Sigrid (Vision Quest)
This is the other post I had earmarked from the first time I thought about this thread. That in mind, let’s talk about Helga.
My idea of the meta is stuck in 2013, so that in mind, I think Helga is probably the strongest unit in VQ. Mine was no exception. I gave her love and she repaid it in spades, I trusted her with all my hardest jobs, and she never let me down. When, in one of VQ’s strongest missions, there needed to be a side objective where I assumed, correctly, that I needed to fight the boss with some benched-but-still-viable monk, it was Helga I trusted to fight her way through and drop him in the relevant position. The enemy phase was dicey, but I calculated it all and realised she’d survive with 10 HP.
Turns out the boss had a sidearm with 10 more might than the weapon he starts with.
I did complete the sidequest, and my reward was an S-rank light tome. This would have been a lot better in my mind if I had any care to deploy my one light magic user for longer. Even if it had just opened up a squad slot, by losing both the and my best unit in the game. Goddammit.
Time passes, and then I get another primary light magic user. Trouble is, there’s about six chapters left in the game, but that isn’t so bad - she’s even got her own Prf tome. And because there’s so few chapters, the S-rank is basically just her second Prf in waiting. Though it’s, um. Though it’s basically just worse. But, hey.
She’s also a monk of level, like, five.
Now I don’t use vanilla Ests. Honestly, I’m a sceptic that vanilla Ests exist. They’re all zero, no hero. But someone I do always use is Ross, and there’s two big reasons for that:
- He has a hatchet, which means he always hits.
- He’s level Minus Ten, which means he gains XP insanely fast.
So fuck it, I give Sigrid a spin. She was level 5 and had Paragon. She was gaining 100 XP from every kill I could get her. And as VQ had hit its endgame, and the loot train that had characterised its side objective up to that point decreased in relevance, suddenly I had a side-quest again: getting this person who would explode if any physical unit looked at her up to viability.
She had a massively accurate brave tome Prf that did credible damage even at her bases. She had zero durability, and I’ve played FE10; I know how to play around having a vulnerable light mage with zero durability. But this time the payoff - and yes, of course it’s illusory, training Sigrid will never be ‘worth it’ compared to just having another slugger - is real.
Because she really did catch up, after a map and a half. And then she kept going. Here’s my Bulan, my actual favourite VQ character, and her statline is about the norm for my squad: near caps, generally not at them.
A very solid unit, in the context of VQ, who was performing well and a key part of my plan. Great! Here’s Sigrid.
I joined Serenes Forest in late 2009, the time where the pushback started to pick up momentum against the received wisdom that Nino Is 10/10, where PEMN was the watchword of the day. Sigrid showed me that green numbers still had a hold over me, after all these years. The brave tome, unbelievably, was still kicking, but at this point it was absurd overkill. And of course, she still had the S-rank. And that S-rank was not worth Helga’s life, just as Sigrid was never worth Jai’s, who died forging out into the fog looking for someone Sigrid could kill. But you’d better believe, in the push to the final boss, it was that weapon in hand.
Was it ‘worth it’? Obviously not. But, by God, it was cathartic.
Custom campaign Ests tend to be a lot more… extreme than vanilla’s, and frankly, I think that’s necessary for them to feel satisfying. But what Sigrid did best of all, I think - and it’s an influence you can see in Jauger in Do5 - wasn’t just the green numbers. Yes, it was nice that she really was my best unit by a distance, at the end. But she wouldn’t have got there if it wasn’t for her ability to hit strongly and reliably from the very beginning. I knew, if I could keep her safe and the dancer nearby, she was getting 200 XP a turn. She was utter dogshit objectively, but I could rely on her. In general, I’m an advocate for making units better at their strengths and accepting with their weaknesses… but there are limits. They still need to do their job.
Don’t look to Nino. Look to Ross. Look to the Hatchet. Put down the foundations, then apply the Gamer Fuel 
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