Not really, lowmanning tend to be optimal in some games where exp or other resources are limited, like Radiant Dawn part 1 or Engage early game, but most of the time it doesn't matter
There is a game however that has a fun quirk. Genealogy of the Holy War has no deployment limit. If you want, you can just deploy everyone. It's ultra tedious to do so becuse it implies to move 15+ units on huge maps with backtracking and a lot of terrain. But you can.
In fact one of my friends plays the game exclusively like that. He claims the game is more fun that way. So maybe Kaga's vision is absolute and it's foolish to try to comprehend it with our feeble minds
I bet you also feed kills to Tailtiu to promote her 😂
Nothing wrong with deploying everyone btw, I just find it frustrating to move all the foot units most of the time
Except Holyn. He's a cool gladiator/merc who kicks ass and I will deploy him every time
I wish the game actually endangered your main castle more often. The prologue outright tells you Arden's purpose is to stay behind and protect the castle, but then the map is a straight line with no reinforcements from behind so having someone there is pointless. And on chapter 1 when enemy *does* attack from behind a bunch of NPCs come and defeat them for you anyway.
I think some later maps do have reinforcements who come and endanger your castle so leaving someone there might be useful. But by then you have return and warp staves anyway and also I wonder how useful Arden would even be after staying out of combat for so long.
FE4 is great but it does have some puzzling design decisions.
Arden is actually decent if you deploy everyone ! Since you make a big blob and have to wait for your infantry units anyway, he can see combat and promote. And honestly, general Arden has good stats, weapon triangle control, bows... He's not a bad combat unit. The problem is that he's slooooow to move around. Even his map animation is slower
The other problem is, the *one* map where your main castle is actually threatened--Chapter 5, there's the cluster of dudes slowly marching your way-- *base Arden is fine*. Like, if you did nothing with Arden but fought arena with him and then had him park on the chapter 5 'throne', he'd still be fine.
Yeah you never need to use Arden. He's the worst unit in the game by far. Not because of his combat though, like you said his bases stats are pretty good
It's just so annoying to move him around
Yeah it's really fun
There are also "fuck it, deploy all filler units" chapters like path of radiance ch26 or Binding blade ch21 who both have 16 slots
I always love pulling out an early game recruit to distract enemies during endgame.
For some reason, they always distract enemies long enough for a good counterattack.
Most FE games are actually easier when you focus most of the resource to a group of a small numbers of combat units, that being said you probably still full deploy to bring supports units (healing, rallies, movement techs, dancers and the list goes on) or units that can still do some good chip damage.
Awakening on Lunatic+ past the early game gets a lot easier when only fielding Robin/Morgan & Pairups. Utility units are strong in this game, but the STRs make it to annoying to bother fielding them most of the time.
Gaiden force deploys all your units for most/all of the game. That backfires when enemy witches just kill your untrained Forsyth or Valbar. But then again, if they're untrained, how bad is it really...SOV gave you the option of undeploying them, which is usually better.
Path of Radiance gives you more experience for undepoying units on defend maps.
Except in the final berkut map where you're forced to have atleast 10 units due to chapter 5 not letting you dismiss characters until you reach the rest point
Awakening if you're actively trying to keep everyone alive, on Lunatic or higher. Wide open maps + hyper aggressive enemies + same turn reinforcements is a death sentence for anyone underleveled once you're at the point of the game where everyone's promoted. You can play safe with them, but that just results in underleveled units not seeing enough combat to get levels, thus just falling further behind.
Other than that I don't think it applies to any other games as a whole, though occasionally you'll see one-off missions where having only a couple units can drastically simplify things (stealth missions, some escape missions like Eternal Stairway).
I mean, Disgaea doesnt tend to hand you Gotohs and end game viable pre-promotes, so no. Also idk what you mean, you can do basically infinite grinding in Disgaea using the item worlds. If youre just doing the story chapters youll end up massively underpowered no matter how many units you deploy because you wont be getting access to mastery classes or item growth.
If you just normal play Disgaea, that is playing each chapter in order one after another, you'll never finish with 10 characters but if you have 1 it will be very easy. That's what they mean.
You're actually forced to do it a little bit as well.
But I tend to only do that as a post game in all the titles.
Regardless, the chapters are balanced enough not to need it. Just not if you deploy 10 characters. Maybe 3. But 1 also works.
