TearRing Saga! My Blind Playthrough - Finale

[Miacis]

Narron's conversation never not cracks me up. It gives him his only support bonus, from Runan. Also yes, Raffin trumps all the "Jagen/Oifey archetypes" in the series ecause of that event alone.

Regarding Holmes' team, the Dullahan is indeed as great as it looks, although, being a heavy inaccurate slab of metal, equipping it is often going to be the very reason for Shigen's not-demise. It does lose one use every time it revives him, but pffrt, you've got forty uses who cares.
If you do start bringing Yuni to battle, I oughta mention that she's there to despoil enemies, not really for doing damage. The way Steal works in this game, every time your thief lands a hit on an enemy, they have a (Spd+Skl)% chance of just taking a random item from them. Yes, even their equipped weapon. And well, she opens locks too, so Holmes can get some kills rather than rush from doors to chests.
Axes are pretty good by the way, just not the earlygame axes. Hatchets, Killer and Silver axes aren't any heavier and all have way more accuracy. They're also super cheap (2000G for 40 uses on the Killer Axe, compared to 3200G for 32 uses on the Killer Lance), so once you are able to start kitting your axe guys with better stuff, they'll be mean critting machines. Samson does completely overshadow Barts right now, and while the latter gets a good skill later on, Samsom gains more smaller skills, has better stats, and only suffers from a later recruitment time.

Advice for next map is... uh

> Do explore everywhere before going to that map.
> Also restock on stuff while you're passing by.
> Buy a couple Bridge Keys in the newest town place. Might as well do it now.

[Deltre]

Yeah when I went back and looked, I noticed that the Killer Axe is pretty decent except that 10 Weight. I think I probably will give Samson a go just for the sake of variety tbh. That's a very crazy way for steal to work by the way, I could see that being very silly if Juni ever got enough bulk to make trying it not an instant death sentence. 

I still can't believe Shigen though lol his sword literally invalidates the whole permadeath mechanic up to 40 times. That's so crazy it sounds like some wild fan-made item, not something that would actually exist in a real game. 

[BrightBow]

That first bandit battle was interesting. I was not aware that this town had it's own battle map. I wonder if that map also contains the town's shop.

[Deltre]

28 minutes ago, BrightBow said:

That first bandit battle was interesting. I was not aware that this town had it's own battle map. I wonder if that map also contains the town's shop.

 

I thought it was pretty neat. I cut around most of that fight to save time, but I did check and no, the shop isn't accessible from the battlefield. 

[Miacis]

6 hours ago, Deltre said:

That's a very crazy way for steal to work by the way, I could see that being very silly if Juni ever got enough bulk to make trying it not an instant death sentence.

Yuni's thing is she's pretty dodgy, and gets even dodgier with time. She's barely ever gonna get any Defense, so her thing is more about stealing with a light sword so her opponent's accuracy is reduced to nothing. Or give her a Levin Sword, she's good with those and stealing weapons from a distance never gets old.

She's kind of a pain to train for combat, honestly, and learns her good skills very late, but once she reaches that point of critical speed, you can just point her at any arena, park Xeno and Katri nearby, and watch her pick the place clean (of course you can steal weapons in the arena!) and gain all the money, and all the levels. But most people won't see much of her stealing prowess, sadly.

[Deltre]

Oh man, stealing weapons in the arena sounds hilarious, especially given that they tend to have pretty uncommon stuff there from what I've seen!

 

Two quick battles in this one. Something tells me Attrom is lowkey good, but eh. My Xeno is so inexplicably good that I can't really see myself ever replacing him.  

[BrightBow]

Yeah, Marchen secretly nursing a priest back to health makes absolutely no sense. Incompetent as he may be, he is still a ruthless murderer.

Anyway, Marchen may be utter garbage as a fighter but he's got some tricks up his sleeves that may not be immediately obvious. Like Holmes he can open chests and doors, which can come in handy since there are some more of these "open all the chests" maps. And his "Mug" is a very exploitable skill. However, the downside of Mug is that it reduces the avoid and hit of all allies in a 3 tile radius by 50 or something along those lines.

