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

[Seafarer]

21 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Hard, probably. But once "hard" stops being the hardest difficulty in these games, choosing which difficulty to play to best assess a game's "difficulty" score is going to be annoying, especially since in some cases, the hardest difficulty mode wasn't exactly the best-designed one. Also, I was into Awakening for long enough that I know full well how to break the game in half even on non-plus Lunatic difficulty, but the idea of grading the game on Lunatic+ sounds both utterly insane and also likely to make certain other categories of the game suffer.

It's a puzzle, and I'd love feedback from people on what I could do.

I'd suggest, in general, going for Hard/Classic or the equivalent (so "Normal" in Radiant Dawn, because it was designed to be the Hard mode, and possibly Brutal in Shadow Dragon, because its Normal seemed kinda like TSS's Easy to me with its expanded tutorials). Theoretically, those should all be tuned to provide similar player experiences.

Awakening is a tricky case. Given that there are at least three things that break the game right in half, then feed the halves through a mincer, then drop the pieces in a black hole where they are torn apart to a fundamental-particle level by the strength of the gravitational forces, then they hit the singularity and are ultimately converted into photons as Hawking radiation... what was I saying? Ah, yes. It's your call as to whether you just play it as you normally would, assigning it nothing more than a paragraph of all-caps laughter under "Balance", or whether you want to add restrictions (I'd favour no Pair Up + must use full deployment on every map if you go for Hard, or just forced full deployment for Lunatic). For any Awakening run, though, I'd definitely ban grinding (DLC or otherwise) and buying items from SpotPass teams. Also, treat it as if you had 0 starting Renown.

Actually, I'd ban any form of grinding in the entire series, but you've already spammed the Arena in Genealogy, so it's a bit late for that.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Seafarer
Kept finding better wording.

[Alastor15243]

37 minutes ago, Seafarer said:

Actually, I'd ban any form of grinding in the entire series, but you've already spammed the Arena in Genealogy, so it's a bit late for that.

Thanks for the advice, though as for this specific point here, I feel the Arena in FE4 doesn't quite count. It's a major part of gameplay and a crucial (and finite) source of income for your army. It's not something that can really be called "grinding".

[Seafarer]

22 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Thanks for the advice, though as for this specific point here, I feel the Arena in FE4 doesn't quite count. It's a major part of gameplay and a crucial (and finite) source of income for your army. It's not something that can really be called "grinding".

Yeah, fair. I forgot that Genealogy's Arena is limited.

Thinking about it some more, I think that going in non-blind to a game with significant imbalances is going to tank the difficulty in a way that you can't really correct for. In Genealogy, for instance, you did a fair bit of optimisation to make Gen 2 easier (especially deliberately killing Silvia, which isn't something anyone would do on a blind run), which I don't think you really accounted for in the difficulty category. If you'd been blind on that, I suspect you would have had to rate it quite a bit higher on difficulty.

Awakening's the same. Coming in blind (and as my first Fire Emblem), I lost units on Normal. That's unthinkable now, when I can burn through Lunatic in a day with no risk of anyone dying ever.

Hm. Maybe you could just ban the broken stuff (Nosferatu, Galeforce, Pair Up), and comment on their existence in the balance section while excluding them as outliers from the difficulty discussion?

[Alastor15243]

26 minutes ago, Seafarer said:

Thinking about it some more, I think that going in non-blind to a game with significant imbalances is going to tank the difficulty in a way that you can't really correct for. In Genealogy, for instance, you did a fair bit of optimisation to make Gen 2 easier (especially deliberately killing Silvia, which isn't something anyone would do on a blind run), which I don't think you really accounted for in the difficulty category. If you'd been blind on that, I suspect you would have had to rate it quite a bit higher on difficulty.

I did my best to keep that in mind, actually. It was more the style of the challenges the game throws at you that reduced its difficulty ranking, and how often it's just Enemy Phase City. The ways I abused the pairing system contributed to its balance score instead.

 

Thracia Day 10: Chapter 7

For a second I thought the game was going to send me into a branching path when Augustus and Leif were talking about their two options for where to escape to. But then Leif actually makes the decision in-story. In one sense, I'm relieved, because I don't like making decisions without having any concept of what my decision even means, but on the other hand, that would have been great replay value if there were a branching story path this early on.

