Alastor plays and ranks the whole series! Mission Complete! ...For now.

[Alastor15243]

Gaiden Day 2: On The Road To Deliverance City

Seems I may have been jumping the gun at the end of last entry. Looks like there’s a good deal of fighting to be done before making it to Deliverance HQ.

No big deal for the first battle, just a huge, empty map with us in one corner, a slightly larger army of soldiers in the corner above ours, and in the corner opposite ours, a lonely cavalier who’s going to make a lonely charge. The map size compared to what’s actually on it is… a bit weird, but I do really like how it’s basically a sort of telegraphed, non-ambush reinforcement we actually get the exact arrival time of.

Unfortunately yet again Kliff is back in getting doubled range, at least when fighting that cavalier. Frustrating, but for everyone else he can do double attacks just fine.

Holy SHIT. The levin sword is unspeakably powerful at this point in the game. 30 magic damage if you double, and 1-2 range. There isn’t a single enemy I’ve seen so far who can survive two 15 magic damage attacks.

However, like Jotari said, Clair is… not great. Only does 3 damage to these soldiers. Her growth rates are pretty okay at least, which is good, because she’s gonna have to live with them as the only way to improve until level 12. She’s my only flier, so I’ll try to get some use out of her, but right now my priority for training is keeping Kliff and Silque above the speed curve. I absolutely, without any shadow of a doubt, need Silque to get warp.

Silque got a level, which is good, and got magic, which is good, but unfortunately she didn’t gain any speed. Which is really, really bad, because like Kliff, she’s just barely doubling these enemies. I think only giving her two of the speed fountain uses… might have been a mistake. But thankfully since her defense is so low, the enemies are going to flock to her, so she’ll get some more combat experience that she’ll almost certainly survive. And I do know that whatever enemies we face next, we’ll have a dungeon with plenty of low-speed undead she can fight and suck the impure undead life force from in an act that in most RPGs would get her killed.

The cavalier arrives and is promptly eviscerated by Grey and the levin sword.

I’m so used to “wait” being at the bottom of the list that the “item” command being below it is really throwing me off. But I know full well that Thracia is going to be much, much worse.

Anyway, I’m having Silque stand on a forest and take out the last two enemies to train, with Kliff and Grey standing by to save her if she fails to keep her HP up enough.

Alright, she didn’t level up speed, but she DID level up defense, which… I mean yeah I’ll take it I suppose, but I really don’t want her to fall behind on doubling when her attacks only have 50% accuracy at best until she promotes.

Okay this next map is kind of ridiculous. Six cavalry on a huge map with features it’s almost pointless to have. And they can double everyone but Alm, Grey, Tobin and Clair.

Now, Grey can just annihilate them if necessary, but let’s see if we can do some player phase tactics to soften them up to get at least a few kills spread out to units who need them. Which means I’m sending out Kliff, my tankiest unit.

Unfortunately, both Kliff and Silque missed their chances to get a kill, so I had to give the exp to the others. But I elected to let one run away so I could get more exp out of them after dealing with the main group of four cavs.

This did not go very well. I only managed to kill one of them and retreat-wound another, leaving two with a clear line of sight to Silque, when they can double her.

…Scratch that, looks like reducing that other one to 10 HP was enough to make him retreat after all. Silque survives just fine.

The enemies don’t have any way to handle a space being occupied, so despite there being two heal tiles on the map, the cavs all crowd around and wait in line for the same one. Which thankfully means that when the cavs come back, I’ll be dealing with them one at a time.

Oh no, wait, looks like one did run off to the other heal tile, just in time for the one he was right by to be cleared right after he moved. I’ll bet you anything he’s gonna run back to it, only to be too late.

...

WHY DO I EVEN TRY TO UNDERSTAND THESE FUCKING ANIMALS!?

No, he didn’t run back to the newly cleared tile. In fact, the OTHER cavalier that had been waiting so patiently to move to the heal tile ALSO seemed to simultaneously get the idea to run over to the other heal tile, DESPITE THE FIRST HEAL TILE BEING RIGHT NEXT TO HIM AND COMPLETELY OPEN BY THE TIME IT WAS HIS TURN TO MOVE.

Ah, to get inside the heads of these minions. What the hell would I even see?

Kliff didn’t get speed, but he did get power and defense, along with the thunder spell which is awesome! Apparently it’s the only 1-3 range spell in this game, with saggitae (or arrow as it’s known in this game) being 1-2 range, just like in Three Houses, for some reason.

Wait. No. The injured cav isn’t heading for the other heal tile. It’s just flat-out given up on healing and is back in attack mode again, heading right for us!

…Weird.

Okay, new plan: Silque gets the leather shield for now so that she can survive a round of combat with the cav so he doesn’t suicide onto someone who doesn’t need the XP.

This works out so perfectly that she can survive a round of combat from the second one too, exactly barely.

Also, I’ve suddenly noticed that for whatever reason, the sound effects aren’t ruining the music in this game as much as they were ruining it in the last. Not sure why, can’t quite put my finger on what’s changed just yet, but it’s a much-appreciated improvement.

Third level up. No speed.

Thankfully, after that battle there’s a fight with a shitton of zombies with stats perfect for Silque to fight them.

…

The zombies in this game sink into the ground like goo and then emerge to attack.

Are you telling me that ridiculous attack animation in Awakening was actually a REFERENCE TO SOMETHING!?

Tobin got a level up since he was close to it thanks to bonus exp, and he got power, which is great since that’s only a 10% growth.

Nosferatu is a ridiculously annoying spell. I’d be much happier if it only did half damage than if it only had 50% accuracy. This is going to make Silque a pain… but we’re talking about infinite warp staves. It’s worth it. It has to be.

One more level up. Magic and skill, but still no speed. SHE HAS A THIRTY PERCENT GROWTH, HOW HAS SHE GAINED FIVE LEVELS WITHOUT PROCCING IT ONCE!?

At any rate, I give Alm the last enemy so he can level up and not go into bonus experience overflow. He got power, defense and HP, so I’m satisfied.

Huh. So just like the thief’s shrine, this dungeon only had one dungeon battle. Curious. But honestly I like this better than how the remake did it. Repetitive random battles got annoying by the end of the game. But then, I’m guessing it gets much worse later on.

…Forsyth’s name is just Force here. That… honestly that makes his “I’m a [name] to be reckoned with” joke from Echoes a lot cooler. Moving on.

Honestly, without Fernand and his “the unwashed peasant masses murdered my family” baggage and the extended dialogue giving this massive decision more weight, this scene is just… kinda transparently dumb. I mean I guess he did just completely wipe the floor with half the invading force’s army with a bunch of peasants, but having the scene be as quick as it is still makes Clive’s decision to make Alm captain of the Deliverance feel… super ridiculous.

That said, Forsyth’s dialogue with Alm is probably the most natural and well-placed bit of worldbuilding dialogue this retrospective has seen so far. But yeah, the dialogue gives me a totally different impression of Forsyth’s character, which makes this yet another character the remake radically changed. But given what they had to work with, I’d say that was a good idea all around.

Hm… now I have to decide who to give the power/defense fountain water to.

Well I know it’s gonna be pointless to give it to anyone who’s going to be promoting a lot, which means it’s down to Kliff or Alm.

Ultimately I decide to give Alm 3 defense, because I’ll be in a really bad spot if he’s stat screwed and I can’t exactly let him carry a shield when he has the Royal Sword and Falchion to use.

…Twilight of the gods was originally also used as a major boss dialogue cutscene theme. That… kind of lessens its bite a tad.

Alright, this is the first map that’s looking like a real Fire Emblem map. Really big, lots of enemies. Unfortunately this map still has the FE1 problem of keeping the enemies too far away from the original starting position of my army. So while we wait for something eventful to happen, why don’t we take a look at my new allies:

Clive is actually pretty great right now. Fast enough to double even with a steel lance, some impressive attack power, and good defense. Plus he’s got 7 move, which is great to have on at least someone.

Python is basically like Tobin right now, but he’ll definitely get better by the end.

Forsyth is basically just a faster, tougher, stronger Lukas, with better magic defense to boot. If I use either of them it’s definitely Forsyth. But that’s something of an if, because XP is tight, and given how little knights have to offer beyond defense, I don’t think I’ll have any to spare for them. Still, since deployment slots are free (at least for now, not sure about later), it’s nice to have more manpower.

Now then, time to see what the enemy does.

…Nothing. Okay this is a new level of dumb from this series. Why the fuck would you start me this far away from the enemy and then not even have those cavalry rush to face me? I think the remake added some enemies to fight behind the first wall, which was clearly a good decision.

On the plus side, No matter how bad Silque turns out from this point on, she only needs 1 more level to get warp. So I’m gonna try to get that for her this map.

Also, it was nice when I had fewer units and travel time didn’t take as long. Having sixteen units on every map was a pain when there was nothing to do but move forward. I hope this game doesn’t eventually get just like that. If it does I may just wind up letting dead weight units die if I can’t afford to train them.

I have Tobin use his steel bow to fight the archers on the wall. The only unit who can get past them without getting attacked is Clive, and there are several units I don’t want damaged by archers, namely Silque.

Oh shit, I just noticed that during combat animations, not all enemy units are red and not all allied units are blue! Interesting. I’ll have to pay more attention to that.

Unfortunately the castle walls are evade tiles, to my archers’ accuracy ratings are utterly shot. I may have to have Kliff help out with thunder.

Thunder, as it turns out, has five weight in this game and brings Kliff right back down to not doubling enemies with two speed. Holy shit why does his speed base have to be so terrible and when will this madness end!?

Anyway, I killed/scared off the archers, so it’s time to advance beyond the castle walls.

I’ve got some pretty tough units now, so I use Clive, Alm and Kliff to bait in the cavalry while walling them off from my weaker units so they can pick them off from range and get some exp.

Unfortunately, the only one who comes over is Slayde the paladin, who I totally forgot about.

Oh shit, the text for pre-battle boss dialogue scrolls automatically. I didn’t get a chance to read it because I was looking at my phone!

He’s nasty fast, but fortunately doesn’t do that much damage.

Unfortnately, due to bad luck with hits, I couldn’t feed him to either Kliff or Silque, and Tobin wound up getting the 51 xp from it.

Hahahaha, okay, so, the text box doesn’t bother changing from someone’s face when doing stage directions, so when Dozer gives is “I’LL REMEMBER THIS!” spiel and flees, I’m picturing him whispering “(Dozer flees)” as he runs away.

What’s less amusing is the fact that every single floor tile of a castle map provides evasion bonuses, which basically makes things even more of a pain for anyone without magic.

Hmm… I can’t remember if this was also the case in FE1, but it seems like enemies don’t get triggered to advance even when your units are in range of them if there’s no valid space to attack them from. That line of cavalry on either side? I advanced it right down the middle, leaving two cavalry within range, but only the first one did anything about it because when it was the other's turn to move, the first was occupying the only space the cav could attack Alm from.

Silque is having absolutely terrible nosferatu luck this map, and it’s driving me nuts. I think I’ve gotten like two hits to connect all chapter despite having her try to land the killing blow on basically everything.

My luck finally picks up towards the end, increasing my hopes I’ll manage to get her warp in time. This is helped by an insanely convenient series of battles with Alm getting a critical and then missing, which is exactly what he needs to do to get the cavalry in killing range for Silque without killing them himself.

Speaking of luck picking up, Kliff gets another speed level, meaning he won’t be doubled by cavalry anymore and can double 2-speed enemies with lightning!

And Silque is now level 7! She still hasn’t gained a single point in speed, but she knows warp know, so, fantastic!

And Kliff gained another defense level up!

Alright, I think at this point I can stop the Kliff and Silque favoritism. They’ve gotten what they really needed to get early on, so we should be good. And just in time too, because chapter 1 just ended!

