There's nothing that says "good and evil is a matter of perspective" quite like restoring the country you fought to destroy in the last game. What Part 1 is a nice demonstration of is a very condensed version of a Path of Radiance-adjacent "Fire Emblem Story", rebelling against a tyrannical invading power to restore peace to our country of origin. We have all the essential ingredients, too: an Ike, an Elincia, and a Soren!
...Say, what did that Soren do for us? Izuka certainly knew his organisational stuff, and without him there would be no Daein Liberation Army, but his strategies were utter garbage and he didn't notice the whole "Micaiah was stealing Pelleas's thunder" until the last moment. It doesn't help that our army's main source of strategies, after him, is counting on Micaiah's Farsight combined with some of Tauroneo's textbook plays. That's an especially concerning note to end on when Micaiah's starting to lose her grip on Farsight. He also kinda shines a light on the whole "Daein is still racist" thing...
This Part is the one that follows the main series formula the most closely, and condensed, it's kinda easy to spot how frontloaded it can be. The back "half" of actually fighting the oppressive army is incredibly short, if it ever existed in the first place, and the game has to call for help to get the thing to shut down and proceed to a different direction.
I'll be open about this: I'm not as sold on the Dawn Brigade as a faction. My issues with it, though, tie in a great deal with the way Daein, Micaiah, Pelleas and Izuka continue on from here. Standing on its own merits, though, Part 1 is a very good story that sets up the pins for later events to capitalise on. It does what it needs to do, but things get... interesting when the time comes for the Dawn Brigade to return to the story. Potentially, part of the problem is that the game didn't give the Daein Army the things they needed for their future role while doing this setup, but there's only so much the part of the game intended to ease new players into the way RD works could do to fix that.
Mechanically, though, how's the Dawn Brigade? This is a pretty all right stretch of the game, getting to go through what is basically a fast forwarded version of FE with most of the basic food groups hanging around (except cavaliers, poor Fiona). Part of the problem with the Dawn Brigade in gameplay, especially on higher difficulties, is that this accelerated pace is matched by rapidly increasing difficulty, to the point where there's very little point in raising too many characters other than Nolan and Jill because of an extreme dearth of EXP to go around to prepare yourselves adequately for the Daein-only content ahead. In addition to Ilyana being a cruel trap for someone not expecting her to go wandering off and the almost excessive amount of high-levelled characters to handle Endgame for you and then leave with their EXP gone to waste, there's a non-zero chance you're going to have a hell of a time when we come back to this cast. Radiant Dawn has a reputation for not pulling it's punches: 90% of them are because of the Dawn Brigade. As someone who sticks to Easy, though, it's much more tolerable.