I'm checking out this map, and it seems really simple. A bunch of enemies in two main groups, one group of sell-literal-swords and one group of veritable Verdane style axe bandits and hunters with a thief and a berserker among them. I'm nabbing that lockpick for sure.

Asbel's pretty well guaranteed to cap magic and speed at this point (speed's gonna get capped before he even promotes, pretty much guaranteed), so I decide to give someone else a turn with the crusader scrolls, particularly the Ced one. I'm gonna give them to Fergus since he's going to be insanely good once his stats pick up. Even now he basically has a guaranteed critical hit as long as he doubles. His PCC puts his second attack crit rate with Karin supporting at somewhere around 80%.

Alright, so, we got a scene with Hannibal, and apparently Raydrik is called the “Twofold Traitor” down in South Thracia. Interesting... I'm guessing he defected from South to North Thracia before he betrayed Manster? I'm hoping we hear more about this.

...Oh shit. This could be bad. So I figured that in order to recruit Shiva you have to talk to him with Safiya, and I was wondering when she and the rest of my army would show up like I remember. But it seems that everyone except Finn and Safiya has been captured, and they're on the other side of the mountain from Shiva. I'm going to have to take out everyone but Shiva while retreating back behind the west side of the mountains until I can get Safiya to talk to him.

...Nope! That berserker is going to rip Finn to shreds, especially since he's dismounted and doesn't have any swords. Looks like they have to go around and try to bait the sellswords over to him.

...HAHAHAHAHA!

Oh wow, so one of the village girls apparently found a master seal left behind by this group called the Panzerritter, and was so infatuated with those big strong athletic soldiers that she was fantasizing that one of them left a master seal behind as an excuse to come back later, and she starts hitting on the character I sent over to visit the villlage.

...Who was Karin.

And then she's all embarrassed and annoyed when she realizes Karin's not one of the Panzerritter, and just asks Karin to make sure the Panzerritter soldier gets the master seal back.

Hilarious. Also, probably not happening, lady. Thanks for the free shit!

And Raydrik shows up to summon the reinforcements. Honestly, Raydrik isn't really the buffoon I was expecting him to be from what I remember of his conversation with Walhart in Awakening. He's actually pretty clever and intimidating, even if he's just a bit player in the grander evil empire. A pretty worthy villain, all told! I'm looking forward to seeing more of him.

Ooh! The cavalry have rapiers! They can't use them without dismounting (Which I'm not sure enemies can even do mid-battle, though given I'm using Dalsin to hold them off I guess I'm about to learn), so I don't think I have to worry about them using them. But while I can't capture enemies who are mounted, I sure as hell can steal an absurdly light rapier from them! At least with Lithis. Poor Lara's con is just barely not enough.

Thankfully I just barely managed to bait Shiva over to Finn instead of the main army by running over the hills as fast as he could before mounting, so I can now recruit Shiva easily due to a quirk of the AI. Very, very conveniently, Shiva moves last of his little sellsword group, so as long as I can make sure to clog up access to Finn and don't get an inconvenient critical hit on the last enemy, Shiva should never be able to attack Finn. And the second I've taken out everyone but Shiva, Safiya will recruit him by running out from behind Finn.

Meanwhile Dalsin has a fairly easy time holding off these lance knights.

...At least until I realize that these are honest to goodness social knights, like from FE4, and can use both swords and lances on horseback for some utterly balance-inexplicable reason.

And then they kill Lithis because he was equipped with a super-heavy broken sword and I accidentally left him in range of Javelin users.

Honestly this is a bit terrifying. Those rapiers are deadly weapons against half of my units, and all of the ones who have any remotely good defense stat are susceptible except for Leif. I think I'm gonna have to have Leif hold off these guys.

...At first I thought this wouldn't work, since I had to plug up the gap with Asbel, who literally has 0 defense and is entirely depending on the luck of the draw to not die every turn the enemies decide he's more tempting than Leif, but we wound up actually weathering the storm! That huge clump of bandits, however, is a no-go without Asbel. I tried clearing them out with Fergus with the brave sword, and it just takes too long and is too demanding of the only healer my main group has. I'm going to have to leave them be, and focus on beating back these reinforcements for as long as I can now that the initial serious wave is over and they're sending in weaker ones. My cavalry can easily do this, and now that Nanna's back, Asbel's evasion is a lot more reliable, combined with the enemy's general disinterest in fighting him.

