History VideoGame / FireEmblemRadiantDawn

* InterfaceSpoiler: In Part 1 Chapter 3, you're playing the Dawn Brigade as they bust Micaiah, Laura, Aimee, and Kurth out of a prison. The latter two are non-combatants who you're supposed to protect as you make your escape, and Aimee has appropriately low stats to match this role, but if you examine Kurth's stats you'll notice they are strangely high for such an early point of the game, particularly his massive 55 HP that makes him far more durable than any of the actual combat units at your disposal, giving away that there's certainly more to Kurth than he lets on. [[spoiler:It turns out he is the prince of the Dragon Laguz and those stats are his untransformed stats for when he appears much later in the game.]]

* TheRevolutionWillNotBeVilified: Averted; while Part 1 follows the trope, glorifying the revolutionary Dawn Brigade fighting against the occupying Begnion soldiers, Part 2 runs against it by glorifying Queen Elincia's established rule of Crimea, villifying the rebellion headed by Ludveck.

* TheDarknessBeforeDeath: If Nephenee [[FinalDeath is killed]] after joining the player's army, her dying words suggest that she's been blinded by her injuries.

* DummiedOut:
** Renning is programmed to be able to use the Amiti, as he is Crimean Royalty, which could have made him an actually pretty good combat unit for the Part 4 Endgame that requires no investment. Unfortunately the Amiti is locked into Elincia's inventory, so without modding/cheating the Amiti into Renning's inventory there is no way for him to legitimately use it, leaving him as last resort filler for players that made it to Endgame with few of their trained units alive.
** Levail is programmed to have personal growth rates unlike other bosses, suggesting it was originally intended for you to be able to recruit him, but in the released game there is no possible way to legitimately recruit him.

* ThisLooksLikeaJobForAquaMan: Nihil, which disables all of the enemy's skills in battle, and Parity, which does the same when activated in addition to removing any additional stat bonuses/penalties like Authority and terrain bonuses, are usually uselsss skills throughout most of the game; barely any enemies will actually have skills beyond the innate crit-boost skills that certain classes have, and except for when playing the Dawn Brigade, the player will always have an Authority edge over the opponent, as well as likely taking advantage of supports, so using Parity will usually make their hit and avoid rates worse. This completely changes for the Endgame however, as the endgame bosses will have mastery skills, making having Nihil or Parity crucial to avoid your units getting instantly smited by them, while the final boss also has a unique skill that always inflicts half the damage dealt to them back to the player, making those two skills necessary to avoid that recoil damage. Additionally there is much more potent terrain in the Tower (such as Cover tiles that add a massive 10 Defense and Wardwood tiles that do the same for Resistance), and in the final couple chapters the player will be an Authority disadvantage, so Parity can actually improve the player's hit/avoid rates and be used to nullify those massive terrain bonuses.

** Chapter 1-9, in which [[SquishyWizard Micaiah]] and a PurposelyOverpowered [[spoiler:Black Knight]] are your only two characters, disables the use of the Rescue mechanic under the justification that Micaiah insists on fighting herself. This prevents the player from rescuing Micaiah with the Black Knight and then soloing the map with him, as since he is effectively invincible against the enemies at this point of the game, it would have completely eliminated any sort of challenge if you could completely keep Micaiah out of harm's way.