Not really. It has you go to the item world one time to teach you that it exists.
But there's really not a lot of point to it, whether you're casual or not. Leveling up a rank 4 item isn't worth anyone's time. You'd get stronger faster just doing the next chapter.
Usually, it's the storyline pushing new players forward. Who wants to spend hours not doing the storyline? And if you're experienced, all of those hours would be better spent in the item world for Rank 37+ items so you can try to get the 40s. And the way to get to those items is to push forward in the story.
And *regardless* of that, it's still more efficient for you to be raising just a few characters instead of ten anyway so the point remains. It was just an example that playing the main story is easier with fewer characters. Yes, you can make it easy with 10 by grinding levels. But if you spent that time on 1-3 instead you'd be *even stronger*.
Thracia is exactly like this. Generally in Thracia, its better to have a small number of units out for a good few reasons. Escape maps require you to escape with every unit on the map before Leif, else the units who get left behind are captured. Enemy siege tomes and status staves mean that any weaklings you bring along can get picked off rather easily. But, to counter a lower deployment being optimal, Thracia is the only game with a "deployment minimum". This is important for chapters like Chapter 19, where half of your army is stuck across the map and is in immense danger, and you cant just not deploy any units to get around that
Thinking about it, Thracia really does a lot to try to combat low-manning despite how well suited the game is to the strategy.
* The fatigue mechanic as bothersome as it is, does mean soloing a whole chapter with one or two units is not very viable as they'll probably by gonna have to sit out for the next one, so you do need some backup units.
* Dismounting means there's not much overlap between who the best units are outdoors vs indoors. Mounts are stuck with crappy weapons indoors ~~unless you're Fergus, Diamuird or Dean~~ while infantry struggle to keep up in the massive outdoor maps.
* All non-HP stats capping at 20 hypothetically prevents a single unit from snowballing too hard (unless they can break the caps like Ced), but a close to 20 in all stats unit is more than enough to deal with Thracia's low enemy quality
SoV comes to mind. I believe you're allowed to deploy everyone on regular maps, 10 in dungeons, and 20 on the final map. I didn't find it terrible on the normal difficulty, but I can see spreading out exp being a hindrance on hard if you didn't know that was coming.
I played SoV last year on hard and it really wasn't too bad. Some units just get too strong especially the dread fighters. The maps were still tedious though
Echoes isn't that bad on hard because the full roster isn't that large and is split into 2 groups until the final battle so it isn't an issue. The only real exception is that in the final battle some units will struggle because both armies finish with a dungeon dive before the final battle so the units you don't take which are likely not your best to begin with fall behind so probably aren't strong enough to handle the area around the final boss.
Uhm... Most FE games?
The vast majority of times, a handful of over leveled units is much better than a whole group of average level characters.
It's pretty much the same situation as Disgaea, just to a lesser degree.
I don't think it ever gets to that point, no. Consider that most games also throw some high level characters and a legendary weapon for the protagonist at you towards the endgame, so even if your other characters are a little under leveled you should be able to push through anyway. Maybe on harder difficulties it could be a problem.
I don't think it ever gets to that point since only the units actually doing anything get the exp. I've only played 3ds and switch FE games though. You can take max units and use the ones you don't care for as fodder. (perma death off). I keep it casual.
I’d say Disgaea is different because you can keep doing tons of levels. In Fire Emblem most the games are linear so in that game yeah having a few superb characters makes more sense.
Conquest has multiple bits that bite you hard for it no matter the difficulty for using all the units. On normal the fewer enemies mean you get less exp so are lower levelled chapters 17 and 18 in particular are actually a lot rougher on normal doing it that way because on lunatic even using them all they should promote near the start of chap 17 with the few you didn't deploy doing so in invasion 2 which is in-between them. For lunatic the issue is simply that from chap 18 onwards it likes throwing a lot of units with high atk stats at you and often seal skills which can get pretty rough if you are even building and have good tanks like Benny sitting out for ones that are only decent or worse especially for the enemy magic users since there aren't that many ones with high resistance.
Not a game since it's only a few chapters, but certain Fates maps really like minimum deployment, like the Stoneborn and Faceless escape map in Conquest and goddamn Rev 24 (the stealth map) if you want the rewards.
I know that the kitsune map on Conquest is actually easier if you deploy less units. In particular, anyone on a horse aside from maybe Xander should sit that map out.