Also, Asbel gained his first point of defense today! I knew leaving the Baldur scroll on him was a good idea! He really doesn't need any of the other scrolls, but that “immune to critical hits” thing means I always want to make sure he has at least one. He'll be set to cap all other relevant stats except HP (which will still be pretty high probably) by 20/20. I think once he promotes I'm going to give him all the defense-boosting scrolls I have by that point and try to get him a bunch of defense levels if I can.

Alright, I think when the enemy starts sending meteor tome users two turns in a row, that's probably my cue to start running for my life. Good thing it took this long though, because it's right when I finally secure Shiva down south.

And while I know I'm not going to see much more of his personality, I like Shiva's conversation with Safiya. Not sure why, I just like how he has this bizarre emotional attachment to this woman despite him clearly not being big on emotional attachment, and how he takes issue with Safiya's blind martyrdom and lack of regard for her own life.

And I nearly lost the map right there. The boss arbitrarily decided to move this turn, probably because the reinforcements are gone, and he made a beeline straight for Asbel, who just barely can't survive even one round against the bastard. Thankfully, he dodged, and critted the motherfucker with lightning, reducing him to a cartoonish pile of ash. So... crisis averted.

But holy shit would that have pissed me off if it had gotten Asbel killed. Opaque AI like that, where an enemy who doesn't move suddenly decides to move without warning, is really annoying, because it's pure trial and error to deal with. It's part of why I like how modern games make it clear when units can and can't move via actually controlling their movement stat. And that's why I find it utterly infuriating that Three Houses decided to do both simultaneously, tricking you into thinking you can trust the game when it says enemies can't move, then giving them their movement back on enemy phase.

Oh wow, the enemy has its own creepy healing theme? Interesting! I don't think the series has ever done that anywhere else! Games have had a different theme for offensive and defensive staves, but I don't think I've ever seen the bad guys get their own enemy phase healing theme!

...Wow. That... I wish I knew that earlier. Apparently if all the enemy has is a siege tome, you can capture them for free without even fighting them, as if they were unarmed. That's going to be insanely useful knowledge that'll get me a lot of meteor uses if I can use the knowledge properly. I wonder why that is. Is it that you have to be able to fight back against the melee attack in order to resist automatic capture?

...Wait, does that mean that all of my archers are in perpetual danger of being kidnapped by the enemy!?

But anyway, I get a talk between Nanna and Finn by sheer luck (it was really nice when Genealogy told you who could talk to who) and this conversation reminds me of the fact that Nanna is canonically Finn's daughter in this game, while apparently Dermott is not. It's this whole complicated tale of adultery on both sides of the Lachesis-Beowulf relationship apparently, though I don't know all the details. But that begs the question: If Nanna is Finn's daughter, where the fuck is her Miracle skill? Everyone else I've seen so far who appeared in Genealogy has all of the skills they had in that game, unless they no longer exist, like Leif not having his mother's Critical skill. But Miracle is still a thing! Finn has it!

Alright, so Leif visits Hannibal's castle, and... I... don't really like this. It seems bizarre to give Leif and Hannibal a history they clearly didn't have in FE4. Especially when that game didn't even let them talk.

...I see he's giving a fake name as Lugh Faris. I wonder if that name has any significance or if it's just entirely bullshitting. But Hannibal notices how much he resembles Altena (though he doesn't mention her by name, it's just obvious who he's talking about if you've played FE4).

And now we see Carrion, or as he's called now, Callion. No complaints there. Still an odd name, but now at least this reasonably-handsome, responsible-looking guy isn't literally named after rotting meat. That sounds like the kind of name you'd give to a bandit or a dark cultist.

And oh yeah! Cairpre! We meet again! And to thank us for saving him, he gives us a warp staff, which... okay, I've been told there are some maps in this game that are infamous for all but demanding warp-skipping, so... I'm gonna save this thing for a rainy day.

But hold on, since one of Hannibal's men is joining our army... surely Leif's deception is gonna get out eventually, right? Callion's gonna find out that Leif is actually Leif, and not Lugh Farris. That's kind of an awkward situation Leif's put himself in, isn't it? And yet something tells me that isn't going to come up. At all. Callion's just gonna find out who Leif really is offscreen and nobody will care.

