Effortposts Around Units We Like (From Custom Campaigns)

[Roze]

Asch (The Last Promise)

In the grand scheme of things, Asch’s stats are nothing special. Here you have his stats compared to Kelik’s ones, who joins a chapter earlier than him.

Definitely stronger and bulkier, but his speed is on the lower side and that 4 luck is not exactly fantastic.
Furthermore, considering the fact that TLP is a game with a great focus on growth units, being a prepromote does not favour you in any manner. Looking at his growths, which by the way are not that bad, is almost trivial. It’s not like he’s going to level up that much or cap any of his stats, which is fondamental for a healthy lategame experience.
However, what makes Asch worth of notice is the numerous amount of tiny little positive aspects that surround him.

Let’s start with an easy one. Asch looks cool. He is rappresented by a very polished splice with some nice custom elements into it. The palette is also pretty cool. Overall, a great start for the guy.

Secondly, Asch is not a guaranteed unit. In order to have a chance to recruit him, the player has to not trust Logan, who’s asking for help, in Chapter 12. This little aspect helps him become a tiny bit more memorable imo.

Speaking of Logan, you can recruit him instead of Asch if you respond to his plight for help. A comparison between the two units is a natural occurrence.

And lucky for us Logan sucks big time. Good luck having any screentime with 5 Strength and Kelik and Tekun on your neck. I guess that’s another point for Asch.

Fun fact, did you know that Asch is the only unit able to weild axes in Kelik mode from chapter 13A up to chapter 17? That’s 4 chapters of free real estate! And guess what, the guy comes with a B rank and a not too shabby 12 Con! He’s going to throw Hand Axes left and right like there’s no tomorrow. But if you really want to lolligagmax, Asch comes equiped with one of the quirkiest weapons present in TLP.

Is it good? Hell no! Is it funny tho? HELL YEAH!

Lastly, a couple of words about his stats. As said before, his numbers are not particularly good in TLP, but they allow him to leave a decent impression at the very start of Kelik’s mode to later gently fall off around Chapter 18.
His strenght is not going to be matched by any unit for a decent amount of time, his speed allows him to double the not exactly fast enemies of the first part of TLP and he is even bulky enough to compete with the likes of Kevin, a unit notorious for being as talky as a wall. But guess what, Asch does not have do deal with having 4 Mov, au contraire, he sports 6! Pretty cool stuff, huh?

In my opinion this shows how, if inserted in the right context, an otherwise underwhelming unit can shine through a myriad of soon to become broken units and help them in their journey. I don’t know how intentional all of these little boons were, but with certainty they make Asch a memorable prepromote in a land of sometimes bland options.

[BobbyAsaka]

One of the most unique aspects of Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light is its overall awareness of tropes, especially in aesthetics. Fire Emblem (and anime and media in general) has this really obnoxious pattern of making all the good guys cartoonishly pretty and all the bad guys cartoonishly ugly, to the point where you can often look at a character roster and immediately tell who’s going to be with or against the player. Personally, I’m really not a fan of character rosters who immediately give away each character’s plot significance through the way a character’s design compares to the characters around them—and I believe the game is playing its hand way too fast if I can instantly tell who’s going to play what story role from a mere picture of the cast.

DLATMOL’s character designs, in general, do everything they can to push against this philosophy and use it to its advantage. The hack goes out of its way to make a fair few of its recruitable characters look plain, ugly, or cartoonishly evil, especially through the use of spliced parts from vanilla villains—which is a huge breath of fresh air to me. It is more than aware of how common “ugliness” is used as a visual coding for a character’s villainy, and it toys with that effect through its portrayals of its less conventionally attractive characters. Units like Ronaldo, Fiana, and both recruitable shamans all fall under this umbrella, among others, but nowhere else does this effect come out more memorably than Alva—who I consider to be one of the most fun and interesting romhack units ever in terms of how he’s designed.

