Topic: What are you playing?

[MagicCow64]

Continuing my run of going back to games I absolutely adored but drifted away from for some reason, I got back into Pikmin 3. This really is a perfect synthesis of the ideas of the first two games. There's a time limit that pushes you forward, but it isn't as hard and fast as the original. The ability to multitask returns, but this time the game actually designs puzzles that force you to use it. And this is one of the few first party Wii U games that really benefits from the GamePad, even (especially) while using the Wii remote and nunchuk controls.

I was a massive fan of the first two games, and this game is the best one yet. I hope we get to see another one some day.

I'm with you for the most part, but I think Pikmin 3 is almost the perfect synthesis of the first two games. The fruit system is in theory a pretty ingenious blend of the structure of the first two games, but it whiffs a bit by making fruit too plentiful/easy to get. I had like over 30 days of juice when I beat the game. Outside of that one section midway through, I felt very little pressure to work efficiently. This made a lot of the multitasking ability fairly moot in my book.


So basically while I am a fan of each Pikmin game released so far, I still think we're waiting for the king to arrive and perfectly calibrate the gameplay with time pressure.

[azeke]

Devil May Cry 4 (PC):
Beat the game on normal. Ugh...

Such a great combat, cool new weapons. But the game itself...

Man, it gets aggressively terrible by the end. The rehashing in the second half is atrocious: enemies, locations, bosses are reused (and then resued AGAIN in a boss rush!). The final bosses were also pretty bad.

Also got S-rank on level 2. Took me a while. I constantly kept getting A on orbs because i was missing the spot at the top of tower (have to execute a very clunky jump with guns to reach it). The whole orb collectathon is annoying -- why do i have to do this and collect EVERYTHING while on timer? In an action game to begin with!

Checked out "Hard" difficulty (Son of Sparda). It feels a bit easier to get S rank on combo simply because there are more enemies and they don't die if as much as fart at them, so you can style on them and get considerable rank.

Assassin's Creed 4 (Wii U):
I am repeating myself, but naval stuff gets in the way. You can't go into many ports because ships defending are way over leveled than your ship. To clear sea map you need to destroy forts but i can't destroy even "medium" forts.

I tried attacking some of them for a few hours. It's no use until you fully upgrade. And to fully upgrade you need to get elite plans for for your ship weapons which are located on islands defended by forts and ships that you seemingly can't defeat without these plans.

After getting frustrated with naval battles, i just default into regular AC collectathon routine. it may be the same mind-numbing stuff as it always been, but it's still satisfying enough to be worth it.

My frustrations with underleveled ship might be because i actively avoid progressing through the story in favour of collecting stuff and doing side-missions, but it has neven been a problem in any other AC games so far: i could always go into any side mission, any time.

Kenway's Fleet component feels like mobile free to play game, it even has gemstones. The gameplay is shallow and everything is made slow on purpose.


Also playing some Desktop Dungeons on lunch breaks on work and some Bayo 2 in bed before going to sleep (still going through story mode).

[broodwars]

I've been playing some Tales of Hearts R on Vita. The battle system is as fun as ever and the game runs quite smoothly & looks alright, despite being a remake of a DS game. What fills me with "despir", though, is the game's translation. Given that Bandai Namco was too damn cheap to dub the game, you'd think they'd put all their effort into making sure the text was properly polished. Well, it's...













...not.  But hey! You can buy a $30 DLC Season Pass to make what was already an incredibly easy game even more stupidly easy with a mountain of stat & gold boosts, SO I GUESS BANDAI NAMCO SKIMPING ON AN ALREADY BAREBONES LOCALIZATION WAS JUSTIFIED!

And with that, I leave you on one final image from RPGamer's review of the game:

[Mop it up]

Have you ever played Klonoa: Door to Phantomile, Mop it up? Ironically, I feel that Klonoa draws a lot from Kirby, and then Kirby 64 has the same sorts of levels, but without the ability to interact with the foreground or background, which is really a shame.

