I'm still fairly early on in the game, playing on casual mode, and I'm unsure of whether I should restart in normal. I picked casual because I'm worried about getting stuck later on with too few characters to make any progress. Then it struck me that losing characters left and right early on was probably accounted for by giving you a bunch of extra characters to replace them as the game goes on.

That being said, if I stay on casual mode and subsequently never lose any characters, will I be drowning in party members by the end? Sifting through the inventories of 8 or 9 party members and sitting through all their inter-party conversations has been manageable, but doing so with 40 or 50 characters sounds like a nightmare.

It probably won't be too much of a problem; I ended up picking about 15 to 20 characters for my 'main' team and everyone else got leveled up whenever I was bored and felt like doing some random battles/getting support conversations unlocked. I'd say keep doing what you're doing, because the other route has the nightmare scenario of you losing the characters you actually like and having to finish the game with a team full of uninteresting clods.

That said, I happen to like pretty much every team member the game gives you, so I doubt that'd happen regardless. Still, you never know!

That's a very good point. I think you're probably right, I'll just keep on going with Casual. Thanks!

You'll probably be drowning in characters by the end, but yeah, it's not a huge issue. You can bench most of them, meaning you won't have to deal with their inventories or support conversations since you mostly earn support conversations through battles.

As much as the game has permadeath, the game isn't actively trying to kill your characters, at least not in the way that something like XCOM is where your dudes can get iced in 1-2 shots if you're not careful. I mean, I guess in Fire Emblem your healers and mages are a little more fragile to physical damage and your knights are susceptible to magic damage, but because there is no fog of war, you should be able to see it coming and avoid it.