Fire Emblem

[A Black Falcon]

That's one nice thing about FE, everyone can play it differently... just having finished mission 13 (and highly conflicted: I got through all right, but I didn't get the Speedwing! I got the other five items, but not that one... and I badly want one... should I restart to get it?)... and in that mission, you can take 12 people... so I took both my mages, both myrmidions, both clerics, a theif (for the chests), the archer, both flyers, Ike, and Mordecai, so that he can push Ike (because you have to push Ike 3 spaces at the start so that he can talk to Astrid on turn one; otherwise, she gets killed by enemies before you can reach her nine times out of ten... yeah, that was INCREDIBLY frusterating until I looked online and saw this little trick...); otherwise, I would have taken Kieran for the last spot. My highest level rank 1 unit is Soren at level 18... the next highest are Ilyana, Mia, and Gatrie at 15, and Gatrie joined at that. You've always got to make choices about which units to use, though... like now there are two archers, so which do I use more... I also usually only take one (so mostly Rebecca in FE, though I used Will some too)... and when you don't let people die, you've got lots to choose from. As my list above suggests, I often like to take just a few of the traditional 'tank' units (Cavaliers/knights), and more I have to be more careful with... though often those ones can, with high enough levels, get very good (I think that Florina was the only one other than the heroes who could injure the final boss of Fire Emblem... only did like 4 damage, with her best weapon, but that's better than the rest... or high level mages, those are awesome), though.

Anyway... bonus experience is interesting. You don't get a whole lot of it on Hard, so I mostly have to level in battle, but it's nice for the ones who join at low levels compared to the main group... a nice addition to the game, I guess, though I'd like to see other things instead (for instance, thieves should be getting experience for stealing and opening chests! They're such bad fighters that it'd only be fair...)... healers? They are often a bit behind, but I usually have managed to get them to rank 2 at least, by trying to heal every time I can, even if it's just a 1hp heal...