I’m really curious about Alm and Celica’s relationship in this game, because it’s not even remotely touched upon by the end of chapter 1. Weird. But regardless, tomorrow we begin Celica’s part, and begin the five stages of grief over the fact that most mages in this game are going to suck unfathomable amounts of ass.

[Interdimensional Observer]

47 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

I’m so used to “wait” being at the bottom of the list that the “item” command being below it is really throwing me off. But I know full well that Thracia is going to be much, much worse.

 

The new translation patch comes with an add-on preinstalled that fixes that, you are given the means to remove it if you wish though.

There is a separate, not installed at the start, add-on that lets you rudimentarily change units' starting positions. And I believe a third add-on that reveals the normally invisible critical multipliers has been made. Will you use any of these? Or play the game as it is by default?

[Alastor15243]

9 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

The new translation patch comes with an add-on preinstalled that fixes that, you are given the means to remove it if you wish though.

There is a separate, not installed at the start, add-on that lets you rudimentarily change units' starting positions. And I believe a third add-on that reveals the normally invisible critical multipliers has been made. Will you use any of these? Or play the game as it is by default?

As tempting as that would be, I am obligated to judge these games as close to the way they were sold as I can.

[Punished Dayni]

On 9/1/2019 at 5:53 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Some other fun things I noticed: apparently dread fighters are immune to the devil sword. As are enemies. And the user's first attack of the combat round can’t backfire ever. Useful to know. Also, it looks like this game is the one that introduces faster leveling for lower level units… but it treats a level 1 cavalier and a level 1 paladin as the same level, so yes, just like in Echoes, this game actively encourages early promotion. It is, I would argue, one of the few games in the entire series where this is a good idea. And yes, I have seen Mekkah’s pitfalls video on late promotion, but I still disagree, and also there were some things he said in that video to support his arguments that were factually incorrect. But I won’t get into that here. Not unless someone in the thread demands it.

I almost want to ask.

Then again, I'd rarely do it outside Valentia, with the most recent being Ilyana in RD because she'd capped everything except for Luck. Blossom is a hell of a drug.

On 9/1/2019 at 5:53 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Moving on, it also looks like this game lets mages add their own magic power to their attacks! Awesome! Far more scarily, however, it looks like effective damage isn’t just the weapon’s might times three. It’s the entire fully calculated attack power times three. If you have 30 strength and a monster-slaying sword with 15 might, you don’t do 75 damage to monsters. YOU DO ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE.

Thanks S. Kaga.

On 9/1/2019 at 5:53 PM, Alastor15243 said:

 Except probably not, because this game apparently puts a hard limit of 60 on how much damage an attack can do, and a hard limit of 1 on how little it can do (the latter I recognize from Echoes and a few other games in the series, and honestly I think it’s a good idea). I’m curious about that maximum of 60 damage though. Are there enemies with more than 60 HP where that would actually be relevant, or is this some sort of trivia they just happened to find in the game’s code for some reason?

Spoiler

Only the final boss.

On 9/1/2019 at 5:53 PM, Alastor15243 said:

And don’t pegasus knights promote to a class that has inherent effective damage YES THEY DO WE ARE TALKING PSYCHOTIC LEVELS OF EXTRA DAMAGE HERE WHAT THE FUCK.

You will see soon just the difference they'll make.

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Holy SHIT. The levin sword is unspeakably powerful at this point in the game. 30 magic damage if you double, and 1-2 range. There isn’t a single enemy I’ve seen so far who can survive two 15 magic damage attacks.

It won't last forever but it hitting Res is such a difference here.

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Silque got a level, which is good, and got magic, which is good, but unfortunately she didn’t gain any speed. Which is really, really bad, because like Kliff, she’s just barely doubling these enemies. I think only giving her two of the speed fountain uses… might have been a mistake. But thankfully since her defense is so low, the enemies are going to flock to her, so she’ll get some more combat experience that she’ll almost certainly survive. And I do know that whatever enemies we face next, we’ll have a dungeon with plenty of low-speed undead she can fight and suck the impure undead life force from in an act that in most RPGs would get her killed.

....You're really trusting Nosferatu?

Good fucking luck. I mean it, the Luna Lance is something you'd need serious luck to get and is probably the only way I'd have the faith you do with this.

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

The zombies in this game sink into the ground like goo and then emerge to attack.

Are you telling me that ridiculous attack animation in Awakening was actually a REFERENCE TO SOMETHING!?

Yep.

They are super squishy.

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

…Twilight of the gods was originally also used as a major boss dialogue cutscene theme. That… kind of lessens its bite a tad.

It also usually doesn't run in full during these dialogue scenes.

Probably for the best it got the changes it did for SoV, the song's still lit..

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

Forsyth is basically just a faster, tougher, stronger Lukas, with better magic defense to boot. If I use either of them it’s definitely Forsyth. But that’s something of an if, because XP is tight, and given how little knights have to offer beyond defense, I don’t think I’ll have any to spare for them. Still, since deployment slots are free (at least for now, not sure about later), it’s nice to have more manpower.

Spoiler:

Spoiler

outside dungeons you'll be able to bring everyone.

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

I’m really curious about Alm and Celica’s relationship in this game, because it’s not even remotely touched upon by the end of chapter 1. Weird. But regardless, tomorrow we begin Celica’s part, and begin the five stages of grief over the fact that most mages in this game are going to suck unfathomable amounts of ass.

In anticipation for the next map, I'll go pray for you.

I'm not religious.

[Alastor15243]

3 minutes ago, Dayni said:

....You're really trusting Nosferatu?

Good fucking luck. I mean it, the Luna Lance is something you'd need serious luck to get and is probably the only way I'd have the faith you do with this.

It was early in the a short map, I was in desperate need to get Silque leveled up, and the only way she'd die was if every enemy lance attack hit and every nosferatu attack missed. If even that.

As for the undead, I gave her the shield so she basically took no damage from any of the undead enemies and she (eventually) wiped the floor with them.

[Punished Dayni]

33 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

It was early in the a short map, I was in desperate need to get Silque leveled up, and the only way she'd die was if every enemy lance attack hit and every nosferatu attack missed. If even that.

As for the undead, I gave her the shield so she basically took no damage from any of the undead enemies and she (eventually) wiped the floor with them.

See, I wrote it pretty much the moment I saw the comment and not after reading it all.

It still really sucks just how unreliable it can be at times, especially in Gaiden.

[Jotari]

Dungeons don't really evolve beyond one battle. Only Duma tower, the final dungeon and the forest Celica explores provide any semblance of a real dungeon. Maybe Witch Mountain too, can't recall. But mostly it's always just one battle and then a shrine. One has two battles with a second secret shrine behind.

[Alastor15243]

Gaiden Day 3: Celica’s Bizarre Adventure

And so begins Chapter 2: Celica’s Leave.

Gotta say, Celica’s portrait spritework is pretty dang cute.

So according to this dialogue between Celica and Nomah, the soil of Valentia has been barren for three years. That’s… an awfully long time. Kinda funny that she’s only setting out now. Maybe she’s been fighting to do it for years and only now is she old enough? Except Nomah doesn’t seem to have been that difficult to convince.

Oh wow! The “big hurty lightning” line was actually based on something Mae bragged about in the original? Yeah, well, brag all ya like, girly. That speed base of yours ain’t gonna last forever. As a matter of fact, I think Boey might be better than you in the long run in this game, if only barely. Your speed growths are identical, and the only thing you really have on him is a 10% higher magic growth.

Meanwhile, Genny at least starts off fast enough to double zombies, our first opponents. Which is good, because her speed growth is half of Silque’s. Not that Silque’s did her any good whatsofuckingever.

Now, I remember making a habit of giving Celica the speed fountain in Echoes to ensure that she would just barely be fast enough to double the necrodragons with seraphim by the time we reach them. Here though, I think it may be important to give it all to Genny to make sure she has any hope at all of reaching level 8. After all, given the ludicrous effective damage in this game, I’m willing to bet not being able to double the necrodragons with seraphim won’t be as much of a dangerous dealbreaker in this game as it would be in Echoes.

Oh shit yes, “With Mila’s Divine Protection” is an awesome song here too. And now I realize how they improved the music’s sound effect priority: they relegated that last channel that can be overridden by the cursor to unnecessary, subtle harmonies so that the song is still super enjoyable even while the cursor is moving.

Now then, time to kick some zombie ass. I’ll be having Genny and Celica do the majority of the fighting, since they’re the only ones in the party with genuine futures right now.

And holy cow, yes, the enemy phase music for Celica’s route is kickass too. I’ll have them both stand on graves in front, and on the off chance any stragglers pass them (possibly due to them being surrounded already) and head for Mae and Boey, I’ll let them take those kills.

Wow, these zombies are so slow, and Mae’s speed base is so high, she could actually double them with thunder if I wanted.

I remember nosferatu being a lot less painful to use in SoV, probably because that game had support bonuses that could boost magic hit rate.

I can’t find the zombie claw hit rate on serenes forest, but either it’s super bad to begin with, or the tombstone evade bonuses are even more ludicrous in this game than they are in SoV. I’ll have to see how units fare against them when not attacking from a tombstone.

So the zombies finally surrounded Genny and a few started attacking Celica instead. I have to say, they went to a LOT of trouble to animate her long, flowing hair as she leaps through the sky.

And so after feeding all but one of the zombies to Genny, I head to the port town. It seems like this game lets you leave without recruiting Saber, which is interesting. Of course I’ll be recruiting him anyway. He’s a mercenary, which means great promotion bases in basically everything but defense, which he has a great growth rate in. Count me in!

Oh wow, so Saber’s just a complete and total drunk in this game. That’s… hilarious. You talk to him and he’s in the middle of a drunken stupor, and Celica still just looks at him with her huge, adorable eyes and asks him to be her bodyguard. Wow. That’s funny, but what’s less amusing is that apparently the golden dagger you can forge into Beloved Zofia is not a weapon at all in this game, so Saber doesn’t start out with a free sword. Shame.

Alright, so, Genny (who has a much different design in this game, and I like her adorable fluffy sheep hair in SoV better) has 8 base speed after the fountains, which means she can double anything with nosferatu that has 5 speed or less. Basically, if she were in chapter 1, she’d have doubled everything but Slayde. That’s good, but I still want to get her Physic as soon as humanly possible. Since this is a map with a massive bottleneck, I’ll have Saber and Celica alternate blocking it while Genny takes potshots from behind at the wounded enemies. That should work, and train Celica and Saber in the process.

As it turns out, the pirates give way, WAY more experience than the zombies, which is… really good. Not sure why I didn’t notice that. I think I just assumed Kliff and Silque were getting too high level.

Okay, this is a bit bizarre. So, in Echoes, the spell is called thunder, but Mae brags about being able to conjure “lightning, Boey. Big hurty lightning”. But in this translation, the spell’s called lightning, but Mae brags about being able to cast thunder. Anyway, I’ll generally be using the modern names for these spells, items and characters whenever possible, but you may see me slip up here and there, either due to not remembering what the modern name is or just forgetting to use it due to exposure to the game’s name.

Anyway, something funny I just noticed is that I’m intentionally playing in an extremely tedious way to make sure I get the best spells… but I don’t feel bored doing it for some reason. I guess maybe because this time it’s my choice rather than this perpetual clunky nightmare the previous game threw at me? Plus it’s something of a fun puzzle, working out how to feed as many kills into Genny as possible?

Like here. I decided Saber did too much damage. He kills them in four hits, which means Genny would have to be absurdly lucky to be able to kill them before they run away to heal. So instead I had Celica, who does one less damage per hit, wait to attack them four times so that they’d be at 2 HP and Genny has a 75% chance to kill them before they run away. Either that or, if I’m feeling impatient, have Mae try to thunder their asses after two attacks from Celica, bringing them down to exactly 1 HP in one turn.

