A fog of war stage. Yaaay...
Actually not too bad for a Fog of War stage. You can bottleneck the enemies pretty easily on the bridges. Though that didn't stop me from getting blind-sided and having to reload a save state on occasion. They put two bandits tucked away at the right of the starting point, so if you had your weaker units hang back, then you could suddenly find them getting ganked out of nowhere. That's why I sent Mia over there immediately to deal with them, and it was still a hassle because one has a Hand Axe and once it was weakened he just started running.
I had Ike, Oscar, and Gatrie heading up the center with Boyd and Titania leading the team on the left. There's three houses you want to open sooner rather then later as bandits will spawn and go after them before long. There's also an enemy to recruit, Makalov. Marcia has to recruit him and that's the only reason I brought her here. This is the last Fog of War stage, so may as well use all your torches here. I had Marcia just doing that. Jill (and a trained Marcia, I imagine) can be really useful here since they can fly across the rivers to help out whichever team needs it and retreat to relative safety above water.
The boss for this stage has different AI than he does in EN PoR. For overseas, the boss doesn't move so you have to push into his spot to fight him and get the win. In JP, he moves to engage you. I suspect this was done for balancing reasons, because in EN, certain classes got an innate Crit Rate boost, and his was one of them. He also has a Killer Axe, which means his Crit Rate could get really high, so I imagine they didn't want him coming out of the fog and surprise players with a 50+ Crit Rate. He still has a chance to crit here, but it's much lower when he just has the Killer Axe to rely on. I believe the classes that got the crit buff in EN were Berserker, Sniper, and Swordmaster. I'd say it's honestly easier without those classes having a crit buff, since you fight a lot of those unit types, especially on Maniac where more enemies are promoted.
Makalov is a swordlocked cavalier. I've heard from one person and one person specifically that he can be good, but I don't buy it for a second. Being swordlocked until promotion is a massive pain for getting him going, even with Canto, and his join time is terrible compared to Oscar or Kieran, so if you wanted a swordwielding cavalier, you could just promote them into using swords. He's got better growths than both of them, but his bases are worse and his join time really couldn't be worse with a desert stage right after this. He just needs too much investment to do what two other units could do just using them naturally. Also, he has that terrible Tempest skill that Boyd had, so you'll want to take that off of him immediately.
