So I got a 3ds today, what are the games to get?

@egg: It doesn't ask you to pick two difficulties. It asks you to pick one difficulty (Normal, Hard, Lunatic) and one rule set (Casual/Classic). It's also very clear on the difference between casual and classic. There shouldn't be a grand debate on what the "right" difficulty is. If you don't feel like having to worry about keeping your dudes alive at every turn, play Casual. If you want to play the game with the tension of the original rules, pick Classic. Casual will, by its very nature, be less difficult, but it doesn't change the fact that Hard is a more challenging difficulty than Normal. Even if you pick Hard/Casual, you still have to level your guys up, and if you're letting them fall willy-nilly, you're only going to make the going harder for them later on when they're still at low levels and the enemies keep getting more difficult.

But that's the player's choice.

It's hilarious, sad, and actually kind of insulting that you act as though the development team had no idea what they were doing when they conceived the difficulty scale and rule variants.

Every difficulty level is fine, and the Casual/Classic variant rules help open the game up to a larger audience than just the diehards. I have a friend that wouldn't touch Fire Emblem otherwise because she's usually been scared off by the perma-death, but when I explained that Awakening has a setting that turns that off, she found the idea of playing it more welcoming. And if she gets through it and then decides to try the same difficulty level on Classic, well, she's challenging herself, just as I could challenge myself by playing the game on Hard Classic and then take my following round on Lunatic/Classic. Both of us are playing the game with degrees of challenge that we prefer while still being allowed to enjoy everything that the game has to offer.

As someone that have never played a fire emblem game before, it's hard to know what difficulty to pick. It seemed all the recommendations said to leave perma death on and that easy is no fun at all, so I picked normal with perma death on.When I got a couple of missions in I kind of wish I could lower the difficulty and/or turn of perma death. I'll probably restart on easy, i didn't get very far anyway.

And it seems some people found the game to easy and didn't enjoy that either.

Some kind of concede option would be interesting, a permanent change to a lower difficulty for all those people that got stuck but don't want to restart. I'm assuming that might have happened to more people then me.

I haven't played a Fire Emblem game before now, but I found the normal setting to be wayyyyyyy too easy once I figured out how to pair the right people together and such. So I recommend hard/classic. Also, as tempting as it is to split characters up due to the branching paths, I'd highly recommend against doing so for the fact that it gets you screwed more often than not.

1. I can refute this logic
2. I WILL refute this logic
3. I will refute it because it is the most uninformed and utterly stupid argument I have ever heard.

@egg: I don't quite understand how the difference between Classic and Casual isn't obvious right from the start. The game couldn't be clearer about its difficulty, it says what each option is in crystal-clear text.

that every difficulty level is fine, therefore is no reason not to have everyone use the same difficulty

What? That's not what I said. I said that every difficulty is so clearly labeled that anyone who can read English with even the most basic proficiency can understand what each option involves. The options open up the game to a huge audience, from the most hardcore masochists to the most laid back casual players, apart from a handful of people like you who apparently can't even be arsed to come up with an answer to the question "How hard do I want this game to be?" How is offering that option a bad thing? Can you not think for yourself in the least? Are you pissed because a fucking decision isn't being made for you? If you sometimes want the game to be difficult and sometimes want it to be easy, then why not keep separate save files, or play a different game when you don't want a challenge?

For the record, 40 hours seems like it should be enough to get everything you need out of the campaign, and it can be beaten in a lot less. Sure, you can spend more doing the random encounters that pop up on various parts of the map, but you don't need to do those.

If that were the case then there would be no reason to have to choose. Even if the game makers came out and said "whatever difficulty level you pick, will be the right difficulty setting for you" then that's perversely false by the principle of being offered a choice at all. Why not just "force" everyone to play on Hard/Casual?