* GoodVsGood: Micaiah's army opposes Ike's in Part 3. He fights along the laguz against the corrupt, evil senators of Begnion, and she fights along the senators because [[spoiler:if she doesn't then Daein will slowly die due to its blood pact with Senator Lekain]]. Micaiah isn't evil or even wants to damage the laguz alliance, but she has no other choice.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: The state of the Tellius and the tensions between the beorc and the laguz can be laid squarely at the feet of [[spoiler:Ashera's heroes. When Yune and Ashera went to sleep and the two races pledged to the goddesses that they would not war again for another thousand years, Lehran the heron and Altina the beorc were married and had a child, the very first Branded. The heroes were overjoyed and thought this would be sign of improving relations between the two races, but when the child came out looking like an ordinary beorc and Lehran lost his powers following the child's birth, they panicked. Fearing that the laguz would take this as an attempt by the beorc to breed them out of existence, they covered up Lehran and Altina's marriage, the child's true parentage, and then declared unions between beorc and laguz to be a crime against Ashera. It was only later that the brand appeared on the child, along with the unusual powers typical of Branded. Since then, divisions between the two races only intensified, the Branded suffer from discrimination under false pretenses, and the Apostle Misaha, descendant of Lehran and Altina, was assassinated when she tried to reveal her true heritage to the world, sparking the Serenes Massacre, Lehran's fall into despair, and the war between the Laguz Alliance and the Begnion Empire. The kicker is it was AllForNothing. On the other side of the Desert of Death far away from the rest of Tellius, the nation of Hatari never heard the edict of the heroes, and the beorc, the wolf laguz, and the Branded born between them live together there in harmony.]]

** Tormod and Maurim join the Dawn Brigade in Chapter 1-7 as a prepromoted Sage and relatively high level Tiger Laguz respectively, where Tormod is fast enough to double and ORKO most enemies in the rest of Part 1 while having enough durability to usually take at least three hits, and Maurim's stats are so high when transformed he is essentially a god that can't be damaged by any physical attacks and will ORKO everything, if he doesn't just outright kill them in one hit. After Part 1 they leave and aren't seen again until all the way in Chapter 4-4 without having gotten any stronger since, where Tormod is now hopelessly so far behind and can't hope to survive a round of combat with any enemy, and Maurim is still strong enough to deal a hard hit and has pretty good durability but will now get doubled by everything while being vulnerable to crits, so he can't endure more than a couple rounds of combat. Then right after this Chapter it's the endgame for them, where they have no hope to compete unless the player dumps a ludicrous amount of bonus EXP and stat boosters into them, and on Hard/Maniac not even that might make them remotely salvageable.

** LesserOfTwoEvils: In the previous game, Begnion was seen as this compared to Daien, as while Begnion was still pretty bad, the war with Ashnard was seen as more dangerous and needing to be stopped. With Daein defeated, Begnion's corruption steps into the forefront, and they turn out to be just as bad, if not worse, than Ashnard. The heroes ignoring of Begnion ends up leading them to be a bigger threat than Ashnard ever was.

** Despite the diffulty, this is {{Avert}}ed to the point that Path of Radiance was the last game to have an adjusted difficulty for the Western release. The difficulty are only renamed, with Easy (actually Normal), Normal (actually Hard), and Hard (actually Maniac, which was removed in the prequel), but play just the same.

* DumbMuscle: This game really shows why beorc, the Children of Wisdom, have dominated Tellius instead of laguz, the Children of Strength. When the Laguz Alliance goes to war against the Begnion Empire, their only strategy is "run up to them and claw their faces off until we win the war because we're stronger." Ranulf is the only one who realizes that not only does Begnion outnumber them, but they have equipment, training, fortifications, and most importantly the strategic expertise necessary to stomp them into the ground. It's for this reason that he hires the Greil Mercenaries and especially the strategist Soren to even the odds, and it's still not enough because Skrimir, the dumbass in charge, disobeys Soren's plans and sends the whole war effort into the gutters.

* BagOfSpilling: While most returning characters return at the same relative class or promoted from the last game, two characters you likely trained in ''[=PoR=]'' return to being first tier in this one for the sake of it being the beginning of the game -- Ilyana and Jill. Thankfully, transfer bonuses can partially rectify this if they capped any stats or weapon ranks, but Thunder magic being nerfed in this game make it an uphill climb to third tier for [[SquishyMage Ilyana]].

