It depends on how you count. I think this is my Radiant Dawn history.
1: Normal. I got to chapter 2 or 3, then gave up. This was my first Fire Emblem, so I was rather clueless. I was about to give up on the game, but went to easy instead.
2: Easy. I played the game through to somewhere in part 3, and then realised that the game was now far too easy for me. Part 3 had been a breeze so far, and part 4 would be so easy it would lose its fun.
3. Normal. I played the game to 4-Endgame 1. I had been playing together with a friend of mine, and she wasn't exactly interested in resetting if something went wrong. So, a load of characters died, and we ended up being unable to finish 4-Endgame 1. (Or another part 4 chapter, not after 4-endgame 1, at least).
4. Hard. Normal was a tad too hard for me, so the only logical choice was to up the difficulty to hard, eh? Well, I ended up getting stuck at a Dawn Brigade chapter in part 3. I had put Jill over to the other side, and I had been royally RNG cursed with every single of my other characters. None of my characters had had a proper def growth, but they had been blessed with STR. As a result, I killed the enemies, but was unable to stand taking many attacks. In defence levels, that's the worst possible combo.
5. Normal, but not using all of the available stuff. That means no battle save, no checking how far the opponents can move and that stuff you have in normal, but not hard. I played up until 4-Endgame 1 this time, and then realised that the game was now a complete breeze again. Nothing was really a challenge. That lead to
6. Continuing the hard from 4. I finished the game continuing from that save. I lost no characters up until the final boss, but on her I lost a few, as my entire crew had been royally underleveled due to me using too many characters. First time I actually finished the game. I later tried the boss again (with the same crew) and managed to do it flawlessly.
7. Hard. I had a competition with 2 other friends of mine. No resets, no prepromotes until they were on-par with the rest of the team. If you failed a level 3 times in a row, you had to sacrifice a unit. In the end, I was the only one of us who actually managed to finish the game, and that was barely. I only had 3 living people (I think) that I didn't bring into the tower, and of the characters I brought into the tower, I believe only Ike, Micaiah, Tibarn and Rolf surived. In total, I finished the game with less than 10 people left in total.
8. Hard. Lords and light units only.
I think that should be it.
Edit: Ooh, I forgot one, I don't know where it fits in. It's another competition with my friends. Essentially, we played blindfolded. The competition was to be whoever could do it with the fewest peeks at how the map was looking now. We were allowed to use pen and paper to draw the map and guess how opponents would move to what we did. In the end, none of us got past the Black Knight & Micaiah chapter in part 1.