The developers never said that "whatever you pick will be the right for you", nor did I say that. They gave you some options, leaving you free to choose whichever one that you felt was right for you. Of course it's possible to make a mistake in judgement, which I did, but that doesn't make the game a terrible game. You've declared a game factually terrible because these options aren't pared down to two, just for you. You've thrown out all of the strategies, all of the different classes, all of the maps, all of the obstacles, all of the characters, all of the social aspects, literally everything about the game because you can't choose between Normal, Hard, or Lunatic and then decide whether or not you want the danger of perma death present? That isn't logically a bad reason to dislike a game. That's petty - a better word might be "arbitrary" - bitching about something that doesn't decide for you.

Yeah, an option would have been nice. Though, that's something I wish more games would do. I think even adding the initial option to disable permadeath, a FE staple, was a concession; so, being able to change that at any time might have seemed like too big of one. I'd still recommend using permadeath and just learning how to manage it, as turning that off gets rid of one of the big rules of the game. Easy is easy, Normal is Normal/Easy, Hard is Hard/Challenging, and Lunatic is Relatively Hard. In previous games, you couldn't even choose to disable permadeath, so you'd be stuck with that not even being an initial option. I feel like the tutorials do a fine job of pushing you in the right direction on how to face the game's challenge, but I can understand why some people find Hard a bit too much for them.

Still, even with some mild confusion in this regard, it's basically just Easy, Normal, and Hard. Easy for people new to strategy games, Normal for people new to Fire Emblem games, and Hard for people familiar with Fire Emblem. And people can switch off permadeath if that's something they might prefer. I'd not recommend doing so, but I'm not everyone. :)

I've never taken drugs, but I feel like if I did I would feel similar to when I read egg's posts. Incredible. He makes me hate him, love him, stare mouth agape at his insane babbling while nodding my head in agreement all at once. I taste purple.

Having engaged directly with him in... whatever this is, I can smell stars and see my children playing with Mussolini's ghost.

All I want to do at this point is become one with the all source and get back to providing personal recommendations of 3DS games.

"It's also very clear on the difference between casual and classic."

"I don't quite understand how the difference between Classic and Casual isn't obvious right from the start."

Guys guys. It's not that the difference between casual and classic isn't clear. But even knowing the difference between casual/classic doesn't necessarily help establish which one you should pick.

"There shouldn't be a grand debate on what the "right" difficulty is."

Agreed because it shouldn't even be an issue. The game makers should have stood behind their game and their talent and have decided on a freakin difficulty. It's not too much ask is it? The solution they used was incredibly lazy and ignorant. I would sidestep this flaw of the game, if only I could.

"The options open up the game to a huge audience, from the most hardcore masochists to the most laid back casual players, apart from a handful of people like you who apparently can't even be arsed to come up with an answer to the question 'How hard do I want this game to be?" How is offering that option a bad thing? Can you not think for yourself in the least?"

Again, it is not an option. It is a liability. It *would have been* an option if I was able to change it later. I cannot, therefore it's not an option but an oppression.

And I can think for myself. That's how I was able to use logic to determine that the choice is not a meaningful one; not really a choice at all. That's how I got to the point where I'm bashing the game on the forum board where everyone else is blindly praising it. That's literally thinking for myself.

Think about it sociologically. For comparison, if everyone in a christian nation believes christianity is right, and everyone in a muslim country believes islam is right. Nobody chose where they were born. Therefore, can either group be considered to think for themselves?

Why is being asked to choose difficulty a good thing, seeing as you can only choose one, and will probably never cross examine your choice against the other choices. (Well, not without restarting the entire game to check see. So you have the burden of having to do that.)

"If you sometimes want the game to be difficult and sometimes want it to be easy, then why not keep separate save files, or play a different game when you don't want a challenge?"

Presumably no matter what I pick the game will probably be relatively easy anyway for the first 10 or so hours. So the difficulty setting is sort of a snail mail'ed decision made arbitrarily in advance.

As for being sometimes easy and sometimes difficult. Now that you mention it, technically there should be no reason difficulty can't be altered mid-campaign.

"Of course it's possible to make a mistake in judgement, which I did, but that doesn't make the game a terrible game."

By providing an meaningless choice, it accomplishes nothing other than allowing the player to make an inferior choice.