While she also isn’t getting any speed procs at all, Genny is getting consistently better levels than Silque did, getting power quite frequently and also getting a few levels of defense! She does have a better growth in that actually, which is surprising because I remember her being the most fragile of the healers in SoV. At any rate, she now has illusion, which I might try out later when I face a cantor.

It’s weird how the “almost victorious” song in this game is a pseudo-upbeat song that the remake turned into a heavily “A Dark Fall” inspired chapter 4 map theme.

Also, I just cast magic with Celica for the first time, and I like how graceful, almost lazy the hand movements are, like she really, REALLY knows what she’s doing.

Alright, onto boat fight two!

This one gets slightly more complicated, with an archer and a mercenary mixed in with  the eight pirates.

A second leather shield mercenary. Well, at least this time we have twice as many magic users. But only two it’ll be worth putting experience into.

I split my troops into Celica and Genny on the right, handling the mercenary and four pirates, while Saber, Mae and Boey handled the archer and other four pirates. The latter group had the worse time due to the inability to bottleneck against an archer and the fact that only one of them both had decent defense AND couldn’t be doubled.

And just when I was worried about what to do about the archer, the problem solved itself in the most spectacular way. The mercenary rushed in to fill the hole in front of Celica that Genny just emptied, and did some pretty nasty damage, but then the archer rushed in to attack Celica at the resulting 2-away opening, missed, and then got two fireballs to the face, the second one a critical. The archer is no more, just when his presence was starting to get really, really scary. I really hope I don’t have to restart this level.

Unfortunately, all Celica gets from her first level up is skill and HP.

Mae helps deal with this terrifying mercenary, but fortunately unless he gets a critical, Celica won’t die to just him because Genny’s so good at healing that she heals all 10 damage he does and then some.

Saber arrives just in time to give Celica backup. Since that means I don’t have to heal Celica this turn, I try to use Mae to get the mercenary in death-by-Genny range, and succeed, but Genny fails to land the kill. Probably because her hit is somewhere in the 30s thanks to the mercenary’s insane speed. Well, this gives me plenty of time to heal up and try again.

…The mercenary got a critical and slaughtered Celica.

Because this game still doesn’t let you resist crits with luck.

Well that’s… utterly infuriating. Honestly, this is an utterly garbage design choice. When you make singular enemies that, thanks to crit rates, it is physically possible to guarantee survival of a single round of combat against, and then you also make it impossible to reliably hit them with magic to kill them in a single turn… you have turned this into a luck-based mission.

From what I understand, Echoes “fixed” this, but still not ideally. It’s still way, way easier to boost your crit rate than your crit avoid, because your crit rate is half your skill and half your luck, while your crit evade is just half your luck. Now, since enemies as far as I’m aware don’t have luck, this is okay, except some enemies, namely recruitable ones, DO have luck, which can make Deen and Sonya an absolute nightmare to fight, especially since they both have crit-boosting weapons and since the latter has 1-2 range, making her nigh impossible to fight without risking being completely bodied in a single round. Though I will concede a 100% reliable strategy may exist that I haven't thought of.

…Right. Okay. No more fucking around. I’ll try to feed the mercenary to Genny if possible, but if not… fuck it, I’m not letting him live longer than I have to.

…And now I’m seeing the game over screen for the first time, and… Mycen… is talking to Celica… from across the ocean. Somehow. Somewhy.

Moving on. Jeesus that was discouraging. And after I had gotten such a lucky break with that archer too. I won’t be able to count on that strategy working again, so I’ll have to work on something else.

“So, Alastor, do you wish you had the turnwheel right now, so you didn’t have to repeat all of that fighting to get back to where you were?”

If the answer to that question ever becomes “yes”, hypothetical reader, it will mean I’m playing a bad Fire Emblem game that I want to stop playing as soon as possible.  And we’re not at that point. Yet. Fun, well-designed games aren’t a chore to retry. And even though the mercenary killing Celica was bullshit, so was Celica killing the archer, so I’m actually kinda looking forward to the opportunity to prove I can beat this level without dumb luck, which I wouldn’t have gotten if I used the turnwheel or save states.

So let’s do this sumbitch.

That’s… a pretty racy animation for the female mages. She’s got a Lyn-level “is she even wearing panties” thigh slit going there, and when she casts magic, arcane winds blow her skirt up like a damned parachute.

Thankfully, magic and defense quash my fears that this new try will give me worse level ups, and we manage to kill the archer even faster than before by luring him down onto our ship rather than letting him take potshots at us from across the sides. Saber gets the kill because he’s the only one of the three nearby who’s going to matter in the long run. Leaving Mae free to heal up so she can start magic-blasting the mercenary the second he strikes.

Saber levels up from taking over for Celica, and unfortunately I could not resist the siren temptation of giving Genny the mercenary kill and let him run away. I seriously hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass, because whatever happens with him now, it’s my fault.

…He got a critical again, and bodied Celica from 20 to 0.

Like I said. Even though it’s terrible game design in the context of a franchise intended to be played ironman, the second I had an opportunity to avoid any further risk with him, it became my fault that I didn’t take it. I took a gamble and I lost, and I accept that.

But this time I got that far without any reliance on dumb luck, so now I think I can manage it this time now that I have a reliable strategy.

And it looks like I was saved the trouble of resisting temptation. Boey tried to soften the mercenary up and wound up critting him. And so ends the tale of the greedy player and the bullshit mercenary. Celica now has a leather shield, which she’s going to keep, and now there’s nothing on this map that makes it dangerous to feed EVERY LAST GODDAMNED KILL TO THE BLOOD-HUNGERING SHEEP GODDESS.

The level up for Genny isn’t quite as good, but she does still get magic yet again. Saber gets defense again, the only growth I’m really counting on and the only thing he really needs to proc, and Celica… once again gets a mediocre skill and HP level up.

Unfortunately I can’t get Genny a second level because Celica crits the second to last bandit, which means Genny wastes a good amount of overflow bonus exp at 99.

Anyway, time to rescue Valbar. And it seems that this time, green units are blue rather than red. At first this made me excited that I might be able to control them already, but no, looks like they’re probably going to be just as suicidal as last time. Which means I can’t stall to feed all of these kills to Genny, which means it’s time to give everyone a piece of the pie when necessary like it’s a normal fucking Fire Emblem game.

I’m probably going to be trading the shield around a lot to manipulate who the AI thinks is the juiciest target, which should help avoid having to heal too much.

Looks like I may have spoken too soon. Kamui and Valbar are actually kicking the pirates’ asses. The real danger might be if they kill the boss before I can.

It seems that even when she has the shield, the pirates still consider Genny the easiest target for attacks. Which works for me, since she’s wiping the floor with them.

Thank goodness, Leon has the good sense to run away when he’s injured. Time to get over to him and heal him before anything bad happens. Meanwhile, so many pirates ganged up on Genny, and she scored so many hits, that she’s now level 7. One level away from getting Physic.

And through a chain of lucky coincidences involving Valbar missing and taking just enough damage to retreat rather than press the advantage, I managed to feed Genny the boss kill.

…And it’s only now that I realize I’ve been so obsessed with getting Genny Physic that Celica hasn’t gotten close to getting seraphim.

Which means I might not be able to fight the dracozombie just yet, which would make this a really lame and anticlimactic cliffhanger.

…

Sure.

I’m still hyper.

LET’S GO.

Right, onto… the fucking cantor. Downside, I remember him being a massive pain. On the bright side, he was also a perfect justification for getting that little bit of training needed to take on the Dracozombies. So let’s give it a shot!

Right, so, first thing that happens after moving a single character is that the music goes “oh shit right, there’s only one guy left” and starts playing the “victory is near” theme.

Oh chiptune orchestra. You adorable naive child.

Kamui’s bases are pretty good, and his growths are… okay? For this game? Main issue is that his best stat growth is speed, which his class already gives him plenty of, so I don’t think that’ll help him much in the long run.

Leon’s nothing special. In fact he’s kinda trash. Worse speed base AND growth than Tobin, somehow, and his only non-HP growth above 20 is defense, which… I mean it’s defense. That’s an archer’s dump stat. Don’t get me wrong, it would be awesome to have an archer with good defense, but only if they could handle enemy phase, and Leon… is NOT going to be able to do that. Ever. Still, he’s my only archer for basically all of Celica’s story unless I make some very questionable choices with Atlas or use the dread fighter loop. I’m probably going to wind up using him to some degree.

Valbar is Valbar. I may use him early game for safer tanking and kill-feeding, but that’s about it.

It’s turn 2 and the cantor hasn’t done anything yet. He’s probably waiting for me to get on his boat.

It takes getting almost right up in his face before he uses his spell, but use it he does.

I just checked my handy weapon glossary, and it seems that “Dora”, the standard dark magic spell, is identical to fire in every way except attack animation. Good to know. At any rate, his attack power is pretty nasty, and he has a 4% chance of insta-killing basically anyone except Genny.

IF YOU INSIST, GAME!

He doesn’t summon nearly as many zombies though, I wonder why.

NOPE! HE JUST GOT ABSURDLY UNLUCKY THE FIRST TIME.

First summon he summoned 2, now basically every other space just got filled.

Saber just got another great level up, gaining both power and defense.

I start whittling away at the cantor’s health with a combination of attacks from Genny and potshots from Mae while she hides safely behind her. In the process of both this and killing zombies, she finally reaches level 8.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to cheeze this fight for a long, long time if I’m going to get Celica to level 5 in time, because the zombies give basically nothing. So I’ll have to come back to the dracozombies later and just finish this as soon as I can.

Thankfully I at least manage to give the killing blow to Celica, so now she’s level 3, after gaining a whopping 90 exp from killing him. Unfortunately, it was another mediocre level up. This is bad, because she doesn’t have two or even three promotions to rely on to fix her stats. She only has one.

Okay, well, we’re not doing ironman, so might as well at least check to see what this dracozombie battle is gonna be like without seraphim.

…A pretty nasty battle, all told. 12 def and res, 15 attack, and 5 speed. It’s nice that this game gives you the opportunity to retreat. Let’s see if we can get Celica to level 5 in these next two fights, then come back if possible. I really want the items they’ve got in there.

So, basically a similar fight to that one that gave me so much trouble, except with more archers and mercenaries. But of course, the enemy doesn’t have the leather shield, do they?

NO.

THEY DON'T.

I DO.

So of course, this is a cakewalk now. And once I dispose of the archers, I’ll be feeding every kill to Celica.

Still no speed, but Celica does gain power, luck and defense, which… okay power and defense is pretty great. But why is Kliff the only one who seems to have any luck with speed level ups!?

For some reason these mercenaries aren’t as eager to retreat despite healing tiles being readily available. Works for me, but it’s still weird. Anyway, one of the mercenaries critted Celica, but now thanks to her better stats and the leather shield, that means basically nothing.

Oh, so NOW they retreat. I know they had room to retreat before, but apparently they didn’t want to be seen as pussies and waited until two people wanted to retreat before either one would.

Celica finally reaches level 5 and learns seraphim, but only gains 1 power and nothing else. Whyyyyyyyyyyy.

Anyway, since there’s no more reason to play favorites with her or Genny, time to feed the remaining two kills to merc 1 and merc 2, who I suspect are going to be big players in the things to come.

With seraphim, the leather shield and a forest tile right in his 9 space threat range, the dracozombie is easily dispatched. Especially since in this game there’s only one. I don’t know if it was a critical by luck or a critical due to effective damage, but the dracozombie went down in one blow.

…Which means next up is exploring the cave. And that sounds like a MUCH better cliffhanger for next time. So let’s do that! Take care. Next time we’ll finish Chapter 2 and maybe do a bit of chapter 3!

[Jotari]

Nosferatu is hard coded to have a 50% hit rate regardless of all other circumstances as far as I remember. That's why it works on Duma.

