Milo (Guard of Avelon)
When I started GoA earlier today, I did not expect to make this effortpost. Seeing his balanced statline and bold colour scheme, I immediately remarked on stream that he was giving Itsuke vibes, which nobody caught on because nobody remembers Itsuke from TLP and half the people in-stream thought I’d said ‘isekai’ anyway (I have a vaguely slurry voice to go with my drawling accent).
But with raw power like this, how could I resist?
Okay, hold the raw power. Hold the power?!
And hold the speed. Hold the speed?!
And hold the spell list. Hold the spell list?! Hey, Jimmy, gimme a mage with nothin’!
Yes, Milo’s stats look bad, but don’t let that fool you. They are bad. Maybe he gets cool spells? Yeah, nah, Fire is the only spell he’ll get all game (maybe there was something different in the single on-map shop I never checked). Thunder is for being on the receiving end of. Is it really good in GoA? I think it has three might.
If I had another mage, you bet that guy walks onto the team. But there is no other character furnished with offensive magic under your control in GoA. Milo’s what you’ve got.
So as you’ve probably worked out from the fact that I’m writing about a guy who literally has lower bases than any unit I’ve ever made myself, GoA is a bit different. The circumstances are as follows. It’s five maps – and the first two are very short – where you only really scale from level 1 to about level 5-7. Units have shitty growths (I think?) and, compounding matters, this is the one time outside of LTC runs where fixed growths has actually made sense and been appropriate. This means that pretty much everyone’s first level is +HP and then their second one is a bonanza of all their other stuff. Level 3 is also tiny, level 4 is big again. I think Milo’s last level was actually empty. What a king.
Anyway, I bullied him initially and tried to funnel experience into other units instead, like Six.
Six is an interesting case that illustrates how this levelling system works better than anyone else. You might look at Six and think this unit looks like outrageous dogshit, and that’s indeed how he turned out to be until hitting Level Three, Precisely. Getting there was like pulling teeth. Then he had 4 speed and went from doubling zero enemy fighters to doubling every enemy fighter, and, indeed, one-rounding them with basically 100% accuracy. There’s a lot of enemy fighters and they hit the hardest of any enemy type, so when he had that on top of chip he became a very valuable thing to have in the back pocket, and this effortpost was nearly about him instead.
But I wasn’t expecting to write it about Milo, even as I posted my final team to the Discord and realised, shit, I was gonna have to write about this freak instead. Is this a cope case? Was I won over by his charming personality? No. I don’t remember a single line he spoke. It doesn’t matter.
We’ve been over what he’s not. But we have to remember what I wrote about Vesper several months ago. Deficit discourse! Let’s not define him by his many, many failings. What can Milo do?
- He is pretty accurate.
- He can attack at 1-2 range.
- He will survive a physical hit from anything other than a steel axe fighter, and there’s only like three of those guys in the game.
- He hits Res.
Okay, but all of this describes, like, any mage. Perhaps. But let’s look at how replaceable these traits are:
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Your archer and your paladin can hit reliably at range, your swordsmen can hit reliably in melee, but with the amount of enemies and your limited action economy (fairly small squad, full deploy, generally 2- or 3RKO standard) you need all hands on deck and knowing that he’s going to hit his shots is one hell of a safety net.
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You get one hand-axe, which will never hit anything, and one javelin. You can buy other javelins, but still, they’re javelins, and accuracy’s a real concern. Besides that, you have an archer. Everyone has vanilla move, and some maps have a lot of forest around. Not only are enemies chunky and numerous, but finding the tiles to attack them from can be a real concern, and this really greases those wheels.
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You don’t have to cover him in bubble-wrap. You can use him to lure enemies, and doink them back, almost no matter who they are. Remember what was said about the action economy. That’s one less hit you have to dole out on player phase.
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This is the big one. Nobody one-rounds armour in GoA. They’re all but fucking minibosses. Your hammer guy almost-but-doesn’t one-shot and sure as hell doesn’t double. Your rapier does 3x2. So does your piercing dagger. And they hit hard in return. So when this guy can lay down 5x2 or 6x2 damage fairly trivially, and take a javelin (or, better still, not take a melee lance) in return, that eases the mathematics considerably.
So of all your limited roster, Milo winds up being the one who stands out the most. Mages in FE tend to feel disappointingly similar to your other guys, but Milo felt unique throughout, bringing his own little thing to the table, even if that wasn’t, like, ‘good stats’. I don’t think he one-rounded anyone in the whole game. He was unique not through addition, but through subtraction. There’s a lesson to be learned there. Nice visual design, too.
Anyway, play GoA. It took me like two and a half hours to beat, slightly inebriated for the final chapters.