My experience with Radiant Dawn
Made my PoR post a week ago or so after finishing the game probably a month or so ago now here https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/1uidqed/my_experience_with_path_of_radiance/
Jesus this game was long af. When I entered the endgame for part 1 I thought “huh that was weirdly short” and then there were more and more parts. The unit list is a little harder to make with all the army switching and varying availability, on top of the tower itself having different valuations (class caps) compared to how I valued them during the rest of the game. Again, I played mostly blind except for being spoiled about how to recruit Stefan who I didn’t use anyways lmao (but his sword came in clutch in tower). And again, this list is more of how they performed for me in my personal experience since I'm new enough to the series that I don't think I could really critique them well.
More detail for units:
Nephenee: more favoritism, except this time she actually justified herself pretty well. Her speed let her double things even in tower and a high magic stat let me drop imbue on her and let her run wild. She and Gatrie supporting each other basically ran the frontline for as much of the game as I could deploy them, and she got my wishblade in the end since she felt like the best user of it. edit: oh yeah she came in with some stat transfers and that helped her a lot on her initial chapter too
Wyverns: They are so op lmao. Comparing the two is kinda interesting. On one hand, Haar came ready to just run every chapter he was on. Having such high strength and defense off rip and high caps made him insane and he was essentially my PoR Titania of this game. Give him a few hand axes and send him alone to enemy phase an entire flank of their army. He made certain maps like Elincia’s gambit much easier with flying super canto. He never got close to dying even against thunder mages. Jill needed much more babying even with stat transfers from PoR. She was much more mortal and her getting jumped a few times led to some chapter resets.
On the other hand, two things put her overall above Haar for me. One, her higher speed cap meant that she could keep doubling things in the later stages of the tower while Haar eventually stopped. She struggled to catch up to Haar but when she did she justified getting Urvan over Haar. Importantly for two, a lot of the DB maps would’ve felt much harder if I removed JIll from the equation. If I removed Haar from the GM maps it would’ve been slower but just as easy, except for Elincia’s Gambit. Jill felt more important to her part of the game than Haar did for his, even if in a vacuum my Haar was much stronger in every part of the game save for the end of tower.
Herons: yeah
Oliver: He went completely unused but it was hilarious. He didn’t move from his spot in his mansion so I started clearing out the guards around him. Then suddenly when Rafiel was in his range, he walked up to him and recruited himself while being a creep. I was just so baffled that this mf had the audacity to join up and everyone was just chill with him being there lmao. He lowkey came better than Micaiah but unfortunately she's a forced deploy and he isn't
Consistently put in work:
Ike felt similar to how he felt in PoR for me, with the added benefit of 1-2 swords being common for him before he got Ragnell. Still fell behind movementwise so he didn’t hard carry, and there weren’t as many Ragnell-enemy-phase-their-army moments because the rest of my units were strong enough that he never needed to. He didn't cap strength so he was having some issues at the end of tower even with all the built-in favoritism the game gave him, especially since Ragnell was only 18 might, but he was still great overall
Oscar and Titania were almost as strong as they were in PoR, but their lower availability and the presence of ledges and shit terrain later on made them much less dominant.
Shinon actually put in crazy work considering how low my hopes were for him being an archer. The 1-2 options the game gives you are nice although they got outscaled quickly, but getting 2-3 on any bow on his promotion was great. Then he got the double bow in the tower. That shit cannot be balanced lmao. What a glowup for the weapon compared to being a specifically 4 range lock weapon in PoR.
Gatrie was my support pair with Nephenee and held the frontline well. He had crazy growths for me and was pretty blessed overall, but his low speed cap hurt him a lot later on. He had some issues doubling even before the tower against swordsmen, but halfway through the tower he just stopped doubling entirely and he fell behind Nephenee a lot in effectiveness.
Laura was available on DB chapters as a staff when I really needed her and somehow speedblessed enough to be much more durable and combat useful than Micaiah.
Elincia has limited availability, but whenever she was available she was incredibly useful for staves and combat and rescuing. Only at the end of the tower did her combat drop off a cliff, but she other two utilities made her still incredibly useful for me. Cantoing around with restore was very useful for how much sleeping was going on in the tower. Marcia was similar but with a little less combat relevance and no staves, but still another flier and was pretty stat blessed.