Come to think of it, maybe the key to keep Krishenu alive on that map is to keep her as close to Marchen as possible.

 

Edited February 9, 2017 by BrightBow

[Miacis]

Oh hey, you found Shigen's lil' event. You did indeed forget to equip the Dullahan, but yeah, the game reeealllly doesn't want Shigen to die. Add another layer to his Phoenix-mode bs, eh? Maerchen's recruitment is also a strange curveball that's kinda poorly handled if you ask me, but it does reinforce Katri's uncompromising goodness and Holmes's relative lack of care about who's on his crew.

I wish Krishna was better, being the "thief that can actually fight" type character, but.... yeah, in practive, I've had better luck with all the other classic thieves than her. Even her promotion doesn't save her, because her stats are just that bad, in a game full of characters with bad stats.

As for the hints on next chapt- oh, RangerJackWalker already posted all of it on Youtube. Yeah, do that.
The game does very heavily encourage you to do the things, in this case.

[Deltre]

Krishna seems like she would be cool and all, but yeah those stats are pretty killer in the worst way, and I have about 3 other swordsmen all in need of a Hero's Crest, and a Samson as well. Seems like the game is kind of generous with those, at least.

 

Not really sure what to make of Shigen still, but he's aight at least.

 

Also, bringing Vega along on this side was totally worth it.

Edited February 11, 2017 by Deltre

[BrightBow]

An annoying thing about Holmes' route in terms of story is that most of the time he seems to have very little reason for doing what he does. So I am not surprised you lost track about what he is currently after, that happened to me as well.

To recap: Holmes is currently trying to find an orb in the ruins of Leda to the north, which has the ability to resurrect the dead. They want to use it to resurrect Attrom's sister. On my run Attrom actually died in his joining chapter, so there Holmes had even less reason to chase after that thing. They definitely should have thought up a better reason to get Holmes to Leda.

As for that house, I think you would have needed the money to offer that woman before entering. Still, I don't think the weird behavior of the text boxes is normal and probably was a bug with the patch.

 

And that thing with Plum is just all kinds of disturbing. It obviously doesn't feel very good to deliberately decide to have her get kidnapped in order to get a dancer. More importantly though, Kaga's slave dancers always seem so... fetishy. And not because of their skimpy wardrobe, if it was just about seeing the cleavage of 14 year old girls, then the whole slavery aspect wouldn't be necessary. I am talking more about how they endured so much pain and humiliation, yet they are also aggressively unaffected by all that abuse. Like, Sylvia, Lara and Plum all got their dancing skills literally beaten into them, yet they also find it super fun somehow? To the point where Plum argues with her brother about it in the same scene where he rescues her?

Tear Ring Saga in particular seems to be very confused about where it's going with all of this. The scene where Plum got kidnapped was a very dark scene, with a seemingly harmless old lady being perfectly happy to help a slave trader preying on adolescent girls for a few coins. In this chapter, we've seen the slave trader throwing disgusting insults at Plum and threaten here with violence with the implication that she gets beaten on a regular basis. Yet, the rescuing scene is oddly lighthearted, with the slave trader being allowed to just wander off as if he was just some quirky troublemaker like Team Rocket or whatever.

It's definitely the aspect of Kaga's games that bugs me the most, that's for sure.

Edited February 11, 2017 by BrightBow

[Deltre]

Hmm, yeah I can't help but feel that there should have been a little bit more direction with what Holmes has been doing so far since Marco was handled. Perhaps they could have given Richard a reason that he needed Holmes to head towards Leda or something. I do remember that the group wanted to go there, but the way it was introduced made it seem more like a side trip rather than the main goal. Especially in your case, where Attrom is dead haha. 

The Plum thing feels like a major WTF game kind of moment to me. I'll be honest, Sylvia never really bothered me; with a disclaimer that I haven't played FE4 in forever so I don't remember the finer details. Still, I felt like they were going for a 'free spirit' kind of girl with that, and I get it. Hell, I even know a few girls kinda like that myself. Leen was a bit darker with the implied sexual abuse, but since the game actually treated it appropriately with Aless wanting to rip the guys head off (and actually doing it), again, I could get behind that. After all, if you actually love something (in this case, dancing) a bad experience, terrible as it may be, shouldn't stop you. Okay, I get that. 