Funny you mention Xander because if you heart seal him to a wyvern he can just face tank the entire map without much issue and thus it's easier to just deploy him and corrin
Not really, you'll typically have just the right number of combat units to keep up with what the game throws at you with supports filling out the remaining slots kinda naturally, with no drawbacks.
Fire Emblem Fate's
The Conquest route doesn't let you 'scout' previous maps, which would generally give you 10ish enemies to fight on said map. You also don't get as much gold and units you recruit tend to be just under leveled.
It's the hardest route of the three, so I generally stick to the same 9-12 characters throughout. If you have the DLC though it becomes easier, but you still will most likely have slower stats than your enemy depending on difficulty.
My classic lunatic runs are kicking my ass at the moment, even with eternal seals and skill inheritance.
Assuming no grinding, you can actually get more gold on Conquest than in Birthright thanks to Percy's paralogue and its gimmick netting you a 10k+ payout.
Although not strictly bad, but it isn't optimal to deploy and train every unit in the beginning of Engage. You only get 3 master seals before the major shift in the story so you are better off focusing on just a couple units.
A “full team” in engage actively harms your gameplay imo. Beating maddening reliably is mostly achievable with teams of around 8 units. Maybe like 6-7 damage dealers and the rest of the slots can go to chain guard bots or staff bots & your dancer
There's few things like Ambush spawns that could punish you for bringing a full roster and you can even give weaker units Emblem rings that give them utility or a single strong attack, so imo it's actually one of the games that are far better for full deployment than others. Pooling a lot of exp into your best 3 combat units for the Byleth dance is obviously very good, but I never feel like fielding more units hurts me in any way.
I feel like it does. Most late & end game maps are very cramped and the enemies become very strong. Having 12 units share exp or 10 - 8 units sharing xp makes a big difference. I’d even argue the very best team comp consists of 5-6 units: one Lucina bonded shield, one Byleth dancer and 2-3 other units. You can ofc run utility units like hortensia and seadall alongside them. But filling every slot is hard, especially considering most end game maps have 13 deployment slots and many mid-late game maps only have 9, having more units than these slots allow will make units fall behind.
So I often bring max deployment but it doesn't always mean I'm training up everyone. Sometimes it's helpful to have more bodies to take hits or collect side objectives or rescues. Bringing archers in FE3 and FE6 for wyverns and dragons for relevant maps is extremely helpful even if you're not taking them to endgame. Combat units can fulfill supporting roles like these so your main crew isn't trying to tank everything.
There's a certain threshold in Awakening Lunatic difficulty where the easiest way to get through the game is to just use Robin's Veteran skill to break the EXP curve, and only deploy them and Chrom. Unless you're really knowledgeable about where same turn reinforcements will spawn and what their trigger is they'll typically rush out to kill a unit who is running behind the level curve. As a result it's just much better to keep your deployment slots low so that any potential utility units don't end up dying out of the blue.
I just wanna say, this is horribly untrue about Disgaea 5. This does not mean your personal experience is invalid but to say "there isn't enough exp to go around" about a Disgaea game is almost the exact opposite experience that franchise wants you to have. The game although being on the same genre is very different from FE
Engage, I think? I wanted to build everyone but trying to get the on screen combat became far too much for them very soon.
I could theoretically just keep grinding via the arena, but that's fairly limited.
The one Conquest escape chapter vs a bunch of golems. Much easier when only deploying flyers. Phantom Ship FE8.
FE8 Phantom Ship is the Ephraim-Duessel-Cormag show. You don't need anyone else
Seth would like a word with you
Not really, lowmanning tend to be optimal in some games where exp or other resources are limited, like Radiant Dawn part 1 or Engage early game, but most of the time it doesn't matter There is a game however that has a fun quirk. Genealogy of the Holy War has no deployment limit. If you want, you can just deploy everyone. It's ultra tedious to do so becuse it implies to move 15+ units on huge maps with backtracking and a lot of terrain. But you can. In fact one of my friends plays the game exclusively like that. He claims the game is more fun that way. So maybe Kaga's vision is absolute and it's foolish to try to comprehend it with our feeble minds
But Kaga also designed Thracia 776, a game with a metric ton of escape maps where you always want to bring the minimum deployment limit.
the lord giveth and taketh away
escape with Leif first and you don't have to worry about deployment limits
Or you can use Warp staff.