I missed this somehow, better late than never I guess. I didn't play this exact game, but I played the Klonoa game on the Wii which I believe is related to in some way. Some kind of remake perhaps? In any case, it did indeed have some good level design, but the gameplay itself is a bit one-note, especially compared to something like Kirby. It's been a while now though so I don't recall much specific about the game.

[broodwars]

So in a 2 week span of huge releases that includes Call of Duty; several Assassin's Creed games; the Halo Collection; Tales of Hearts R; Far Cry 4; and Dragon Age: Inquisition, naturally the game I've been playing has been...LittleBigPlanet 3.  : : This one's made by the team that did the excellent Vita LittleBigPlanet, and this feels like a further extension of that game. The jumping's been tightened up a bit (Oddsock feels like a perfect union of Mario's jumping with Rayman's speed and wall traversal), the level design is actually enjoyable to traverse and full of new and different things to do, and the presentation is is just really well-done (with some particularly excellent usage of 1950s music).

One odd thing, though: the various "areas" are now broken up into stages linked by a hub level, with NPCs and sidequests. You even have a quest log! 

I said back at E3 that Sumo Digital making this game meant it was in serious danger of actually being good, and I'm happy to see that seems to have proved true. We'll see how long the game can maintain this pace.

And oh yeah, if you pre-ordered the game, you got this:

[Ceric]

And we will call it Broodling.

[Soren]

My current rotation is:

Bayonetta 2 - started as soon as I finished the first game. Finished the prologue, and I'm already loving the Umbran Climax and how it integrates with the rest of the combat.
Mario Kart 8 - at least a few matches online.
Zelda: Minish Cap - Downloaded, not played yet.
Zelda: Link's Awakening - Played like, 5 minutes so far. So...

[azeke]

Aside from Pure Platinuming Wii U Bayo...

Ninja Gaiden Black (360):
What an incredibly polished game. Itagaki had a very clear vision of what this game should be. NGB commits to the vision of badass somewhat realistic ninja and executes it very well. Animation flows between stances realistically and sword doesn't just appear from nowhere, Ryu takes his sword and sheathes it back when he's not using it as you walk or run. Purposedly omitting some wacky combat stuff of Devil May Cry gave Ninja Gaiden Black rather unique "grounded" feel among similar action games.

I've finally defeated second boss fight with Alma and entered the pyramid. It feels like the final level. Also it got kinda scary with bugs and spooky music so i went to sleep.

Alma scorpion form was an incredibly tough boss. A lot of her attacks are very hard dodge. But once you stun her with wind run + flying swallow, you can take up to 40% of her life in one combo as she lies.

For how hard this boss is, she sure is pretty weak. If you luck out to dodge all her attacks and not whiff yours you can defeat her in less than a minute. But if you err just once she can one-hit kill you in less than a second. So either way this whole fight takes less than a minute long and it was kinda annoying to spend more time getting to the boss after dying and continuing than on the boss itself.

Fantasy Zone (MAME):
I've found how to defeat snowmen boss in level 5:

Apparently once you kill enough of them you can just avoid their shots and after some time they stop shooting. "Avoid their shots" is easier said than done though, considering the bullet spam. One way to stay alive is to go behind the big snowman and to keep constantly circling around them. That is if there is any room for you there, sometimes big snowman refuses to move forward and you die because you have nowhere to do.

A-a-and as i suspected, level 6 gets even more more obnoxious with bullet spam...

[Triforce Hermit]

L.A. Noire- Half way through homicide cases. Story drags a little, but still a lot of content. The game is genius at a lot of points and then sometime just plain ridiculous with the clues. You see a pencil and paper, pick it up, and then just write out the secret message. Because Phelps felt like it. Yeah, sure, no normal person would make that connection. You also see a water heater that was installed two days ago, but yet it is torn apart and for some reason just decide to fix it and get a clue.