Alva – a model on how to leverage SRPG gameplay mechanics to make Fire Emblem side characters really cool

Alva is a mage introduced in Chapter 11 of DLATMOL. While being a mage in DLATMOL is always a plus, his bases are painfully average for this point in the game. This makes some sense given his setup in the story, as he’s an upper-class noble, but it makes him an unappealing choice for deployment when the player has likely sunk investment into others in their roster by now. And considering DLATMOL’s difficulty curve, this join time means he essentially misses out on 14 chapters of free EXP to grow compared to other units in your army.

His introduction in the story reinforces this conclusion, as he’s initially presented as a shady, untrustworthy noble from the enemy country who wants to strike a deal with you. The protagonists go in expecting a trap, and when they meet him they feel their fears are warranted—he belittles his own men as useless, he makes racist comments about his personal bodyguard, and he comes off as an unsavory person in general. It’s obvious that he just wants to use them so that he can fill the empty throne once the war is over, either himself or through a puppet emperor.

And would you trust a face like this? What a trustworthy smile. Nothing like a Jerme splice to make you go “I think this man will keep my Social Security number and credit card info safe and sound”.

Now, with all that said… let’s say the player ignores all these clear red flags. Let’s say the player goes out of their way to baby a unit who’s not only unimpressive at base, but also seems set up to backstab them and leave the party at some point.

What happens then?

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Well, Alva’s gameplay performance inevitably disappoints them, that’s what.

His offenses don’t grow consistently. He basically only doubles slow enemies like armors. His stats stay unimpressive in general, minus one 50% growth—and since it’s 50%, it has a high level of variance, so the chance of deviating from the expected average is higher.

But this is where DLATMOL’s lack of modern hack “features”, specifically visible growths, plays to its advantage. If the player knows Alva’s growths, they’d know to expect that he’ll inevitably disappoint them in most important areas. Without that transparency, however, Alva just comes off like he got stat-screwed, because there’s nothing about him at first glance that suggests his growths are the way they are. This means that, when the next prepromote Sage shows up a few chapters later eclipsing him in all but (usually) one stat, a blind player is much more likely to come to the conclusion that Alva just got unlucky and replace him for a significantly superior substitute.

In this way, between his setup and the circumstances surrounding him, Alva feels deliberately coded in both gameplay and story to be alienating to the player—as if the very game itself is warning you against investing in him.

But what if the player, once again, deliberately ignores all of this? What if the player doesn’t care that Alva has been apparently stat-screwed? What if they just really, really want to see if this no-good, very bad, slimy-looking asshole will shape up, even though he has repeatedly failed to consistently level well enough to keep up with the curve and is probably spiking your army’s water supply with hallucinogens when nobody is looking?

Well... (mild spoilers for details that are more satisfying if uncovered on your own)

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Let’s say the player decides to deploy Alva on the chapter where you get the Sage who almost completely outclasses him. At the start of that chapter, if Alva is deployed, he’ll have a short dialogue with a villager where he asks about the whereabouts of another NPC who’s on the map.

And if the player actually pays attention to that dialogue, and takes Alva to meet said NPC… they’re met with a very different interaction than everything else they’ve seen from him. This NPC treats Alva more kindly and gently than anyone else in the game does, praising him for being a hero above many others. Contrary to Alva’s first impression, he seems dismissive of the idea that Alva is selfish and terrible, and insists that Alva still has room to grow and improve himself. He even gives Alva an expensive tome though it really should’ve been a unique Prf to help patch up his combat tbh. As for Alva himself, he seems rather anxious and embarrassed about it all, insisting that the NPC stop talking to him so that the others don’t ask questions. In this way, this conversation shows a very different side of Alva while also mirroring the player’s faith in him through the introduction of this NPC.

Once more, DLATMOL’s lack of quote-unquote “quality of life” actually works to its benefit here. None of this would function at all, nor would it be particularly satisfying to discover, if there was a little speech bubble indicator on top of the NPC in question that blatantly gave away the answer to the puzzle. The only clue to finding this dialogue for a blind player is deploying Alva at the start of the map—and the (likely) only reason that you’re deploying Alva at this point in the game is if you’re willing to dismiss both the narrative red flags and the gameplay red flags, and likewise deploy an otherwise functionally redundant unit in hopes of seeing more of his personal growth.