In your case, you had to restart the game, and you blame yourself but effectively the game forced you to. Can you call that a good game? It's like if a restaurant had two entrances but everyone who goes through a certain entrance has a pail of water dropped on them. "oops! Well it was my fault not the restaurant's! I should have went through the other door! Mistake in judgment and all that."

Mind you, just because not everyone made the wrong choice as you did, doesn't mean you weren't forced to make the wrong choice. Using the restaurant example, statistically speaking X percent of patrons will get a bucket dropped on them and their clothes wet. That X percent translates to Y people meaning the restaurant *forced* Y people to experience that fate -- it's only a matter of *which* people. No one person was FORCED to get bucketed, but a certain amount of people were inevitably going to get bucketed. To defend the restaurant is sociologically irresponsible because they did nothing to lower the amount of Y.

Keep in mind there was nothing to be gained in FE Awakening's method of choosing difficulty. If it's so people don't find the game too hard or too easy, allowing people to choose a difficulty that is too hard or too easy, is an illogical and ass backwards solution.

And on top of that the choice impacts the entire experience, permanently. Again, I would ignore this flaw, if only I could, but in fact I cannot. Short of picking the absolute hardest difficulty, I might spend the entire duration of my playthrough wondering if I should have picked a harder setting.

"That's petty - a better word might be "arbitrary" - bitching about something that doesn't decide for you."

For the record, technically the game still decides for you. Only it decides based on an arbitrary criteria and that criteria is which is: "what setting the player chose". It's like a sort of personality test.

You guys are jedi mind trick'ed into thinking you were choosing a difficulty. To be more accurate, you were choosing labels subjectively describing a difficulty, AND presuming those labels to be truthful. Because if the labels were named differently ("medium" is "normal", "lunatic" is "hardcore", "casual" is "modern") you might have chosen differently. That's an obvious fact but everyone here is sweeping it under the rug. As well as it having no bearing as to how difficult the game makers actually tuned each difficulty setting to be. They could have made each setting a little bit harder or a little bit easier. As we all know and goes without saying, some games are easier than others, regardless of difficulty setting. One game's "normal" is another game's "hard". When choosing difficulty in Fire Emblem Awakening, you're choosing blind. The labels serve as a lazy way to shift responsibility onto the player.

It's like going to a career counselor and being asked "do you like salt" followed by "how much do you like salt" and then wonder for the rest of your life the extent to which your answer affected your life. That in a sense is Fire Emblem Awakening -- one of six games everyone else may or may not be playing.

It's like someone understands what intelligent speech sounds like and the concept of questioning things. But then that person can't properly combine the two into anything meaningful. At the very least he's awful at getting his point across. I've never seen someone care so much about the difficulty settings in a game they've never played. Try putting this effort into something important mayhaps?

Jesus Christ, what is even going on anymore? Is this real?

Am I real? I'm starting to see the sounds of eagles dancing among the waves of the moonbeam fairies.

Egg, dude, you really need to learn how brevity and coherence can help your argument. You're spouting nonsense and are coming up with an insane amount of criticism for a game you've never played.

@hailinel: He's accomplished two things. The first is that he's nearly made you speechless, something I've never seen before.

The second is that he's made me throw my hands up in the air and give up, something I don't often do.

I don't care about difficulty setting, but the game nonetheless forces me to choose one.

Now do you see how you can't win?

To once again use my restaurant analogy. Even if I KNOW there is a 50/50 chance of a bucket of water falling on me, and that it depends on which entrance I walk through, that still doesn't help me.

Even if I enter the restaurant, don't get bucketed, enjoy the food and have a good time, that still doesn't make it a good restaurant, because the fact is I lucked out. The only correct choice was to find another restaurant; i.e. a restaurant that isn't retarded. The only correct choice is to not play Fire Emblem Awakening, but rather a good game.

@egg: I think at this point, you've made your point, promoted discussion on Fire Emblem and made several people question their sanity so I'd quit while I'm ahead if I were you.

Here's another way of putting it. Instead of picking the difficulty to best suit our taste, what we should have been doing is picking the worst possible difficulty. This way we can judge the game objectively. By picking the difficulty you think you would enjoy, that's simply being generous. Sort of like using a Circle Pad Pro on a game like Kid Icarus Uprising. Is the game itself good, or is it merely the Circle Pad Pro that makes it good?