[Alastor15243]

Just now, Jotari said:

Nosferatu is hard coded to have a 50% hit rate regardless of all other circumstances as far as I remember. That's why it works on Duma.

That's odd. I know I saw it looking more like a 40% at best on the hit bar in combat against speedy foes.

[Jotari]

35 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

That's odd. I know I saw it looking more like a 40% at best on the hit bar in combat against speedy foes.

Well I might be wrong, but that's what's in my head. It exclusively works different to all other magic in some way which results in the Grima glitch.

 

[Interdimensional Observer]

4 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

I remember nosferatu being a lot less painful to use in SoV, probably because that game had support bonuses that could boost magic hit rate.

And it got bumped to 60 Hit too, you'll take another 10% with something at a coinflip level.

4 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

That’s… a pretty racy animation for the female mages. She’s got a Lyn-level “is she even wearing panties” thigh slit going there, and when she casts magic, arcane winds blow her skirt up like a damned parachute.

To be fair, Boey is wearing something similar, according to the Gaiden manual's artwork:

Spoiler

SF has its all of its old and limited artwork here.

And it has the Fire Emblem The Complete FEs 2 & 3 artwork for every playable character in both games here. This includes a very different looking Boey:

Spoiler

Long story short, pants/a modest skirt or dress aren't mandatory for all mages of all genders until like FE6 or 7. Shorts and slit dresses were fine prior to that. And, Boey had an inconsistent hair color, which IS decided to change to white in SoV because why not?

Edited September 4, 2019 by Interdimensional Observer

[Espurrhoodie]

4 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

And it got bumped to 60 Hit too, you'll take another 10% with something at a coinflip level.

To be fair, Boey is wearing something similar, according to the Gaiden manual's artwork:

  Hide contents

SF has its all of its old and limited artwork here.

And it has the Fire Emblem The Complete FEs 2 & 3 artwork for every playable character in both games here. This includes a very different looking Boey:

  Hide contents

Long story short, pants/a modest skirt aren't mandatory for all mages of all genders until like FE6 or 7. And, Boey had an inconsistent hair color, which IS decided to change to white because why not?

Green Boey legit looks like Alm if he was a stripper.

I think Alm, Celica, Clive, and Mae had consistent designs.

EDIT: Why does Red Boey have weird feet?

Edited September 4, 2019 by Espurrhoodie

[Jotari]

9 hours ago, Espurrhoodie said:

Green Boey legit looks like Alm if he was a stripper.

I think Alm, Celica, Clive, and Mae had consistent designs.

EDIT: Why does Red Boey have weird feet?

Consistent up to a point. Celica kept the same general reddish hair (colour, because style changed considerably too, though given Gaiden being Gaiden, consistent hair colour is a major plus)+some kind of tiara, but her clothes (and naturally how the artstyle expressed faces) changed in each iteration. Don't forget hentai!Celica was the most modern interpretation we had of her for a few years.

Clive's Echoes artwork looking a lot like his original mug.

It's basically the exact same detail only with more shading and detail being allowed after the 3DS. But then this is what he looked like in Gaiden artwork.

Keeps the armour and (at a stretch) the hair colour. But that's about it. He has a way chunkier face with a scar on it for some reason.

Most noteable thing about Alm is that he has the standard Fire Emblem lord blue hair in Gaiden. You might think this was just early limitations and that he was always meant to be green due to the box art, but then you find artwork like this.

And people have even noted that his Awakening incarnation's hair looks more bluey green than straight up green. Also, tragically, he lost the dong guard in Echoes. He actually pulls it off almost nonsilly in that above artwork actually. As I also mention in my signature, Alm was designed to be less bishounen before Echoes too.

Mae though is absolutely the most consistent as her character design always boils down to bright pink pigtail girl. They really did a great job capturing her design in her NES mug.

And of course all this is relatively speaking. There are of course Gaiden characters who go through far more different designs. Like who would ever guess these two are meant to be the same person?

And Dean straight up lost his original design to a minor boss.

(and just glancing at his gallery page on the wiki, which of his eyes was actually missing jumped around randomly in his pre Echoes incarnations. I expect it's probably solidified now as it's consistent between both games, assuming none of the images I'm looking at are mirrored).

EDIT:

Actually Nomah might challenge Mae for the consistency award.

He's basically magnificent bearded sourcerer in all incarnations, but they've managed to keep the general design of his clothes, inclding the presence of a cape and armoured shoulders complete with a staff. His OG Gaiden artwork is the most dissimilar, missing a hat and not being purple, but I still have no problem believing it's meant to be the same guy.

Edited September 4, 2019 by Jotari

[Espurrhoodie]

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Consistent up to a point. Celica kept the same general reddish hair (colour, because style changed considerably too, though given Gaiden being Gaiden, consistent hair colour is a major plus)+some kind of tiara, but her clothes (and naturally how the artstyle expressed faces) changed in each iteration. Don't forget hentai!Celica was the most modern interpretation we had of her for a few years.

Clive's Echoes artwork looking a lot like his original mug.

It's basically the exact same detail only with more shading and detail being allowed after the 3DS. But then this is what he looked like in Gaiden artwork.

Keeps the armour and (at a stretch) the hair colour. But that's about it. He has a way chunkier face with a scar on it for some reason.

Most noteable thing about Alm is that he has the standard Fire Emblem lord blue hair in Gaiden. You might think this was just early limitations and that he was always meant to be green due to the box art, but then you find artwork like this.

And people have even noted that his Awakening incarnation's hair looks more bluey green than straight up green. Also, tragically, he lost the dong guard in Echoes. He actually pulls it off almost nonsilly in that above artwork actually. As I also mention in my signature, Alm was designed to be less bishounen before Echoes too.

Mae though is absolutely the most consistent as her character design always boils down to bright pink pigtail girl. They really did a great job capturing her design in her NES mug.

And of course all this is relatively speaking. There are of course Gaiden characters who go through far more different designs. Like who would ever guess these two are meant to be the same person?

And Dean straight up lost his original design to a minor boss.

(and just glancing at his gallery page on the wiki, which of his eyes was actually missing jumped around randomly in his pre Echoes incarnations. I expect it's probably solidified now as it's consistent between both games, assuming none of the images I'm looking at are mirrored).

EDIT:

Actually Nomah might challenge Mae for the consistency award.

He's basically magnificent bearded sourcerer in all incarnations, but they've managed to keep the general design of his clothes, inclding the presence of a cape and armoured shoulders complete with a staff. His OG Gaiden artwork is the most dissimilar, missing a hat and not being purple, but I still have no problem believing it's meant to be the same guy.

Correction: semi-consistent.

[Alastor15243]

Gaiden Day 4: Genny do change your number (from 12 to 1)

Well, we finally have one of the many regeneration items in the game. Recovering 5 HP per turn is a must-have ability for any spellcaster, and I’m giving this ring straight to Genny because that way she can actually make use of physic without having to be near the action.

This next part will net us a second one, a holy sword. And I’m a bit torn as to who to give it to. If I give it to Celica, she can use magic basically with impunity. But if I give it to Saber or Kamui, then I’ll have TWO units who can slay terrors instead of one. Ah, decisions, decisions… well, time to get it first before worrying about that.

It seems kind of pointless to have rooms in these dungeons at all if the battles are just going to be fixed when you get to the other side of them. What’s the point of the room if there’s nothing to do in it? Surely making the room the same shape as the battlefield would have at least been nice.

Also, I forgot to mention this last time, but it seems odd that the spell animation for seraphim, or “angel” as they call it here, is a ring of fairies.

But yeah, moving on, I send Genny, Celica, Saber and Kamui, the four units that matter in the long run, to take out these terrors.

Once again Celica does not gain speed, but she does gain defense, which I suppose is a luckier nab, but still, WILL SOMEBODY WHOSE NAME ISN’T KLIFF PROC SPEED ALREADY!?

These fountains are both basically worthless. Skill and HP. I’ll go with HP for Celica just for the hell of it.

So the “secret” extra length of the dungeon is… not very secret. The gaping, 3-space-wide hole behind the statue is… well… gaping. Of greater concern are those damned gargoyles you have to fight when you reach it. They can fly right past my lines and tear mages like Mae to shreds. Not that I’d miss her by this point, but I’m trying to avoid losing anybody. At least for now.

Thankfully seraphim obliterates them before they have a chance to act on being in range of anyone squishy, and Genny keeps my main fighters healthy from her safe little corner with the others.

Unfortunately, I was hit with a morton’s fork where both Saber and Kamui were at mostly half health, and I had to choose who to heal. I thought healing Saber would be best since they had identical defense but Kamui had one more HP, but Kamui died anyway. …Which means I gotta restart the whole dungeon.

Alright game, let’s play ball.

Well, Saber got speed on his new level up, so at least now I know it’s not just Kliff who can do it.

Celica, however, didn’t even get defense this time, just skill and HP, and yes, no speed.

Hmmm… why is the “save" option available in dungeons…?

…Huh. Looks like you CAN save in dungeons. Fascinating. Well, I may or may not take advantage of that depending on how long the dungeons get, but given the size of the battles involved, it seems more reasonable to have to do them all in one go.

Anyway, this one was pretty nerve-racking, juggling healing three units taking roughly equal damage while trying to keep the main force away from my more fragile units. But in the end I managed to succeed by grouping my three swordfighters together to limit the number of sides they could each be attacked from. Also, despite trying to keep Genny out of the fight, she got intercepted by two bonewalkers I forgot are faster than all base footsoldiers, gained another level, and got defense. She could actually promote soon at this rate.

At any rate, I now have the blessed sword, and since Saber is the faster swordfighter, I elected to give Kamui the blessed sword since it’s lighter than the steel one I gave Saber. Or wait… no… no, I want to make sure I have at least one unit as good at doubling as I possibly can get them in case a fast enemy shows up. So no, Saber gets the blessed sword.

It’s funny how, due to how the map labeling works, the game asks you if you want to ENTER a building every time you leave it.

Aaand it’s a ship full of mages. At least they aren’t 1-3 range like in Echoes, but this could get nasty. In fact, it may be a good idea to feed this map to Genny since she’s the only one who can’t randomly get bodied by magic criticals. I’ll have Celica stand by to guard the rest of the ship in case they take the other boarding plank.

…Yeah, scratch that. Genny can’t do enough damage given that they can all heal and do a freaky healing daisy chain.

Actually it seems that a fault in the AI makes that impossible. If they can attack Genny, they will, even if they can heal a friend. Which means that when I’m on the plank, the dark mage in melee range isn’t getting healed at all.

Celica’s level ups continue to be absolute garbage. I think I’ll wind up relying on her… shudder… promotion bases… to make her function late game.

Genny continues to get plentiful, but mediocre, level ups. Hell, if it takes long enough to kill this last stubborn heal-camping dark mage, she might even reach level 12!

…Let’s do it.

…Except not, because the map kicked me out for taking too long. But it let me keep all the exp.

Alright, point taken. I won’t abuse slow-ass battles to gain exp anymore.

…Huh. Okay, that’s odd. I wonder why it made me retreat when none of the enemies respawned. It’s just the one guy again.

Alright, I finally killed the sorcerer, and even when trying to do it as quickly as possible without risking death by magic crit, Genny still took so long that if I go to the shrine right now, having her solo it is definitely going to level her up to level 12.

So let’s do it. What the hell.

In the ensuing skirmish, Kamui and Saber helped clean up, and both gained defense on their level up. If they gain any more defense at all, they’ll actually be ahead of the myrmidon bases!

Anyway, Genny promotes to saint, and gains 4 defense and 9 HP. I was kinda hoping for better promotion gains considering she didn’t gain any speed at all, but her magic’s pretty badass, so I can’t complain that that didn’t improve.

Well, now that Genny has all of her good spells and doesn’t have to rely on nosferatu to gain exp anymore, I think we can safely say she doesn’t need to do any serious combat for a while. We can start focusing on the other three.

