@Pizzamorg I'm doing all the paralogues, watching most support conversations, completing all the missable dadsion story events and fully exploring the maps and looting dungeons also doing bird time and building team members in the arena and recruiting most characters to see every support, also completing all side quests.

On hard mode classic i have only gotten jasmine killed

@XenobladeKisekiFan In fairness, I focused little on bonds beyond just getting people ready to recruit, I also must confess I spent little time exploring the map, or exploring dungeons unless a quest specifically required me to go there. I focused my free time on clearing side content, raising renown, building my army and levelling them up. I tried to make it as an efficient and focused loop as I could to avoid running into the issues others had with this side of the game.

@Pizzamorg I have seen most of ninae's supports, however the two best support conversations I have seen in game so far, is seteth and dadao's c support and cai and tialla's a support,

I have enjoyed my time with fortunes weave so far and intelligent systems could make the game better with making some of the tasks more straightforward such as recruiting and building supports, I also think a 60fps mode would speed things up,

My two main takeaways as I go into Act 3, which I guess double as my two main complaints, are thus:

Even if I have to buy it as DLC, I need the other four routes. I know we'll never know the truth about what happened during development, but you can't play all four Act 1 routes and not admit that it feels like huge chunks of vital story were torn out of this, leaving little tatters of threads behind never stitched up. I feel like until they do that, and restore the story and characters to their complete forms, it is almost impossible to judge how good the story, characters, writing etc are here as it is so obviously incomplete

My second complaint is Act 2 is absolutely awful, and at least so far, Act 3 feels like we're doing Act 1 again but worse somehow. I need to put in more time into Act 3 to really judge it, but I am getting big Baldur's Gate 3 flashbacks where Act 1 was like a 5/5 near perfect RPG, and which got significantly worse once you made it out of that Act 1, but as so few people actually did, the discourse surrounding that game online was infuriating, because it was effectively people arguing about two different games, as those who only played Act 1 of BG3 had a very different experience to those who played all 3. My understanding is BG3 cleaned a lot of that up with post launch patches, so maybe FW can do something similar with DLC restoring routes.

I’ve decided I’ll just do 2 routes when it’s said and done. I’m working thru ledas route, and trying to decide if I want to do Theodora’s or Dietrich’s next. I don’t have the time or the patience to do all 4, or 3 for that matter. While I’m really enjoying the game, I can’t pretend that I’ll happily play thru this game for 125-150hrs. 60-80hrs is typically my cut off for a game. TotK was an outlier for me. Sometimes too much content is no good for me, which is why I enjoyed 3H and Engage as much as I did. For 3H specifically, I didn’t feel like I absolutely needed to play thru the other routes to see the game through. I feel like I need to do at least 2 to have a fair shake at beating the game and ACT 3.

@NintendoByNature I started with Leda then did Cai - it was about 33 percent shorter and I tried to recruit everyone - only missed three who were not available in last month, much better than I did with Leda. The map is restricted with Cai so in some ways less to explore. Doing Dietrich now and on track to get every recruit but the autosave screwed me a couple of times when I made non optimal choices so I had to repeat a couple of parts including the longest segment multiple times to get it right - I think they did this on purpose cause even by chance you might get something wrong, so it’s taken me almost as long as other two combined. There’s tricky bits where you have to be in town one to two days for paralogues before end chapter goal that is all the way across the map one time I thought I did it perfectly and it still left me only three turns at end

@Misima there are sometimes other clues, the children love the cheap cervi whatever that is - so determine which characters are supposed to be children, books apply to same characters like Tialla and book content seems to matter for some characters, characters who like spiritual characters seem to mostly really like spiritual things too though not always, taking care of others is code for cooking and garum, mostly, Olympia (beauty) is jewelry and probably other women from that post battle conversation in that one arena battle, there’s weapons for those who like fighting regardless of their skill niche, fishing mentioned or growing up in port means fishing equipment, mentioning physical activity means training equipment, archery stuff for archers, horse stuff for all characters with mounts even if flying or ostrich, animal lovers = all characters with mount. When drinking with friends does not mention alcohol- tea or coffee likely. Stories = most books. Haven’t figured out what the womanizing thing means, yet.

@wooferjones interesting, thank you for the feedback. I think I might need more of a powerhouse in either Dietrich or Theodora. Cai might be off the table unfortunately.

I would say Dietrich's route is the most restrictive if that is the measurement for whether a route is to be a skipped or not. He has the worst renown mechanic and therefore the hardest time recruiting characters, even if he himself might be the most OP Unit in all of modern FE.

Dang, so Theodora might be the best option it sounds like? Looking to recruit multiple characters and have a decent army going into act 3

@NintendoByNature Theodora's route is slow going at the beginning which may make you nervous you made the wrong choice, but on the back end I had little issue amassing renown and forming a large army.

@Pizzamorg ok that’s very insightful.

@NintendoByNature I can’t comment on Theodora but with what I now know I am confident I could get every recruit on the other paths. I have to use a guide for paralogue dates but otherwise it’s tedious but doable due to the UI. Dietrich is so powerful I have to do maps with much lower characters accompanying him because the game artificially restricts Advanced license so it is sort of pointless to level them much past 35 I think until you get more of them.

Has anyone seen Dante's supports, her voice actress does an amazing job in portraying her character and her supports are fun to watch,

So far my favourite characters have been: Seteth,
Ursula, Buccar, Ninae, Dante, Cai, Tialla, Sha lan and Dadao,

Sha lan's voice actress is also princess peach's new voice actor and she does Renne in trails,
Ninae's voice actress has done tio plato from trails:

https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/Courtney-Lin/

@XenobladeKisekiFan I like making Dante do the play and choosing the worst option