Great game to invest time into though. I'm loving it, the humor, the music, the look of the cars and the city, and it does an excellent job of replicating the time period. Beautiful game. (Phelps was a stuck up little ass in the beginning. Now he is just always angry)

[Ceric]

I was trying to play Wolf Among Us but after losing my progress in the room with the bloody bed when it locked on the ending cutscene of the episode and the ability to skip cutscenes not in the game coupled with how hard it is to find time to play this game the opportunity cost for this game had skyrocketed.  Telltale you are now in the same space as BioWare.

Fool me once shame on you Fool me twice were done.

[marvel_moviefan_2012]

I got back into Super Mario 3D World after taking a couple of weeks off. I also have been really getting into Symphony of the Night now that I FINALLY figured out how to get to the second castle, something I didn't even know existed.

I also dug out my USB arcade joysticks and loaded up the MAME program for some arcade action this last week, lots of classics mostly TMNT and Bust A Move though.

[broodwars]

I have finished episode 1 of Telltale's new Tales from the Borderlands series (PS4 version), and...wow, that was surprisingly good. For one thing, it's the first Telltale game I've ever seen where there were no major technical issues. Yes, even in the game's 2 major setpiece action sequences, there was no framerate stuttering or weird model glitching. I heard some minor audio glitching and I think I saw a guy talk once without moving his lips, but overall the game is just solid on the technical side. On the artistic side, the environments are way larger and way more detailed than previous Telltale games, and the game just has a really fun "heist movie" feel to it.

Besides the really funny "unreliable narrator" aspect to the story (the story's told by 2 characters, and they pretty frequently call each other on their B.S. if you push the story just a little too absurd), I really like that Telltale seems to have brought the whole "choice" aspect of their games back, albeit in a largely cosmetic fashion.

Now let's see how they **** it all up in Episode 2, particularly on the technical side.

[azeke]

Zen Pinball (Wii U and 3DS):
I spent a LOT of time on playing Excalibur table on 3DS game. It's always my goto game when i need to kill a few minutes.

That's why i felt like checking out how the same table works on Wii U.

First of all: man, Excalibur table alone costs as much as entire 3DS game (with four tables). I guess they realize that it's their best table and they can get awat with pricing premium for it... And that entire "free-to-play" structure is kinda iffy, especially with awkward implementation on Wii U...

Then there are controls. It's weird that on 3DS you can control flippers with d-pad and face buttons but on the supposedly superior home console version you can control flippers only with awkwardlly placed shoulder buttons. Another weird control decision is taking out launching based on for how long you press A button. Now when you press A, you launch always it with 100% force and if you want more precise you need to use either right stick or touch screen and neither are as precise as it was on 3DS.

That's two strikes against Wii U version already.

Obviously the game looks better on console, but i would trade 3d for of all this bloom in an instant. 3d in Zen Pinball DOES actually enchance the gameplay, while all this shinyness of the table is just overwhelming sometimes.

And final and the biggest problem for me is that physics is very different on Wii U port. I don't know what it is or why -- but i am really struggling to reach my regular points. On 3DS version i can casually reach 10 millions no problems but here everything is off and i can't put the ball where i want. Some ramps have suddenly became completely inaccessible for some reason.

Maybe factory settings between two versions are different and maybe it's 3DS version that is in the "wrong" here, but i don't care -- 3DS version feels better for me.

So for nearly the same price you Zen Pinball 3DS plays better AND has more tables than just buying one Excalibur table on Wii U.

Red Remover (free flash game):

Not even close to Jelly no Puzzle, but an okay puzzler to waste a few hours on...

It's physics based so that's already a big minus, because of the randomness factor that real-time physics adds. It simply doesn't feel as good to solve this kind of puzzles.

I solved all levels and got all pars, but i didn't go for "bonus mode" completion. This "bonus mode" simply to makes levels dark outside of a small circular area around the cursor. This is simply not fun and adds nothing to already lacking gameplay.