Anyway, that means it’s time for the end of chapter 2, and the beginning of chapter 3, because I’m still rarin’ to go.

Honestly, right now this game is way, way better than Dark Dragon. I always thought the game was weird in the context of the rest of the series, but I now realize how smart a lot of the decisions it made were for the time. This game does add a lot of new mechanics while taking away others, but there seems to be a consistent pattern of it taking away anything it would be too complicated to make bearable on this hardware, while adding in things that mechanically are a lot simpler for the player to handle. Removing weapon durability and instead limiting everyone to exactly one item eliminates basically 80% of what the previous game wasted my time with, and making magic be inherent and cost HP rather than require tomes also completely eliminates this frustrating inventory management nonsense. Making the maps all rout instead of seize also seems to serve to speed battles up, at least for now. It’ll certainly be less susceptible to warp abuse, but hopefully it also won’t drive me to the point where that’s the only way I can have fun.

And this is the first hint that Alm and Celica know each other, when Celica calls Mycen “Grandfather” too.

Alright, I now see the reason for that prologue they added in Echoes. Introducing the entire backstory about why they’re important to each other right before they get into a huge spat, like Gaiden’s doing right now, is just… yeah. It’s up there with the “oh, and by the way, Gra’s leader killed your father, so fight him” nonsense in Dark Dragon.

...Yeah, this is about what I expected. Celica is even more of a naive, wide-eyed pacifist idiot here than she was in Echoes. And it was pretty damned bad in Echoes still. She just doesn’t seem to understand the concept of war and finds it more likely that her own friend is just being a selfish glory-hound than accept that Rigel isn't going to diplomacy. At least here she doesn’t yell at him, but her passive aggressive “but I understand you won’t see reason, so I won’t stop you, goodbye, you unfortunate soul” implication with her parting words is somehow even more infuriating.

…Yeah, Jotari? The fact that an earthquake happens and then literally seconds later some guy is able to run over to Alm to report back and confirm that Celica is okay… I’d say that’s one more point for the “Valentia is fucking tiny” theory.

Alright, let’s move on to Alm again. I’ll be doing these two one after the other, doing all of Alm's side and then all of Celica's side, to minimize the number of reinforcements I provoke to arrive.

So, on to the first chapter 3 Alm map! …In which we’re introduced to witches. Honestly, at immediate glance I can’t remember any differences between their sprite and Mae’s.

They have 5 AS and 13 attack power, which means that they very nearly one-round Lukas, but Forsythe should be fine. As should everyone else. I just need to keep everyone together until the witch makes her move so I can take her out right away. Being able to teleport literally everywhere is going to be frustrating later, but for now it’s just one, and I can handle it.

On the plus side, other than that, this map has all the same enemies we encountered in chapter 1, so there’s still some time to get my army up to speed after that rather skewed distribution of experience in chapter 1. I’m going to prioritize getting Clive, Grey, Alm and Kliff experience, roughly in that order (Clive is just about to promote), with the rest taking potshots when possible.

It also occurs to me that I have yet to see a single enemy with an item that I couldn’t take from them after they died. Now on the one hand this is cool, in that it simplifies things immensely from DD where they just didn’t even let you see what you could get from enemies, and that it averts the classic video game question of why the fuck you can’t just take shit that enemies clearly have and are using. On the other, it does limit what the enemy can do, and it especially limits enemy bow users since they’ll always be out-ranged by your own archers.

I give Clive the horseslayer and send him after the cavalry, while I then have Silque warp Clair off to fight the stubbornly non-teleporting witch who’s clearly biding her time until she can make the difference between life and death. I pick Clair because as underwhelming as she is, she’s the only one with good resistance who isn’t a mage and thus can actually damage her.

Seeing her battle animation, I’m still having trouble telling witches and female mages apart.

…Okay this is weird. I think the calculations on the Serenes Forest site are wrong, because effective physical weapons aren’t doing nearly as much damage as the stated formula suggests. Clive’s only doing 16 damage with a horseslayer. He has 15 attack and the enemies have 5 defense. According to the formula on the site, he should be doing 40 damage, but he’s only doing 16. Since the horseslayer is adding 3 might to his actual might of 12, that suggests the effective damage formula is… just what it always was, just with weapons with way worse attack. The horseslayer’s might goes from 3 to 9, doing 16 instead of 10. I’ll have to check this and maybe point out a mistake on the site later. For that matter, I never checked if that’s actually how seraphim works either, even if seraphim clearly does a shitton of damage.

Clair got a terrible level up (what else is new), but is doing quite well against the witch. Unfortunately, she’s also attracted unwanted attention from a knight, and I’ll have to warp someone in to save her probably.

Honestly, Tobin’s speed base is holding out a lot longer than I thought it would. Being able to double from 5 spaces away with a steel bow against basically everything but cavalry is pretty fantastic. Unfortunately, promoting to a sniper isn’t going to improve that speed at all. It isn’t until bow knight that promoting’s going to do his speed any good.

This is pretty tricky. Damage and healing are significantly reduced, which presents an interesting challenge that I’d enjoy seeing in a more modern fire emblem game. See, it’s pretty difficult and generally unrealistic for any of my units to one-round any of the enemy units without some absurdly good matchups, which means that I have to deal with them being around my units for a lot longer. Combined with the fact that healing is a lot trickier in this game and you’re generally only provided with one healer per team, this means that you have to really think long-term about damage management and who you position where, because you you can’t just solve encounters in a single turn and then heal up like you can in other games.

Alm, while he’s struggling to gain speed like everyone else, did manage to get yet another level of power and defense, which is awesome!

Now all that’s left is the knight boss and the witch, who I am really, really nervous about the movements of. So I took a gamble and warped Tobin over so he could wound her into retreat mode. That seemed to work, but now the second she’s healthy she’ll be able to attack whoever, and now Silque is weak enough to die even from a magical attack. I’ll have to have Tobin try to kill her even when she’s on the heal tile.

Miraculously, despite the ludicrously terrible odds, he succeeds.

Silque uses her last spare drop of HP to heal up Merric so he can take on this Zack guy, leaving her at 1 HP and no safe opportunities to get more.

Thankfully, despite missing more often than I’d like throughout the map, Kliff pulls through and takes him out immediately afterwards. He then proceeds to get skill, speed, luck, and the spell excalibur. SWEEEET. This just skyrocketed his attack speed on player phase by THREE. All of that panic about whether or not he’ll keep up? Suddenly gone. I think he’s home free with a fair share of the exp for the rest of the game.

And now that means we move on to a bunch of enemy sorcerers, which means Python and Tobin will be seeing a lot of action, as will Clair probably. But first, time to promote Clive because I can.

He didn’t gain much, just 1 speed, one defense and 2 HP, but those are good things to get anyway.

Tobin’s probably going to promote after the next battle, but I’m not going to grind for it, I’ll just let it happen naturally and then come back. I wish the game didn’t make you fight enemies to get to the shrines.

On the plus side, I’m seeing nothing in terms of reinforcements yet. Maybe they were a thing the remake added and I just imagined memories of that in the NES? I don’t remember getting this far anyway.

Curious. Apparently mages get to travel unhindered through forests. Can’t imagine why, but it’s useful, I’ll give it that. Unfortunately, as I discover when I look up to check, they seem to be just as hindered as everyone else on sand. Figures. That would be a weird thing for the remake to change.

Anyway, trying to take them out with just the archers turned out to be a bad idea, and I’m really glad in hindsight that I advanced Clive and even Clair just in case. They managed to keep things from getting really, really nasty by taking out two of them on player phase.

Oh thank goodness. For a second I thought I screwed up and Clive would die, but no, it seems this game also has a sort of obsession with the protagonist going on, because after the first of the two remaining in-range mages softened Clive up, the remaning one went for Alm instead because he was in range.

…Nope, looks like there ARE reinforcements that show up on the map. Of course there are. Well, I’ve still gotta promote Tobin, so…

It’s a bit annoying that you can’t go past Zofia castle, you have to go through it.

Oh shit, he’s sending out lots of paladins. Right, well, okay, this will be our last promotion backtrack then, until we get to that next shrine.

Kliff gains another level up in the process, gaining power, defense and HP. Considering he’s out of the speed woods, that’s a fantastic level up!

…Grey, of all people, got speed.

AS DID ALM!

Is the curse finally broken!?

Anyway, the stat boost to sniper improves Tobin’s power by a little and his defense by a lot, which is great, honestly.

…Looks like the castle isn’t a safe spot to stand, and that cavaliers can ambush attack you even when you’re standing on castle tiles on the world map. Plus side, this gives you terrain advantage on a cool map you only get to see when this happens! And the enemy starts far enough away that the fact that they go first barely matters. At least after I warp Alm to block the bottleneck between the castle walls.

The sniper sprite is… well… it’s so badass that it’s almost comical. This huge, armored warrior pulls out a giant compound collapsible bow that springs to life in his hands, he fires off a huge dramatic shot, and then puts the bow away.

I love it.

Anyway, these are some tough reinforcements. They’re a paladin and a lot of level 5 cavaliers, as opposed to the level 1 cavaliers we’ve been fighting, which means that at least against these, Merric’s speed isn’t good enough anymore. At least not without Excalibur. On the plus side, it probably means they give more experience!

Anyway, that was fairly easy, owing almost entirely to the terrain we had. But see, we have a problem. I have to fight that exact same battle. Again. Except not in a fort.

…Well, that’s as much of a cliffhanger as I’m going to get. So come back tomorrow to see what happens!

[hinode]

It's been over a decade since I played Gaiden so take this with a huge grain of salt, but IIRC effective weapons are 3x might as usual. This means that the generic 0 mt bow does nothing extra to fliers.

The one glaring exception to this is Falcon Knights vs monsters, perhaps since they might not have a weapon equipped. So instead they get 3x attack power, which winds up being completely insane if you do have a good lance equipped.

[Jotari]

12 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Gaiden Day 4: Genny do change your number (from 12 to 1)

 

This is pretty tricky. Damage and healing are significantly reduced, which presents an interesting challenge that I’d enjoy seeing in a more modern fire emblem game. See, it’s pretty difficult and generally unrealistic for any of my units to one-round any of the enemy units without some absurdly good matchups, which means that I have to deal with them being around my units for a lot longer. Combined with the fact that healing is a lot trickier in this game and you’re generally only provided with one healer per team, this means that you have to really think long-term about damage management and who you position where, because you you can’t just solve encounters in a single turn and then heal up like you can in other games.

This is something I really like about Gaiden and its remake. Low enemy quantity, high enemy quality. It's one of the points I use to defend Gaiden's map design. The maps in this games are less maps you progress to towards and end point, and more like an arena you fight on. Battles are quick with the first few turns being used to set up the approach and then utilize the terrain to most effectively engage the enemy. There are some exceptions to this of course, especially on Celica's side (which people cherry pick as the bad design), but that's generally how the game is designed.

[Alastor15243]

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

This is something I really like about Gaiden and its remake. Low enemy quantity, high enemy quality. It's one of the points I use to defend Gaiden's map design. The maps in this games are less maps you progress to towards and end point, and more like an arena you fight on. Battles are quick with the first few turns being used to set up the approach and then utilize the terrain to most effectively engage the enemy. There are some exceptions to this of course, especially on Celica's side (which people cherry pick as the bad design), but that's generally how the game is designed.

I will concede my opinion of the game has drastically improved during this playthrough.

 

Edit: It happened. I just read the part again and I accidentally called Kliff Merric. I knew it would happen eventually.

Edited September 5, 2019 by Alastor15243

[Alastor15243]

Gaiden Day 5: Oooh, Mathilda!

I have a feeling Clive and his horseslayer are going to be very instrumental to this victory. My main concern is if I can keep everyone who ISN’T instrumental out of the way. The fact that I can’t bench them from active deployment is getting kind of annoying for somebody who doesn’t want to use them but also doesn’t want them to die.

