Interrupting your regularly scheduled Hag in White praise (it deserves it), I bring you the Codger in Crimson from The Eligor’s Spear, Kaarlo.
Him
This is Kaarlo. Kaarlo is a unit recruited two-thirds of the way through Eligor’s Spear. From a first glance, Kaarlo looks quite unimpressive. For comparison, here’s an enemy Druid (I used FE Builder to find one nearly the same level as him).
But Kaarlo has a few tricks up his sleeve to help him. For one, his growths are quite interesting; 60% Mag and 40% Spd means he becomes quite powerful offensively, and 40% Def & 25% Res makes him your classic hackrom bulky shaman (when I played a while ago, he had 50% Mag and 40% Res, but I doubt it changes much given his bases are the main appeal).
His starting inventory, whilst good, isn’t particularly relevant, so let’s skip to his weapon ranks.
Yup! Kaarlo is an anima focused Druid. Anima access is (theoretically) quite common in Eligor’s Spear, and it is very powerful given the anima tomes available (multiple free Boltings and Fimbulvetres, a legendary tome, etc). However, most users of anima magic have issues. Francis
*This is untrue, in my run I actually got him killed off and forgot. Still, he is the only other dedicated anima wielder in the route, and it is very possible for him to get stat screwed/killed off.
Kaarlo represents a really important aspect of unit design that I hadn’t quite understood before, that being the importance of replacement units. Kaarlo’s stats might be relatively mediocre, but he arrived at just the time I needed an anima mage, whilst having some unique factors to set him apart from his competition. In my run, he mainly acted as a frontline Fimbulvetr and Nosferatu user, shifting to using the Ilmatar for the strong monsters in Endgame, but he can equally as easily be fit in as a staff bot (with some pretty good support partners to boot) or seige-tome abuser with the Boltings.
Or you can just bench him! He’s a random guy who shows up and joins your army with okay stats. Some players won’t need help filling up holes in their team composition. Unlike someone like FE7 Pent, who makes training the other mages feel a waste of time, or Isadora, who feels outclassed without a niche, Kaarlo pretty perfectly exists as just another option if you need or want it.
Overall, I think Kaarlo is a good example as to what makes a mid-late game pre-promote enjoyable, and I am not biased because mine got stat blessed. The end.
