Merric is a mage who came with the Excalibur (?) magic. He was also part of my trinity of death (Marth/Abel/Merric)!

I just finished it last night..........I must have restarted the End Game like 10 times! It took me 1.5 hrs to to beat it.....in actuality it was probably more like 3 hrs with the restarts. This was certainly a worthy Fire Emblem game......made my 1+hr commute breeze by. However, I think that Radiant Dawn is still the class of the Fire Emblem franchise.

just thought I'd share the opinion of a newcomer to the Fire Emblem franchise, the only other game I played was.. this one, using a NES emulator. I don't remember exactly in which chapter I am, but I just got Merric (and IIRC I turned the game off because I was going to lose one character that I didn't want to)

what do you usually do about losing characters? I have let one axeman die and I guess I had only one other unit killed. it kinda sucks having to restart some missions from the beginning but it's funny, unless the character is absurdly generic (e.g. the axeman), I don't wanna lose any unit at all! and I'd guess that it will be worse when the levels are higher, it will feel like that I lost a lot of time with them if I just let them die..

I don't know if it's fair to compare with Advance Wars, but I played a bit of Days of Ruin and I really didn't care much about the story (also when the scenarios started to feel really "scenario"-ish - that is, there wasn't really much strategy but rather doing the right movement - I stopped playing it). this one is the first Fire Emblem (I would expect that later FE had more "complex" stories) and it seems really cool gathering a lot of troubled characters to reclaim what is yours

my "experience" so far has been pretty good, the game flows well, Intelligent System's interface is great, skipping enemy movement, etc. and while it's not shallow, there is not also a shitload of stuff to play with...

So Izaaz, you found the endgame hard?

Benga said I would find it tough with only 9 characters, and lv 12 marth.... It was a breeze.

Ditched Marth in the bottom right corner, and didn't use him before the end. He ended at lv 13 I think.

The Endgame was (to me) brokenly easy.

I agree with Izaaz on another thing though - Radiant Dawn is by far the greatest (10 > 7 > 6 = 9 > 8 = 11 > 4 > 5)

Radiant Dawn is brokenly good :P.

I really think this game was too easy though... I'm at chapter 15 (I think) at hard **** now, and it hasn't been even close to as hard as Radiant Dawn's Hard.

I've bought this game, and it looks cool so far, but the game keeps breaking my motivation to continue. I've gotten a few chapters in on both normal and hard, but as I continue on some of my characters die. After it happens enough, I don't want to keep playing that save-file so I start the game again.

What's the normal thing to do? Keep playing even as you lose characters you've built up? Restart a level after the death of a single guy? Or do you all play extremely conservatively so that you never lose troops?

I have never, ever lost a character on my first playthrough in any of the now 8 Fire Emblem games I've played (restarted if it happens)

But again, I'm an obsessive FE fan.

Oh, and I play extremely conservatively yeah.

I should have my copy in a post around Monday, cant wait to finally play this game.