: Where is all the super-hard aftergame content that was hyped?! I bought all the DLC, but I'm not impressed from trying Champions of Yore 1-3. I guess when people buy their DLC they want to break the game right away with it rahter than wait to the end of hte game. Lost Bloodlines is also listed as 2 star difficulty so my hopes are not much higher there. Are all the hard maps still Japan only? (I guess there's Infinite Regalia at 4 stars, but eh, haven't tried that yet.)
