all i want is a new story. beating a dragon God gets old xD..something like path of radiance where the black night was the enemy for revenge

Radiant Dawn on Hard = pulling teeth lol, especially on the Micaiah chapters. You cannot save if I remember correctly.

I didn't even know there was a Battle Save option until my 2nd playthrough, so that wouldn't really bother me as much. The whole time, I thought it was a new name for Suspend, and never tried to load my past saves. Anyways, it was essentially unique to the Western version of Radiant Dawn (though FE4 also used it in Japan), and was way too easy to abuse IMO, since you can essentially control stat growths that way. Really messes with one of Fire Emblem's core features.

I rememeber finding some of Micaiah's early missions pretty challenging though, even on Normal difficulty. I guess the problem was that everything was relabelled when the game was localized. The Normal/Hard/Maniac mode from the Japanese game was relabelled as Easy/Normal/Hard for Western audiences. So playing on Normal mode outside of Japan gives the wrong impression on how hard the game is supposed to be. XD

I don't think I S-ranked HHM either, it was difficult enough just completing it with all possible side-quests. I'm not sure how I pulled it off, easily one of my most frustratingly challenging video game experiences. I think I recall getting a few Null Level Ups (no stat gains) during that playthough. Jeebus, what a waste of a perfectly good level up.

I assume the side-quest you're talking about is the one where you need to kill the Kishuna the Magic Seal, right? That was pretty frustrating, both because you needed to kill such an overpowered character, and get Nils to some arbritary level during the prologue story. I think I ended up taking 20+ turns on the final chapter in Lyn's story to achieve that, basically far more than anyone who didn't know about the prerequisite beforehand would attempt. What made it worse was that a key part of the story could only be discovered through that side-quest set. I'm not sure what the developers were thinking when they planned that. It's the same story as the prerequisites to recruit Sephiran, or see that final Ike/Soren conversation in Radiant Dawn.

I guess that exp penalty isn't quite as bad as I originally thought, though losing all the BEXP would be a pain. Not quite as bad as losing the attack grid though. I swear by that thing!

I'm conflicted about it. The teaming up part is a really great addition and made supports/character development worth your time. They also completely broke the game and allowed you to breeze through it even on Classic/Hard.

I do like that it had a greater focus on story and characters, because that has always been the weakest part of Fire Emblem, imo.