Chapter 9x: To a Dark Place (Absolution)
I’ve already written a longpost on another cool chapter from Absolution (by ZessDynamite), but that thread was then, and this is now. Besides, copy-pasting over that old post is just so… passé.
Instead, I’ll just do another new writeup.
(Splicing this image together from screenshots was actually really tedious.)
In Chapter 9x of Absolution (by ZessDynamite), your control is swapped to a new party, commanding characters who otherwise serve as some of the game’s major antagonists. These five come in as pre-promotes with carefully planned inventories, stats, and skills, tuned to take on the specific challenge in front of you.
The thing I find most interesting about this chapter is just its objective. Defend and Survive maps are often maligned in the FEU community, criticized as being too easy to win by just turtling up in a chokepoint instead of actually engaging with the map’s challenges. Chapter 9x, however, excellently forces you to play with the mechanical flow of defending, desperately stopping enemies charging into your position from overwhelming your whole group.
…What do you mean, “it’s not a Survive map”?
(Please don’t comment on the playtime.)
This Rout map might well be the best Defend map I’ve ever played. (In close competition with Chapter 6 of Souls of the Forest and Chapter 12 of Iron Emblem, though I’d imagine those two will get posts of their own soon enough.) There’s no turn limit, and the end of the “timer” is signified by the flow of reinforcements stopping and the otherwise-stationary boss charging your position. Due to the party switch, you barely even have to worry about side objectives or experience point management. All that matters is you, the enemy, and the desperate task of survival.
Not only do reinforcement waves charge you from the sides of the map, these enemies also have massive stats, outscaling your units one-for-one in addition to vastly outnumbering you. This whole team is designed such that raw combat isn’t enough to pick fights they can win. Instead, Chapter 9x gives this alternate party a whole new mechanical identity: abusing debuffs for fun and profit.
This team takes down enemies through one specific combo: lowering their stats with all manner of debuff-inflicting spells, weapons, and skills, and then following up on the weakened foes to bring them down. The flashiest way to kill a debuffed enemy is this party’s main character, whose shiny new personal weapon is in a screenshot above - he can easily one-round even a lightly debuffed foe, often with ludicrous overkill. (This also sets him up to be more intimidating as an antagonist in the story, now that you’ve seen how strong he can get with the right setup.)
(Not every day you double a Swordmaster.)
Aside from just the Lunar Lance, though, you have lots of weaker ways to turn matchups in your favor and combine units to kill enemies. Beyond that, this party’s toolkit and the fact that enemies come to you affords lots of little opportunities to optimize the flow of debuffing and killing foes, especially once you’ve got the hang of controlling this party - do you save one of Iris’s actions to toss out a Hex at a distant foe instead of healing a wounded ally? Do you risk baiting an enemy on Enemy Phase, possibly lowering their HP to the point where one action next turn can finish them, but also putting yourself in danger? Do you flee to a chokepoint where you can control the flow of enemies instead of letting them swarm you in the undefended courtyard?
(You’ll need to find a way to deal with this fashionable guy sooner or later.)
The whole experience coheres into a fun, frenetic, and incredibly memorable experience, as well as hyping up the power of these characters as something your main party will one day get to wield and/or fight against. It’s also an interesting little detail to study in designing map flow, and just how a common FE objective can mean something wildly different from its usual purpose when backed by interesting map design.
Story-wise, this chapter is fine overall; it has some very nice character beats for the members of its party (who have all been introduced already in some form or another), and showcases their motivations a lot more clearly. I do have some slight quibbles with the specific setup of why the fight happens, but they’re clearly secondary to the growth of the characters involved, and even that is just a component of Chapter 9x’s greatest success: combining a unique fixed party composition, an unorthodox take on a common objective, and the buildup of its own villains into an incredible complement to an already great campaign.