Damien(Two Milkmen Go Comedy)
I shall first establish that almost the entirety of my bias for this unit comes from the fact that I have made his portrait. I got emotionally attached to him through the fact that I’ve spent time on his ingame appearance. After a few portrait revisions, I cannot even deny the fact that I love this unit because of my involvement.
It should also be mentioned that I typically have a bias toward enjoyment of archer units I find in romhacks; my favorite Call of the Armor unit is Poincare, my favorite Last Promise unit is Zach, and so on. Something that these two have in common with Damien is that they are written off as bad or poorly crafted units(The veracity of those beliefs is not important to my writing), and as such, I am typically in the minority for liking those units.
What is different with my relationship to Damien than to Poincare or Zach is that I initially started out opposed to Damien as a unit. He joins in the Zeke part of TMGC where the entire small army is force deployed for three maps before being merged with the main party in chapter fifteen. There is another archer named Sam who joins in chapter three(fourth map), and has about 9 or so chapters of availability over Damien. Upon the army merge, I had seen the unpromoted Damien, and compared him to my promoted Sam(Sam’s statline is focused on her speed and skill stats, whereas Damien’s is somewhat of the inverse, and focused on his strength stat) and saw that she had more use in combat on paper at that point thanks to her higher speed stat enabling doubling. I had even said something along the lines of “I don’t see why Damien exists, he’s pointless” to the hack’s creator, Retina, over these observations. For the longest time after that, I had just completely ignored Damien’s existence.
Fast forward to about August 29th of 2022, I had mentioned wanting to make a new portrait for Damien so he wouldn’t look like a blonde version of Roswell, the protagonist for a telephone hack that is still being worked on in Retina’s Discord. I had finished the portrait in about a day, but even then, any interest I had in Damien remained dormant.
It wasn’t until Summer of 2023 that I had really become attached in Damien. I was playing through TMGC for Retina as a playtest in VC, and of course, cause I’m a vain goofball, I was essentially only using units I made portraits for if possible. Cue Damien: I had put investment in Sam that run, on account of TMGC having free deploy for every unit up through chapter ten, but what was different that run, is that I had promoted Damien for use on chapter fifteen. That was when it hit me: Damien has quite possibly the best skill in the ROM: Adept. Adept is a skill that allows the unit to double on command at the cost of some extra item uses expended. This almost entirely levels the playing field between Damien and Sam at minimum, or slants it in Damien’s favor due to the fact that it can make Sam’s speed advantage not matter.
From that revelation onward, I was a full on Damien acolyte. I was extolling his virtues on many different discord servers. I had used him extensively on my run where he had been essential in many boss kills thanks to adept-great bow attacks. It is safe to say that by this point, I had completely given up on even THINKING about using Sam as a unit. I mean, why would I? Damien could do anything Sam could have done(Due to unit edits there are some differences between the two that would entice people into actually using Sam now) and probably better too! I was honestly kind of annoying with my devotion to Damien, but that’s besides the point.
I think the irony about me loving Damien for his adept skill is that I absolutely HATE the other TMGC unit who joins with Adept: Stefan. If you just join Retina’s discord, you can literally see my talking about disliking him. I do not particularly know why I enjoy adept on Damien compared to adept on Stefan. Could it be because I made Damien’s portrait? Could it be that I enjoy archers more than cavaliers? I may never figure it out, but Adept in TMGC is such a divisive skill for me.
I guess that what I’m trying to say, is that attachment to your own works and things you enjoy can make you blind to other unit opportunities and what they can bring to the strategic table. Many TMGC units are kind of homogenous in combat, especially exemplified in the lategame, where you have so many tools available, that essentially every unit can pull off an easy one round on enemy targets. This makes that attachment to units in TMGC even more important, why use Stefan to kill this berserker with weapon triangle advantage, when you can throw Dean against any enemy and absolutely destroy them with his Smash combat art? Why use any unit in TMGC at all? In my opinion, it’s cause you think they look cool, or you like the class they come in.
To boil it all down, unit attachment and sentimentality can go a long way in hackroms with large, homogenized casts, and nothing exemplifies that better than my blind, almost ignorant adoration for damien.
Oh yeah, earlier this year I revised his mug lol:
