They're also all available in base game, and the only route-locked one is Edelgard (which makes sense because she's a lord, and all the lords are locked to their routes no matter what you want to do with them)
Also NEITHER DIMITRI NOR CLAUDE ARE BI OPTIONS which enrages many fans, Dimitri because he is obviously so deeply affectionate with Byleth and Claude because THERE IS A VERY, VERY OBVIOUS AND CRUEL BI TEASE IF YOU PLAY BYLAD
but I will say that, like... if you want a good feel of how the story progresses and changes, I've heard that the best order is Blue Lions, Black Eagles, Church Route (an offshoot of BE), and finally Golden Deer
which mostly amounts to 'uhhhh strongest units first? ill put jacob behind this wall i guess and group everyone close together azura stop almost dying i beg'
Church route will feel like a letdown if you play Golden Deer first, but it's kind of a lame duck route anyway considering you're forced to pass up on all the lords, so its being repetitive on top of that will feel less disappointing
But the Golden Deer route is great, and I'd hate to have playing through a route that apes it while also not giving you the best character of Claude's route (aka Claude) rob Golden Deer of its charm before you've had a chance to play it
Fun fact: Sylvain's so thirsty with the ladies that, if you're not playing Blue Lions(and thus already have him), he'll jump right into Bylass' class the minute she asks, absolutely nothing else required
I liked Inigo much better than Laslow, partly because Inigo didn't have the ridiculous accent but also because you saw more of Inigo's good points in Awakening, but yeah, I'm glad you're familiar with him
There are two ways around weapon durability, although both...require significant over-leveling to be feasible, because they involve sacrificing nearly all weapon strength to do
1) You get no bonus damage from weapon strength because you're not using a weapon at all, so to do any appreciable damage it helps to be significantly stronger/a higher level than your enemy
3) Only male characters can use the fist-related classes, for some reason, presumably as a tradeoff for only female characters being able to access the pegasus classes
1) Since they're broken weapons, all their stats are terrible - strength, accuracy, crit rate, weight, you name it. The only way you can use them effectively is to be way stronger than your enemies already, and ideally to have very high stats!
After a certain number of early chapters, you'll unlock the blacksmith, who can - for some materials and gold - repair your weapon durability at a fraction of the cost of buying a whole new weapon!
So you may need to grind for gold/weapons in the early stages before you unlock the blacksmith, but you can save the broken ones (they don't vanish once they're broken, they just become unusable until they're repaired) and then fix them up once the blacksmith is available
help Claude von Riegan is threatening my heterosexualityincluded this as the picture in its original context