But with Plum, it's just like...what the fuck. First of all, she got over the whole thing so quickly that you'd think she went away to summer camp or something. Second, Bartz played it way too cool for someone who's sister was kidnapped and forced into slavery. I could almost look past that point if I had recruited her with Holmes, but Bartz should have had that guys head on a pike. Third, what the fuck. Fourth why the hell would she suddenly be comfortable dancing in front of relative strangers now after suffering what are no doubt numerous traumatic incidents, and fifth and finally what the fuck. I don't know if I'd call it fetishized, although that may not be entirely incorrect, but in the best case scenario it tells me that Kaga didn't know how to write this at all.

The kidnapping part, while dark, is okay to me since the scene was appropriately serious and believe it or not, I like that it made me feel bad. That says to me, that the scene did its job since I should feel bad for a character put in this situation, and I should feel bad that my actions were directly responsible. The rescue...ugh....

The worst part is, that because we (presumably) didn't off this guy, he's free to do it again. I know it's a game, but good lord Bartz, you have a sister. Bartz of all people should want this guy dead above all else because he should know that this guy is gonna do the same thing, potentially to someone else's sister. It's really not that hard to write something like that correctly, at least that part of it. 

 

[Miacis]

Yeah, the scene would have been fine if the events had been treated seriously. Bartz gets over it very fast, Plum even faster, and later on when it comes up again, it's still treated very casually. Holmes's version of the rescue is actually quite different: after knocking out the kidnapper, Holmes basically goes "Huh, you were with Runan and now you're here, fancy that. That was some pretty good dancing back there, you should do it again for our army!" and Plum does actually show reluctance in that scene. It's honestly arker than the Bartz scene because who says that? Plum's thing is definitely the worst part of this game's plot. Only thing that rivals it later on is a couple of overextended plot dumps, and those are more tedious than they are offensive.

Mechanically-speaking though, Dance does have an interesting effect: it has a small chance of giving status buffs to your allies. The more Plum dances, the better the chances of seeing status effects... however, because this is Tearring Saga, the formula for it is laughably terrible.

Dance count ≤ 150 ---> 0% chance of effect
150 < Dance count < 160 ---> 10 to 90% chances
Dance count ≥ 160 ---> 100% effect

Oh, and don't worry too much about the money lady. All she does is uncurse your weapons. How does a weapon become cursed? When you accumulate 100 kills on it, it has a chance of becoming cursed, gaining the devil effect. You know, typical stuff that definitely happens to you by chapter 14. You can't even use her to uncurse Zieg's Devil Lance, because it's not cursed, it's just devilish or something.

One last thing, uh, don't... look too much into character hair colors. As more family ties become apparent, you'll see that they're effectively random. Xeno's resemblance to Tia in hair color seems all but a coincidence, tbh. I like to think that after Nintendo pressured Tirnanog into changing Runan's hair to brown, they just randomized everybody's hair colors just to prove a point that hair colors can eat shit.

Here's some hints hints for next chapter:
> I forget if the game reminds you, but Attrom is from here and has one use.
> You can come back to this map anytime with Holmes, and everything will still be there.
> The caves, however, are a light point of no-return of a few maps. Only enter them when fully prepared.

Edited February 14, 2017 by Miacis

[Aethin]

I'm enjoying the episodes so far!  It's nice to see the game through the eyes of a player in action and catch more typos.

Since all the scenes in the script are listed slightly out of order, it never really clicked for me the extent to which Plum's troubles are presented lightheartedly... but holy shit. I couldn't even change those scenes if I wanted to, since the kidnapper definitely lives, and Plum definitely becomes a dancer...  There's something to be said for depicting realistic, terrible things in a story, but it needs to be done gravely, not humorously.