Ninja Gaiden Black (360):
After dealing with all annoying bugs in the pyramids, i entered labyrinth with even more annoying ghost fish. It's not even that hard, just annoying-- they zone in on you so fast, your only option not get bitten to death is just to keep running, jumping and slashing with a sword non-stop.

In the end of a rather short labyrinth level there was a ghost boss. He was even harder to get any hits in than Alma-scorpion. Had to resort to using lots of health potions and even had to use a ninpo magic a few times -- to avoid getting caught in his inescapable unblockable attacks (Alma had only on inescapable attack -- this boss has like three).

Whatever, i somehow defeated him. I don't really feel good about how i did it spamming health potions and such, maybe i will try to do it properly on replays...

After that i entered some kind of tower, just a few floors with regular monsters (some bugs and dinosaurs). It felt doable but it was too late and i was exhausted so next time...

Legend of Korra (Steam):
Game's achievement for completing all tutorial is glitchy and sometimes doesn't activate even after you complete story mode. Sometimes you need a few playthoughs to get it. So i decided to start the game afresh. And because i am a masochist i picked Extreme difficulty.

Enemies are absolutely relentless in this mode, easily on the levels of Ninja Gaiden enemies -- very little breathing room and you have to abuse mechanics a LOT just to say alive. Took me a few hours just to get through first two levels.

Also tried Pro-bending mode on Captain difficulty. That was even harder. Because i nullified my earth- and fire- bending levels when i restarted campaign, Mako and Bolin became useless -- their power depends on my bending levels. I managed to beat five teams and then got crushed by the very last one.

On this difficulty enemy players start to actively use their own counters, and sometimes it turns into a game of ping-pong with me and him/her sending the shot back and forth. With each deflect the shot become stronger until on fourth counter it turns red and if you get hit by it you instantly get knocked back no matter your health.

Also on this mode targeting really becomes important, so that you focus all your team shots on one player to overwhelm him.

Very frustrating. I think i need to replay the story a bit to upgrade my bending levels and then come back to pro-bending later.

[ejamer]

Re: Zen Pinball on Wii U - you aren't alone in finding the 3DS versions better. Part of this is inevitably just what people get used to first... but I also had a hard time adjusting to the Wii U version. The problems you mention all exist, but I also couldn't find a view that was really comfortable with.


That said, the portable version have their own issues. The Empire Strikes Back table from Star Wars is broken in at least one spot, and some of the other tables have wonky moments too. Doesn't seem to be any fixes on the way either.

[Adrock]

I decided to run through my Virtual Console copy of A Link to the Past I bought forever ago. I started it a while ago then put it down. I don't remember the last time I played through the entire game. It may be over a decade at this point. I don't know where anything is anymore. Some parts are familiar, like I know where Hyrule Castle and the Lost Woods are located on the map, but I'm drawing a blank on how the screens are organized. Whatever. It's like new to me then. I'm taking a lot of hits because I'm not used to the mechanics anymore.

[BranDonk Kong]

The Walking Dead: Season One (Xbone)

Awesome game. Haven't had time to get into a game for a while, got both seasons (and 400 Days) on XBL Games with Gold for $25 combined. A little ways in to Chapter 2, excellent writing so far.

[MagicCow64]

Assassin's Creed Unity (PC):

Took the plunge against my better judgment, mostly because my computer came back from the Asus repair nightmare labyrinth and I wanted to put it through the paces.

Despite the online caterwauling about performance issues, I'm running it on high/ultra with better load times than previous entries and an almost consistent frame rate (it chugged for some reason in the underground rat king mission). Jaded as I am, I was actually impressed by the visuals for the first hour or so. The main character animates very well and the clothing textures/physics are probably the best I've seen. The lighting is also pretty damn good.