I don’t know whether this was deliberate on the dev’s part or not, but it doesn’t really matter. This obscure little talk conversation, and the way the gameplay and story are set up around it, are set up in a way which makes it immensely satisfying to uncover on your own. I cannot understate how fulfilling it felt in my first run to put so much faith into a person who didn’t quite seem to deserve it and finally unearth this little magical bit of payoff.

It’s from this moment on that Alva’s dialogues begin to point towards his own self improvement, too. He has battle quotes with enemies who he doesn’t stand a chance against at base—quotes where his growing sense of nobility and righteousness steps into the spotlight. Just like with the above talk, the only way that one will find these quotes, and likewise see the better side of Alva, is through putting their faith in him. And the fact that these quotes are only reasonable to obtain (without suiciding him) by giving him EXP is what makes investing in him in gameplay so rewarding and fun.

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Conclusion

Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light is a hack that is generally very playful with how it uses coding and existing FE tropes. I think it does a very stellar job at initially presenting characters in a certain way to establish player expectations, only to leverage those expectations to enhance the story’s effect when it takes those characters’ stories in a different direction than vanilla might. In many ways, I consider Alva to be the crux of this.

None of Alva’s most compelling dialogues are particularly “secret” in the complex sense. None of them require some convoluted requirement that you’ll only find on a wiki. Rather, all of them are tied towards deliberately looking past multiple layers of character coding designed to make him seem unappealing in both gameplay and story… all for the promise of that sweet, sweet nectar of character development.

On an initial run, putting that faith in him despite everything and being rewarded for it is gratifying in a distinctly remarkable way. And on a replay run, knowing that gameplay investment in him directly translates into a more fulfilling story—that every combat he participates in is bringing you one step closer towards helping him shape up and be better—is an aspect that makes him incredibly fun to use in a way that no other romhack character can compare to for me.

[BigMood]

I was recently made aware of a hack called Tales of ChoHakkai, which has essentially no story or characterization to speak of other than memes and indulgent self-references. Despite that, one unit shines as being a beacon of mechanical interest based around an extremely simple concept.

Enter Tej.

I’m not going to go back and play through the first few chapters to get a proper screenshot of this guy. Here’s his stats in builder.

The growth totals are actually perfectly normal by this hack’s standards, and his base stats are perfectly serviceable and not particularly interesting. It is necessary to mention this at least once to provide context for the rest.

Now, let’s look at him in endgame.

I taught him a bunch of goofy skills, none of which ended up mattering. What does matter here is what’s hovered over: Blue-haired Swordsman. Although he is not actually the lord of this game, Tej is meant to be a pastiche of FE1 Marth, and with this comes a number of esoteric benefits.

First: note the 6 Move. That’s his base movement. Marth had 7 but you can’t have everything in life.

He comes with Supply. Did Marth have this? I don’t know. What’s important is that this hack does occasionally encourage you to split your army, and a second supplier is fairly useful in terms of arranging your inventory or pulling out chest keys/door keys to make progress. On the topic of unlocking things:

I’m sure most people here know this, but FE1 Marth can just go around unlocking shit with the divine power of the Fire Emblem. This translates to Tej being able to use lockpicks. You get four units total that can pick locks in the entire game: your rogue jagen, this guy, Joshua Bright from the Trails series in endgame (who is actually a pretty good unit), and a 1 MAG troubadour. For most of the game, you will be using Tej (who can also just pull out door/chest keys for others to help).

Note the rapier. That’s not his rapier. I got it off of a different prepromote I got killed by accident. The rapier is shared prf between Tej and that unit, and there’s really no indication that Tej can use the rapier other than the fact that he’s a blue-haired lord. It does make him quite serviceable, though.