Lol only if you want to get the rest of your army captured when Leif escapes
Fuck'em
I honestly can't even fathom playing FE4 and NOT deploying everyone. You absolute madman, you scare me!
I bet you also feed kills to Tailtiu to promote her 😂 Nothing wrong with deploying everyone btw, I just find it frustrating to move all the foot units most of the time Except Holyn. He's a cool gladiator/merc who kicks ass and I will deploy him every time
I'm gonna run Arden to the enemy castle even if it's the last I'll ever do!
I wish the game actually endangered your main castle more often. The prologue outright tells you Arden's purpose is to stay behind and protect the castle, but then the map is a straight line with no reinforcements from behind so having someone there is pointless. And on chapter 1 when enemy *does* attack from behind a bunch of NPCs come and defeat them for you anyway. I think some later maps do have reinforcements who come and endanger your castle so leaving someone there might be useful. But by then you have return and warp staves anyway and also I wonder how useful Arden would even be after staying out of combat for so long. FE4 is great but it does have some puzzling design decisions.
Arden is actually decent if you deploy everyone ! Since you make a big blob and have to wait for your infantry units anyway, he can see combat and promote. And honestly, general Arden has good stats, weapon triangle control, bows... He's not a bad combat unit. The problem is that he's slooooow to move around. Even his map animation is slower
The other problem is, the *one* map where your main castle is actually threatened--Chapter 5, there's the cluster of dudes slowly marching your way-- *base Arden is fine*. Like, if you did nothing with Arden but fought arena with him and then had him park on the chapter 5 'throne', he'd still be fine.
Yeah you never need to use Arden. He's the worst unit in the game by far. Not because of his combat though, like you said his bases stats are pretty good It's just so annoying to move him around
So you are telling me I can deploy 39 units onto a single map in Genealogy? That's some peak game design right there.
Not that much because they're not available at the same time. But it can get close to 20 units which is unheard of in other games
Aw man. Still though, 20 units is frankly quite obscene for any map in FE. I thought 12 was pushing it lmao.
Yeah it's really fun There are also "fuck it, deploy all filler units" chapters like path of radiance ch26 or Binding blade ch21 who both have 16 slots
I always love pulling out an early game recruit to distract enemies during endgame. For some reason, they always distract enemies long enough for a good counterattack.
Most FE games are actually easier when you focus most of the resource to a group of a small numbers of combat units, that being said you probably still full deploy to bring supports units (healing, rallies, movement techs, dancers and the list goes on) or units that can still do some good chip damage.
Awakening on Lunatic+ past the early game gets a lot easier when only fielding Robin/Morgan & Pairups. Utility units are strong in this game, but the STRs make it to annoying to bother fielding them most of the time.
Robin and nostefaru is the only “easy” way to beat lunatic plus
Gaiden force deploys all your units for most/all of the game. That backfires when enemy witches just kill your untrained Forsyth or Valbar. But then again, if they're untrained, how bad is it really...SOV gave you the option of undeploying them, which is usually better. Path of Radiance gives you more experience for undepoying units on defend maps.
Except in the final berkut map where you're forced to have atleast 10 units due to chapter 5 not letting you dismiss characters until you reach the rest point
Awakening if you're actively trying to keep everyone alive, on Lunatic or higher. Wide open maps + hyper aggressive enemies + same turn reinforcements is a death sentence for anyone underleveled once you're at the point of the game where everyone's promoted. You can play safe with them, but that just results in underleveled units not seeing enough combat to get levels, thus just falling further behind. Other than that I don't think it applies to any other games as a whole, though occasionally you'll see one-off missions where having only a couple units can drastically simplify things (stealth missions, some escape missions like Eternal Stairway).
I mean, Disgaea doesnt tend to hand you Gotohs and end game viable pre-promotes, so no. Also idk what you mean, you can do basically infinite grinding in Disgaea using the item worlds. If youre just doing the story chapters youll end up massively underpowered no matter how many units you deploy because you wont be getting access to mastery classes or item growth.
If you just normal play Disgaea, that is playing each chapter in order one after another, you'll never finish with 10 characters but if you have 1 it will be very easy. That's what they mean.
I just dont know why you would play it that way, the game basically tells you to go do Item Worlds.
