In playing birthrite on normal and classic mode and it's not as easy as James says. I'm playing to keep everyone alive and it's far more difficult than "self punish". Your decisions hold far fsr more weight. I restarted chapter 10 10 times last night cause I kept losing someone. That's not easy.
Those chapters where you have to reset a few times aren't really indicative of Birthright's overall difficulty. Chapter 10 was one of them, but I only ran into a handful of those throughout the entire game. Even on hard/classic it felt like I could get away with the "let the enemy put itself in a position to be destroyed" strategy too often, so I can see how James would think normal was a cakewalk playing that way. It comes down to how you approach the battles more than skill or anything else.
Fire Emblem has always been like anime. It just depended on what type of anime was popular at the time of each game's release.
I've been curious about this for a while since I only really got into the series with Awakening. I'm assuming the older games also involve dragons, magic, and grandiose storylines, so I can't see them being that much less anime. It would be nice if Nintendo would release Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn on the eShop, as I'd really like to find out for myself.
It's not that the game is hard on normal but one of your weaker guys can get ganged up on and they might die which will cause me to reset.
That's what I mean when I talk about it coming down to playstyle. Since the enemy will engage you no matter what when you're within the danger zone, you can use your stronger units to draw them in and pretty much never put your weaker units in a position to get ganged up on. On normal it makes the game a cakewalk because using that strategy, the enemies are going to die on approach a lot. Like I said, even on the hard difficulty that happened a little too often for my liking and in my rush to get to Conquest I generally avoided grinding altogether, so it wasn't a case of my army just being overpowered. I agree with you on the fact that keeping every unit alive is much more challenging than just punishing yourself if you a lose a unit and pressing on, but the issue is when you play it a certain way there's no real peril of even losing a single unit on normal.
Also, I don't know if you plan on playing Conquest after you complete Birthright, but if you're getting sick of "rout the enemy," Conquest is much better in that respect. I'm on chapter 11 or 12 and I think I've only had one battle with that objective so far. There's a lot more variety in that game.
Fire Emblem has always been like anime. It just depended on what type of anime was popular at the time of each game's release.
I've been curious about this for a while since I only really got into the series with Awakening. I'm assuming the older games also involve dragons, magic, and grandiose storylines, so I can't see them being that much less anime. It would be nice if Nintendo would release Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn on the eShop, as I'd really like to find out for myself.
But if you're making a game about medieval style battles with magic and whatnot, I'd like the characters to be a bit more grim and grounded than the ridiculous anime tropes they've settled upon.
To be honest, as much as I loved Awakening, I was really hoping they would take the narrative in that direction with the next game. In that sense I can see where older Fire Emblem fans are coming from, cuz my impression of the series before Awakening were exactly what you described there. After playing through Birthright (which I liked, but doubles down on Awakening's tone and story) I'm REALLY wanting to play the GC/Wii games after hearing you describe them that way.