You might have noticed he’s level 20. He does not promote, and he doesn’t get any bonus for leveling up to 20. In many ways, he feels like a very silly unit to bring as part of your main party if you care about combat, and the fact that he uses Roy’s animation really cements that fact. However, late in the game, you’re rewarded with this:

Following the footsteps of “lords” before him, the man is awarded with a powerful sword in endgame. There’s actually no indication at all that this sword is meant for Tej to use, but it’s not, like, a difficult guess to make. As monsters dominate the final few endgame maps, this sword allows Tej to nuke most foes out of orbit. Still, isn’t he a bit weak? Those level 20 stats aren’t doing anyone any favors. However, this brings me back to the initial screenshot of his growths:

This game is comically growth deflated, both for playable units and foes. This does have a natural consequence: enemy quality doesn’t ever spiral beyond the point where Tej, with his apparently modest 11 STR and 15 SPD, can’t handle them. The lack of a promotion stings, as promotion bonuses are still real in this hack, but he doesn’t really need them to stand his ground, and his prfs and unique skills help him maintain relevance throughout the course of the campaign.

I’m reminded of this video by ActualLizard about Marth in specifically FE1, and how his unique FE1 kit gave him a number of bizarre advantages that future lords (even future Marths) did not enjoy. Tej is a unit that has recreated the feeling of these advantages outside even the context of being the lord. You’re never forced to bring him, but like the Marth of yore, the unique contextualization of this project’s balancing decisions makes him surprisingly enjoyable to use for a unit that is otherwise “Roy but he never promotes”.

Oh, and he starts with a Light Brand so, you know, he does have 1-2 range swords going for him.

[StardustSheep]

As the local furry, it is my obligation, no, my destiny to effortpost about a furry unit. And so I feel it is vital to bring up the furriest of them all! The true progenitor of a very short line of anthropomorphic animal units in Fire Emblem romhacking!!!

…What do you mean, “he doesn’t have fur”?

Malcolm from Bloodlines is as of writing this the third of four lords to join Bram’s army. His stats don’t look like much to write home about, and really he just looks like an archer with added flavor, but that’s because you haven’t taken a closer look at that movement.

As a birdman (a valgriph crow, if you will), he is able to fly! This is, however, also true of other Valgriph Rangers you’re going to face, which presents a pretty unique dynamic for at least a majority of the first act. There are times when you’re gonna want to push forward with him as far as birdly possible, in order to take out particularly nasty flying foes, but if you go too far, another crow could snipe him where nobody else would reach him. Even if he manages to survive that, the next opportunity to heal might be ways off…

And yes, I briefly touched upon his base stats, but really they’re quite ordinary for Bloodlines. Just about every unit that joins you is a growths project, and most enemy types actually start out stronger than your playable guys. This is where Malcolm’s ability to chip from afar comes in-handy, because even the most powerful Eliwood!Lord with two cool epic flaming super death swords is absolutely going to fall against a LV.1 mercenary with stats akin to Dieck.

(Not shown: LV.1 Mercenary, because I am lazy.)

While combat-wise he’s pretty interesting in Act 1, it’s in Act 2 where he really starts to shine. His flying ability is only put to use sporadically in those first couple of maps you have access to him, and some chapters like the one with the beeeees really reign him in by putting a handful of archers somewhere he’d really like to beeee, but once maps start being more or less about bumrushing, that’s where putting him to use can make or break your playthrough.

The tent map, for example. His flight is invaluable for reaching them, before your NPCs do anything stupid (seriously, I don’t think you can even keep J.R. alive if you don’t overextend with Malcolm). Or the sinking harbor map, where he’s practically the only unit, who can help your stragglers get away from the swarms of mermen chasing them through the mud. The list goes on and on…

What I’m really saying is, you should give Bloodlines a shot. It’s great.

[Parrhesia]

Carmela (A Vestrian Tale)

A Vestrian Tale is weird. It’s really good, and it does a lot of things that should piss me off, but don’t, but sometimes they still do. 1-99 hit limit is really funny until the moments where you actually miss a 99. But it works. And so far - roughly midway into the game - I’ve been ironmanning it just fine, rolling with the punches. With the lone exception of when I opened the most recent chapter, missed a 99 as my first action of the map, looked at the screen, looked at myself, and closed it and haven’t played it in like a month. Oops.

If only there was a unit who could escape the terrors of 99.

Oh, wait!

Mushroom girl // she’s been livin’ in her mushroom world

This is mine. I don’t think it was a good idea to promote her. Since I’m a man of honour, I have no idea what her growths are, and I don’t think I need to. She’s grown Pretty Shittily.

