Sacred Stones is the Fire Emblem game that you to the largest extent break or make yourself. If you play the most efficient and clever way for everything, it can be a rather dull game. If you use the characters you like, and stick with them even if they're not necessarily the best choice, the game is a lot more fun. Using people like Duessel and Seth a lot sort of just breaks the entire game completely. Personally, I pretty much only liked the squishy low-defence people in SS, so I ended up with a very oddly shaped team.
The oddest thing with FE8 is how the chapters are placed. The main storyline is by far shorter than in the other games, in fact, the main storyline is the shortest in the entire series (save Gaiden), but it actually has the most chapters overall out of all the Fire Emblems.
FE6 is 25 mainline chapters, but there's a split route of 4 more, and 6 gaiden chapters, making for 35 in total.
FE7 is 31 mainline chapters, with 3 extra through split routes and 7 gaiden chapters, making for 41 in total.
FE8 is 21 mainline chapters, with 6 extra through split routes, 8 in the Tower and 10 in the ruins, making for 45 in total.
FE9 has 30 chapters, but sort of 3 extra due to one being a 4-parter. So 30/33 in total.
FE10 has 43 main storyline chapters.
(For the record, FE5, FE11 and FE12 all have 25 chapters, and FE4 has 10, though the latter are too different to compare).
