Fructuoso (Hag in White)
Meet my friend, Fructuoso! He’s going to be with me for a good, long time–
Shit.
Let’s rewind.
So a few chapters into Hag, you wind up at a roadside stop. For frankly incredible reasons, you wind up hiring a mercenary, with a choice of three. Of these, the correct choice is Fructuoso, henceforth ‘Fructi’.
He is a law-abiding citizen trying to make some coin. But, wait! you point out. His story is, in fact, extremely flimsy! He is clearly a brigand! Oh, you got me. But he is at least trying to make a new start, cosplaying as a knight even if he doesn’t quite fit the part.
Even his initial pitch isn’t the most convincing. I mean, he does open with a lie (albeit a laughably shitty one), and he admits his main motivation is that it’s really hard to find work as a former brigand. But over the course of the game, he really will start to live up to his newfound ideals, and finds a place for himself in the company. If you’ll give him a chance, he’ll take it with both hands.
And this dovetails perfectly with his design.
Fructuoso arrives with this statline and two skills. The first is Provoke. Provoke is 100% reliable. Enemies will ALWAYS go for him if they can, passing up lethal blows just to deck him in the face. Now units like this are notoriously very powerful, as you’d imagine. Harold made Deity Device’s enemy waves approachable at times.
The second is that his poorly-fitting armour falls apart under the slightest pressure, and at the end of every combat, he takes 4 damage. It won’t kill him, but unlike FEH Fury, it has no benefits. It’s just there as a check.
And his speed is poor – though he won’t generally be doubled, and you can get him a Wary Fighter item down the track – and his resistance is, notably, fucking horrific. This is not a guy who can take on enemy waves by himself. This is a guy who can peel off just a guy or two from the front, sending them on a snipe hunt. When it comes to physical units – or, hell, one mage at a time – he can take the heat.
Yes! THAT TLP anim!
So Fructi walked into the team and never left. He wasn’t a slouch or a gimmick unit, either. His strength and skill are high, and he does a decent job just slugging it out with enemies. He feels like a real unit, not just a gimmick. And it fits in with Hag’s unit design philosophy. You get a lot of units who offer support as part of their toolkit; Lopez, above, of course, being a prime example. And, because he has very clear limitations, he doesn’t warp the game around him. He just makes some engagements easier.
So long as you’re very, very sure of your calculations.
Fructuoso in his natural HP habitat.
I played Hag as an ironman run, which it was perfectly suited to. I missed some lines but found others. So, Fructi was constantly walking a tightrope. He could hook one, two, sometimes even three guys off the front, but if the damage stacked up, he was fucked.
He had a few narrow escapes, but when I was caught in a pincer attack, I memory holed a sage. You will note his resistance is fucking dogshit; with the exception of a wyvern knight, every other unit I fielded was in double digit Res, usually by a distance. Pegasi chipped him down, just as I planned… then the sage finished him off.
Still, without his help, I’m sure far, far more would have died. He might not have reached his epilogue. I might not have seen a punchy little paragraph extolling his new life. But he was clear about what he sought. He wanted redemption. I think he found it.