Being a fan of the gba fire emblems, I went and got FE:SD. Haven't beat it yet, but I can say..It's pretty much the same as the other ones, but with minor improvements/bigger disappointments. There are improvements like the re-class option, which lets you switch units to the class of your liking before battle,(with some restrictions) then there are disappointments like a fairly weak story, no support convos, and a flood of semi-useless characters dumped on you.

The animations are new, making them look kind of like animated and faceless chess pieces, which is kind of cool, but most of them are fairly lame. You've got marth, but he is not as cool as his SSB counterpart. He's the typical self righteous prince that has to run from his kingdom under fire, while the story attempts to make you care why you are fighting with short text boxes. I'm only on chapter 8 so far, but get ready for epic spoilers. There's an evil shadow dragon! that's all I know at the moment in terms of story.

Don't want to bash it too much, but it just seems disappointing compared to the previous games. Not to say it's not fun, since the gameplay is unchanged and still quite enjoyable(and frustrating at times). Soooo in the end I'll say that it's good as a strategy game, not so good as a fire emblem game. Though hopefully I start enjoying it more as I get deeper in!

*edit* well...on the file I was playing, there was a level where there are these ballista type dudes. there is one you can recruit by talking to them with the princess chick who was a pegasus knight by default and i kept her that way. lets just say giant balista bolts are very effective against peg knights. I couldn't get to the guy in one turn, and I though she could survive a hit.....it was 53% chance to do 33 damage. she got smoked, and I had been arena farming that level, and got my merc up to level 20 then promoted to a hero. I did not want to do that again. In rage, I sent my hero over to Mr.Jake the balista man, and killed him. from there on...I was just killing all characters until I finally wanted to start a new game.

That made me not play for a few days, but I pushed that aside and started a new game, and this time I wasn't just going to recruite every useless character. So that's been going pretty well, and when you have 15 characters or less, you get all the bonus chapters so I think it was a good choice. When you have a set group of dudes you like, it makes the game fairly more enjoyable. Plus I'm being far more careful in not rushing my dudes into certain death.