That's about it for the positives, though. They've revised the movement system yet again, and somehow made it worse than AC III/IV, which in turn was worse than the Ezio games. The down-climbing is theoretically an improvement, but everything is so goddamn sloppy that it really doesn't matter. They've also chucked a bunch of options from combat and "stealth" that make things a chore in various ways. It's harder, but not in a good way.

For all the blather about the improved mission design, I'm about 1/3 through and I'll be damned if I can discern a significant difference. There are still tailing missions, still insta-fail stealth stuff. A few bits didn't end the mission if you get caught, but instead eject you from the area, but really it just takes more time and is pointless.

Having spent a month in Paris last year, I am personally not a big fan of the city's aesthetic, but beyond that, the "true scale" thing just makes it a pain in the ass to move around a lot of the time, given the pokey climbing animations and wide streets in many areas. And most of Paris looks the same outside of major landmarks, with a dusty beige color palette. (Curiously a brief interlude into the 1890s looked way more vibrant and inviting. I'd rather play a game then!)

They've also spent less effort than ever explaining all the side crap and even the main plot. After the perfunctory opening stuff, it just plops you in the city with a nauseating array of mission icons. There's no indication of what anything is or what it does, often even after you activate tasks. Like, I walked up to an interaction point on a random short bridge, was presented a Nostradamus poem, and told to "solve" it. At least in previous games they'd have you talk to somebody to give you some rotecontext. Not so in Unity! When I wandered into what I guess is the home base of the game, the main character was almost literally like "yeah yeah, I get it, upgrade ****, get more revenue, later, not going to bother even asking your name".

Skip this ****! Don't do what I did!

[azeke]

Re: Zen Pinball on Wii U - you aren't alone in finding the 3DS versions better. Part of this is inevitably just what people get used to first... but I also had a hard time adjusting to the Wii U version. The problems you mention all exist, but I also couldn't find a view that was really comfortable with.

View 6 (or 7?) i think works very well, i usually prefer camera that moves with the ball but still gives enough view of the table itself.

That said, the portable version have their own issues. The Empire Strikes Back table from Star Wars is broken in at least one spot, and some of the other tables have wonky moments too. Doesn't seem to be any fixes on the way either.

Yeah, it seems like after a while they abandoned 3DS version which is a huge shame.

I have no interest in playing anything else besides Excalibur from Zen. Even tables in 3DS version (except for Excalibur) are kinda bad (Shaman, Earth Defense Force and something Indiana Jones-like). I played a bit of Marvel tables and they were all pretty meh, Ironman table was kinda okay, but still underwhelming.

I played Mars table on Windows 8 version a year or two ago (it was free at the time) and it was solid enough but still nothing exceptional.

Also just last night i specifically tried out Pinball FX2 version on 360. For some reason, physics on that version feel exactly like in Zen Pinball 3DS port. Even when playing with 360's analog triggers ball goes exactly where i want it to go on Excalibur. So whatever they did on Wii U, it didn't happen on 360.

Also it's not as bloomy and bright as Wii U port, it feels a bit more subdued and "comfier" somewhat.

[broodwars]

I have finished the first episode of Telltale's new Game of Thrones series and...well... at that ending. If you had an issue with the lack of meaningful moral choices and big "watercooler" discussion moments in Telltale's last few series, you'll certainly get them here!

Also, the real Dinklege decided to show up for this game, not the fraud we got in Destiny. That said, as much as I got into the storytelling in this game, it is kind of shockingly ugly. Telltale went with a realistic art style, and with their limited technical prowess we ended up with a game that looks like it should have been on the PS2. It especially looks awful in their recreation of the iconic show intro.

[NWR_insanolord]

I love that there's a company like Nintendo out there who's willing to go all-in on a concept like Captain Toad as a full game. I'm absolutely in love with this game.

