ADDITIONAL SPOILERS LIKELY IN THIS THREAD
Many possible pairings noted, Y! I'm predictable, I expect, in that the ones that hit me hardest were Guy/Luke, Asch/Luke, Asch/Natalia. I wanted to like Tear/Luke more than I did at the end -- I felt like it got a good start, but then she was too wrapped up in a) Van and b) Legretta for the romance plot to really work well. (Legretta/Tear, Y) I could see playing with a lot of others, though. ^^
And we did about as much sidequesting as we could manage! Because yeah, the extra character stuff it provided was just awesome, totally worth the effort (and the zillions of dollars, sometimes). We didn't manage to get the last of the catalyst weapons, and for some reason we couldn't get Guy's title to trigger for the "you've done all this stuff to help the towns!" set of titles/sidequests, even though we could get everyone else's. But otherwise! I think we got all the others it was possible to do during a first playthrough. ....adljshghkj, the Jewel of Gardios. ♥