The moment you can dig up the magia soul in Bastorius the game becomes trivialized. If you give your mage the trinity staff, which attacks the entire enemy group, with the magia soul, which lets you recast the same spell immediately, everything on the enemy's side dies.
The only exception is if the enemy has an angel with the reflect magic skill opposing you, in which case you have to use a different unit to take that angel out. But in 99% of cases that won't happen.
The trinity spell is supposed to have a weakness, in that it takes a long time to cast, but with a separate character using the white cat hood, you can remove that weakness and reduce the channeling time to zero.
There's also the innate weakness of a mage having low initiative, so the fight might be over before he even starts casting the spell, but the lipis ring can remove that weakness, so you just give the lipis ring to a third character and tell them to move the mage's initiative up to the start of the battle.
A fourth aspect of the combo is the sorcerer's familiar charm, which increases the power of the spell by 50%, including the copy cast, which should be given to a fourth character. This four part combo is nigh unbeatable. I used it to defeat Gerard and get the Holy Unicorn Sword at level 26, as well as defeat Amalia at the colosseum and recruit her, well ahead of schedule. I've also grabbed all the available anomie weapons, (I'm still in Bastorius so I haven't collected them all yet), all their guardians also fell before me.
Frankly this combo shouldn't exist, it trivializes the game, but luckily I don't have to use it. Generally I plan on fielding my weaker units to face the game's normal challenges in fair fights. I just needed it to deal with these particular roadblocks that were keeping me from my fat loot.
The difficulty of the game is indeed higher, I've had to retry stages many times to avoid losing units or just losing my home base entirely. But that was before I dug up this broken combo. Now I fear there won't be any difficulties except the ones I impose upon myself. Even without the combo my deeper knowledge and understanding of the game has let me ace stages I struggled with at the lower difficulty. The difficulty can't keep up with my growing expertise as I approach 200 hours played.
For instance, this time I managed to recruit the wolf and the bear characters simultaneously, by fighting a battle on two fronts against both of them. Last time I only recruited the wolf. Also I spared the thief Gammel instead of sending him to jail, which later allowed me to recruit him and his archer friend, something I failed to do last time. I'm using tons of new characters and new character combinations and strategies this time through. A lot is still the same, but a lot isn't, and those differences make the gameplay completely fresh and exhilarating. Like with Fire Emblem Three Houses, you can play the game multiple times by changing your strategy, because there's more than one way to win.
Once I beat the game this time I'll be content, though, because I will have already completed all the stretch goals the game has to offer. Another playthrough wouldn't uncover any new content like this one has.
Meanwhile, Russia has taken the village of Peromaiska, basically a suburb of Donetsk, which had stubbornly held out all this time until now. I said this would happen after the fall of Nevelske and sure enough it has. I have to give Ukraine credit, they hold every inch of territory much longer than one would expect, but the ending doesn't change.
I also flipped the rankings of two songs, Dawn from Gettysburg fell back to 4-star, while Unstealable Jewel from Xenogears went up to 5-star. Unstealable Jewel has been 5-star before so this isn't surprising. It's just tough getting songs on the margins rated correctly, the difference is so slim.
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