But to play Fire Emblem Awakening this way (picking the worst difficulty, to be tough on it) this still takes us back to the exact same problem, which is we don't know what the worst difficulty setting is any more than we do the best difficulty setting.

We can however theorize that each difficulty setting must be better or worse than another. (At least that's what I think. I think it's a logical assertion to make, everyone here apparently disagrees, everyone here thinks the difficulty setting they pick is magically the best one for them. How can they determine this, is beyond me.)

So let's say Fire Emblem Awakening is a theoretical deserved review score of 90 if you pick the best difficulty setting. (whichever difficulty setting that may be. Again, we don't know which one it is.) With six combination of difficulties and five of them being being inferior to the sixth, therefore Fire Emblem Awakening will be one of six quality levels for a given player. If I deduct 5 points from the game's review score for each successive inferior difficulty setting you pick, it would look like this:

• 90
• 85
• 80
• 75
• 70
• 65

The game can be either a 65 or a 90 depending on which difficulty settings you have picked.

This doesn't however account for the possibility of having to start over like believer258 did, or for the inanity of having to choose a difficulty to begin with. Either of those should deduct a certain amount of points from the game's theoretical deserved review score, making it possible for the game to be even less than a 65.

Obviously what the game makers could have done is label the difficulties "most enjoyable" and "least enjoyable" rather than using a scale of "hardest" and "easiest". But even then that doesn't really address the issue fundamentally; it can't be justified presenting it as a choice to the player. Most players would just pick "most enjoyable" and anyone who picks anything else is obviously either going by insufficient information, or, used a strategy guide or game FAQ. (i.e. using information they're not supposed to have, which the game shouldn't benefit from, at least not from an objective critical standpoint. You're effectively cheating just to make the game less bad, much in the same way someone could read an FAQ to avoid encountering glitches, avoid having their save file corrupted, etc. Doing this makes the game more fun for YOU, but the game is still bad; Fire Emblem Awakening is still bad.)

@egg: So... would you be okay if the game just had one difficulty level with no options?

Or do you just want the option to change the difficulty setting after starting the game?

No, because a lot of games force you to select a difficulty at the outset.

Uprising only uses the CPP for left-handed play. It does nothing to enhance the existing controls beyond that. And being a lefty, I appreciated the compatibility, as it's one of my favorite 3DS games.

You're being foolish. Play FE and judge it on its actual merits, or don't play it and stop complaining about things you have no knowledge about.

Oh yay. Egg is back. And he brought his insane, nonsensical ramblings with him.

@egg:

or for the inanity of having to choose a difficulty to begin with.

Why are you assuming that everyone will find a single difficulty the most enjoyable one? That's not true at all. Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games of the past few years - I only played it last year - but if there's one flaw with it, it's that it is too easy. Even the finale is a bit of a breeze. I'd love to see a re-release with a higher difficulty setting. With Fire Emblem Awakening, the game will never be "too easy" or "too hard" for anybody because you can make it trivial or you can make it nearly impossible. You have yet to explain how this is a bad thing beyond your own inability to answer the question "How difficult do I want this game?"

And here's a side objective for you - answer without using any metaphors or similes and in two paragraphs or less.

"So... would you be okay if the game just had one difficulty level with no options?"

That would be more favorable than the way it is now. It would make the game playable at least.

"Or do you just want the option to change the difficulty setting after starting the game?"

That would be admirable.

"No, because a lot of games force you to select a difficulty at the outset."

If a lot of restaurants threw a chair at you as you walked in, that still wouldn't make them good restaurants.

That's not to say Fire Emblem Awakening isn't an outstandingly egregious case. At least in other games that do this, only ask me to pick a difficulty once, not two times, and there is usually an option labelled normal/medium.

It is also rare for an RPG to have a difficulty setting at all, When starting Final Fantasy 6 or 7, you don't choose from a difficulty level, much less six of them.