Getting Silque warp was TOTALLY worth it. Beyond any shadow of a doubt. Especially with how annoying and uncontrollable unit placement can be. But I really, really want to give her a healing ring soon so she can do it more than twice per map and not be at death’s door and too risky to try to use nosferatu with. But at any rate, I move Clive, and warp Alm, onto two forests, with Alm going far deeper in to try and soften up the cavalry. With no magical enemies, with the forest tile, and with his obscene defense of 11, he’ll be fine, and he was close to leveling up anyway so I wanted to guarantee he got in on the action.

Python unfortunately starts way too far away from the action to do any good without warping, and I’m not sure if it’ll be worth it for him.

Whoops. My mistake, there is a mage. That’ll be a problem, so I’m going to have to do something about that. Hopefully Tobin can lend a hand with him.

Alm leveled up and got nothing but defense, but on the other hand, he got defense.

Also, I forgot how fast these level 5 cavalry are. Clive can’t double them, which is… very unfortunate. He does still do 14 damage to them with the horseslayer, though, which is great.

Looks like those enclosed heal tiles are surrounded by outdoor walls, not indoor ones, and Clair can fly over and on them. Huh. I always assumed those were buildings with roofs.

I don’t want to jinx it, but the forest doesn’t seem that much trickier of a place to fight them than the castle. It’s not nearly as ideal for feeding kills to high priority units, but the number of forest tiles with no adjacent forest tiles makes for some very choice tactical placements. If I can just get rid of that damned mage, I’ll be in the clear.

In a ballsy but maybe not wise strategy, I warp Tobin onto the heal tile on the enemy’s side, right by the mage. This will give him nowhere to run to, but a treat tactical position to fight the mage from and safety from being caught without a means to heal given that Silque isn’t Genny.

Kliff got another magic + defense level in the process of cleaning up the last few enemies who insisted on staying on frustrating terrain. I’m hoping he starts getting more speed soon, but for now, this is making him basically an unkillable demigod. He does more damage to himself than enemies do to him.

…So. This is what the Berkut fight was like originally. Without Berkut. Just three paladins. I remember that the first time I did this fight in Echoes, it was with reinforcements on the space, and I didn’t immediately realize because the number of enemies it had seemed entirely appropriate. This is… well okay let’s actually fight them before judging.

The only real difficulty with this map is that the game forces all of my most fragile units to get closest to the enemy. I did my best to make my main force as juicy a target as I could, but there was no way when Silque, Clair, and my most fragile frontliner Grey were all inescapably in their movement range. Thankfully there are plenty of forest tiles they can use, but even then the paladin got lucky and got Silque down to one HP immediately.

…Yeah, I think it just might be impossible without getting obscenely lucky with Silque’s dodges. Which means…

Hm… I wonder if shifting unit order on the world map has any effect. I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that Grey, Silque and Clair are all right next to each other on the name menu. What if I swapped Silque… with Kliff?

MUUUUUCH better! Now Silque is safely with the rest of my strong allies, and the closest targets are Grey, who can easily reach a forest tile and avoid being doubled at least, Clair, who can flee into and through the forests, and Kliff… who is KLIFF. This is still absurdly awkward compared to modern Fire Emblem games, but a major improvement over FE1, that’s for sure.

As if that weren’t enough, Grey gets a lucky crit and one-shots the first paladin to attack him. And seeing how much experience he gets inspires me to get him to level 7, so that as soon as I get the opportunity, he can promote at last.

Yeah, really, the only thing remotely challenging about that was figuring out the placement dilemma. After that was solved, there just weren’t enough enemies to really make this challenging, even taking that lucky crit into account. Anyway, onto the village!

…OOH! I would have guessed the trader was a new addition to the remake! That’s awesome! But right now there’s really nothing worth sending to Celica’s party. Really, Alm’s side is the one in need of GETTING stuff.

Looks like we have a quest to rescue a girl from a shrine, and…

…OOH! Luthier! He’s… okay… but he’s nowhere near as good as Kliff. Kliff outstrips him in basically every stat that matters to a mage, except power where Luthier wins by a single point.

Unfortunately the time I spent in the village bought Dozer enough time to assemble more reinforcements. Alright… let’s see what fighting him with those reinforcements would be like, just for the hell of it.

…It doesn’t look AWFUL. For those who haven’t seen the map, it’s a big square room on a mountain with a long staircase leading up to it, and a large prison cell with Mathilda inside and archers ready to attack her. But in this game, without any real bows equipped, the archers can only attack Mathilda one at a time, because only one space outside of the cage is in reach of her. And we can always warp Kliff in to help out while standing on one of the heal tiles.

If I recall correctly (I may not), stairs don’t count as floor tiles for evasion either, so it might not even be a pain to deal with the bottlenecked cavalry. Might even be a good training opportunity for my archers! All assuming that Mathilda’s AI isn’t monumentally stupid. I will have to re-arrange some positioning though.

Okay, if I want to have the best first turn, I want Silque to be close to Kliff, so Silque should swap with Grey, then Python with Lukas. Alright, BREAK!

Holy shit. Mathilda’s stats are insane. I already thought Clive was pretty good, but this girl is nuts! And what’s more, apparently her growths are better than Clive’s in everything that matters, too! Oh, I really hope she doesn’t make it a pain to get her. Especially since Tobin just gained speed, which puts him at… 7? Even with a steel bow? Did he gain another point of speed and I missed it? Anyway, this officially means that becoming a bow knight isn’t going to improve his speed at all, but having that speed early is awesome!

More importantly, Kliff is warped onto a heal tile with access to the only spot on the map that the archers can (currently) attack Mathilda from. Hopefully she won’t run around too much and wind up in a more compromising position. I really wish I could tell her what to do. Seeing her blue and uncontrollable just feels so wrong.

…Okay, Dozer might make this difficult. He has a deeply uncomfortably high attack stat, so high that it makes Kliff’s defense look mediocre. He missed, thankfully, and he’ll probably go down quickly to magic, but I’ll need to get lucky here.

…Yeah, I think I made a terrible mistake. Kliff is immediately surrounded by knights, and they’re strong enough that he’s not safe even on a heal tile unless he dodges well. If Genny were here we’d be completely and totally fine, but she isn’t, so we have basically no means to heal him beyond the paltry amount he gets from the space he’s on. This was a very, very, very foolish idea. He can’t even heal back the HP he gets just from casting spells!

…And he died. Well. That’s what I get for being cocky and not even reading the enemy stats, especially in a game where it’s much less of a chore. Plus side: Mathilda didn’t move, so there’s no serious need to take out those archers quickly. They’re inaccurate and only do 2 damage, so I should be good for at least a little bit of caution here.

And thus I lose Tobin’s speed level up. But again, that was my bad decision, I deserved that.

I’m going to use the opportunity to, whenever I get the chance, at least TRY to feed kills to Silque. It would be great if we could at least promote her eventually and not kill her momentum forever.

Unfortunately, the first opportunity to do so fails pretty hard because Alm gets a crit. Well at least he’s close to another level.

…Also there’s a sorcerer in a fort nearby casting fortify. That’s… not good. Gotta get rid of him somehow.

Silque does at least manage to kill the Paladin, giving us a continuous streak of killing one enemy a turn. And Alm finishes up the sorcerer that came with the reinforcement party, getting a speed level up! Shit, now I feel a lot of pressure to not screw this up.

…Oh shit. There’s a cantor. And he has summon. That… that really, really scares me. But rushing in won’t end well. If it didn’t end well for Kliff, it won’t end well for anyone. Let’s just hope Mathilda doesn’t keep getting unlucky with dodges, she’s lost 4 HP to two attacks already.

…FUCK. I REMEMBER THE CANTOR NOW. He started summoning zombies, and some of them got in the cage. They can only do one damage, but that’s going to add up FAST. And what’s worse, they provoked Mathilda to move.

The wizard with fortify also has slime, which is a super powerful spell. This isn’t somebody I can take out with units I can spare from the main assault. He’ll have to wait, and I’ll have to just deal with him in the meantime.

Thankfully, we finally broke through before Mathilda’s even reached half HP. We should be good if we can just get rid of everyone threatening Mathilda.

The fact that Silque doesn’t have physic feels deliberate here. And I will admit it’s giving me some interesting dilemmas.

Miraculously, my formation was absolutely perfect to deal with the zombies who came to try and block my path.

It was a straight line of:

Healthy Zombie
Zombie who was injured from having just attacked Alm
Alm
Luthier
Kliff

Kliff thundered the injured zombie, Alm advanced in to attack the healthy one, and then Luthier went in to excalibur the now injured zombie to death, and then Silque advanced up to the space Luthier was once in to heal him.

This promptly provokes the wrath of Dozer, who attacks Alm and does 10 damage.

And thus we have to retreat again, because there’s no way I can beat him fighting at the other side of the bottleneck where his archers have all the maneuverability advantage and I can barely fit in two mages to fight him, and even then only if one of them uses thunder. I do the retreat immediately, hoping that the zombies don’t make it too hard to regain the lost ground. On the plus side, the cantor’s next batch of zombies don’t spawn in the cage, and Grey has finally made it to the fort to join the fight!

Dozer promptly goes down like a bitch to the combined firepower of Luthier and Kliff, and gives way, way better foreshadowing dialogue about Alm’s true origins. His dying words in Echoes just pretty much gave it away.

And with that, we’ve finally broken through! Now to take out the other knights and save Mathilda from that cantor and the remaining archers, then fight the socerer!

Kliff leveled up, but only got Skill and HP, which is… well considering he’s my best unit right now that’s not the end of the world, but on the other hand, he’s my best unit because of all the levels I’ve been putting into him. But on my mutant third hand, he was the only one really worth putting all those levels into besides Alm and Silque. And on my mutant fourth hand which has mutant camaraderie and sides with the third, Luthier got a level up too, and it was even worse.

The last archer has been slain. It’s pretty much inconceivable that Mathilda will die at this point, but I won’t get careless.

…It’s done. Mathilda is safe. All that remains is to kill the sorcerer who’s been spamming fortify.

…On the other side of the map.

…I’m going to be smart about this, but I’m not going to make this a slog. I’m going to get Silque on that heal tile, and then start warping people in. First to lure the sorcerer off his heal tile, then to plug up the heal tile… and then more if necessary to provide backup if we start getting our asses kicked.

I sent Python in first, since he can take potshots from behind the wall once his initial role of luring the bastard off the heal tile is done. Thankfully the guy used fortify a lot and is currently at low health.

…If this fucker gets a critical, I’m letting Python die.

He doesn’t. In fact he misses entirely, but unfortunately I forgot that Kliff wasn’t at full health and had to heal him up, losing the opportunity because now the sorcerer wants to fully heal up for some reason before attacking Python again.

Well, if he’s gonna play like that, so will I. I’m gonna heal up everyone too.

He finally decides to attack Python, hitting this time, but getting off the heal tile and taking two hits from Python, who levels up. Well done, getting close to promotion there!

And with that, Kliff warps in, and unless we get psychotically unlucky, we should have him. Just to be sure, I warp Tobin in too.

Tobin winds up killing the sorcerer AND getting a speed level! Go Tobin!

Unfortunately, it looks like that won’t stop the reinforcements, as immediately upon beating that group, the floodgates spawn new ones. A mage team. Damn it. Alright, time to get the royal sword at least.

…And Mathilda. Huh. I just kind of assumed she’d joined already. Weird to see her locked in a completely different room than the one she was clearly locked in for that whole battle.

At any rate, she’s awesome, and you know who else is awesome? Alm with the royal sword. He now has 19 attack power, a 100+ hit rate, and around 28 crit, without any reduction to his speed! AND IT FUCKING HEALS HIM TOO.