Aran got a lot of defense levels and a surprising number of speed levels (googled his growths afterwards) and was a wall in every DB chapter as well as the Tibarn army for just farming the laguz. Don't know how his caps would differ from Nephenee but if they were the same I would've brought him in over Gatrie if I didn't want overall class diversity going into it
Crucial in certain parts:
Sothe carried the early parts of the DB chapters heavily and then proceeded to fall off a cliff. In the tower he was so cosmetic I stopped deploying him entirely by the spirits part because he would just get jumped and die if any spirits were alive to attack someone lmao
Zihark was similarly an early carry like Sothe, but coming a little later meant that he was a little less crucial. Plus he was a little slower on the comeup since it was hard to justify training him on the GM chapters. Did I mention the GM chapters? I accidentally recruited him to the GMs with Mordecai and did not realize that at the time he left the DB I would have to play more DB chapters later… Without him… Forcibly underemployed… I later did train him up in the army split and by the time he hit the tower he was strong enough to do good work with the vague katti and especially alondite. He just didn't really do much outside of DB until then. Even though Mia and him are similar, I think the Jill reasoning applies here where while Mia doesn't perform worse in isolation, Zihark is much more important to the DB chapters (when I HAD HIM) than Mia was to the GM chapters
Tauroneo was a wall in the DB chapters he was in, especially the one on the cliff looking down at the GMs, but he was pretty filler outside of that.
Volug is a similar story to Sothe, but Nailah was just genuinely so OP I rarely bothered using her, but she was very useful in the DB swamp early on to make sure as few NPCs died as possible.
I honestly didn’t really know where to put Micaiah, but I guess she was useful at some points for being a much needed second healer on the DB chapters. She was kinda irrelevant otherwise but forcibly deployed.
Nice units:
Good combat or utility units, but not super remarkable/crucially necessary. Tibarn and Naesala obviously are better than the rest at combat, but they never felt crucial to their armies/chapters since the rest of the army was competent enough without them. Edward and Nolan struggled to get off their feet and weren’t really close to as useful as Aran in DB chapters, and never really caught on afterwards.Tanith didn’t catch up to Marcia, Boyd has low movement, Mist and Rhys saw good use but GMs were so strong they didn’t feel super necessary, and Soren basically never caught up in staff rank for that reason.
Pelleas:
Character descriptions are long enough so I don’t feel like describing the other parts outside of not knowing how you can recruit Pelleas given this mf dies in the cutscene. I reloaded the save to check both options and he still died.
Army Splits
I had no clue going into the split about what to expect and I was already feeling kinda mentally tired, so I kinda just split them according to lore lmao
I tried to put the DB Characters with Micaiah and Naeluchi with Leanne. Lethe and Mordecai because whatever I guess. I wanted to pair Haar with JIll for the support, and Jill and Haar felt like such carries that I didn’t really need to think too much about who else I put there as long as I had some extra frontline in Danved (who I didn’t end up using anyways) and Mia. Rhys got put there since I wanted two staves per army and I already had Mist + Soren in Ike’s army
Ike’s army was mainly the Greil Mercs who were already my strongest combat units. I slapped most of my useless units there (Astrid, Kieran, Fiona) then wanted to keep Volug there for Nailah and Zihark because he had a support with Volug
Tibarn’s army was just random mfs + Marcia and Aran lmao. I felt like Tibarn + Elincia + Tauroneo + Aran + Marcia would be strong enough that I could put literally anyone there, although in retrospect I don’t really remember why I put Laura here instead lmao
I think I generally lucked out. Marcia and Tanith had some unfortunate incidents vs. crossbows in their split and I think they would’ve made the desert in Micaiah’s army a little more enjoyable for me, but otherwise it didn’t seem very consequential. Cavs in Ike’s army felt meh with the ledges but they would’ve been much worse literally anywhere else so I was fortunate I grouped most of them up together. I saw the swamp map and immediately undeployed Makalov lmao
Tower
Giffca was the only freebie I took since I picked him in PoR and was biased towards him, and the free form shifting royals just seemed too OP. Goatffca was OP anyways and could even double Ashera when capped on speed, not to mention actually doing a fuckton of damage per hit unlike Zihark (who still performed well himself). I forgot to put Nihil on him in my final reset attempt on Ashera though so he had some maintenance to do when breaking the wall lmao. I love this guy
I thought Kurthnaga would be underwhelming given his join state, but the fact that 0 dragons attacked him on the dragon chapter of the tower made him trivialize that whole map. I just had him eat all the dragons then his dad and he eventually grew strong enough in combat. Still not great because his speed never let him double, but making that chapter a freebie alone and leaving him with good enough combat for subsequent chapters made him a tower carry imo
The other two dragons were neat buffers and Nasir was decent chip on the Ashera wall thing.