"Play FE and judge it on its actual merits"

That is not an option. The game makes me choose between six combinations of difficulty levels, none of which are "just let me play the game". That makes the game effectively unplayable, because even if I wanted to play the game, I can't, instead I have to jerk off the game makers.

Any choice I make is a permanent taint on the experience, because the game I end up playing is entirely the result of what I chose, and the choice I made was merely the result of being forced to make a choice for the sake of making a choice.

A game has both merits and flaws. I am weighing the two against each other objectively. I have no stake in the game. Unlike all y'all I didn't buy it and force myself to enjoy it. I have no personal investment in whatever difficulty level I chose, and this is true so long as I don't make one. If and when I do make a choice, I'm betting 40 dollars and 40 hours of my life that I made the right choice. And although making the wrong choice might not break the game, I will always be second guessing and wondering if I should have picked something else. Wondering for the first 20 hours whether I picked too easy and wondering for the last 20 hours whether I picked too hard. In a way, there is no correct choice, even if I didn't personally object to making the choice to begin with, precisely because there is no way of intelligently choosing.

"Force myself to enjoy it" now you're just projecting your tastes as outright fact. I, and most apparently as the sales and reviews indicated, enjoyed the game immensely. The fact that you were so befuddled by the game having the standard 3 difficulty option and an additional "PERMADEATH? Y/N" screen is hilarious and invalidates your statements on the game. But the fact that you didn't play the game does that as well so why are you even attempting this arguement?

@believer258: I think there is a ROM mod of Chrono Trigger called "Chrono Trigger Hardtype" which significantly rebalances the difficulty. Maybe you could look into that? Back when it first came out, there was so much new to it that the difficulty felt more challenging, but I can definitely see how it might be considered easy with the way we understand and play RPGs now.

@egg Then play the game on Normal/Classic. As I noted earlier, that's the default in the actual game. If I were to review that difficulty, I would say it is challenging but can eventually become easy if you play it like a harder game. I like it on Hard, as well, and the game makes it clear that FE veterans should play that difficulty instead. Regardless of that level of challenge, I think it's well-crafted and quite an entertaining strategy game. Definitely one I recommend. If you want to play something else, that's fine, but for those who like strategy games and have a 3DS, I'd say it's a safe bet. :)

The reviewers played one of six difficulties, so the reviews can't be used to defend the game any more than reviews of Fire Emblem Awakening and 5 other random games.

Logically, the game would be treated as 6 different games with separate review/scores for each, depending on what setting the reviewer played. (Though I'd be surprised if all reviewers even state which difficulty they chose. Easy/Casual helps meet the deadlines!)

Sales don't necessarily reflect anything either. Case in point you're asking me to play the game before I judge it. Seeing as the game isn't bad until AFTER I buy it then that implies sales don't in any way correlate to quality or lack of quality.

I have played the demo and have proven using logic that the game is bad. No matter how good the rest of the game is, it is still a reflection of your difficulty setting choice made before you had even started. The game in effect does not exist beyond the flaw of choosing a difficulty level.

And for the record it's not "PERMADEATH? Y/N". The choices are labelled Casual and Classic. And I have to wonder if this really needed to be a choice. Why not just wait for a character to die and then just ask the player whether they want to restart the battle?

So, you think any game with multiple difficulty levels need reviews for each difficulty level?

And the Casual vs Classic choice is exactly "PERMADEATH Y/N", as the game explains that one is permadeath and one is not. They simply gave that option because they know the fear of permadeath has kept some gamers from playing the series, and this allows those people to have the option to not worry about it. Personally, I like to worry about it, but other people are different and will have their own preferences.

It's a shame you didn't enjoy the demo, but I liked the demo. And I know others who did, as well. So, even if the demo was bad for you, it doesn't mean the game is bad. It's just not for you, mate. Don't get too bent out of shape. We're just recommending videogames we personally enjoyed. :)

Cool, thank you.

Well, that's a relief. I'll have to try playing it on Normal/Classic then. I'd be okay with perma-death as long as it doesn't completely mess up the ability to progress through the game.

