Funky Tim

Note sure if you still have a fork left, but if yes, Dread Fighter!Noma because the idea of that sounds hilarious to me.

Heh, this sounds like fun, hehe. I've never tried Lunatic +, and don't intend to to be quite honest, but it looks like you're having a blast, so keep it up. :) Also, don't worry about the goals, I actually like that. If anything, if I'm allowed to offer some criticism, I would have preferred had you typed out what you did more rather than just referred to a guide I, well, didn't read. I'd rather hear about your playthrough and strategy than read a guide. :)

I'm not particularly fond of most of these characters to be honest. I'll give it to Sakura simply because she's rather inoffensive, Leo because he's the one royal who's actually smart, and Azura because I hate Corrin with a passion.

Heh, alright then. Voting Casual in that case. :)

Ironman is playing without resetting. If a character dies, they die. If you get a Game Over because Chrom or MyUnit dies, your run is over. I'm not sure if that's even possible for Lunatic + though.

Count me in. I've always loved playlogs, and I don't find those often enough. Good luck! As for the poll, that depends on wether you'll do Ironman in Classic or not. If Ironman, I vote Classic, otherwise I vote Casual.

I've been wondering the same thing actually. Except I did try Shadow Dragon, but was kind of underwhelmed by it - the "press X to see enemy ranges" thing not being there especially annoyed me.

I'm pretty sure Echoes is balanced around the Turnwheel not existing to be honest. I'd buy that argument if Mila's Turnwheel was in Awakening with its ambush spawns and ridiculous Lunatic + mode. But Echoes seems perfectly playable without it, so what makes you think the game is balanced around it?

I thought I already explained why it's of use to me when Casual is not, but I'll try to be more clear: I do not use the turnwheel as an immunity to losing. As mentioned, I had permanent deaths on my first playthrough (which was on Normal Classic by the way) that I did not reset for. I accepted those as mistakes I made and moved on. And yet I was still able to correct misclicks, or bad moves that I noticed early enough. Those are options playing on Casual simply doesn't give me. I see it as an "inbetween" thing - something that's harder than Casual mode but not as punishing as Classic.

Misclicks will happen either way. I don't see a way of preventing those other than having every single command end with a "sure you want to do this?" question, which would be incredibly annoying. Smart placement of options certainly helps, but the issue will never completely go away because people are people and make mistakes. Which brings me to my second point. You might not have caught that from what I wrote previously, but what you described in your second paragraph is actually how I play Fire Emblem in general. I know about these tactics and use them to my full disposal to avoid risks as much as possible. And yes, that includes Echoes where I have a "cheat device" at the ready. But even then, I'm not perfect. There will always be something that I missed, something I didn't account for, and that can spell doom for my plans. And having a completely optional and non-intrusive way out of sticky situations is something I appreciate. Another thing I want to note is that not everyone has all the time in the world to plan out each turn perfectly. I like playing in the way you outlined above, meticulously planning out turns, placing units with AOE skills correctly, considering potential stat debuffs, critical hit chances, and all that. But it also takes me a lot of time to play that way. When Shadows of Valentia came out I had a 12 hour work day and household responsibilities, along with a girlfriend, a social circle and other hobbies. Having the turnwheel feature allowed me to play through the game in a relatively swift manner without resorting to Casual mode, which I personally dislike. It was still challenging enough for me, and yes, I had permanent deaths on that playthrough that I did neither rewind nor reset. If you can play on a high level without massive time commitments that's great, unfortunately I'm not nearly good enough for that, being relatively new to the franchise. And seeing as I play video games primarily to have fun, I don't aim to improve rapidly either. I'm perfectly okay with never beating Conquest on Lunatic.

I feel what you're missing is that not everyone uses the turnwheel to "correct" bad RNG. I myself use it to correct things like misclicks, or bad decisions I catch on time. It's a convenience feature for me more than anything, and those are a plus in my book. I'd rather just rewind after placing Silque in a bad spot instead of having to restart a whole battle that I might have played perfectly up to that point. Heck, one of the main reasons I play Ironman is because I hate repeating stuff because of a single mistake. I also fail to see how Conquest can't screw you over with RNG and Echoes can. Yes, most of the maps allow for more strategic plays that allow a smart player to reduce their chances of falling victim to bullshit RNG, but I don't think it's possible to completely negate the chance of a low-percentage critical hit killing one of your units at all times... except maaaybe if Mila's Turnwheel was actually in that game. Echoes' map design is what it is. You may like it or not. I personally don't mind it because I feel the open maps are counterbalanced by the simpler gameplay mechanics, but that's just me. Nevertheless, Mila's Turnwheel makes the game better for me simply because of how convenient it is. I don't have to use it to break the game if I don't want to.