Also, the lack of that big dramatic royal sword cutscene is indirectly an improvement: again, it makes the reveal of who Alm really is way, way more subtle. The game doesn’t make a huge deal about the fact that it’s probably going straight into Alm’s hands, it just does it unless he’s carrying a shield or the levin sword already. The clues are still there for the player to piece together if they read all of the NPC dialogue and pay attention, but they don’t outright go “you’re wielding a sword only those with royal blood can wield! Oh goodness gracious me, whatever could this happenstance possibly be implying!?”

Moving on...

…Oh wait. Those weren’t reinforcements. That was just Tatara showing up.

Well then, good thing we’re right by a shrine cave! Let’s rush it and get some promotions!

Well, okay, at first this was downright terrifying. A huge map with two armies of 10 mounted units, one on each side, 18 cavaliers and two paladins. But the vast majority of these cavaliers, all but 4 of them, are level 1. The same ones we’ve been fighting for a while. So I think we should be able to handle this easily even considering all the dead weight we’re carrying around.

I just need to switch my formation a bit. This is annoying, but given the limited number of units whose position actually matters, I’m not complaining too much. For now.

First, let’s have Clive stand on a western forest, with Mathilda and Kliff coming in to back him up. If necessary. It probably won’t be considering the fact that he’s got a horseslayer, but maybe for the level 5s and the paladin. Good to stay careful.

Next… let’s have a bit of fun and see how Alm fares soloing the ENTIRE EASTERN FLANK.

It was an absolute bloodbath. None of them stood a chance. The two level 5 cavaliers on his side at least had enough bulk to survive a round with him, but even then one of them fell to a critical and the other fell to Alm’s next player phase attack. There were no survivors but the ones too far away to reach their deaths.

Alm leveled up. Just defense, but more defense is always awesome, and it’s making his score in the thing frankly insane.

Also, it would be a serious shame if I wanted to use more than two lance users right now, considering I only have two lances. Physical fighters really need weapons in order to be useful, so it's kind of a pain that they're in such short supply when they make you deploy everyone.

Anyway, it was an absolute slaughter, none of them stood a chance. Now, on to the shrine to get some…

…

…Gargoyles. An entire enemy army full of fucking gargoyles.

Doubling everyone, doing 11 damage, which is a lot more than some of my squishier units can handle…

…AND NINE FUCKING DEFENSE.

This… This isn’t fair. I can probably get my good units out of this alive, but how the hell am I supposed to protect-

…Wait.

This isn’t all of my units.

It’s just my first 10.

So… I can protect two of them.

Ultimately I decide that since everyone but Mathilda can be doubled, I need to get rid of anyone with bad defense who can’t be useful, so I get rid of Clair and Lukas and swap them out for Luthier and Mathilda.

I form a defensive semicircle around the small opening at the southern end of my side, and hope I can keep everyone healthy long enough to take the gargoyles out with magical attacks and archery. I just barely have enough “sturdy” units to form this barrier loose enough for my squishier ranged attackers to move around inside of it and feasibly make potshots.

My efforts are stymied by Tobin getting hit by two crits in a row, causing him to take priority with the healers for way too long.

But eventually the tactic worked. Making my wall bizarrely shaped to make sure the weakest links had the fewest exposed sides to the enemy really, really helped. And Mathilda gained power and defense on a level up, which is a fantastic and welcome addition to her amazing bases.

Alm however only got luck, but hey, I’m just glad to have gotten out of that alive. It’s rather impressive that this game managed to make turtling both necessary AND difficult, and also kind of satisfying and fun. But really, considering how much this strategy depended on having my whole party and how important victory depended on positioning I was incapable of changing once the battle began, this game feels way less designed for ironman than FE1 was.

…And yet in several other ways it feels way BETTER designed for it. Unavoidable crits and extremely unreliable hit rates aside, this game doesn’t have ambush spawns or other dirty tricks in general, which is awesome. That just takes a lot of the stress out of the experience, knowing that the game isn’t going to spawn in a ton of enemies and then attack you with them before you can react. The only reinforcements in this game are summons, and they have to wait a turn to move. You get a fighting chance against everything the game has.

And with that, we rescue the girl I completely forgot about and gain access to the shrine!

Grey becomes a myrmidon and gains the best promotion bonuses we’ve seen so far. But that speaks almost as much to how shitty Grey’s growths are as it does to how good the mercenary line is.

The shrine offers HP and XP, and it’s a no-brainer which I pick. XP obviously. Free leveling is awesome when I’m not grinding. The only issue is who to give it to. I could give one level to Python to let him promote right now and keep him from falling behind (which he’s been in perpetual danger of doing for a while now), or I could give all of them to Alm and Kliff, the ones who would gain the most from a free level given that they’re level 10 and gain so little from…

…or I could give all three of them to Silque. And make her a sister right now.

…LET’S DO IT.

…

…Oh that’s not fucking fair.

It doesn’t level you up like the remake does. It just maxes out your exp at 99.

…Fuck it, I know I’ll be making return trips here soon, and now I have a solid strategy for those gargoyles. I’ll save the rest of it for Silque later.

Anyway, making a quick stop at the village rewards us with the holy lance, which is going immediately to Mathilda, who can now double and have effective might on gargoyles. That’s going to make heading back there much more of a breeze.

However, looking at my playtime today, I think that’s a good place to leave off. We’ll get started on finishing up Alm’s side tomorrow!

[Shadow Mir]

On 8/23/2019 at 4:47 PM, Alastor15243 said:

For now, however, it’s time to focus on my new air force. I’ve always wanted to create an air force in a Fire Emblem game, using a ton of fliers, but it’s never seemed a practical, realistic, or bright idea. Here, however, one plus side of the slow pace is that it’s made raising a bunch of fliers into a massive no-brainer. 

Any reason why you came to that conclusion (the part about having an air force never being bright, realistic, or practical)?

On 8/23/2019 at 9:29 PM, Interdimensional Observer said:

I'm not aware of what sources outright say this, but I have heard secondhand that FE was originally meant to be played ironman. Characters like the excessive cavaliers exist in case someone dies. Sure they'll be inferior to your first picks, but that is the price of your "stupidity" I suppose.

From a conversation I had on the subject, the issue with that is threefold: one, the replacement units tend to be too poor to last very long themselves. Two, it fails to account for the fact that in the event that players lose a unit, they might be more inclined to restart to keep their better unit than to try to train up an inferior replacement. Three, trying to train up a replacement might be more trouble than it's worth.

[Punished Dayni]

On 9/3/2019 at 10:18 PM, Alastor15243 said:

So according to this dialogue between Celica and Nomah, the soil of Valentia has been barren for three years. That’s… an awfully long time. Kinda funny that she’s only setting out now. Maybe she’s been fighting to do it for years and only now is she old enough? Except Nomah doesn’t seem to have been that difficult to convince.

I feel like it's probably mostly gone barren. We also know Novis at least has fishing in SoV.  What with Archanea being closer there too, trade with them might be feasible, but of course Archanea isn't exactly something they know about..

Maybe others beside Nomah were against it and agitated before now and now either they'd stood back or Celica's decided to go anyway, damm the consequences. Considering she's a secret princess, hiding her would be considered sensible.

But that implies there was that much thought into that specific plot point.

On 9/3/2019 at 10:18 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Anyway, time to rescue Valbar. And it seems that this time, green units are blue rather than red. At first this made me excited that I might be able to control them already, but no, looks like they’re probably going to be just as suicidal as last time. Which means I can’t stall to feed all of these kills to Genny, which means it’s time to give everyone a piece of the pie when necessary like it’s a normal fucking Fire Emblem game.

I’m probably going to be trading the shield around a lot to manipulate who the AI thinks is the juiciest target, which should help avoid having to heal too much.

Looks like I may have spoken too soon. Kamui and Valbar are actually kicking the pirates’ asses. The real danger might be if they kill the boss before I can.

You can get green units to retreat.

You just have to pull out of the map itself and they'll not be there the next time.

Pretty sure it's the same with SoV.

On 9/4/2019 at 9:29 PM, Alastor15243 said:

It also occurs to me that I have yet to see a single enemy with an item that I couldn’t take from them after they died. Now on the one hand this is cool, in that it simplifies things immensely from DD where they just didn’t even let you see what you could get from enemies, and that it averts the classic video game question of why the fuck you can’t just take shit that enemies clearly have and are using. On the other, it does limit what the enemy can do, and it especially limits enemy bow users since they’ll always be out-ranged by your own archers.

Something SoV fixed.

On 9/4/2019 at 9:29 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Silque uses her last spare drop of HP to heal up Merric so he can take on this Zack guy, leaving her at 1 HP and no safe opportunities to get more.

No no no, Luthier's the one who knows Merric.

Is DD having that much of an impact on you?

On 9/4/2019 at 9:29 PM, Alastor15243 said:

This is pretty tricky. Damage and healing are significantly reduced, which presents an interesting challenge that I’d enjoy seeing in a more modern fire emblem game. See, it’s pretty difficult and generally unrealistic for any of my units to one-round any of the enemy units without some absurdly good matchups, which means that I have to deal with them being around my units for a lot longer. Combined with the fact that healing is a lot trickier in this game and you’re generally only provided with one healer per team, this means that you have to really think long-term about damage management and who you position where, because you you can’t just solve encounters in a single turn and then heal up like you can in other games.

Well, that's true now.

Late game does give you more healers in the form of mages, but the lack of healers early on complicates tanking in this game.

On 9/4/2019 at 9:29 PM, Alastor15243 said:

 Thankfully, despite missing more often than I’d like throughout the map, Kliff pulls through and takes him out immediately afterwards. He then proceeds to get skill, speed, luck, and the spell excalibur. SWEEEET. This just skyrocketed his attack speed on player phase by THREE. All of that panic about whether or not he’ll keep up? Suddenly gone. I think he’s home free with a fair share of the exp for the rest of the game.

It's a good spell.

He gets it two levels later in SoV, a big part of why people really like Sage Tobin over Kliff.

On 9/4/2019 at 9:29 PM, Alastor15243 said:

…Looks like the castle isn’t a safe spot to stand, and that cavaliers can ambush attack you even when you’re standing on castle tiles on the world map. Plus side, this gives you terrain advantage on a cool map you only get to see when this happens! And the enemy starts far enough away that the fact that they go first barely matters. At least after I warp Alm to block the bottleneck between the castle walls.

That map is one nice map conceptually.

Bit of a pain when you realise you have to fight the reinforcement, but it doesn't really hold you back that much.

Though why is there two big entrances to the castle? Is that why Dozer had such an easy time couping his way in?

On 9/4/2019 at 9:29 PM, Alastor15243 said:

 The sniper sprite is… well… it’s so badass that it’s almost comical. This huge, armored warrior pulls out a giant compound collapsible bow that springs to life in his hands, he fires off a huge dramatic shot, and then puts the bow away.

I love it.

I would probably switch those adjectives around but same otherwise.

On 9/4/2019 at 9:29 PM, Alastor15243 said:

Anyway, these are some tough reinforcements. They’re a paladin and a lot of level 5 cavaliers, as opposed to the level 1 cavaliers we’ve been fighting, which means that at least against these, Merric’s speed isn’t good enough anymore. At least not without Excalibur. On the plus side, it probably means they give more experience!

I mean, I see why you'd make the comparison, but you stop that.

23 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Also, the lack of that big dramatic royal sword cutscene is indirectly an improvement: again, it makes the reveal of who Alm really is way, way more subtle. The game doesn’t make a huge deal about the fact that it’s probably going straight into Alm’s hands, it just does it unless he’s carrying a shield or the levin sword already. The clues are still there for the player to piece together if they read all of the NPC dialogue and pay attention, but they don’t outright go “you’re wielding a sword only those with royal blood can wield! Oh goodness gracious me, whatever could this happenstance possibly be implying!?”