But hey, I'll find out for sure next time! But before I go, I was staring at how I spelled Leif's last name as I was finishing this document, and out of a strange paranoia that I've been misspelling it (I haven't been), I googled it and found out, from the wiki blurb Google always shows, that Faris is in fact Leif's canon middle name. So I guess that's where that part of his BS pseudonym came from at least!

Alright, have a great weekend everyone! Maybe I'll see you before it's over! And above all else, happy holidays!

[Shadow Mir]

53 minutes ago, Seafarer said:

Thinking about it some more, I think that going in non-blind to a game with significant imbalances is going to tank the difficulty in a way that you can't really correct for. In Genealogy, for instance, you did a fair bit of optimisation to make Gen 2 easier (especially deliberately killing Silvia, which isn't something anyone would do on a blind run), which I don't think you really accounted for in the difficulty category. If you'd been blind on that, I suspect you would have had to rate it quite a bit higher on difficulty.

I would say whether the subs for Sylvia's chldren are better than the children themselves is debatable - personally, I think Lene (or whatever her localized name is) being able to inherit the Knight Ring and Leg Ring trumps Laylea's extra Charisma.

[Alastor15243]

4 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

I would say whether the subs for Sylvia's chldren are better than the children themselves is debatable - personally, I think Lene (or whatever her localized name is) being able to inherit the Knight Ring and Leg Ring trumps Laylea's extra Charisma.

For speedrunning, sure. But getting the knight ring on Leylia isn't that hard, and the leg ring she's gonna have to buy anyway because generally someone from chapter 6 (usually Seliph) wants to inherit that instead of her.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Alastor15243

[Shadow Mir]

4 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

For speedrunning, sure. But getting the knight ring on Leylia isn't that hard, and the leg ring she's gonna have to buy anyway because generally someone from chapter 6 (usually Seliph) wants to inherit that instead of her.

You might have a point about the Leg Ring, I admit, but still, that's an option Leylia doesn't have. Same for the Knight Ring, which is mega expensive to buy (40,000 gold). Again, Lene doesn't have to worry about that due to inheritance.

[Alastor15243]

1 minute ago, Shadow Mir said:

You might have a point about the Leg Ring, I admit, but still, that's an option Leylia doesn't have. Same for the Knight Ring, which is mega expensive to buy (40,000 gold). Again, Lene doesn't have to worry about that due to inheritance.

The leg and knight rings are pretty much the only things she will ever need to buy. The leg ring, which is by far the more important one, is cheaper and can be done easily if you give her some of the Leonster villages (she wants to go over there to get the barrier blade anyway). The knight ring can be done later once Patty is stronger or once Leylia marries Ares. Unless you're doing a ranked run (in which case Leylia is borderline impossible to obtain and thus would lose by default even if you weren't strapped for time and didn't need her to succeed in the arena), I contend that the things Leylia lets you do with her aura make her generally more useful than Leen's head start on those two items. The shit you can do with four aura bots in this game is no joke. For something like an ironman run, I'd pick Leylia over Leen every time.

[Interdimensional Observer]

3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

And oh yeah! Cairpre! We meet again! And to thank us for saving him, he gives us a warp staff, which... okay, I've been told there are some maps in this game that are infamous for all but demanding warp-skipping, so... I'm gonna save this thing for a rainy day.

Hammerne works on it!😉

 

3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

And then they kill Lithis because he was equipped with a super-heavy broken sword and I accidentally left him in range of Javelin users.

So, did you leave him dead?

 

3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

For a second I thought the game was going to send me into a branching path when Augustus and Leif were talking about their two options for where to escape to. But then Leif actually makes the decision in-story. In one sense, I'm relieved, because I don't like making decisions without having any concept of what my decision even means, but on the other hand, that would have been great replay value if there were a branching story path this early on.

I think they actually mean the two enemy groups, if you cross the western mountains packed with bandits, then the cavalry can't reach you b/c horses can't cross them.

 

And, did you have everyone escape on the same turn or didn't start escaping until the boss was dead? If you have someone escape while reinforcements are still coming from the north, Hannibal will respond to Raydrik's troops on the Thracia border by deploying his own green Armors including himself. That forces Raydrik's cavalry into fleeing, they're afraid of the Shield of Thracia. Hannibal's stats (which are somewhat randomized).:

HP	Str	Mag	Skl	Spd	Lck	Def	Bld	Mov
43	14	4	12	7	7	16	19	7

Auth	MS	PC	Weapon Ranks	Skills
5	0	0	D,  A,  B,  A	None

With a Silver Lance and Silver Bow.

