Coventry (A Vestrian Tale)
In this double feature of AVT, I’ll be covering my personal favorite unit of the hack, the “Lord” of the game, Coventry.
Coventry isn’t actually the lord of the game, of course, he’s some hapless noble that the protagonists of the game convince to “escort” in exchange for a gray gem. The key thing that I really love about Coventry is just how much of his character is conveyed without him speaking a single word of dialogue. He doesn’t say a thing during the opening scenes of Chapter 2. Helena’s journal mentions some random noble joining you, and then you’re dropped into preps like this:
If you’ve gone full recruitment and deathless up to this point, then you will be forced to bench 1 unit, and hilariously enough it just so happens that the default bench fodder is Coventry. But since you’re considering deploying him, let’s take a look at him.
There’s that gray gem he said he’d pay us with.
His stats are really unremarkable. Ezekiel and Liquirizia have better speed, Helena and Samir have better strength, Carmela has better bulk, Anatolij has better skill… I guess he has the best luck of the group? But that’s about it. What about his weapon ranks?
Ah, it looks like we found our character gimmick. At first glance, Coventry is a jack of all trades, master of none type character. On second glance, you might notice his paragon skill, which hints at him being some kind of growth project unit, but on third glance you’ll see that he has 6 movement and cannot promote. He’s definitely a character that takes a little bit of puzzling to figure out how to use well, but he’s very rewarding once you do.
Coventry really benefits from a lot of AVT’s weapon types being very bottom heavy in terms of useful weapons. At E rank, the best things he can be using are iron weapons, glass weapons, and devil weapons. Let’s start with iron.
Irons have a decent bit of longevity in AVT, the game is short (only 10 chapters) and enemy stats aren’t super high, so you can get away with using them for a while. Coventry’s iron of choice is probably the iron bow. He won’t pack quite the punch of your archer Helena, but with his +1 movement over her, he can position himself much more aggressively, then have a teammate switch him to a lance or something so he’s not a sitting duck on enemy phase. This can keep him afloat in your team for a handful of maps, his high threat range making up for his low damage, until your midgame prepromotes come in and do what he does better.
Glass weapons are for our more methodical players. They’re very rare, you can only really get them from capturing enemies, but they have high mt and bypass AVT’s usual 99 hit ceiling. These weapons can supplement Coventry’s normally low damage output and build his weapon ranks fairly quickly. He’s not the best at using them to capture, as his con is merely okay, but he’s still a perfectly fine user of them, especially the glass bow for reasons previously mentioned.
Devil weapons are for our high rollers in the audience. These weapons have even higher mt than glass weapons, and they build his ranks even faster. Devil weapons are emblematic of AVT’s chaotic core gameplay loop, being some of the best weapons in the game, and two of them (the devil lance and the devil axe) are only available through secret events. The only one you’re guaranteed to get every playthrough is the devil sword, and Coventry is a pretty enticing user of it; he has that high luck base, after all. There is a guaranteed no backfire setup you can do, if you grab a holdable luck booster from chapter 6 and then have 18+ luck while holding it, or you can be like me and just start swinging. The kid grows like a weed, he’ll have 30 or 40 HP before too long, and at that point you don’t even care if he backfires, so just go for it!
Coventry is really good at creating his own story through the choices you choose to make in gameplay. Is he more pragmatic than Helena gives him credit for, wielding basic, but useful weapons as an honest but inexperienced member of the group? Is he foolhardy and ambitious, determined to master the most powerful weapons he can get his hands on, no matter the cost? Or is he simply along for the ride, a footnote in the tale of Ezekiel and his gang of thieves? The choice is yours to decide in the tale of this truly bizarre unit.