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Reading Eltosian Kadath ironman of Vestaria Saga 1 inspired me to try one of my own. I never finished an ironman of this game before but it shouldn't be too hard. The game give you many different tools to crawl your way to victory as well as means to negate most of the biggest obstacles like crits and status effects. Compared to a game like Berwick which really isn't made for ironman runs, this should be fun. As tradition dictates, we begin with a short and simple little chapter during which our lord, the (soon to be) heir of the kingdom of Meleda, must flee by boat and seek out allies to help him reclaim his homeland. We are introduced to the main lord of this game, Zade, and his big brother Zech as well as Garlan, Zade's tactician. You may notice some differences in the artstyle between portraits. Apparently, Kaga reused some of the portraits meant for Tear Ring Saga but this will be a lot more apparent with later units. This here is the first map, the prologue. Very simple objective, few side objectives (the flower, the village and preventing a ship from being destroyed). It's really here to let you learn how to use your units and to let the villagers fill you in on the doubling threshold and the like. Speaking of our units: This man here is the main lord and compared to the other kaga lords he is... okay. Pretty good combat unit with good growths but he is shafted hard by his promotion, which takes place after chapter 15. Other than that, he comes with some good skils: commander 1 gives +10 accuracy to all allies within 3 squares of him and critical edge adds his dex (the skill stat of this game) to his chances to crit. The third skill you see, orison, is only here as long as he has his Edelstern equipped and it increases his avoid when his health dips below 50%. Speaking of his personal weapon, this is Kaga Saga. You'll see a lot of personal weapons and they are all pretty crazy. For comparison, the short sword has 4 might and 65 accuracy whereas the Edelstern has 7 might, 15 crit, 120 accuracy, an effectiveness against armor knights and is a brave weapon. It's really good but 30 uses might feel a little low, if not for this game having Siurian Thaumite which are small blue stones with one use letting you completely repair a weapon. They are decently common , maybe 20 or so throughout the game if you don't buy any in shops. Finally, Zade has the light cavalry weapon type which isn't great but there is even worse. Before talking about the other units, I'll talk about the stats a little. STR, DEF, RES, MOB (for mobility) and MAG are pretty obvious, DEX is skill and gives + 3 accuracy per point, AGI is speed and gives + 2 avoid per point, LUCK is only used to prevent crits with each point giving you one point of crit-evade. PROF is proficiency, the stat that dictates what weapons you can use. Here, Zade can only use normal swords with a PROF stat equal or inferior to 5. It's not too limiting given that it has a high chance of increasing on level-up and that few weapons have high PROF stats but it still screws several characters. A general rule is that non-magical characters don't have a magic growth, a very low resistance growth and almost no-one can gain movement points by leveling up. For comparison with Zade, here is his brother. He has even more skills, but it's not really relevant. The only things to remember about him for now is that he wields Silvanister, has a Vermil Ring and is supposed to marry our next character, Atholphis. Athol is our starting healer as well a the Starmaiden. Whatever does this mean I wonder? She only has two skills, benison which is miracle with a Luck x 2 percent chance to activate and charisma which increases by 5 the avoid of allies within 5 squares of her. If you pick Clemency mode, charisma is replaced with Starmaiden's grace which increases STR, MAG, DEF and RES of all allies by 2 as long as she is here if I remember correctly. It's a lot more broken than it sounds. On Orthodox we are stuck with charisma unfortunately. She is also unable to promote which is really annoying. We will also need to remember later that she is a 14 year-old girl which might explain some of her actions. Neither her nor Zech really have feelings for each other, their marriage being an arranged one. Next is Prody. Prody is an armor knight and they still suffer from the same problem as always, shit movement and movement type. But Prody has more to offer. To start with, he can wield both spears and throwing spears which are separate weapon types in this game. Up next are his skills, diligence (50% bonus exp) and good neighbor (+3 DEF and RES to adjacent allies). He still isn't going to be very good but he is far from useless. Unfortunately for him we also start with Bonacel. Better in every way before the growths kick in and he also comes with a Phalanx Lance with a PROF stat of 9 meaning only he can wield it for now, giving him +3 DEF. What this means is that he is pretty much invincible earlygame. He comes with wrath (25% chance to crit on a counterattack) and shield (DEX% to nullify any attack against him). I'll mention it here before I forget, the doubling threshold in this game is 3 SPD, a crit doubles the damage that would be normally inflicted and a point of weight is nullified every 2 point of STR (MAG is used instead for magical weapons). Our last character is the best unit in the game by far, Troy. He may not look very impressive for now but he is a fighting god. His only skill is multichance which lets him attack again AGI x 3% of the time. Simple, effective, perfect. On this map Troy has to charge alone to rescue the ship while the rest of the group drags itself across the map. This is what will happen most maps. This here is a list of the conversations currently available. All of these ones are flavor text but some other will give us items of even let units form bonds with each other. Bonds differ from supports in that sometimes Unit A may give a bond bonus to Unit B but Unit B doesn't give anything to Unit A. As of now, our only bond is Zade giving a small bonus to Athol. This how a combat looks: On our way to the harbor we can visit houses from flavor text, tutorial and 100 denarii each. If Athol visits some houses on this map they'll have different dialogue and the house will remain open, so that you can see the bonus dialogue and still see the normal one after that . Some of the enemies are carrying treasures. It's not a problem here but some later thieves will have a jeweled knife equipped, meaning that they have to be killed before they land a hit on you if you want to get the knife (which sells for 600 denarii). On his way to the harbor, Troy kills a special enemy which nets him a full level-up. It's a pretty good one for Vestaria Saga. There is also this little conversation to remind us that there is a village to visit. I also forgot to mention that we can save every 5 turns in this game. The game gives you 99 save slots for a reason but this is an ironman so I won't be able to savescum this time. Something I forgot to mention about knives in this game is that, just like in Berwick Saga, they bypass defence. This doesn't really mean much for now but we'll meet buff thieves with triple attack knives sooner than we'd like. . I didn't manage to catch it but the battlefield darkens and a "Critical" pops up when you crit. The sound is also a little different which is nice. This is how it looks like when a skill activates. It's a little bit overkill here. This is how it looks like when someone gets an item through an event like searching the flower. I had to place Athol in range of the pirate because he sometimes just refuses to be baited by Troy. It works and she dodges. After that he gets gutted by Troy and Prody and I can calmly search the rest of the map. Troy gets a cutlass visiting the village. Its a brave sword. Kaga. I finish up on turn 14 and gets a nice little reward for having saved the ship. And so we see the Empire's army led by Ajax (the black knight without a helmet) repair the bridge and slowly approach the capital supposedly leading to Zech's death. I'll end this first part with a musical recommendation: Holy Diver by DIO. This is the first time I do something like this so any criticism is welcomed.