 

 

3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

It's this whole complicated tale of adultery on both sides of the Lachesis-Beowulf relationship apparently, though I don't know all the details.

This possibility was hinted at in FE4 if you do BeowolfxLachesis. As put by the old translation with me updating the names.:

Lachesis:
“Beowulf…”

Beowolf:
“Lachesis, if anything were to happen to me, I want you to go to Leonster. Finn is there with Quan’s children. Give him a hand, okay?”

Lachesis:
“How could you say that? When we go, we’ll go together!”

Beowolf:
“Lachesis, I’ve got a confession to make.”

Lachesis:
“Hm?”

Beowolf:
“I’ve known your true feelings all along.”

Lachesis:
“What…!”

Beowolf:
“Take good care of yourself. It was mighty nice while it lasted.”

Lachesis:
“Wait! Beowolf!”

[Alastor15243]

2 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

So, did you leave him dead?

Nah, I had to scrub that attempt entirely because of that. I'm not trying to do this ironman.

3 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

And, did you have everyone escape on the same turn or didn't start escaping until the boss was dead? If you have someone escape while reinforcements are still coming from the north, Hannibal will respond to Raydrik's troops on the Thracia border by deploying his own green Armors including himself. That forces Raydrik's cavalry into fleeing, they're afraid of the Shield of Thracia. Hannibal's stats (which are somewhat randomized).:

HP	Str	Mag	Skl	Spd	Lck	Def	Bld	Mov
43	14	4	12	7	7	16	19	7

Auth	MS	PC	Weapon Ranks	Skills
5	0	0	D,  A,  B,  A	None

With a Silver Lance and Silver Bow.

I thought something like that might happen with some trigger due to the opening dialogue, but by the time I started retreating, the boss was dead at Asbel's hand. I was mostly trying to buy time to recruit Shiva. Without that I probably would have just bum-rushed Hannibal's castle immediately with no regrets, holding off the rear reinforcements with Leif and some cavalry assisting. But I had to hold back in order to get Safiya in contact with Shiva safely.

...Unless Leif could have done it the whole time, but I didn't want to spend an entire attempt just trying to figure out that question before resetting if wrong.

[Interdimensional Observer]

3 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

I thought something like that might happen with some trigger due to the opening dialogue, but by the time I started retreating, the boss was dead at Asbel's hand. I was mostly trying to buy time to recruit Shiva. Without that I probably would have just bum-rushed Hannibal's castle immediately with no regrets, holding off the rear reinforcements with Leif and some cavalry assisting. But I had to hold back in order to get Safiya in contact with Shiva safely.

...Unless Leif could have done it the whole time, but I didn't want to spend an entire attempt just trying to figure out that question before resetting if wrong.

I chose to send everyone through the mountains, and Safiya and Finn over the other ones to get to Shiva, this actually lured him and fellow sellswords west into those mountains, not north.

Unfortunately, I couldn't didn't get Hannibal to appear so soon (not that I knew it'd happen) because the obvious candidate to trigger him, Karin, was busy lugging Dalsin b/c armor can't cross mountains either. Such a giant paperweight he was. 

I think going for the early bosskill is actually the better strategy here.

 

And I forgot to say, congrats on getting past the (in)famous Manster Escape! Leif is in the clear and can rest easy for now. Not that the rest of the game is cake, but you won't be hurriedly trying to escape every single battle from here on out. And, your allies will begin to wax and never suddenly wane ever again.

[Eltosian Kadath]

There is a way to blatantly cheese this map. The Boss that appears can be spawn blocked. Normally killing the boss ends reinforcements, but with him spawn blocked only the first handful that spawn with him appear, which makes this map a cake walk.

 

12 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

I chose to send everyone through the mountains, and Safiya and Finn over the other ones to get to Shiva, this actually lured him and fellow sellswords west into those mountains, not north.

That is my preferred route for story-line reasons, but the early boss kill/spawn block is better if you are trying to ironman.

 

16 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

I wonder why that is. Is it that you have to be able to fight back against the melee attack in order to resist automatic capture?

...Wait, does that mean that all of my archers are in perpetual danger of being kidnapped by the enemy!?

