Vela wrote:

Final map looks intimidating.

It's fairly easy to cheese it a bit (and that's not because I named my character Cheese). I played normal / classic though.

Curious to hear what you think about it after you've finished it.

Scratch that. It's a savage one. Like you know when the game hasn't let you get enough experience to beat it on purpose.

So to add a tiny bit more detail for Nina's benefit...

I found that this route (Crimson Flower, Hard Classic) felt like a more reasonable path than some of the other story options.

My problems (minor irritant) lie mainly with the gameplay loop. Essentially you run through 4 week months where each week has one lesson day, a couple of optional battles if you have a high enough professor level (spoiler: you dont), and you can explore the monastery running errands, locating missing items for people who wont talk to you when you have it, and doing optional training if you have enough professor points (spoiler: you dont).

Alternatively, you can do more battles to earn more cash, and then use that cash if you have enough (spoiler: you dont) to buy more weapons or train the students if they arent fatigued (spoiler: they are). Or let your super weapons recharge at the expense of training, experience and skills.

This builds a vicious cycle where each month passes by where there are 10 useful things you could be doing but the game only lets you do three, plus wandering around doing busywork. Which is a shame, because the actual battles that 90% of the game are building you up to are pretty good in theory.

I had one fort battle where you had a safe zone to defend that ran the entire left side of the map. And enemies advancing up the hill to take it. But they never moved aside from the first two waves so I had to chase their stationary commanders. It should have been a tense siege with three routes to defend but instead it was a normal cheese mission where you suround the boss with your heavies and pound away with the safety of the battle predictor on your side.

I probably sound like I hate it. I dont, I just think it is focussed on the wrong things and keeps the player from the best bits. I think my completion time for this route is ~60 hours. I would say half of that was actually battles, the rest was busy work. Contrast that with a solid 35hr for Path of Radiance or 75hr on Awakening (normal, classic) which had about an 80:20 split between missions and mid-mission exposition/management. (PoR had way less grinding).

And pairings are creepy. At least Caspar and Linhardt got to settle down in their old age. RIP Hanneman.

Re last level:

Wave 3 of the DLC is out. Apparently you can now interact with the cats and dogs. This might be up for goty again. (ability to interact can be earned through quests)

Also looks like there's a quest to recruit Anna. Jeritza (was that his name? I feel like his story ended a bit too quickly) will join you on a certain path.

Sounds like the most interesting wave so far. Enough small new things that a new game + might feel a bit different.

Wave content

Guessing last wave will be big story content.

I finished golden deer on ng+ in the last week or so. The way it ends is so weird in comparison to the Black Eagle run. I'll put it in spoilers just in case.

Anyway. Ng+ was on normal with perma death was very easy. It really highlighted the flaws in the game. I had all my relationships maxed by roughly the start of pt 2 so the monastery bits were pointless. They also make it hard to get certain crafting materials and it seems a bit pointless to do so. The Brave weapons are so OP it's kinda all you need. After 120 hours it's definitely a great game but it has flaws and a lot of systems in there that you aren't really fleshed out enough and can mostly be ignored.

Nina wrote:

I wonder if you're spoiler will be for the last story related dlc. It was such on odd way to end things (i did Black Eagles - Edelgard), felt like there were loads of loose ends everywhere, and I'm usually not one that's too fused by plotholes of the overall thing of still fun.

Still, I put quite a bit of time in this game, so it must have done plenty right.

Haha I'm definitely the same. It's not perfect but I've had a great time with it.

As for the dlc I thought that would be the case until I played the GD path. I don't really know why they'd do something different to what's already there if you were going to take them on post game.

Spoiler for GD path

Cracking title.