Started my first run picking the Black Eagles on casual normal difficulty. This game definitely expands on the support aspect of the game pretty hugely. initially starting this the game felt overwhelming with all the little gameplay details I had to keep tabs with but I definitely ended up having a good understanding of it in the end. from a story perspective its a somewhat interesting premise for a Fire Emblem game specifically, its really nice how it ties in to the new support and class upgrading system. given the opportunity I will treat this game like Pokémon with no shame to the hours of level grinding being put. I will say despite the fact that I initially enjoyed how the class advancement worked, getting the characters to the final master class seemed way more like a chore than it needs to be, I'm sure it was designed this way intentionally to prevent people like me from overpowering their units and make the lack of a power gap make the Divine Pulse more useful but man it feels hopeless getting some characters to class progress. as for the Divine Pulse itself its nice they found a more convenient method to save time for the people who adore save scumming, I can be guilty of doing that but not for this game specifically. the Devine Pulse mechanic/feature is definitely good to prevent hours of gameplay from going to waste. this game overall definitely feels great and cohesive, a major step above from the 3DS games (Awakening specifically since that's the one I played the most and finished). I'm glad Koei Tecmo was able to pull it off with the guidance of Intelligent Systems however with Engage being their official 30th anniversary game for the franchise (even if it ended up getting hit with delays and missing the deadline for that), I'm very curious how much of a contrast that is compared to this one. Definitely looking forward to playing the other ending routes and trying to play this game as efficiently possible when my gaming burnout fades away. I don't have any real complaints that I felt ruined the experience but I do wish the performance for this game was a bit better and that they didn't cheap out on the cutscenes.