Carmela arrives in the first chapter as a trivially-recruitable fighter; she has a lot of HP/strength and enough skill for the earlygame and that’s about it, but she also has Wary Fighter, ensuring she’s not going to be carved to pieces. Even by then, she isn’t your first unit who you can rely upon for just One Big Hit; your excellent starting archer, Helena, is in the same vein and probably, from any objective standpoint, better. And I adore Helena. But I’m not sure I could write a huge post about her. Her virtues are obvious. Carmela… you kind of just have to use. And to see how she fits into the system.

“What first attracted you to the millionaire, Helena Daniels?”

AVT is in the vein of FE5; enemies are somewhat weak, numbers are low and environments are chaotic. And Carmela, despite her wild character, is someone you can rely on. When things look rough, you can just jam Carmela into the fight and let her get punched in the teeth. And that’s huge. The only other unit with a lot of HP has terrible defences and no guarantee of avoiding doubles; you only get one armour knight in the earlygame, and mine’s dead. Things will go wrong in your turns, ‘sure things’ will turn out to be anything but, and when something goes wrong that’s when you put Carmela in the front lines and can be sure she’ll make it to the next turn. She’s a tank in an environment where that matters.

Yes, the platonic ideal of an armour knight is a fighter with 10 Con.

But she doesn’t have to be purely reactive, either. Her unique weapon is the AYE-AYE!, which would be bad in almost any other custom campaign I could name. It guarantees 10 damage. Guarantees. And you’re only getting that 10 damage because, again, Wary Fighter, she isn’t doubling shit. It’s only in melee. And while stats are low, they aren’t ‘enemies have 10 HP’ low. But in a game where your units have to team up to secure kills, and where you need redundancy because stuff will go wrong, the 10 guaranteed damage goes a long way. And if you need a capture, hey, it’s there to help soften up for that, as well (or to secure it, though Carmela’s Con stat is unremarkable). This axe, which in almost any other environment would be a joke weapon, has seventeen (17) uses and, reader, I’ve been trying to ration it.

Carmela’s other main gimmick is that sometimes she’ll stumble onto mushrooms that are a nice extra source of consumables. I haven’t had to fall back on these much, but it’s good to have them in my back pocket, just in case. And she’s a fun character with a distinct voice. I’m past the earlygame now and, really, I reached the point where it became clear I should drop her, I have other units. I have a new warrior in the C Axe / A Bow Hackrom Warrior archetype (as Do7 Garath begat Shale, and so on) who is almost strictly better than Carmela. Even the AYE-AYE! only has one use left.

But I like her. And when I want to make sure it gets done right, it’s her I’ll send.

[lowres]

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.

[BobbyAsaka]

I’m going to piggyback off of this post here lol

On the topic of Coventry, one thing that I think is really critical to discuss here is opportunity cost, especially in a game like AVT where resources are so tight.

This stuff is made moderately cooler if you uncover it yourself

Choosing to invest in Coventry, or to give him the glass or devil weapons (both of which are incredibly scarce, and are all 10 or less uses) ALWAYS requires foregoing some other option for someone else. He is a character that other units will have to make sacrifices for if you want him to function in the long term, in part because he shares weapon types with so many of the starting gang. This is the way it is from the very beginning—as shown in the post above, you even have to explicitly go out of your way to pick someone to abandon to slot him in, and why would you drop any of your existing crew over the utter rando who abruptly appeared in your roster with zero dialogue and no onscreen appearances?

This is what makes his later story beats function at all. It all comes off like a form of mechanical feedback for sinking so much time into this guy. A player likely won’t ever read his Alyssa recruit conversation or lategame battle quotes unless they’ve actually tried to build him up, which is tricky to do without hindering the capacities of some of your other units early on. So if you do commit to putting resources into him… hearing him talk so bombastically, alongside Alyssa’s shock at how much he’s changed, comes off as a really nice drop of characterization stemming from your decision. Here the game shows you the fruits of your labor: how this formerly meek young man’s temperament has been altered by the favoritism you’ve poured into him.