Yeah, you always have enough characters where losing one or two in the course of things isn't going to kill you. Personally, I prefer redoing levels if I mess up like that, but it is by no means necessary. Just try to avoid it, and if it happens, it happens. Life goes on. I think the only tough part about losing anyone is that you get attached to them, as they have fun little personalities. :)

@duxa:

Where'd you get that list?

That is Metacritic.

http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/3ds?year_selected=&sort=desc&hardware=all&view=condensed

"They simply gave that option because they know the fear of permadeath has kept some gamers from playing the series, and this allows those people to have the option to not worry about it."

Since posting in this thread I have to wonder if all the settings there were just for the sake of having settings. Just to have a bullet point on the box so to speak. "Hey if you think the game is too hard, we have 3 different easy modes just for you!" Likewise "you're a hardcore badass gamer looking for a challenge? Tired of dumbed down easy games? Try out Extremehardsuicide mode! With a name like that you just know it's hard!" It doesn't truly solve anything it's just sort of pandering. I have to wonder if properly solving the issues like permadeath might have diminished their ability to pander to either audience. (even though they've labelled one "casual")

It just happens not to work in my favor I suppose because 1) I didn't play a Fire Emblem game before the Awakening demo (except some GBA one for a few minutes) and 2) I don't care, because not having properly played an FE, I don't have a starting point with which to criticize the series. Let me play FE Awakening, without forcing me to decide what FE Awakening is. If I find something wrong with it, let me change it without having to start the entire game over. I was never someone who was saying "I am not getting the next Fire Emblem game unless it has permadeath or doesn't have permadeath".

@egg: Well, I think it was reasonable, considering the history of Fire Emblem. If you've never played any of them, I suppose I can see why all of this might be confusing for you.

Maybe you could play the Fire Emblem on Wii or the DS. Those are two fine entries in the series as well. :)

Though, hopefully you can allow this thread to get back on track with discussing recommended games for the 3DS. People all have their personally enjoyed games that they want to recommend.

But if you don't care about whether you get soaked then what difference does it make. If you "luck out" on the games difficulty and choose the right one for you, which you can probably figure out if you have half a brain and can read, that doesn't make it a bad game. You're essentially saying that something you don't care about is making you not play a game and call the game bad.

Do you leave your house or are you paralized by the fact that at every single intersection you drive through your chances of having a good day, bad day, or dying altogether increase exponentially in all directions? There's even less to base your choices on in real life and those have infinitely more important repercussions. How have you not gone insane and killed yourself(not saying you should) from being such a cynical and hating anything that has choice that you don't know the outcome from before you choose?

I reccomend Fire Emblem: Awakening, DK Country Returns 3D, Monster Hunter, and the new Animal Crossing (if you're into those kinds of games).

Can @egg posts be flagged for completely derailing the thread? The OP asked for recommendations on 3DS games, not a fucking rant about how you don't like difficulty select in FE or whatever. Your posts became so inane, pompous, and filled with superfluous nonsense, that I didn't bother reading them all because you clearly can't make a more concise argument for something that doesn't actually matter.

Also, back to OP. SMT IV is coming out and I think would be a good way to get into the SMT franchise if you are curious about it.

Out of the games I own, the best ones are Animal Crossing, Monster Hunter 3 and Ocarina of Time.

The others being Kid Icarus and Resident Evil Revelations which I probably wouldn't recommend unless you got them real cheap.

I want Fire Emblem but waiting to see it at a decent price.

@neoepoch: You can PM the moderators if you believe there is an issue.

As for SMT IV, yeah, it's looking quite nice. Hopefully that and Mario & Luigi: Dream Team in the next two weeks will live up to expectations and get many recommendations. I'm excited about both of them. :)

Wow, this thread certainly went nuts ha ha.

Choosing difficulties is just based on how good you think you are at strategy games. When it comes to strategy games there is no one size fits all because everyone has varying levels of experience playing strategy games.

Dream Team is out in 2 weeks?! I completely forgot.

EDIT: No. You son of a bitch. It's out August 11th. You just HAD to get me all excited. Now I'm sad.