So, in other words, what you want is an options menu then? I could imagine something like Bravely Default does. In that game you have an entire "Difficulty" submenu that lets you change the difficulty level of enemies, turn experience gain, monetary rewards from fights and job points (those level up classes) on or off, and even lets you modify the encounter rate of random spawns. I imagine in Shadows of Valentia's case, there would be an option to turn off the Turnwheel entirely once you get it. Also, the Medal system could be reworked to have separate rankings depending on your difficulty choices. There are two ways I could see that being done. One option is to have separate rankings for each difficulty setting, i.e. Normal Casual Turnwheel, Normal Casual No Turnwheel, Normal Classic Turnwheel, etc. If you get a medal in one setting it will count for all lower settings, so you won't have to do it six times over. Alternatively you could just have the settings used when getting the medal displayed when tapping it with the stylus. The problem I see with this approach is making things needlessly complicated for completionists. Imagine someone plays the game on Hard Classic with Turnwheel and gets super lucky by finding both an Astra and a Sol in Thabes labyrinth (very unlikely I know, but hear me out). If that were to happen to me, I'd make damn sure I get the last weapon for that medal since it's such a pain to get, but I'd get frustrated because having used the Turnwheel, I will need to do it all again on another playthrough if I want to have the perfect file, which would sour the experience for me. That's a situation in which the game actively punishes me for not playing on the absolute highest difficulty, and I don't like the idea of that. Putting all that aside for a moment, would that fix your issue? Personally, I would be okay with the option to turn it off, though don't really find it necessary. I have no problem with enforcing rules on myself as long as it isn't inconvenient. The Breath of the Wild example I gave earlier today is one that inconveniences me since I have to think each time I want to sell something to a merchant which is annoying, so in this case I'd like an option to be implemented. But the Turnwheel is stupidly easy to ignore - just don't ever tap it. In fact, on my first playthrough I didn't even figure out how to use it for a while, so I can't exactly say it's an intrusive feature. I've already outlined why I don't like the idea of difficulty level influencing the medals you can earn, but I would be fine with having a Medal that is awarded for clearing the game on the highest difficulty level - so Hard Classic No Turnwheel.

You're actually making a fair point here. I still think my argument from earlier holds up to some extent, but I'll admit I didn't consider things from this angle. I personally don't mind having what you called "house rules" at all, I do that all the time. Since you brought up Breath of the Wild as an example, in that game I have a "realistic merchants" rule where shops and merchants will only buy things that would make sense for them to buy, effectively making rupees much harder to come by and gathering materials more worthwhile. Coming up with these kinds of rules and following them is fun for me. It allows me to tweak the difficulty of the game I'm playing to my liking. That said, I do sometimes wish it wasn't necessary to do that in the first place, so yes, I do somewhat agree with your reasoning despite overall having a different stance on things.

Nope, I absolutely do not mind. I can see where you're coming from when considering the story angle, but this is one instance of gameplay and story segregation that I'll happily accept seeing as how useful Mila's Turnwheel is. As for your argument about it lowering the difficulty of some achievements, especially the medals, I personally think that doesn't hold up. Video games are supposed to be fun, not a competition. If you want to get all those medals without using the turnwheel, you're free to do just that. I believe that giving people options is a good thing. I've played the game twice so far, once on Normal Classic and once on Hard Classic, and I've used Mila's Turnwheel both times. I will admit that the ability to rewind time does kind of ruin one thing I like to do in Fire Emblem games: Ironman. On my Hard Classic playthrough I had no permanent deaths despite not soft resetting a single time, because the one unavoidable death that was caused by a random enemy spawn I accidentally ran into on the overworld map could be fixed by one of the revival fountains in a later dungeon. The good thing is that I can tweak my own rules to accommodate for that. I'm about to start my third playthrough, Hard Classic again, and while I will still use the turnwheel to fix mistakes, I won't rewind deaths. That should make it interesting enough - for me. I could even forgo using it completely if I wanted to to get a more classic Fire Emblem experience. TLDR: From a story standpoint, I get where you're coming from, though I personally don't mind at all. From a gameplay perspective, you're free to not use it, so I don't see an issue here.

This kind of stuff is the reason I play games and watch anime in English. I think I can count the number of instances where I prefer the German localisation of games or anime to the English version on one hand.