** The Swordmaster class line is significantly better here than it was in PoR, and is at perhaps the best it ever been in the series. The big buff is that Wind Edges and its upgraded counterparts were added to the game, the first and still only time in the series that non-exclusive physical 1-2 range swords existed, which even with Wind Edges being inferior to Hand Axes and Javelins, gave Sword users some means to meaningfully retaliate from 2-range and not be left a liability when fighting 2-range enemies. The second big buff is that the significantly better enemy quality and stat caps being relevant means their Speed advantage over other classes actually matters on the hardest difficulty with doubling enemies, while other classes can be outright unable to hit important Speed benchmarks. The third buff they got is when promoted to their third tier class, Trueblade, their inherent crit bonus is doubled from +10 to +20, which when combined with their great Skill and Speed helping them activate their mastery skill and other useful combat skills like Adept more often, allows them to score [=ORKOs=] at shockingly high rates in spite of their low Strength.
** Ike in PoR was a rather mediocre unit that struggled on harder difficulties until he got the Ragnell and Aether at the end of the game, but in RD he was significantly buffed to better befit his ingame reputation. First Ike now amazing base stats, even beating out Titania's with his combination of Strength, Speed, and durability, unlike in PoR where he started with all-around poor base stats and required a ton of growth to catch up. His unique classes additionally have even better stat caps and are among the best in the game, allowing Ike to potentially double everything in the game while hitting very hard and being very durable. Then the aformentioned Wind Edge buff for Swordmasters also applies to Ike, allowing him to use proper 1-2 range before he gets the Ragnell (plus he gains Axes too upon promotion too). And then finally Ike gets the Ragnell ''much sooner'' than he did in PoR, with him being able to use it for nine maps here, wheres in PoR he only got to use it for the final three maps (one of which was the Black Knight duel that was optional to complete anyway). Ike's growths were nerfed a bit however, particularly in Speed, but his base stats more than make up for the lower growths, and Ike starting so close to capping stats makes him an excellent abuser of the new BEXP system to reliably improve his stats with weaker growths.

* NoKillLikeOverkill:
** Most Tier 3 mastery skills have effects to put enemies to sleep or paralyze them, but there's a good chance the player will never see these effects, since they're also effectively {{critical hit}}s+ and almost always kill before their effects take hold. To give an example of how overkill the skills are, even Lyre can kill about anything if she activates Rend.[[note]]Lyre has '''14''' strength when transformed at base and if she were to reach Level 30 (the level required for Laguz to learn their mastery skill) and never got a single point of Strength nor raised her Strike rank, Rend's 5x Strength multipler will let her do 70 extra damage in addition to her A-Rank Claw's 8 Might, so with 78 attack only the Part 4 Generals, Tigers, and Dragons could survive a Rend from base Lyre, and she would just need 22 Strength (which would be increasing her Strength 4 times from base) to OHKO even the sturdiest Red Dragon with a 118 power Rend.[[/note]]
** Eclipse exemplifies this the best of all masteries; it not only negates Defense but multiplies the Black Knight's Strength by five. With the Alondite equipped, he would do 208 damage to anything; for reference the absolute most HP any player unit can have is a capped out Gareth with 90 HP, while no Beorc unit can exceed 68 HP, and the final boss has the most HP in the game with 120. It activates on half his Skill stat, so he always has a fixed 20% chance to absolutely kill anything multiple times over. And to farther emphasize just how excessive Eclipse is, if the Black Knight had Luna like the other armored units, which "only" triples Strength while negating Defense, he would do 132 damage, which is still more than enough to easily one-shot absolutely everything in the game.

** UnderdogsNeverLose: Most ''Fire Emblem'' games involve a hero gathering a RagtagBunchOfMisfits to defeat a more powerful enemy. Such a scenario occurs when the scrappy Dawn Brigade goes against the battle-hardened Greil Merenaries. The battle play out exactly as you realistically expect them to and the story itself never expects the DB to ever triumph against the GM. Your objectives while playing as the underdogs are basically survive as long as you can, and when the GM finally take to the field against you in 3-13, your only options are RunOrDie.