I kinda touched on it in individual character’s parts, but tower meta was interesting. In the only other FE games I’ve played (7 and 8) caps rarely mattered to me since they rarely ever capped out in a relevant way. Growths were #1. But my units with good growths and not great caps like Gatrie and Sothe just kinda became irrelevant there, and I feel like a lot of the value boiled down into “can this unit double at the end game”. Haar lost a surprising amount of value because he couldn’t while Jill pulled ahead of him since she could. Zihark had a low strength cap (32 I think) but pulled crazy weight with doubling EVERYONE with alondite and vague katti.
Final thoughts
The game was a fucking journey lmao. I think my view of the game is more polarized than of PoR. If PoR was neat and well-contained, RD was sprawling and ambitious but had a lot more surface area to fail on. The biggest things for me were the DB chapters and the game dragging on with a lack of variety later on.
The DB characters didn’t get much time in the light to get invested in. Honestly if they removed the Daein involvement entirely I feel like there wouldn’t be much missed plotwise, and even Yune overtakes Micaiah herself later on. Micaiah feels like she’s a main character directly from the young adult fantasy novels I read as a teen. That's not like inherently bad or anything, but it felt so reminscent that it personally made me cringe lol. I just ended up feeling uninvested in the DB chapters in general and, combined with how weak their units are, they felt like slogs to get through. Plus a lot of their maps were defenses or pseudo defenses that felt like end turn simulators since the units were so weak it felt difficult to push for an earlier chapter clear. My units were NOT killing my level 19 Ike or pushing past the patch of land in the laguz swamp. Don't get me started on the blood pacts, especially for Naesala. It just felt so contrived and ass-pully.
Another thing I would’ve preferred would be more clarity or foreshadowing on when perspectives are swapped and what units are going where. Swapping between the DB and the GM was cool, but it felt kind of frustrating when I could never tell “okay when am I going to see this unit again if ever”. The royal knights felt so irrelevant and I hesitated from using any stat boosters on them since I didn’t know when I’d get them. All of them ended up being pretty useless for me anyways save for Geoffrey, and even then he wasn’t great. Plus, at the end when you were picking the party for the tower, it’s crazy that you can’t even unequip them before learning you had to pick 11 people for the tower. I ended up having to reload the chapter to unequip skills and items from the people I wasn’t going to use. For the army split, having little knowledge of what terrain or anything before it happens also felt kind of annoying to plan around, especially when it seemed like some terrain clearly favors some units over others. If I had packed any more cavs for the Silver army desert or the Hawk army swamp they would’ve been cooked. There seemed to be no way to realistically plan around this, and even the idea of “just make balanced teams” feels bad since the splits themselves are not very balanced.
Part 4 and the early tower chapters felt incredibly draining, given that they’re towards the end of an already really long game and they’re all rout maps with constant reinforcements throughout the chapter. Like 5 or 6 rout maps with reinforcements spawning in corners of the map or even where you CAME from just made them feel unnecessarily long and boring. Especially on maps like the desert where swinging back around to kill reinforcements often took long enough that more reinforcements spawned on some other random ass corner. At least later tower chapters turned into boss kills who were protected enough by the mooks so you didn’t completely ignore the chapter. I wish there was more objective diversity at that point of the game
That said, the sheer scale of RD was great. PoR already felt large scale with its march across Daein, but having multiple armies that you even split up and march across different routes to the same spot was so cool, like some avengers assemble type shit. Ledges were an interesting addition to the game and it made things like defense maps feel even more thematic. They took some cool gameplay leaps with stuff like the AoE attacks from the bosses and some (limited) mechanics to play around them like the terrain tiles for Ashera. And I just felt so comfortable with the Tellius cast with the continuity of PoR + this long ass game. When it ended I felt kinda sad it was gone rather than triumphant I finished idk I'm rambling at this point
I’m probably moving onto awakening or smth next idk what's actually next? I’m kinda going in order of release/QoL but I know nothing about the rest of the series except from what I saw in smash ultimate and memes lmao