I know that Gaiden's older than me, but yeah that cutscene was too gratuitous.

23 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Also, the lack of that big dramatic royal sword cutscene is indirectly an improvement: again, it makes the reveal of who Alm really is way, way more subtle. The game doesn’t make a huge deal about the fact that it’s probably going straight into Alm’s hands, it just does it unless he’s carrying a shield or the levin sword already. The clues are still there for the player to piece together if they read all of the NPC dialogue and pay attention, but they don’t outright go “you’re wielding a sword only those with royal blood can wield! Oh goodness gracious me, whatever could this happenstance possibly be implying!?”

It also led to me being annoyed Celica couldn't use it in SoV.

[Alastor15243]

27 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

Any reason why you came to that conclusion (the part about having an air force never being bright, realistic, or practical)?

To be clear, I'm talking about having like five or more fliers on a single file, and a lot of games don't even have that many. The best way to make it happen is with class changing, and of the games with class changing that I regularly enjoy playing (Fates), there have been various considerations at one time or another that have just never made it feel like a great idea to try at the time outside of my mounted-only challenge run.

@Dayni Yes, I an well aware of that freudian slip. I knew it would happen eventually, you'll notice I commented on it earlier. Hopefully it'll stop now that I have more mages.

 

Gaiden Day 6: Taking the sluice gate!

Alright. So. Considering that by the time I get back to the shrine, Silque will be ready for another go…

…I’ve decided to repeat that gargoyle fight a few more times to use up that fountain and promote Silque. Man I wish this game didn’t force so many grinding opportunities on you, but hey, it’ll be a good tanking drill too. And if I lose even once, I’ll give up on the endeavor and move on without having saved at all since I just booted the game up now. It’ll make for a good challenge that way, a good way of proving mastery. I guess in that way the experience gain will feel more earned.

Okay, mistake number one: I forgot that I didn’t actually equip the holy lance on Mathilda last time. Gonna have to make sure to fix that on round two.

Silque’s accuracy with nosferatu against these speedsters is absolutely garbage, but thankfully she only needed the pity exp of merely attempting to attack in order to level up. She gains magic and HP. Still no speed.

I almost entirely forgot I promoted Grey, the class visual change is so subtle.

Clive got speed, which is awesome, but doesn’t really help here unfortunately.

Tobin gains skill and, amazingly, another point of speed!

This is all surprisingly easy once you get the hang of it. Lucky I hadn’t lost anyone. Honestly, it’s weird how much fun it is to build your own human fort and do damage management and artillery fire from inside of it. Kind of like an actual battle formation.

Of course, now that Mathilda has the holy lance it’s kind of just a massive bloodbath. But in the process, I get Python that last level to sniper by getting him some convenient potshots. Man, if I knew that there would only be one bow for so long, maybe I wouldn’t have made two snipers. I’d have enough lances for three paladins now, but I’ve been doing the whole game forcing Python to fight at 1-3 range with chip damage. Hopefully this boost will help.

Round three, and everything seems to be going according to plan. All that remains is to go back in one last time and promote Silque after she gains one more exp in this fight.

Tobin managed to gain another level up from a lucky crit and gained skill and speed YET AGAIN.

HIS SPEED HAS CAUGHT BACK UP WITH KLIFF’S. HOW.

NO, WAIT, IT’S BECOME BETTER AGAIN, I FORGOT HE’S CARRYING A SPEED REDUCING BOW!

..Nope, nevermind, Kliff just leveled up speed as well.

Okay, this last run was obscenely lucky. I counted:

5 total crits

4 level ups that gave either speed or defense

And with that amazing stroke of luck I managed to keep, I finally have a sister Silque! Which means not only can she now use seraphim, but she can also heal everyone around her in a passive aura without wasting any of her own HP!

This next fight seems pretty straightforward.  A huge map full of archers, snipers, a bow knight and two witches, spanned by a tile-wide river with a single tile bridge connecting them. Plug that bridge with Kliff or Alm and I have enough time to alternate blocking duty with Kliff and Alm while my bowmen take out their bowmen.

That’s weird. The enemy snipers have an entirely different attack animation involving a crossbow. Or maybe that’s only for the default bow and I never noticed because Python hasn’t attacked yet?

Grey wound up killing a ton of them with his thunder sword because after two snipers took the only 3-shot spaces in range, all the other snipers in range took the 2 range slot and were promptly slaughtered. Considering how generally hard it usually is to one-round enemies, it’s nuts that the levin sword is still this strong. Of course he took a hefty amount of damage for it, but he can always retreat.

At any rate, both Tobin and Kliff can double the boss (well, Kliff only on player phase. Damned 3 weight default attack), which is extremely handy, but I’ll have to gauge if Kliff can take any more punishment from these bowmen after using Excalibur.

I think Echoes should have fixed this game’s speed system. Given the idea they were going for with more powerful enemies in lower quantity, it would have been nice for there to be a wider threshold between doubling and being doubled. Of course that would require entirely overhauling all of the enemies’ stats like Shadow Dragon did, but I think it would have been worth it.

The witch teleported. Nifty little animation for the time, but honestly, I hate witches as a concept in this game. When you aren’t allowed to make units sit out of overworld battles, I find it to be exceedingly unfair game design to make units who can attack you from basically anywhere unless you build your entire formation around blocking all valid targeting spaces for this one ally. If that witch had just one, just ONE more point in attack, or Lukas one fewer points in resistance, and the witch would have one-hit-killed him, and I’d have to have save-scummed for a miss.

Speaking of misses… apparently this game calculates critical before it calculates hit. Alm did the critical animation but then missed. That’s… weird, and a bit disappointing.

But anyway, on to fight Tatara. This was always a pain, since you have to kill the boss without killing Delthea, who you have to pass on your way to him. Which basically means warp skipping. But then it means you have to send units who can handle fighting him for an extended period of time, and… Well it’ll be a bit of a gamble with that 27 magical attack power he has.

I’m going to wait until Delthea gets some distance from her hypnotic master, then warp in Kliff, then probably Tobin, then Alm. Hopefully the 5 HP cost of his death spells will wear him down enough to kill him by then, and before Delthea can-

…Wait. Enemy Delthea is a witch in this game? Which means… ohhhhh noooo… can she warp?

…Let’s be charitable and assume she can’t until proven otherwise, because holy shit would that be unfair. Especially since I need to keep her alive.

Anyway, I decided to give Python a turn with the steel bow to help him catch up in levels. He’s much slower with it than Tobin is, but still more than enough to double these sorcerers.

Okay, looks like Delthea’s walking like a normal person. Let’s hope.

Alm has just enough power with the royal sword to one-round these mages.

AND SHE FUCKING WARPS. WHY!? Holy shit am I lucky that Clive didn’t take just one more damage…

Okay. So. What I need to do is get her at 6 HP or less, so she can’t cast spells anymore, and then hope that they forgot to program in her warp ability to the AI calculation of if there’s a valid path to a heal tile.

Tobin almost saves the day but whiffs the second one. So as plan B, I have Grey tank an aura hit by attacking her nigh-uselessly with the levin sword, making her waste the HP she needs for aura herself.

…EXCEPT THAT TATARA HAS FUCKING FORTIFY. WHAT. WHY. HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO…

…Wait. This just might be perfect. I was worried about how the hell I was going to weaken Tartarra. If I can make him use Fortify one more time, I could get him weak enough to ambush with Alm! I just need to keep making Delthea waste her HP on someone who can take it…

…Unfortunately, due to her HP being exactly 8, it was impossible for her to not kill herself due to the way I set things up without thinking. Fuck. Well, restart.

…Fuck it. Let’s try this, just for the hell of it, to see if it works. I warp Alm straight to the boss and try to get a lucky crit off of Alm’s decent chance.

…I can’t believe that actually worked. And I didn’t even need to cheese it with a crit! After two attacks from Alm and one draining use of his own magic, he immediately retreated to a heal tile without trying to attack again. As long as either Tatara or Delthea misses on the enemy phase, and as long as Alm doesn’t miss his first attack on Tatara on turn two when he’s on a heal tile, he won’t have enough HP left to counter, and then I just had to warp in Kliff to finish him off with excalibur!

…Just warp skipping in right away… was actually a semi-viable strategy. That’s completely nuts.

The tricky part after that was taking out the sorcerers at the beginning of the map when both my archers failed spectacularly to get any hits at all in that turn. But thankfully Luthier and Clive pulled through to kill enough that nobody I exposed could die, and due to some idiotic enemy movement order, one of the sorcerers insisted on fighting Clive in melee rather than waiting for a ranged space to open up.

Incidentally, healing items and healing tiles don’t stack, unfortunately.

Unfortunately for some reason Delthea’s recruitment dialogue auto-finishes really quickly and thus vanished before I had time to read it all, but it didn’t seem substantially different from what it was in Echoes.

That’s weird, I’m having a similar problem with the other guy in this room. I haven’t had this issue before, I wonder if it’s a glitch. But at any rate, it’s time to get to the other floodgate, which means it’s Celica time. However, I’m thinking that at this point, now might be a good time to stop for the day, since I’ve had a busier day than usual.

But I thought I’d stop and give my preliminary thoughts so far since I’m… hm… I wanna call it halfway through the game now.

I’m having a lot of fun. It’s certainly got a lot of hiccups, and I don’t care for several of its design elements, but the sheer contrast between this game and what I played before it is night and day. Like I said, I can’t say for sure if it was intentional or not, but the soon-to-be staple features the series abandoned in the name of experimenting with other stuff comes across as a very wise choice to take out everything that could be cool later, but which the hardware and the team’s talent level couldn’t handle yet. Abandoning and stripping down the inventory and shop system, turning all maps into rout maps against much smaller armies that (usually) come to you, these two decisions in particular just did so, so much to make the formula more enjoyable in these early days where they’re not quite sure what they’re doing yet.

I’ve suffered undeserved bullshit deaths like in FE1. I barely have more control over unit placement here than I did in FE1. The stat formulas are still completely fucked like in FE1. And this game even has several problems FE1 didn’t have. But you know what? I’m having fun. And I’ve been having fun for a hell of a lot longer than I did for FE1, because there’s just so, so much less tedious busywork you have to do between the big moments of action. No infuriating stretches of individually moving sixteen soldiers one by one across empty maps, or juggling inventories while trying to buy shit, or managing a stash that would make a hoarder blush. And I’ve come to realize that really, that, above all else, had been the biggest problem with FE1. The sheer expansive number of boring things the game expects you to do in order to get to the next fun part. What I’m hoping that means is that from here on out, the rest of the games on this list, even FE3, are going to be just fine.

Apparently I can put up with all sorts of weird, imbalanced, dated nonsense in a game as long as it doesn’t waste my time. I’m just hoping that playing FE1 first hasn’t fried my standards so that it’s hard to judge the subtle distinctions between how good the rest of the games are.

Edited September 6, 2019 by Alastor15243

[Shadow Mir]

58 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

To be clear, I'm talking about having like five or more fliers on a single file, and a lot of games don't even have that many. The best way to make it happen is with class changing, and of the games with class changing that I regularly enjoy playing (Fates), there have been various considerations at one time or another that have just never made it feel like a great idea to try at the time outside of my mounted-only challenge run.

Actually, off the top of my head, the only game where that is indeed the case is Genealogy. Most other games do indeed have at least four fliers, but whether all of them are actually viable is another matter altogether. In any instance, this has got my attention, and I really have to catch up.

[Alastor15243]

Just now, Shadow Mir said:

Actually, off the top of my head, the only game where that is indeed the case is Genealogy. Most other games do indeed have at least four fliers, but whether all of them are actually viable is another matter altogether. In any instance, this has got my attention, and I really have to catch up.

Thanks for the interest! Yeah, upon reflection I suppose I misspoke. I guess it's more that getting a whole bunch of fliers that are good units is harder to manage.