Finished Radiant Dawn. There's a lot I really like about the game and a bunch which I'm pretty mixed on.
Overall I'd say the map design and difficulty is much better than Path of Radiance, especially the defense maps which were pretty underwhelming in PoR. Ellincia's Gambit was one of my favorite maps for example.
The way you constantly switch between teams is probably annoying for some people but I liked how it gave you an excuse to use a majority of the characters. In every other FE game I end up only getting any real use out of like 20 characters, max, across the entire game, but in RD almost the entire cast sees use at some point. It also makes the decision of who to bring into the tower that much more impactful, since there are a lot more units than normal which have contributed meaningfully up to that point.
On the flipside, it creates a problem with some units getting screwed over due to really poor availability. The worst offender of this is Vika, who comes in at a decent level early on, then vanishes until right near the end of the game at a point where she's super underleveled. I don't even get why they remove Tormod's crew from the story for so long, wouldn't it make more sense for them to be fighting on the side of the Laguz Alliance from the start of part 3?
There's also the problem of not all teams being equal. It's becomes clear pretty quickly that the Greil Mercs easily outclass the Dawn Brigade and Crimean Knights, and the Dawn Brigade maps in part 3 only emphasize this fact. Suddenly you're back to using shitty unpromoted units but the enemy units are seemingly just as powerful as those you fight with Ike's team. It's really telling that the map in which you play as Ike fighting Micaiah's squad is pretty easy (save for the presence of the Black Knight) but the reverse situation later on is quite difficult. Actually killing Ike seems near impossible without going out of your way to unequip Ragnell beforehand.
By part 4 the only (non-mandatory) dawn brigade member I was using was Jill, and she doesn't really count anyway since she's from the previous game. Micaiah and Sothe aren't even all that good; Micaiah is about as durable as a piece of paper and gets doubled by everything, and Sothe is useful in part 1 but falls off pretty hard in the latter half of the game. It doesn't help that the dawn brigade is made up of a bunch of non-characters. The other teams don't really get much time to highlight the individual characters either, especially without any real support conversations, but they have the previous game to fall back on so the dawn brigade stands out as being really boring, save for Micaiah and Sothe. If the non-Greil Merc teams were better as units and more likable I think the whole multiple teams thing would've been more effective, especially in part 4 where you need to make big choices about who goes on what team and who enters the tower.
About the story, I thought it was one of the more interesting fire emblem stories up until part 4 where things just kind of fall apart. The blood pact plot device is pretty dumb but not enough to ruin things like part 4 does. At that point there's really no story explanation for anything going on other than "but god." And yet this god which can seemingly turn anyone to stone, revive the dead (?), and turn anyone into your enemy for some reason can't touch any of your units. What a convenient coincidence! A plot about gods just becomes kinda stupid when sometimes their powers are ridiculous bullshit and other times they're limited. Before part 4 though, the way they tell the story from multiple perspectives is cool and makes the Dawn Brigade vs Greil Merc chapters pretty exciting.
Nitpicky, but I'm also mixed on the slight change in art style. Some characters like Ranulf and Ellincia look pretty much the same or just touched up from their PoR appearance, but some characters like Soren just look off, and others like Jill and Sothe look completely different. I prefer Ike's PoR design too.
I feel like I'm mostly negative here but I did really enjoy the game, and I probably will replay on Hard eventually.
