Teodor (An Unexpected Caller)
Jagens are the only real FE archetype, and this is an objective truth. Many games, both romhack and official, try to keep their Jagen in check, as an extremely powerful/“broken” Jagen is often seen as some sort of failure state or aberration of balance. However, some games have taken an opposite approach, wholeheartedly welcoming the idea that one of your units is simply game-defining and deserves to be as powerful as they are. An Unexpected Caller’s Teodor truly shows what letting a unit be unabashedly busted can do for a hack’s experience.
From the very first map, Teodor makes a strong impression. His stats are weighted heavily towards Magic, Skill, and Resistance, with solid HP, middling Defense, and low Speed. His starting inventory is somewhat unconventional: Flux, Nosferatu, and a healing staff. Notably, Nosferatu is his equivalent to a typical Silver weapon you’d find on a Jagen. Flux lets him weaken enemies to the point where any of your other units can finish them off, and Nosferatu’s higher might lets him outright oneshot many earlygame enemies, while also making him your bulkiest unit by far.
What truly lets Teodor become the most dominant unit in the game are the myriad tools that fall into his lap. If you don’t pick Sophia in the first interlude, your next dark magic user doesn’t join until Chapter 11, and she’s generally regarded as quite a poor unit. The other remaining dark magic users are all either Summoners or have some other sort of special gimmick to them, so most of the dark magic toolkit may as well be entirely Teodor’s to play with. These include a 3-7 range 0 might tome with 20 uses (enemy Resistance is quite low on the whole and Teodor’s Magic is fantastic, so it’s very substantial chip), a 1-3 range tome that grants a significant boost to Defense and Resistance, and a 1-5 range Mend (relevant because one of Teodor’s few true weaknesses is a low base staff rank in a game where ranks on the whole build rather slowly). His growths are also extremely good despite his position as a Jagen, primarily because he has plenty of the one growth that really matters for him - a 65% Magic growth.
Would you believe it if these aren’t even the strongest parts of his kit? In Chapter 9, Fargus joins the army, bringing along the Sake, which grants +2 Pow/Def and -5 Skl passively while held, bonuses that Teodor uses fantastically. The Power helps ensure oneshots during a stretch of the game where otherwise his growth is outpaced by enemy HP, the Defense gives him a stronger safety net when he has to eat hits, and the Skill penalty, while annoying, is offset by the fact that his great base weaponrank in dark magic means he will likely be approaching S rank by this point, and thus approaching the S rank hit bonus. Alcohol isn’t Teodor’s only secret weapon. In the third interlude, you get Ereshkigal, an extremely strong unbreakable S rank dark tome. Suddenly, Teodor’s able to oneshot almost everything again, if he wasn’t already. Incidentally, if he used a Body Ring, he has 12 Con, and can thus use Ereshkigal without losing any speed.
This wasn’t enough for him, and so after Chapter 17 he gets his personal weapon, the Shadow Shrike. Remember that 3-7 range tome with 20 uses? Shadow Shrike is that again, except it’s brave. Combining this with a Fila’s Might boost (another powerful tool that, while not directly a Teodor tool, is extremely potent when used on him) lets Teodor oneround almost anything he wishes from a great distance. Fun fact: originally, the Shadow Shrike also came with a promotion to Dark Druid, though that promotion was unfortunately removed before the hack’s official release, probably because the universe wouldn’t be able to handle Teodor’s raw power.
Now, I’ll admit my experience might be slightly skewed by the fact that my Teodor was an absolute legend who didn’t miss a Magic level once for 80% of the game. Even so, it’s very clear that the game was designed around Teodor and around letting the player feel like a badass for doing big things with him. Many games stumble with Jagen design, either trying way too hard to limit their Jagen or dropping them into a game that can’t handle a unit that powerful. AUC manages to consistently make Teodor feel both overpoweringly good and like an important part of your strategy that genuinely requires thought to utilize well. He is so firmly the best unit in the game that it’s not funny, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
also he kisses puzon goodnight and he’s real for that