Ohhh my goood that was soo exhausting... I guess this was my first real attempt at it too, but second try? After I figured out what all the gimmicks were on my first attempt I made a detour outside to do invasion 3 to get some kinshi knight Amaterasu's for healing. Had to grind Soleil up 4 levels for that, and luckily I finished Azura's S support just in time there to get access to Shigure, another Kinshi Knight that came with Amaterasu for free. With the two pseudo-healers in tow, I went off to attempt the endgame again.
Yeah chapter 27 is a breeze. Just had to keep resetting until the Entraps warped you in a good way, but I think it settled into a pattern if you kept up the same movements each time.
Endgame though, ho boy. It took me like the entire day of picking it up for 20min to an hour at a time, just doing like 2 or 3 turns and then setting it down to cool off my smoking headbrain. Like there was very little wiggle room to screw around, you had to be on top of things. Demanding optimal moves, each turn. Just constantly, wave after waves of enemies just barely lower than the number of your army. Attack stance the whole way through, getting as many orko's as possible, leaving only about 2 or 3 enemies you could afford to 2rko. Very exhausting.
I don't know if I could have done it any other way except constantly moving forward, "riding" the waves of reinforcements forward. Being too defensive would have eventually made me run out of dragon veins and get overrun by enemies. There was a point where things got really chaotic, that would have been right in front of the 4 maids. Xander missed a kill and got crit-ed to death and really screwed things over, that sucked. Big, big wrench, that. I had to quickly kill the maids and then rush everyone forward at that point. So some things went poorly but the boss fight went very smoothly. Although I did only barely kill him with Takumi not activating Vengeance on Corrin at all and Corrin activating Dragon Fang twice (auto proc?). It was kill or be killed since that Corrin attack was my last action for the turn and there were a lot of enemies behind me. Honestly it would have been a lot less stressful and easier if I had properly read the Lifetaker skill and realized that it only activates if he initiated, I would have suicided my units for damage. But I didn't because I didn't know. So for better or worse, I think only 4 of my units died: Xander, then Beruka (I don't remember how this happened), Felicia (no safe spaces left to run at the end) and Midori (probably didn't need to happen, but she stayed behind to be a decoy at the end to get a Wyrmslayer horse away from the rest of the army). My only deaths of the entire run.
But whew, that's over. Lunatic conquest. If I play the other two, I'm going to play on Normal. But you know, the levels were very well designed, the difficulty was perfect (not that I'd want to ever do this or ninja hell again). I mean, I would have cried if I died at the end there, but my overall experience was very good. So much better than Awakening imo. It says something that I hated Invasion 3 more than this Endgame chapter and the opinion I had of that was how it was like Awakening level design--have all enemies on the map walk towards your army. Hate that. Conquest felt like there was a clever solution hidden and not reliant on bludgeoning your way through on numbers and luck. I enjoyed it, good game. Probably won't do it again though.
To finish, I think I'll do a top 5 or whatever for the maps that were the hardest or most annoying for me, based on what I remember for the earlier ones (I think I started like 2 years ago? lol).
Chapter 8, Ice village map. Thief made it very stressful.
Chapter 10, port defense. I don't think I need to elaborate here. First taste of Conquest hell.
Chapter 11, Hinoka rooms. First encounter with Hexing was an experience all right. Lunge ninja room was also annoying, as was the penultimate room.
Chapter 14, water logs. Kinshi knights were terrifying when you're trapped on a narrow line of tiles. It was also a long map, probably one of the first of them.
Chapter 17, ninja. hell. Claustrophobic, very long, Life and Death samurais, and an extremely scary boss room.
Chapter 22, Sakura labyrinth. This is the map that caused my half year long hiatus. Split armies suck.
Chapter 23, great wall of Takumi. Probably the map that caused me the most resets trying to figure out how the hell Hinata's AI works. Such a long map too with so many pairs of powerful Master of Arms with a mix of all three colors, rallies, ranges, -catcher and physical/magical weapons. Baiting while retreating, whittling them down a little at a time contributed to making this a very, very long, grindy chapter. Going forth to aggro/spawn new enemies while back again to whittle bait them down. So annoying. Up the wall had lunge shenanigans too, with assholes sitting on the stairs to prevent passage. Not a huge factor, but there were ballistas too. All on one map.
And Endgame. Of course.
edit: looking back, searching through the original Fates topic, it seems I picked up my copy sometime around before July 14, 2016, making this run a little over 2 years long. Nice.