[BranDonk Kong]

broodwars what are you playing the game on? I've been watching videos on YouTube and it looks fantastic. Sure the intro isn't as pretty as the show, but it's still pretty impressive with all the animation they did. The background imagery in the intro is just about as bland and jagged as it is in the game too, though that's definitely a penis pointing towards the west end of Ironrath.

[Ceric]

He's playing on PS4 I'm sure.

[azeke]

Bayonetta (360):
Very few things left to do in this version:

• Completing Non-Stop Infinite Climax mode. Not going to platinum mode because
  
  • it's beyond my level of skills so far (but i do plan git better on Wii U version try platinum-ing it there)
  • i just want to get it over with on 360 and get the last achievement
• Beating the campaign in less than 3 hours. This is what i am doing -- i am just completing levels on Non-Stop Infinite Climax with no backtracking not really caring for ranks getting silver, bronzes and even stones. The most i can hope to get with that approach is Gold (have to complete all secret verses and Alfheim to Platinum), but i don't care because 1)
• Collecting all 101 Umbran Crows. First 30 Umbran crows you gets for completing achievements, the rest are scattered across the levels on three difficulties. I've got them all on Normal and Hard now only have NSIC crows left. Because when i am looking for crows everywhere and have to rotate the camera constantly, tearing on 360 gets very obvious. It's not a problem in regular battles because there you barely have to touch right stick, but yeah it's pretty bad when you swing the camera.
• Defeating Rodin (?) Should i even attempt or just do it on Wii U? Not sure.

God Hand (pcsx2)
What a stupid, stupid game.

I love it.

Most of the moves are done like in smash bros -- a directional input plus a face button. But it still deep enough to stay interesting and is immensely satisfying.

First demon enemy is a tad too fast for me to react and i can only defeat him abusing god hand and by hitting him as he's down. Dodge is still a bit hard for me to do, because you need to move your finger from face buttons to right stick and that's why tend to just jump away from enemies rather than staying and dodging.

One of the most useful tricks in God Hand is to use roulette to reorient yourself instead of 180 turn. Roulette automatically targets on the closest enemy and then you can just cancel it without actually activating roulette move.

Speaking of 180 turns: each time camera makes jerky movement in this game i get motion sickness from it. That's a shame because otherwise the game is super funny and super fun to play. Even watching let's plays makes me dizzy slightly.

I really like side stuff like you can save random peasants and they will give you health and sometimes you need to do some kind of quest to save them like one peasant gets poisoned and you have to scour the level and find the antidote. It's not structured like missions on the menu or something, just a random side stuff you can do.

QTE are activated when you mess up and let the enemy trying to grab you. These QTEs give you chance to recover from that and they're extremely fast less than a fraction of a second to activate. And some counters come even faster like the counter against the first demon.

There are also pummelling QTEs when you stomp an enemy into the dirt and that's how i deal most of the damage to demons. I launch them into the air, get some hits in as they're floating in the air and as they fall i keep kicking them as they're down.

Combat system while not hard to figure out, actually has a lot of depth in it. Lots of context dependent stuff in there and you can combine moves in a very cool and flashy looking ways: like you can uppercut an enemy, juggle him for a while and then kick him while he is in the air and send him flying into the wall knocking other enemies along the way.

It's kinda hard for me to activate running mode with analog stick, maybe it's better on dualshock controllers. I can see people starting to run almost with no windup but i need some fast lane to start running.

Legend of Korra (Steam):
Finished on Extreme difficulty (starting from scratch).

Say what you want but Platinum knows how to do a satisfying videogame endings. They always reward you by upping the scale thousandfold and turning you into some kind of overpowered god so that you can go wild on the final boss and then to finish it up they give you easy mission to cool down during the credits. And they always do "Thank you for playing!" kind of message.

Extreme difficulty from scratch is completely unbalanced, and the only way to beat it is to abuse finishers and by parrying everyone and everything.