Oh, sorry. Yeah, August 11th North America, July 12th in Europe.

"But if you don't care about whether you get soaked then what difference does it make."

Getting soaked is a metaphor for picking the wrong difficulty, which of course I care about. The makers of FE Awakening have introduced an issue which needn't exist.

In Believer258's case it resulted in him having to start over. That's the situation the bucket analogy was drawn from, as he is a person that essentially got bucketed. But not having to start the game over doesn't necessarily even mean that you chose the right difficulty setting, because it's possible a different setting might have provided a more memorable experience for you.

(This is even putting aside the absurdity that he had to restart the game at all, and other people did also, yet here we are defending the game regardless.)

Mind you, even if I didn't care about getting soaked, that still invalidates the requirement of being FORCED to choose. The irony is in the fact there is no "I don't care" option! You CAN'T WIN! The game might as well have picked a difficulty for you at random, and the game would more or less as bad as it is now, by the same principle by which it is bad now. Think about it that way.

"Do you leave your house or are you paralized by the fact that at every single intersection you drive through your chances of having a good day, bad day, or dying altogether increase exponentially in all directions? There's even less to base your choices on in real life and those have infinitely more important repercussions. How have you not gone insane and killed yourself(not saying you should) from being such a cynical and hating anything that has choice that you don't know the outcome from before you choose?"

tbh I admire where you went with your thinking. I will say this though, the game hasn't even started yet and therefore deciding on a difficulty setting cannot be considered analogous to life. (see also "immersion")

"There's even less to base your choices on in real life and those have infinitely more important repercussions."

There's even less to base your choices on? Says who? The amount you have to base your choices on is completely variable. Of course it is variable, considering it's real life, where everything is variable.

I can at least hope that, the more your choice has gravity, the more meaningful and greater quantity of information you have to go by when making it.

lol what happened to this thread. Anyways thanks again everyone who gave real recommendations.

Recently picked it up and I have to say I'm loving it. So thanks for clearing stuff up!
You get a ton of new characters so it's okay to loose some but like you said, you kind of don't want to.

The writing in this game is really, really solid and I've been laughing during some of the dialogue which is rare for me. Really like the characters. There's really only one cringe-worthy thing I find about it and that's when one of the characters is revealed to be a lady and Chrom is like WAIT WHAT, A LADY FOR REALZIES? . It also goes pretty far into the whole "able female / powerful female / girlz can fight too" stuff which is unnecessary. I think it would be better if they just had it like that but didn't make such a huge thing about it / lay it on thick). Oh and one of my favorite characters is that guy no one sees, his character reveal was fucking great.

I also really appreciate how the AI just isn't a joke and how the game really means something when it says something. Having my pegasus-lady oneshotted due to my own carelessness was an eye opener. I've also had things where I figure "eh, the AI will probably just attack the thing right in front of it" to have that same unit go right for an unprotected healer at the back of my group.

I'm about 5 hours in and enjoy doing the side mission stuff although I'm not really able to complete the mini-objectives within them (such as "hey level up this guy before you beat the thing to get him as a follower") but I'm also a bit worried because every mission seems to be one chapter and I kind of don't want it to end yet. But maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg?

@xymox: For leveling up that character in the battle, I recommend having other characters weaken up an enemy and then have him do the final little damage to kill them. It's actually relatively easy if you just plan ahead on it. And most other secondary objectives are getting to specific spots, and if you make it a priority, it isn't too bad.

And, heh, each battle is a chapter, but you've still got a decent bit to go. Including side missions, there are well over thirty, plus the optional skirmishes you'll have. 5 hours in, unless you've been blazing forward(which will probably just get you killed), there is a lot more to see.

Why didn't I think of that?! That's practically just applying those daily dota skills of last hitting. I'll get on it next time I see something like that. Thanks.

It's also good to hear there's a lot more to it.

@egg: Stop trying to use metaphors until you have a better grasp of the language. You might have a valid point in there somewhere, but literally nothing you're saying makes any sense.

That's actually a really important principle of level-raising in the game. It's essential in helping lower-level characters gain levels as the game progresses. :)

Have fun!