Like draayder said, Lunatic and Lunatic+ are much more 'roll the dice' than proper strategy games. I don't really count them to be honest.
Oh yeah, I tried Lunatic once.
It wasn't fun at all.
Sorry if what I said earlier seemed confusing or poorly worded, a game's difficulty is not directly correlated with it's quality. I quite like Fire Emblem Path of Radiance and Sacred Stones and they aren't particularly hard either. A lot of the difference is the map layout, story, and character writing. I actually did a second run of Awakening without using any bonus missions, sans the ones to recruit Anna and Donnel, and also without using any second seals and it still wasn't very difficult. Every map is simply 'Route Enemy' or 'Defeat Commander' so a lot of advanced strategy is totally lost.
Ah, don't worry about it, I usually don't understand things the first time I read them anyway (but I think I sound like I do sometimes).
True, Sacred Stones was really easy (mostly; that one with Selena on Ephraim's path was actually pretty tough, at least to me, and so was the one with the ships on his path too). I dunno about the character writing (I rarely get supports besides Colm/Neimi), but the story writing's alright, and everything else you said is spot on. I remember actually being worried when I saw that volcano chapter with all the Gorgon eggs; yeah, it ended up not being so hard because I could 1- and 2-shot everything with quite a few of my units, but I felt like I might lose throughout that chapter, and Awakening only managed that on the final chapter, because Grima is kinda broken and like 3 people on my team could hurt him (Chrom/Robin/Lucina).
And yeah, having just Kill All The Dudes and Kill This Specific Dude got boring quickly. I thought it might end in Valm, and if you count Tiki's paralogue it kinda did, but the entire main story being those two very similar mission types bored me enough that I put it down when I was replaying it. Haven't touched it since, though I might now that Fates is coming out.
Awakening, in my opinion has a very poor grasp on difficulty as a concept and this is reflected in a few things in my opinion.
1) The sheer roll the dice-ness or Lunatic and Lunatic plus. They just aren't fun, it's simply rolling the game's internal dice until you get favorable outcomes OR griding for hours upon end.
I've read about some of the skills on Lunatic+. Is there really a skill that always halves your defense when you get attacked? That always-hit skill could be alright, but that just seems horrible.
2) Units are often balanced in such a way where on their own they're somewhat weak and suseptable but very much on the verge of being able to murder everything singlehandedly at any point in a normal run, with Pair Up existing as this boost. A suitable example in another game would be Kurthnaga once you get him in FE10 or Ross in Sacred Stones but one is an end game unit and the other is an Est who needs 10 levels of baby sitting at least. This makes it really difficult to ever feel a 'fair' challenge, ya know?
I... never noticed this, but that makes sense; my units were always pretty okay, but Pair Up made everything so much easier. It seems like a bad design choice to give it the stat boosts, the follow-up attacks and the chance to negate damage all at once, so glad Fates is splitting the benefits. Maybe it'll finally be balanced.
Or if not, it'll at least be broken on both sides, since enemies can do it too (at least, that's what I heard).
3) It often assume you've grinded or made use of the second seal system to gain additional levels or better, more ideal classes and skills especially in the later paralogue chapters and on higher difficulties.
It did? I honestly never noticed, though I also didn't get very far on Hard before going "screw this, I'm gonna go play Brawl" so I dunno.
The later paralogues... do you mean the ones with the children? Because yeah, those seemed a bit above the difficulty of the main game.
And my biggest pet peeve being this one
4) When enemy reinforcements appear they tend to appear in huge waves AND be able to all move and attack on their turn of arrival. This is utter bullshit, because on many maps there is no forewarning of any kind nor any way to tell where they'll appear from or what unit type they'll be. (The mystical tree, Laurent's recruit mission, and Walhart's recruit all readily come to mind.) Some maps show stair cases or castles, but these barely help as the enemy units often still appear with no warning, making the game add in pointless retries if you're wanting to have no deaths. It's unfair to the player and is just generally unfun to deal with. In older FE games when enemy units appear they're either forewarned by dialogue if they can move as they arrive OR they appear on the map but cannot move or attack when they arrive. This way you have a full turn to prepare and adjust your strategy to what the game has thrown at you. It's fair and assume you as the player aren't psychic.
Yeah, that's some bulls***. I think it got Ricken and Maribelle killed at least once each on the chapter you get them from when I was playing it.
I remember it giving you advance warning, but it still felt like it came out of nowhere at times.
Maybe it would've been better if it were restricted to higher difficulties, or they only did it very sparingly.
Genuinely this was my biggest peeve with Awakening from a gameplay standpoint. Much of the difficulty it had felt very artificial and with little counterplay and simply forced the player to restart entire levels at a time while at the same time removing battle save from any non-casual run. WHY DO THAT? They're a total quality of life addition that Radiant Dawn put in because it admittedly had very long chapters. There's no reason to remove them as they simply save the player frustration.
Looking back, this is quite true. It didn't feel like there was much challenge (in the main game, anyway, some of the children chapters were vicious), but it felt like I was overpowered to the point that bulls*** was the only way to have difficulty (I blame Pair Up, infinite grinding and the children, though there were probably other factors). Seriously, Validar got built up for like the whole game and then he went down like a chump in Chapter 23. Even Gangrel put up a better fight than that LIKE EIGHTEEN CHAPTERS EARLIER. And Grima was only hard because of his bulls*** most-of-your-units-do-next-to-nothing-to-me skill (he had something like that), which was more annoying than anything (though it did make my strategy easy, just have Chrom/Robin/Lucina wreck Grima while my other units try to fight the other dudes).
Admittedly, the final chapter of Valm was actually kinda nice, since it built up to fighting Walhart by having you go through small armies with Cervantes and Excellus first, and also he moved. Moving is why I almost had to restart against Gangrel a few times, so that's definitely a plus for difficulty. True, he was mostly difficult thanks to the combo of moving boss, having a really good weapon and having an ability that negated effective damage (which I didn't know about the first time I got to him, almost had to restart), and taking him out was still a bit easy since I mobbed him with my toughest units, but actually having to do that is something I didn't have to do on any other boss. It felt kinda unique, even for a fairly standard let's-kill-the-boss chapter.
Also, since you mentioned it earlier, do you think battle-saves would return if they made a remake of FE4? Because the maps in that game are
HUGE. Like, I-could-cut-them-up-into-like-5-chapters-in-most-other-games-minimum-per-map huge.