Edited February 12, 2017 by Aethin

[Deltre]

Yeah, I'd imagine translating the text yourself (speaking of which, thank you very much for doing so!) makes it a little less apparent how silly that whole exchange is, but it's definitely the weakest link with everything I've seen so far. The Holmes version sounds pretty ridiculous too, but I'd have to actually read out the scene myself to see if it's better or worse. 

Those dance mechanics are pretty silly. You'd never hit 150 dances playing the game at a natural pace... or so I thought until I played Chapter 16. I've definitely found my least favorite enemy type in the game. This one was a nightmare to edit haha. I easily had over 1.5 hours of recording on battle 16 alone, but I tried to edit it down as much as possible, because believe me, playing through all that (as I'm sure you guys who have played the game know) was pretty rough. 

 

Edited February 14, 2017 by Deltre

[BrightBow]

Frau should really listen to her sister. You let Katri out of your eyes for a minute and suddenly you find yourself knee-deep in zombies.

Anyway, Occult Scrolls can indeed be used by unpromoted units. So using them on Pegasus Knights is a good idea, especially since the difference in caps between promoted and unprompted units is fairly small, so promotions are not that vital. And in the case of Dragon Knights, their magic actually takes quite a bit of a dive. Just keep in mind that you can only use those scrolls when a unit has already hit their level cap.

I suppose it would have been better to explain how that town works, spoilers be damned. It should be communicated to the player that they don't have to do everything right away and that they are not expected to, otherwise this simply map could easily end in frustration.

Edit:

Also, I have no idea what the point of donating to the church is either. One would think that doing that would eventually get that priest to trust you with Lyria but I recall dumping quite a bit of money on this guy in order to get her (since my Attrom died) to no effect.

Edited February 14, 2017 by BrightBow

[RJWalker]

The house which offered to forge the Silver Sword is part of a long, tedious and completely-not-worth-it sidequest of forging two items to make a new item. The only worthwhile items are the Blessed Bow, which is a Long Bow that is effective against flyers and a second Hammerne staff but that takes too much time to do. Miacis posted more info so look there.

The house where you kept getting ignored is the secret shop. Of course, it's not possible to get the Key that gives you access on Holmes' route just yet.

In the next chapter, a special event happens that introduces two extremely important characters earlier than usual. This event happens on turn 11 and can be missed but is purely story based. But you should be ready to seize immediately on your turn because the event will cause trouble if you stick around after it happens.

Frau and San are really good. San gets a unique sprite palette change if she promotes too.

I don't remember if the house event on the next chapter will give you hints on who to take there so just in case it doesn't while you're playing, open this spoiler:

 

It's Mintz.

Edited February 14, 2017 by Ranger Jack Walker

[Miacis]

Ooh boy, lotsa things in this episode... Adding to what BrightBow posted, Frau also has a good magic growth, so using a scroll on her is definitely an option if you want to keep an anti-magic flier. That's as close as you'll get to a Falcon Knight.

Blaahd does have a lot of weird houses.
The gambling place, for starters, is great if you want to get some funds on emulator without grinding in these fucking caves. The Win/Loss is decided before the roll, so there's no real reason to ever choose tails. Just savestate before flipping. If you win, savestate again. If you lose, reload your state, and decline. End turn, burn a RN or two, re-enter, savestate, and so on.
The forge is interesting because it will actually offer you some pretty good deals... if you complete all previous recipes. Here's the list for this forge, so you can decide how much you want the later rewards.

Spoiler

 

1 	Estoc 			Silver Shield 	Shieldblade (not sure why it's saying Silver Sword...?)
2 	Slim Sword 		Magic Shield 	Wardblade
3 	Sword Breaker 		Gold Bag 	Thief's Dagger
4 	Long Bow 		Azoth		Blessed Bow
5 	Healing Staff 		Smith's Hammer 	Hammerne

None of the first few ones look very attractive, but the Thief's dagger is useful to get rare items, and the Blessed Bow is essentially your legendary bow for this game and is incredibly good. Up to you if you wanna come back to this later to get them..

You can't do anything with the weird lady until you've rejoined with Runan. Like all suspicious houses that don't give a thing, it's a secret shop.

And now, dumb mechanics part deux: Singing.