No I think its only siege tomes, if an enemy has a weapon with 1, 2 or 1-2 range, than they have to be taken down to be captured.

Edit:

Spoiler

The classes that can use Ballista can't be captured at all as far as I can tell. I think the game treats them like a zero move mounted class that can't dismount.

 

 

16 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

But anyway, I get a talk between Nanna and Finn by sheer luck (it was really nice when Genealogy told you who could talk to who) and this conversation reminds me of the fact that Nanna is canonically Finn's daughter in this game, while apparently Dermott is not. It's this whole complicated tale of adultery on both sides of the Lachesis-Beowulf relationship apparently, though I don't know all the details. But that begs the question: If Nanna is Finn's daughter, where the fuck is her Miracle skill? Everyone else I've seen so far who appeared in Genealogy has all of the skills they had in that game, unless they no longer exist, like Leif not having his mother's Critical skill. But Miracle is still a thing! Finn has it!

There is the question of whether Nanna is Finn's biological, or adoptive daughter to even further muddy the waters of that discussion.

 

16 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

And oh yeah! Cairpre! We meet again! And to thank us for saving him, he gives us a warp staff, which... okay, I've been told there are some maps in this game that are infamous for all but demanding warp-skipping, so... I'm gonna save this thing for a rainy day.

I will note that the warp staff is an A rank staff, so you will need to grind up some staff rank before that is an option.

 

Edited December 21, 2019 by Eltosian Kadath
correcting my capture comment for greater accuracy.

[Shadow Mir]

3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

The leg and knight rings are pretty much the only things she will ever need to buy. The leg ring, which is by far the more important one, is cheaper and can be done easily if you give her some of the Leonster villages (she wants to go over there to get the barrier blade anyway). The knight ring can be done later once Patty is stronger or once Leylia marries Ares. Unless you're doing a ranked run (in which case Leylia is borderline impossible to obtain and thus would lose by default even if you weren't strapped for time and didn't need her to succeed in the arena), I contend that the things Leylia lets you do with her aura make her generally more useful than Leen's head start on those two items. The shit you can do with four aura bots in this game is no joke. For something like an ironman run, I'd pick Leylia over Leen every time.

The thing is, I would prefer to minimize inconvenience, especially when the inventory system is as clumsy as it is in that game, and to that end Leylia does me no good, considering I have to jump through a boatload of hoops to get her the money needed for both of those rings (to say nothing of the mental hoops I'd have to jump through to convince myself that whatever Leylia brings to the table trumps convenience).

Edited December 21, 2019 by Shadow Mir

[Alastor15243]

Just now, Shadow Mir said:

The thing is, I would prefer to minimize inconvenience, especially when the inventory system is as clumsy as it is in that game, and to that end Leylia does me no good, considering I have to jump through a boatload of hoops to get her the money needed for both of those rings. 

At this rate I think this would warrant its own topic. All I'll say on the matter here is that Leylia had the leg ring on that most recent run of mine by the very, very beginning of chapter 8, and I could have given her the knight ring extremely soon after that once Patty promoted halfway through and started bathing in liquid gold. I only didn't do it because I failed to get the knight ring in the first place.

[Jotari]

10 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

 

And Raydrik shows up to summon the reinforcements. Honestly, Raydrik isn't really the buffoon I was expecting him to be from what I remember of his conversation with Walhart in Awakening. He's actually pretty clever and intimidating, even if he's just a bit player in the grander evil empire. A pretty worthy villain, all told! I'm looking forward to seeing more of him.

Oh wow. My sides. XD That is hilarious. Did you really just say that in earnest?

Spoiler

This is the last time you see Raydrik before the chapter you kill him.

 

7 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

And, did you have everyone escape on the same turn or didn't start escaping until the boss was dead? If you have someone escape while reinforcements are still coming from the north, Hannibal will respond to Raydrik's troops on the Thracia border by deploying his own green Armors including himself. That forces Raydrik's cavalry into fleeing, they're afraid of the Shield of Thracia. Hannibal's stats (which are somewhat randomized).:

HP	Str	Mag	Skl	Spd	Lck	Def	Bld	Mov
43	14	4	12	7	7	16	19	7

Auth	MS	PC	Weapon Ranks	Skills
5	0	0	D,  A,  B,  A	None

With a Silver Lance and Silver Bow.