** The Swordmaster class line is significantly better here than it was in POR, and is at perhaps the best it ever been in the series. The big buff is that Wind Edges and its upgraded counterparts were added to the game, the first and still only time in the series that non-exclusive physical 1-2 range swords existed, which even with Wind Edges being inferior to Hand Axes and Javelins, gave Sword users some means to meaningfully retaliate from 2-range and not be left a liability when fighting 2-range enemies. The second big buff is that the significantly better enemy quality and stat caps being relevant means their Speed advantage over other classes actually matters on the hardest difficulty with doubling enemies, while other classes can be outright unable to hit important Speed benchmarks. The third buff they got is when promoted to their third tier class, Trueblade, their inherent crit bonus is doubled from +10 to +20, which when combined with their great Skill and Speed helping them activate their mastery skill and other useful combat skills like Adept more often, allows them to score [=ORKOs=] at shockingly high rates in spite of their low Strength.
** Ike in POR was a rather mediocre unit that struggled on harder difficulties until he got the Ragnell and Aether at the end of the game, but in RD he was significantly buffed to better befit his ingame reputation. First Ike now amazing base stats, even beating out Titania's with his combination of Strength, Speed, and durability, unlike in POR where he started with all-around poor base stats and required a ton of growth to catch up. His unique classes additionally have even better stat caps and are among the best in the game, allowing Ike to potentially double everything in the game while hitting very hard and being very durable. Then the aformentioned Wind Edge buff for Swordmasters also applies to Ike, allowing him to use proper 1-2 range before he gets the Ragnell (plus he gains Axes too upon promotion too). And then finally Ike gets the Ragnell ''much sooner'' than he did in POR, with him being able to use it for nine maps here, wheres in POR he only got to use it for the final three maps (one of which was the Black Knight duel that was optional to complete anyway). Ike's growths were nerfed a bit however, particularly in Speed, but his base stats more than make up for the lower growths, and Ike starting so close to capping stats makes him an excellent abuser of the new BEXP system to reliably improve his stats with weaker growths.

** HeroicNeutral: Deghinsea attempts to force Goldoa to remain out of ''any'' conflict that occurs, regardless of how terrible it is. [[spoiler:His reason is because if he does get Goldoa involved, the pact made with Ashera many years ago will break and she will pass judgement on the world, so if he keeps out of any conflicts, he can avoid a world war that would awaken her]]. However, several characters call him out for letting other nations more or less suffer for no reason when he could help those in need, and by the end, he is so dedicated to remaining neutral that his son joins the war because he can't stand how StupidNeutral his father is being. [[spoiler:This causes Ashera to reawaken like he feared, but while he was right to avoid it, the party call him out for not taking steps to help ''before'' things got to the point they did]].

** TakeAThirdOption: In Act III, Pelleas reveals why he joined forces with Bengion despite logically them having no reason to; [[spoiler:he was tricked into signing a Blood Pact, dooming the people of Daien to die if they don't follow orders. When he reveals this, he asks Micaiah to kill him in the hopes it will be a LoopholeAbuse. Regardless of if Micaiah does it herself or has Tauroneo do it, the Blood Pact instead transfers to his killer. This sends Pelleas' mother into a rage at the heroes; they just killed her son based on a guess and not only have taken away their king, but now they have no idea how else to break it]].

** RightfulKingReturns: Elincia suddenly appearing and taking the role as Queen of Crimea doesn't go smoothly, with just as many finding her to be incompetent at worst, at best unsuited due to having no prior experience. Ludveck starts a civil war to obtain power, causing the nation to nearly fall apart by using this to call into question her legitimacy. Part 2 is all about the struggle she goes through having to prove she can lead a nation. Also, Pelleas is the son of Ashnard and thus the prince of Daein, but his sheltered upbringing on top of his overly doting mother means that while he is a good person, he's not equipped for the role of a king. This results in him making mistakes out of good intentions but being too naive to be careful. [[spoiler:On a second playthrough, it turns out he isn't even Ashnard's son, which when he realizes has him AbdicateTheThrone to Micaiah instead]].

