I really plowed through this one, compared to other Fire Emblem games I've beaten, but I really enjoyed the hell out of this one. I went through on Hard, Hardcore mode (the permadeath one, I only remember it's the non-casual mode), and went through the usual malarkey of getting through FE with no one dying. The pair up system really adds A LOT to the game, but it really feels like they expect you to use it the way I sorta went with.

Like, I imagine if you're on casual mode or normal difficulty, there might be more incentive to pair up characters whose personalities you think fit best together, in a sort of Sims-esque way, but it just came down to damn practicality for me. Finding male-female pairs of big attacking guys to pair with fliers to get a combo of very mobile DPS-tanks took up a big majority of my micromanagement, but damn if it didn't pay off. Chrom & Cynthia, and Lon'qu & Cordelia were my pairs of MVP's in the late game. Just dodging every attack that came their way with all of the crazy speed, and being like invulnerable to attacks they do get hit with with the crazy paired up resistance and defense. I was basically just using that 4-man team near the end and bum-rushing bosses.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, since it seemed like you really had a lot of agency over which characters lived or died with the pairing system, where in previous games it seemed like you were completely at the mercy of their level-up qualities on whether or not a character would just be totally useless. A strong recommendation to even people who didn't like FE previously, just because of how forgiving the casual mode is, and how well implemented the pairing up system is.

Ok, so playing this game again, without the childhood bias, its not as good as I believed it to be. I think the story is among the best the franchise has to offer but man... the gameplay is kinda ass. Firstly, the difficulty is fucked. Hard mode is peepee baby time and lunatic is stat inflated up the ass. Lunatic forces players, mostly early, to play in very specific strategies and the maps are designed poorly on top of that. Most of the time, you get rushed by 100 enemy units in these maps, the solution? Send in your overpowered main character unit to one tap every living creature. The optimal way to play the game is have a couple dudes, around 4-5 that get all the exp then you slap 4-5 stat stick characters on those guys. Its why the game lets you have around 9-10 units most times. Half your units are never meant to see the light of day and just be stat sticks. You also have to make sure all your good units are tanky enough to survive the absolute horseshit ambushes that occur. This was also a problem I had in three houses. When my units eat shit and die cause some units spawn out of thin air on top of mine, it not very fun. Its a trial and error mechanic, where my units die, then I reset then try again, or if youre on casual, you just play the rest of the level with half your team missing. This game is mostly a power fantasy where the custom character who has inflated stats up the ass, just steam rolls everything while all your friends die. I remember when I was a kid, I beat the final levels with my whole party dying and just soloing the level. As a SRPG, this is like a cardinal sin. If it had better designed maps that werent just zerg rushes, and a better adjusted difficulty, it would probably retain its 9/10 rating I previously gave it. I think it speaks volumes when lunatic+ where its the same thing but enemy units have random skills, can be impossible to beat in the early levels.