Hannibal comes with a Silver Bow and A rank in Bows in Thracia! Canon Armoured Bow Knight! Put him into Heroes! I want my canon Armoured Bow Knight!

Edited December 21, 2019 by Jotari

[Alastor15243]

5 hours ago, Jotari said:

Oh wow. My sides. XD That is hilarious. Did you really just say that in earnest?

  Reveal hidden contents

This is the last time you see Raydrik before the chapter you kill him.

...Yes. I had said that in earnest. I really wish I hadn't read that spoiler, but my curiosity got the better of me. That is... quite the letdown.

 

[Shadow Mir]

7 hours ago, Jotari said:

Oh wow. My sides. XD That is hilarious. Did you really just say that in earnest?

  Reveal hidden contents

This is the last time you see Raydrik before the chapter you kill him.

 

And this is supposed to be the main villain of the game? That's surprisingly little exposure of him. Unless this is still during the time where you didn't see the main villain that much...

13 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

At this rate I think this would warrant its own topic. All I'll say on the matter here is that Leylia had the leg ring on that most recent run of mine by the very, very beginning of chapter 8, and I could have given her the knight ring extremely soon after that once Patty promoted halfway through and started bathing in liquid gold. I only didn't do it because I failed to get the knight ring in the first place.

I just think the stuff you're recommending is impractical as all get out to actually do (having Leylia marry a mounted unit... in a game with giant maps? Or trying to have Patty play Robin Hood, to which I once again point out the giant maps pretty much forcing me to go out of my way for this). I'll just leave it at that.

[Interdimensional Observer]

Just because a game is two decades old doesn't mean we should ever casually bring up spoilers for someone who is playing through it the first time, curiosity might kill the cat.

It makes sense that Raydrik isn't so present later, he hasn't been tasked with capturing Leif anywhere on the peninsula at all costs. Even if it is still a flaw in the narrative.

Well, there is always room for a remake to improve things!

[Alastor15243]

8 minutes ago, Shadow Mir said:

And this is supposed to be the main villain of the game? That's surprisingly little exposure of him. Unless this is still during the time where you didn't see the main villain that much...

I'll have to pay attention to when we start seeing more of the villains. I know we see a lot of Nergal and I believe Ashnard, I know we see at least some of Zephiel but it may be more, we also see a lot of Lyon, a good deal of Garon (though not Anankos)... and then it all comes to a screeching halt again with Three Houses, which as far as I can tell gives up entirely on the concept of showing the viewer scenes Byleth can't see after the end of act 1.

(Three Houses Spoilers for CF and VW)

Spoiler

Unless I'm mis-remembering horribly, the first time we actually see Dimitri in act 2 on Crimson Flower is when we're fighting him to the death. Rhea is barely any better if I recall, only being seen in that map and the final map after it. And in Verdant Wind, Nemesis is basically a giant space flea from nowhere save for what we hear about him secondhand. The fact that the game doesn't even let us see the supposed wave of chaos and pillaging he goes on, and just get informed about it by some generic mook while we're in the monastery... holy shit was that disappointing.

 

Edited December 21, 2019 by Alastor15243

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, Shadow Mir said:

And this is supposed to be the main villain of the game? That's surprisingly little exposure of him. Unless this is still during the time where you didn't see the main villain that much...

I just think the stuff you're recommending is impractical as all get out to actually do (having Leylia marry a mounted unit... in a game with giant maps? Or trying to have Patty play Robin Hood, to which I once again point out the giant maps pretty much forcing me to go out of my way for this). I'll just leave it at that.

1 hour ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Just because a game is two decades old doesn't mean we should ever casually bring up spoilers for someone who is playing through it the first time, curiosity might kill the cat.

It makes sense that Raydrik isn't so present later, he hasn't been tasked with capturing Leif anywhere on the peninsula at all costs. Even if it is still a flaw in the narrative.

Well, there is always room for a remake to improve things!

He still gets far more exposure than Blume, who within the universe is Leif's greatest enemy and is tasked with hunting him down.

1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said:

I'll have to pay attention to when we start seeing more of the villains. I know we see a lot of Nergal and I believe Ashnard, I know we see at least some of Zephiel but it may be more, we also see a lot of Lyon, a good deal of Garon (though not Anankos)... and then it all comes to a screeching halt again with Three Houses, which as far as I can tell gives up entirely on the concept of showing the viewer scenes Byleth can't see after the end of act 1.