With normal healthbar if you miss even one hit you can die in two seconds, because as you're stunned everyone else will gang up on you. All enemies are become complete damage sponges and are much longer to kill than on normal mode (even with super-charged attacks!). The best option is to get a Talisman that halves your health but gives you twice the attack power. At this rate it doesn't matter if you go down in one second or two seconds (if you allow an enemy to hit you even once, you're gonna die either way), but boosting your attack is the only way to kill them in reasonable amount of time.

On Extreme difficulty, waterbending becomes the most viable because of it's long range and you can use super strong finishers whereever you are -- if you managed to stun an enemy, you just press B and he and everyonw standing close to him gets washed away by my finisher.

Firebending also gets cooler because if you spam it, it interrupts enemies' attacks and more interestingly it has a weird teleporting effect where after second or third hit in the combo you magically teleport towards the nearest enemy. Why? Probably to balance out that firebending is really bad at long range.

Speaking of teleporting, the air scooter talisman that you unlock for completing pro-bending at the highest difficulty does something like that. If you dodge an incoming attack you time slows down and you magically get carried away towards the enemy who attacked you. It gets the most weird when you dodge projectile from an enemy who is very far from you. It's like everything stop and an invisible hand grabs you and moves you towards the enemy. It's kinda like Vergil "Dark Slayer" teleport.

I STILL didn't unlock the achievement for doing all the tutorials -- there is some bug with it, and do this you might need to delete your save files or something and restart the campaign again, but i am not sure if i even want to at this point...


Stealth Bastard Deluxe (Steam):
No Guts, No Glory part in 2-9 took me a lot to figure out, i tried to solve it a few times last month, but then last night i retried and randomly decided to jump instead of crouching and it worked.

Also progressed a bit into world 4 and S-ranked a few levels in world 3.

By this rate it will be a LONG while until i S-rank the first game and then will be ready to move on to the sequel on Wii U...

[MagicCow64]

Fire Emblem (GBA via WiiU):

I was hesitant on this, having never played a game in the series before, and also thinking I probably didn't have the patience to tackle a genuine strategy game at this point. But then four hours went by in a blur and I am now hooked on it in a way I haven't been with a game since, I dunno, Little King's Story? The core gameplay is streamlined just enough to keep you restarting checkpoints every time your crappiest dude/ette dies, while allowing for satisfying tactical engagements. The AI feels kind of sluggish and dopey until it smells blood and then all of the sudden a mage runs at a wall to wipe someone out you didn't realize was in range and that's 20 minutes of lesson learned. The options are surprisingly robust for a GBA game, too, text speed, game speed options, UI options. The dedicated explanation button also ensures that you're never in the dark about any stat category or item.

Some quibbles that I'm curious about whether or not they're cleaned up in later games:

-It's occasionally but very annoying when the cast swaps around and you lose personnel you've been keeping carefully leveled. I wish the cast was more stable and less redundant in certain categories (no thanks third axe guy/second crappy archer; where's my little dancing fife boy?!), but that would probably clash with permadeath.

-Attacks seem to whiff too often, even with no terrain or weapon disadvantages. Makes archers even more marginal.

-Random reinforcements from the edges of the map can screw you over if you haven't already played a scenario and know to expect them.

-Main avatars (Elliwood, Lyn) are unpleasantly weak and remain anemically leveled due to risk aversion. Not asking them to be Markuses, but they feel more like liabilities than protagonists most of the time.

-Speaking of which, Markus and a few others are ridiculously stronger and more versatile than anyone else. It's quite difficult at points not to just steamroll the enemies with your tanks and thus unbalance things even more.

[Ymeegod]

"Random reinforcements from the edges of the map can screw you over if you haven't already played a scenario and know to expect them. "

Yeah, they never really address this with the series, but in later games they usually allow you one turn after enemy respawns.  In the first game they respawn and it's their freaking turn which is annoying as all hell in the later chapters.

The archers get an long bow which is quite deadly since it allows them 2+ attack range so they can attack without worrying about the counterattacks.