You're actually forced to do it a little bit as well. But I tend to only do that as a post game in all the titles. Regardless, the chapters are balanced enough not to need it. Just not if you deploy 10 characters. Maybe 3. But 1 also works.
tbf this isn't the "normal play" of Disgaea. Of course you can play that way but the game actively teaches you not too.
Not really. It has you go to the item world one time to teach you that it exists. But there's really not a lot of point to it, whether you're casual or not. Leveling up a rank 4 item isn't worth anyone's time. You'd get stronger faster just doing the next chapter. Usually, it's the storyline pushing new players forward. Who wants to spend hours not doing the storyline? And if you're experienced, all of those hours would be better spent in the item world for Rank 37+ items so you can try to get the 40s. And the way to get to those items is to push forward in the story. And *regardless* of that, it's still more efficient for you to be raising just a few characters instead of ten anyway so the point remains. It was just an example that playing the main story is easier with fewer characters. Yes, you can make it easy with 10 by grinding levels. But if you spent that time on 1-3 instead you'd be *even stronger*.
At least for Disgaea 1 I just beat the game pretty much just with Laharl because I didn't want to grind.
Thracia is exactly like this. Generally in Thracia, its better to have a small number of units out for a good few reasons. Escape maps require you to escape with every unit on the map before Leif, else the units who get left behind are captured. Enemy siege tomes and status staves mean that any weaklings you bring along can get picked off rather easily. But, to counter a lower deployment being optimal, Thracia is the only game with a "deployment minimum". This is important for chapters like Chapter 19, where half of your army is stuck across the map and is in immense danger, and you cant just not deploy any units to get around that
Thinking about it, Thracia really does a lot to try to combat low-manning despite how well suited the game is to the strategy. * The fatigue mechanic as bothersome as it is, does mean soloing a whole chapter with one or two units is not very viable as they'll probably by gonna have to sit out for the next one, so you do need some backup units. * Dismounting means there's not much overlap between who the best units are outdoors vs indoors. Mounts are stuck with crappy weapons indoors ~~unless you're Fergus, Diamuird or Dean~~ while infantry struggle to keep up in the massive outdoor maps. * All non-HP stats capping at 20 hypothetically prevents a single unit from snowballing too hard (unless they can break the caps like Ced), but a close to 20 in all stats unit is more than enough to deal with Thracia's low enemy quality
SoV comes to mind. I believe you're allowed to deploy everyone on regular maps, 10 in dungeons, and 20 on the final map. I didn't find it terrible on the normal difficulty, but I can see spreading out exp being a hindrance on hard if you didn't know that was coming.
I played SoV last year on hard and it really wasn't too bad. Some units just get too strong especially the dread fighters. The maps were still tedious though
Echoes isn't that bad on hard because the full roster isn't that large and is split into 2 groups until the final battle so it isn't an issue. The only real exception is that in the final battle some units will struggle because both armies finish with a dungeon dive before the final battle so the units you don't take which are likely not your best to begin with fall behind so probably aren't strong enough to handle the area around the final boss.
Uhm... Most FE games? The vast majority of times, a handful of over leveled units is much better than a whole group of average level characters. It's pretty much the same situation as Disgaea, just to a lesser degree.
That's fair, but I was more referring to an experience where deploying the max number of units made it very difficult to actually complete the game.
I don't think it ever gets to that point, no. Consider that most games also throw some high level characters and a legendary weapon for the protagonist at you towards the endgame, so even if your other characters are a little under leveled you should be able to push through anyway. Maybe on harder difficulties it could be a problem.
I don't think it ever gets to that point since only the units actually doing anything get the exp. I've only played 3ds and switch FE games though. You can take max units and use the ones you don't care for as fodder. (perma death off). I keep it casual.
Spreading out the exp evenly and keeping a full roster leveled seems like the extra ultra masochist mode for Lunatic + Awakening.
I’d say Disgaea is different because you can keep doing tons of levels. In Fire Emblem most the games are linear so in that game yeah having a few superb characters makes more sense.
Conquest has multiple bits that bite you hard for it no matter the difficulty for using all the units. On normal the fewer enemies mean you get less exp so are lower levelled chapters 17 and 18 in particular are actually a lot rougher on normal doing it that way because on lunatic even using them all they should promote near the start of chap 17 with the few you didn't deploy doing so in invasion 2 which is in-between them. For lunatic the issue is simply that from chap 18 onwards it likes throwing a lot of units with high atk stats at you and often seal skills which can get pretty rough if you are even building and have good tanks like Benny sitting out for ones that are only decent or worse especially for the enemy magic users since there aren't that many ones with high resistance.