** RightfulKingReturns: Elincia suddenly appearing and taking the role as Queen of Crimea doesn't go smoothly, with just as many finding her to be incompetent at worst, at best unsuited due to having no prior experience. Ludveck starts a civil war to obtain power, causing the nation to nearly fall apart by using this to call into question her legitimacy. Part 2 is all about the struggle she goes through having to prove she can lead a nation. Also, Pelleas is the son of Ashnard and thus the prince of Daein, but his sheltered upbringing on top of his overly doting mother makes him a good person, but someone not equipped for the role of a king, and he ends up making mistakes out of good intentions but being too naive to be careful. [[spoiler:On a second playthrough, it turns out he isn't even Ashnard's son, which when he realizes has him AbdicateTheThrone to Micaiah instead]].

** TakeAThirdOption: In act III, Pelleas reveals why he joined forces with Bengion despite logically them having no reason to; [[spoiler:he was tricked into signing a Blood Pact, dooming the people of Daien to die if they don't follow orders. When he reveals this, he asks Micaiah to kill him in the hopes it will be a LoopholeAbuse. Regardless of if Micaiah does it herself or has Tauroneo do it, the Blood Pact instead transfers to his killer. This sends Pelleas' mother into a rage at the heroes; they just killed her son based on a guess and not only have taken away their king, but now they have no idea how else to break it]].

** RightfulKingReturns: Elincia suddenly appearing and taking the role as Queen of Crimea doesn't go smoothly, with just as many finding her to be incompetent at worst, at best unsuited due to having no prior experience. Ludveck starts a civil war to obtain power, causing the nation to nearly fall apart by using this to call into question her legitimacy. Part 2 is all about the struggle she goes through having to prove she can lead a nation. Also, Pelleas is the son of Ashnard and thus the prince of Daien, but his sheltered upbringing on top of his overly doting mother makes him a good person, but someone not equipped for the role of a king, and he ends up making mistakes out of good intentions but being too naive to be careful. [[spoiler:On a second playthrough, it turns out he isn't even Ashnard's son, which when he realizes has him AbdicateTheThrone to Micaiah instead]].

** MyCountryRightOrWrong: In act three when Daein joins the war on the side of Begnion and not the Laguz Alliance, Micaiah is rightfully confused by this but agrees to lead the war for the sake of the people. She slowly however begins to throw away her morals as it becomes clear Daein has no chance of winning, and she almost crosses line into committing acts that before disgusted her just so she can win. She gets a dose of reality when Tibarn threatens to kill Sothe, causing her to [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone crack]] and try to stop the conflict. [[spoiler:She finds out that Pelleas was forced to sign a Blood Pact without knowing, meaning if they don't fight Daein will be wiped out by it, forcing her to continue the war anyway]].

** LesserOfTwoEvils: In the previous game, Begnion was seen as this compared to Daien, as while Begnion was still pretty bad, the war with Ashnard was seen as more dangerous and needing to be stopped. With Daien defeated, Begnion's corruption steps into the forefront, and they turn out to be just as bad, if not worse, than Ashnard. The heroes ignoring of Begnion ends up leading them to be a bigger threat than Ashnard ever was.

** LesserOfTwoEvils: In the previous game, Begnion was seen as this compared to Daien, as while Begnion was still pretty bad, the war with Ashnard was seen as more dangerous and needing to be stopped. With Daien defeated, Begnion's corruption steps into the forefront, and they turn out to be just as bad, if not worse, than Ashnard. The heroes ignoring of Bengion ends up leading them to be a bigger threat than Ashnard ever was.