It’s funny, as in my first run of AVT he was my least favorite character in the game. Wimpy on paper, slim chances of getting future bits of writing, absolutely no dialogue nor connections with an incredibly awkward and tacked-on introduction… everything I saw of him compelled me to drop him and never look back. I hadn’t used him or read his later dialogues, and going off his boring first impression, I (understandably) never got the feeling that he could be shaped into more than a tacked-on, bland guy. And when others prodded me to try investing in him on a rerun, citing cryptic stuff like “fun gameplay” as his merits, I often felt an underlying sense of frustration when I tried to use him or give him kills at the expense of other characters with more charming presences in the script… only for that struggle to shift into surprise as it began to feel like the game was acknowledging the efforts and sacrifices that I had made for him.

While I do still think Coventry is a bit underwritten in an SNESFE type of way, I also think that the concepts behind him are neat and promising, and his fundamental structure is quite comparable to Alva DLATMOL in some ways.

[HeroVP]

Reversecard, Dies Emblem

Reversecard is a unit that joins in the third map of Dies Emblem, along with 3 other units that fulfill very similar niches: Krow the auto-galeforce dex based-swordmaster, Ignis the knife wielding shopkeeper, and Devisio, probably the second most important unit in the earlygame for their ability to completely sidestep Dies Emblem’s very punishing trauma system. Anyway, let’s take the middle case, here’s Krow’s stats

So let’s not beat around the bush, RC’s stats and growths are all strictly worse than Krow’s, who’s stats are also just barely good enough for galeforce once per turn after any sword attack to make them viable. But hey, Dies is a game with FE4 based trading, so having a good inventory (or even one you can sell for a lot of gold) can make a bad unit good. And Reversecard probably-

…has nothing of value. If you were wondering, Krow’s inventory is worth a solid 5900 to sell, RC’s is worth a pitiful 1200 for their +3 defense armor and 3 might dagger. Also, to be clear, Dies enemies are jacked, Reversecard is lucky to find a fight that doesn’t one shot them, let alone one where they can dink an enemy for actual damage. Oh, also, since we haven’t talked about it yet, being knifelocked in Dies…it’s like, fine, I guess. Knives use half of strength and dex for damage calcs, which is bad for Reversecard tho.

But hey, in Dies, you can have bad stats, and bad items, and bad growths, and still be okay if you have good skills! RC’s first skill is just shade, but hey, less chance to be targeted is pretty solid when everything kills you in one hit. The second skill though, is what turns Reversecard from a shitty meme unit, to a legitimate superstar of utility. Tremble, mortals, and rejoice!

Vehicles in Dies are special units that can be ridden in by infantry, the first vehicle you get has 4 slots for units to ride in, plus a driver, who has to be in the vehicle for it to move. In the first few maps, yeah, this is nothing special. But starting around chapter 5, Dies allows you to load units into vehicles in the prep screen! And vehicles only take 1 deployment slot, no matter how many units are in them. This effectively makes it so that Reversecard can be freely deployed on any map in the game that allows you to bring a vehicle (almost all of them). And hey, when there is no opportunity cost to bring a unit, all of a sudden a filler unit that can shove your units, drive vehicles, pick up chests and interact with map gimmicks, and throw poison knives becomes a very attractive unit to invest in

The best part about this, in my opinion, is that combat Reversecard is truly unfixable. They can mayyyyybe take an effective dagger and slice up a mage with it, but aside from that, even chip damage is a big ask. Despite this, there is a lot an extra unit can accomplish. For example, a few maps after RC joins, the party heads to a city called the underdome, which is the first major difficulty spike of the game. On this map, there are little trucks you can drive around. They can’t attack, but they have fairly solid defenses, and moving them in range to bait or block off enemies is crucial to completing the map cleanly. The map also has a lot of houses to go in, with various rewards that you don’t want to miss. However, the map is effectively timed, and it’s a short timer for a map with this much combat, so having an extra flunky to make dialogue checks frees up your cavalier to choke a point. Without playing Dies, it is hard to understand how valuable an additional warm body can be, which is why you should go play it. Genuinely, the unit design is bonkers, but it interacts with the map design in such a delightfully funny and memorable way that it’s hard not to get addicted.