In my most recent playthrough of the game, I’d taken it upon myself to trigger as many battle quotes as I possibly could. It is, however, impossible to get every single battle quote within one playthrough, given that the most obscure and hard-to-get quote in the game is also mutually exclusive with a gaiden chapter.
Of course, I’m talking about the Mort vs. Peirhok battle quote in Chapter 17. This might sound reasonable and normal at first glance, until you remember that Mort is a very dangerous cavalry boss who rushes at you from the first turn, and will probably die on turn 3 as a result… and Peirhok is a reinforcement unit who will not appear until turn 20—about 10 turns after most people have probably finished the chapter—whose arrival means you’ve lost the Gaiden chapter that comes after this.
So how was it done?
Pretty simple really, copious amounts of Sleep uses to nullify the immediate threat. This also gives me time to get all the people that Mort can ORKO and/or hurt very badly outside of his range, which lets them deal with the castles in the meantime.
By the time Mort wakes up, the middle road of the map is a lot clearer, so it’s much easier to bait him down to the bottom of the map close to where Peirhok will show up. I kept him trapped with lance units, but unfortunately I was careless and they took away a lot of his HP counterattacking, so I ended up having to remove their weapons so they didn’t kill him.
Peirhok shows up on turn 20 to say hi to him
And finishes him off
How did I get the gaiden after that? Loading a save state, of course. But I compromised with the quote by bringing Mort down to the bottom of the screen and ending the chapter without killing him anyways.
What’s the point of going out of my way to get this? A goddamn fine sense of accomplishment that’s hard to emulate in other hacks. It’s uniquely fun and interesting to work towards getting it, and I hold Spheal in a lot of respect for adding little interactions like these that have a practically 0% chance to occur unless the player goes out of their way to deliberately make them happen. It’s especially important to have a quote like this given Mort’s involvement in Peirhok’s past, even if almost nobody except me will actually see it in game.
Is this thinly veiled advertising to try to get other people to go out of their way to read this nice bit of lore? Maybe.