In short, singing is a free AoE heal with a small chance of refresh, centered around the user. The more you use it, the more it heals, the farther it heals, and the more it refreshes. And just like dance, it's got strangely paced break points, with weird different formulas for all of its attributes. The gist of it is:

Spoiler

At 0 sings, Lyria heals 2 HP to all allies in a 1 Rng distance. Each of them has a 10% chance to be refreshed.
At 5 sings, her range increases to 2.
At 10 sings, he range increases to 3.
At 15, her range increases to its maximum value of 4.
...
At 50, her refresh rate goes to 12%. It will keep going up by 2% for every 50 sings from now on.
At 150 sings, Lyria now heals 3 HP!
At 195 sings, she heals 4 HP.
At 245 sings, she reaches her maximum heal value at 5 HP.
The maximum sing count is 250, where she'll be healing 5 HP to all allies in a 4 range circle, with a 20% chance of refresh.

Obviously, it's not going to be very useful for healing, and the low refresh rate makes it impossible to abuse a Sing-Dance combo, but there is some value to mass-casting refresh even with a low chance. In narrow, cramped, shitty caves, she can pretty consistently refresh at least two people from a distance. Thankfully, her range increases the fastest, and support bonuses with her do boost the chance of the supportee getting refreshed. She's... still weak and inconsistent, but she's at least useable in her own little niche if you let her sing for fifteen turns or so in Blaaaaaaaahd.

Hint for next chapter:
> Turn 11, cool things happen.
> There's no green text in TRS, but all those valuable items are droppable. Get'em!
> Promise, this one isn't me getting confused about points of no-return like last time.

Edited February 14, 2017 by Miacis

[Deltre]

Definitely gotta agree that if I were 100% committed to getting every item then Map 15 would have driven me insane had I not known that I could come back haha. That's a cool trick on the gambling house, but I probably won't be exploiting it, and even though the rewards on that forge quest might only be alright at best, I still think that's a really cool and unique addition to the game! Haven't really seen anything like that before, or even since either. 

Good lord, Sing needed to have it's healing buffed significantly. That's honestly so bad that it may as well not even be there haha. Still, if you throw her into a large crowd of allies that could be a'ight. Is it known how much the supports add to the formula? 

Lionheart stole my stuff :( 

[BrightBow]

Wow, I was not aware that the fort gets attacked by Mogals until you deal with the Archmogal. That's pretty cool.

That fort is similar to the town, except you can only visit it during a skirmish. Those skirmishes fortunately respawn quickly.

That Arvanrest you got is sadly completely worthless. It can only be used by those wooden tanks. If they attack with it, they will turn into a stationary and frail Ballista with zero movement. Transforming into a Ballista may sound cool but the problem is that there seems to be no way to turn the Ballista back into a tank. I guess this is a feature that was simply left unfinished.

And man, even with the new translation it's very hard to keep track of what's going on. There are just so many characters, locations and relationships to keep up with.

 

Edited February 16, 2017 by BrightBow

[Miacis]

I love how they couldn't be bothered to even recolor Poem's profile mugshot. it's literally the same as Marcel's.

4 hours ago, BrightBow said:

That Arvanrest you got is sadly completely worthless

*Arrowspate. The Arvanrest on the contrary is quite good!

5 hours ago, Deltre said:

Is it known how much the supports add to the formula?

It's Support bonus/5, so that'd be... 1-2% more for her supportees (Juni and Attrom). Wow, that's kinda garbage, I remembered it being higher.

A few fun things about Ligria. You can have anyone talk to the archer dudes guarding the fort, and they all have something different to say. Samson even has unique conversations with them (he's from Erial too, remember?). The stores are also a nice place to dump useless units like Marius.

And the forge of Ligria is completely separate from the Blhaaahd one:

Spoiler

1	Wooden Shield 	Master Potion 	Dragon Potion
2 	Silver Sword 	Iron Shield 	Silver Shield
3 	Brave Sword 	Gold Bag 	Hero Crest
4 	Elixir 		Miracle Charm 	Azoth
5 	Thief's dagger 	Bridge Key 	Guild Key

I mean, you can get another Guild Key if you missed it, or broke it by repeatedly visiting the same secret shops? Otherwise,this one isn't worth the time and materials.