(Three Houses Spoilers for CF and VW)

  Reveal hidden contents

Unless I'm mis-remembering horribly, the first time we actually see Dimitri in act 2 on Crimson Flower is when we're fighting him to the death. Rhea is barely any better if I recall, only being seen in that map and the final map after it. And in Verdant Wind, Nemesis is basically a giant space flea from nowhere save for what we hear about him secondhand. The fact that the game doesn't even let us see the supposed wave of chaos and pillaging he goes on, and just get informed about it by some generic mook while we're in the monastery... holy shit was that disappointing.

 

We do see a lot of Lyon, but I think it's a major weakness of Sacred Stones' narrative that it's all pushed to the last few chapters of the game.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Jotari

[Seafarer]

21 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

I would say whether the subs for Sylvia's chldren are better than the children themselves is debatable - personally, I think Lene (or whatever her localized name is) being able to inherit the Knight Ring and Leg Ring trumps Laylea's extra Charisma.

That's irrelevant, though. The point I was making -  and the point Alastor answered - is that he deliberately killed a unit, which a blind player would never do, in order to optimise the strategy he planned to use. Whether said strategy is the best possible has exactly no bearing on my point.

@Alastor15243 TH spoilers

Spoiler

Rhea appears in cutscenes in CF Chapter 15, too. Also, there are some scenes that Byleth can't see in Part 2, such as that Rhea scene and Hubert and Edelgard's discussion of Arundel's death in AM.

 

Edited December 21, 2019 by Seafarer

[Shadow Mir]

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

He still gets far more exposure than Blume, who within the universe is Leif's greatest enemy and is tasked with hunting him down.

Fair enough. Maybe a remake can fix this...

4 hours ago, Jotari said:

We do see a lot of Lyon, but I think it's a major weakness of Sacred Stones' narrative that it's all pushed to the last few chapters of the game.

Indeed. You do see him first in the prologue, but he has no speaking role, and it's right before a fade to black. It doesn't help that most of what you do see of him before the end is from flashbacks.

1 hour ago, Seafarer said:

That's irrelevant, though. The point I was making -  and the point Alastor answered - is that he deliberately killed a unit, which a blind player would never do, in order to optimise the strategy he planned to use. Whether said strategy is the best possible has exactly no bearing on my point.

Fair enough. 

[Fields]

On 12/20/2019 at 9:52 PM, Alastor15243 said:

..I see he's giving a fake name as Lugh Faris. I wonder if that name has any significance

Lugh is a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lugh

If I recall correctly, "Leif" is the Scandinavian version of the name Lugh. Appropriate given how much eastern Judgral is influenced by Celtic mythology.

Edited December 22, 2019 by Fields

[Jotari]

5 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:

 

Fair enough. Maybe a remake can fix this...

Indeed. You do see him first in the prologue, but he has no speaking role, and it's right before a fade to black. It doesn't help that most of what you do see of him before the end is from flashbacks.

Fair enough. 

There's not many ways I think you could fix it without massively altering the story of Thracia which is pretty tight. There's pretty logical reasons these people don't appear. One idea that could work is of they introduce a bounty hunter who is tasked with pursuing and hunting down Leif. A powerful unit like the Death Knight who shows up in certain levels to pursue the player (maybe member of the Black Rose worked directly under Veld). That way we could get more scenes with the bounty hunter reporting back to Raydrik and Veld, bolstering their presence and screen time.

[Interdimensional Observer]

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

There's not many ways I think you could fix it without massively altering the story of Thracia which is pretty tight. There's pretty logical reasons these people don't appear. One idea that could work is of they introduce a bounty hunter who is tasked with pursuing and hunting down Leif. A powerful unit like the Death Knight who shows up in certain levels to pursue the player (maybe member of the Black Rose worked directly under Veld). That way we could get more scenes with the bounty hunter reporting back to Raydrik and Veld, bolstering their presence and screen time.

That thought popped into my head, but that introduces a new problem. How do you make the chaser's presence on the already-designed maps felt?

And, how do you add the pursuer without making them seem incompetent? Does Leif get captured for 3 seconds five times before someone bails him out? If they truly are a threat, it has to be felt, and constant "Damn it! The pesky kid gets away from me again!" doesn't make for a truly threatening character.