[ShadowMarth]

Indeed. Permanent character deaths made the levels have more meaning. If you could just run in and take them all out without regard for your characters besides your lord, it would have been much too easy. The original game never gave me a whole lot of difficulty (or perhaps it was just that I played it so much?), except for a couple really painful levels. The last level took me a great deal of tries. And my Dorcas was an absolute 20/20 beast.

For some reason, some of the Sacred Stones levels were much harder for me. I trained my characters as far as I could with my resources at the time (You can enter as many times as you like, but eventually you'll run out of money from using up weapons), but I still had trouble with certain levels. For instance, there's one where you have to last a number of turns in a castle, shortly after your lords get promoted. This one took me an enormous amount of tries to get past without losing anybody. And certain characters were too powerful. My rogue, Colm, was unstoppable. He could keep going until he ran out of weapons, without fail.