Mechanics-wise, Terra is indeed kinda like a mastery skill in its power. It's like a critical hit, except it negates terrain bonuses and its activation is rolled before hit (so it can miss!). Pretty useful on Mahter since she can easily get to enemies standing on difficult terrain. The animation for it is cool too.

Oh, and Rennie is another growth unit. Like Frau and San, she can turn into a great unit, but you need to put the work into it. She's one of the few chosen ones with a Movement growth, so she typically won't stay at 4 for long... if you're lucky enough.

Hints for next map:
>Mintz knows someone from here.
>If you're not proMLG enough to handle a hard boss (or you're curious about things), you can wait til turn 29 for Easy Mode. filthy casuals...

Edited February 16, 2017 by Miacis

[Deltre]

Yeah, I gotta say, it's getting kind of tricky to keep up with all the different interactions/character relationships in this game at this point. I almost feel like I need to create a chart or something haha, but when I'm paying attention it's not too bad. And when I'm not, I call Raphael everyone but Sasha's dad.

To counter that, I really like all the little side areas and secrets they threw into this one. FE is usually really linear by design (even the ones with maps) so I have to say that a game that actually bothers to take advantage of the World Map feature is really refreshing.

This map was a little trickier, not gonna lie. Fortunately, I was lucky good enough to get through it without too much trouble. I am glad the game seems like it's ramping up in difficulty here though. 

[Miacis]

Maybe I'll go ahead and do a lil' character relationship chart next time we get to a plot dump. This is definitely a very interconnected cast, as opposed to more modern FEs where you'd see NPCs existing for a purpose, but with no actual life or place outside of that purpose.

Maruju is also one of the guys who gets a skill for promoting late, but it's at level fucking nineteen and it's only Adept, so it's not as bad as missing Xeno's Lethality (not that he really needs it either, but it's good style points).

Not much else to say on the chapter proper. It's a tough map with entrenched enemies. I do wish the game was a bit more fluid so the unending sea of zombies didn't make it such a slog. As for the one house that did nothing, well, you might be seeing a pattern here... it was a Secret Shop. It did have Levin Swords, Physics and Longbows, but iirc Runan is still very much broke. Gotta love TRS throwing missable secret shops at you right after you've been robbed blind by Narcus and the Dragon Flute man.

Next chapter, you will want to:

> Have the obviously-recruitable character talk to both people. They're not just "Join Us!" talks.

Edited February 19, 2017 by Miacis
*snip* I stand corrected.

[BrightBow]

42 minutes ago, Miacis said:

How do I tiptoe around this one...? One of your characters will not be playable again after this map. However, this will not become apparent who that character is until six maps from now on. So that you don't lose out on unique items or anything, I can either tell/hint you who that character isso you can empty their inventory, but that's moooost likely a big-ass spoiler. Otherwise, I would recommend that you strip off units you aren't bringing for this map, and that the ones you do bring only have personal or generic weapons.

If a character leaves, TRS usually drops their items into the storage beforehand. There are some exceptions but I'm sure this one isn't one of them.

Edited February 19, 2017 by BrightBow

[RJWalker]

Yeah, said character leaves his inventory behind. What a nice person.

[BrightBow]

Congrats on Leonie getting Movement. And btw, you are correct in your assumption that Flurry requires you to be faster then your opponent.

Meanwhile poor Kate doesn't get a single point of speed from her promotion. I didn't realize her promotion gains are that terrible. I love the Lady Knight class and it's sword & bow combo, so I really wish that Kate would be a little better.

The Sol sword is not actually a personal weapon for Runan, everyone can use it.

The game doesn't actually use different sprites for different weapons of a category, it just uses different palettes. Like, if you use a Hammer, it's displayed as a black axe. The SNES Fire Emblem games on the other hand did actually use different sprites for each weapon. Well, at least the Jugdral games did, I don't remember about FE3.

 

Edited February 21, 2017 by BrightBow