I love Fire Emblem to death, so I preordered this and my copy should be showing up today. In fact, I'm going to go check my mailbox in a few minutes to see if it's arrived yet.
There's a few new things to this game:
The 'battle save' feature lets you save the game at any point and start from there instead of the beginning of the mission. I assume that they put this in to make it a little less intimidating to people who haven't played the series before. Since I've been playing Fire Emblem for a while now, I probably won't use it unless there's a sadistically hard level.
This game is by far the longest Fire Emblem game to date. There are 45 missions, compared with 30 in the Gamecube game and around 25 in each of the GBA ones.
There's a third promotion tier, meaning that units can change class twice, meaning the level cap is effectively 60 at this point. Considering that a lot of the fun of Fire Emblem is building up characters from new warriors to unstoppable machines of death, I can't wait to see how ridiculously powerful characters get towards the end of this game.
The Bonus EXP exploit from the Gamecube game has been removed. If you didn't know, in the Gamecube game you would earn Bonus EXP for doing well on each mission, and you could then give those experience points to characters in between missions. The thing was, unlike level ups within missions, you could just reset when they got bad stat gains from their level ups and save after they got good ones, so with enough patience you could make your characters much stronger than they'd naturally be. They fixed this by making every level up obtained from Bonus EXP gain give you exactly 3 stat points in random categories. No more, no less.
Because of the third promotion tier, Laguz can now level up to 40.
If you have a Gamecube memory card with a Path of Radiance save file (I'm not sure if it has to be a clear save or not, but I can check once I get my copy), then it can read that data and give the characters you used the most in the first game stat boosts when you get them in this game. Which means my Soren will be even more of an invincible badass.
There might be a couple of other minor changes that I forgot, but I'm really excited for this game and I'm probably going to be spending most of tonight playing it.
EDIT: I just picked up my copy, but I'm waiting until after class to play it. But I did check the manual and it does need to be a clear save from the Gamecube game.