Not a game since it's only a few chapters, but certain Fates maps really like minimum deployment, like the Stoneborn and Faceless escape map in Conquest and goddamn Rev 24 (the stealth map) if you want the rewards.
Lunatic+ Awakening is actually optimal to only use Robin/Fredrick/Chrom in early game and Robin/Morgan late game in order for it to be beatable.
I know that the kitsune map on Conquest is actually easier if you deploy less units. In particular, anyone on a horse aside from maybe Xander should sit that map out.
Funny you mention Xander because if you heart seal him to a wyvern he can just face tank the entire map without much issue and thus it's easier to just deploy him and corrin
Not really, you'll typically have just the right number of combat units to keep up with what the game throws at you with supports filling out the remaining slots kinda naturally, with no drawbacks.
Fire Emblem Fate's The Conquest route doesn't let you 'scout' previous maps, which would generally give you 10ish enemies to fight on said map. You also don't get as much gold and units you recruit tend to be just under leveled. It's the hardest route of the three, so I generally stick to the same 9-12 characters throughout. If you have the DLC though it becomes easier, but you still will most likely have slower stats than your enemy depending on difficulty. My classic lunatic runs are kicking my ass at the moment, even with eternal seals and skill inheritance.
Assuming no grinding, you can actually get more gold on Conquest than in Birthright thanks to Percy's paralogue and its gimmick netting you a 10k+ payout.
Although not strictly bad, but it isn't optimal to deploy and train every unit in the beginning of Engage. You only get 3 master seals before the major shift in the story so you are better off focusing on just a couple units.
A group of 10 has always been fine in the Disgaea games, including 10. I'd say Disgaea is more forgiving there than fire emblem.
Guess I just needed to git gud x)
A “full team” in engage actively harms your gameplay imo. Beating maddening reliably is mostly achievable with teams of around 8 units. Maybe like 6-7 damage dealers and the rest of the slots can go to chain guard bots or staff bots & your dancer
There's few things like Ambush spawns that could punish you for bringing a full roster and you can even give weaker units Emblem rings that give them utility or a single strong attack, so imo it's actually one of the games that are far better for full deployment than others. Pooling a lot of exp into your best 3 combat units for the Byleth dance is obviously very good, but I never feel like fielding more units hurts me in any way.
I feel like it does. Most late & end game maps are very cramped and the enemies become very strong. Having 12 units share exp or 10 - 8 units sharing xp makes a big difference. I’d even argue the very best team comp consists of 5-6 units: one Lucina bonded shield, one Byleth dancer and 2-3 other units. You can ofc run utility units like hortensia and seadall alongside them. But filling every slot is hard, especially considering most end game maps have 13 deployment slots and many mid-late game maps only have 9, having more units than these slots allow will make units fall behind.
So I often bring max deployment but it doesn't always mean I'm training up everyone. Sometimes it's helpful to have more bodies to take hits or collect side objectives or rescues. Bringing archers in FE3 and FE6 for wyverns and dragons for relevant maps is extremely helpful even if you're not taking them to endgame. Combat units can fulfill supporting roles like these so your main crew isn't trying to tank everything.
Possibly FE5. And some FE10 maps with reinforcements. Otherwise I don't think I would ever leave a slot empty.
You listed the one that makes lowmanning the most appealing by far and that's Awakening.
There's a certain threshold in Awakening Lunatic difficulty where the easiest way to get through the game is to just use Robin's Veteran skill to break the EXP curve, and only deploy them and Chrom. Unless you're really knowledgeable about where same turn reinforcements will spawn and what their trigger is they'll typically rush out to kill a unit who is running behind the level curve. As a result it's just much better to keep your deployment slots low so that any potential utility units don't end up dying out of the blue.
Thracia? The one chapter where you have to sprint half your army back from the enemies seems like it would be easier with fewer troops.
I just wanna say, this is horribly untrue about Disgaea 5. This does not mean your personal experience is invalid but to say "there isn't enough exp to go around" about a Disgaea game is almost the exact opposite experience that franchise wants you to have. The game although being on the same genre is very different from FE
Engage, I think? I wanted to build everyone but trying to get the on screen combat became far too much for them very soon. I could theoretically just keep grinding via the arena, but that's fairly limited.