The Return of the Heart Seal Playthrough!

[Frug]

Greetings all you Conquest fans!  I would greet Birthright and Revelation fans as well, but their game is not the focus of this topic.  I have recently had a fun idea, and was pleased to see that there were many before me several years ago with a similar idea.  Of course, the idea is to do a playthrough of conquest reclassing every character with a heart seal. 

My own ruleset was as follows:

- Use the Ghastly Gold DLC to get as much gold as necessary for heart seals (obtained primarily through online castle visit sprees) and weapons

- Reclass everyone as soon as is reasonable with a heart seal.  For some units that join halfway through a chapter (i.e. chapter 10 Camilla's squad), reclass them as soon as the chapter concludes.

- Yes, that means Azura, too

- Corrinsexuals can be reclassed to whatever I want as long as it does not belong to their original class tree (i.e. no reclassing Shura to bow knight)

- Corrin must reclass to the alt class chosen by me.  In my case it was fighter since Berserkers are my jam.

- No child characters can be deployed after their starting battle.  This was mostly a rule I self-imposed because I was sick of using Elise!Ophelia and Effie!Percy in every playthrough

Difficulty is Normal Classic.  I first did this during a spree of Conquest playthroughs all on normal classic, so this ended up being as such as well.  I imagine it is doable on hard, but I am not sure about lunatic.

This playthrough has given me some new appreciation for some aspects of Conquest, such as the value of character weapon rank bases (since most characters need to start with bronzes), as well as how every character works with heart sealing on a base level.

I will say conquest feels much more like a gba fire emblem with this ruleset; some characters (Arthur, Peri, Benny) are just terrible, and other characters (Leo, Elise, Silas, Niles) end up overperforming compared to what I am used to since the competition is less fierce.  Leo especially is a lot of fun to use.

So go ahead: try the playthough out for yourself!  You don't need to follow my rules exactly; if you want to skip reclassing Azura or use child Characters you absolutely can.  If you have already done a playthrough like this, share your experience!  I know that I ended up using some bad units to see how they would work, and I would love to hear other people's success stories with some units I didn't end up using, like Arthur, Peri, Mozu, and Kaze.

 

Edited December 18, 2020 by Frug

[AnonymousSpeed]

That sounds very interesting, actually. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the DLC, but if I ever find myself with some pocket change I might try this out.

[Eltosian Kadath]

15 minutes ago, AnonymousSpeed said:

That sounds very interesting, actually. Unfortunately, I don't have any of the DLC, but if I ever find myself with some pocket change I might try this out.

If you have enough visit/battle points, you might be able to use the money you get selling those items to pull this off without the DLC...

[Johnnie]

I'm curious why you think Arthur is trash as a Cavalier. The switch actually gives him a point of Luck and the Goddess Icon from Chapter 4 gives him a net of 0 after his personal. Also he has pretty much the same stats and growth rates as Silas with more HP. A level 10 Arthur and a level 10 Silas are effectively the same unit minus personal skills and weapon ranks.

[Frug]

The stats may be similar (if a bit worse), but Arthur is missing Silas’s broken personal skill.  It makes a world of difference in the early game.  Without it, Silas, and by extension Arthur, is pretty mediocre.