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.

[Cygnus]

This is my first time writing an effort post on a unit, and for my unit I will be talking about Janette from Liberation Blade by TrikkiNikki.(not to be confused with other Liberty-Noun projects)
To my understanding, the game is far from complete, but the two chapters I’ve used her in have already cemented her as one of my favourite units.

The first thing I want to say about Janette is just how interesting her stat spread is. For the most part, her stats are fairly typical for a Troubadour; pretty good Res and Magic and serviceable HP. But on a second glance, one will see that her Luck is nearly capped at a titanic 26! She also has one of the highest base Spd stats of your starting squad, which effectively ensures she’s always doubling someone. With these two traits alone, you’d have the basis for a pretty effective mini-Jeigan–just plop her in a forest or fort and let her bait enemies for days with her astronomical Avo. She also has Bond, which heals units within 3 tiles of her at the start of player phase by 10% of their health. It’s not much, but it’s free health care.

But fortunately for Janette, she’s not all about that staffbot life!

One thing of note is that offensive weapons do not break in Liberation Blade. Right out of the gate, Janette comes with a 1 Mt Staff that deals magical damage. Now, 12 Mt total from an attack might not seem like much, and it’s not. But the fact that Janette has Wilt to begin with allows her to contribute even on turns where none of your units are in dire need of healing. Wilt is great because she can soften up low-resistance enemies that your other units might not be able to one-round. Hilariously enough, I was so enamoured with her “combat capability” in one of Liberation Blade’s maps that she ended up getting slowly picked off by a Longbow archer because I was so confident in her ability to slowly chip away at the enemy while avoiding counter-attacks at every turn.

Janette is also a troubadour, which is my favourite support class in Fire Emblem due to my eternal love/hate relationship with mounted units. Although I’ve yet to experiment with this, her second chapter gives you access to both the Rescue and Warp staves on a recruitable priest. Both the staves are useable at C rank in this projest as of the current patch, and Janette starts with D staves. Since Wilt is for all intents and purposes still a Staff, one could feasibly grind up her Staff rank through the dodge-tanking shenanigans I mentioned previously. Quite a fun prospect, if I might be honest.

Now comes my favourite part about Janette:the Runestaff.

A 15 use staff that does exactly what it says on the tin:It places down a Light Run; which if you’ve never encountered in vanilla, turns a tile into impassable terrain. This alone would be a fairly useful staff, but its Range is half of the units Magic, meaning you can make your own choke-points FEMapCreator style by plopping down a Light Rune and watching the enemy units funnel through the meat grinder! An interesting quirk about enemy AI is that certain AI types will go around the long way if they cannot move past a Light Rune, meaning you can force enemies to disengage from a potential advantageous battle for them by using the Runestaff to set a Light Rune around an impassable area. In her debut chapter, I set down a Light Rune in a hallway to allow my Archer growth unit Sam to chip enemies for respectable EXP and forced them down another part of the map where my Lord and other units could fight.

I have no idea if you will get a second Runestaff later in the game, but the Runestaff could arguably be the true Jeigan of the game in the vein of the Echoes Lightning Sword or Corrin’s Dragonstone in Conquest if TrikkiNikki chooses to build future maps around its existence. Its existence reminds me of the terrain staves in Engage, which is something I’ve never really thought about in a GBA design-space until now. That being said, I absolutely adore the idea of unique staff concepts in GBA campaigns and I urge you all to try out Trikki Nikki’s demo as soon as you can so she can build upon the solid potential and foundations she’s working with in Liberation Blade.

[Vulgard]

Cutting to the chase right away, I’d like to write about Colm from Sacred Stones Reforged.

(Note: I realize that a redux may not be considered a custom campaign. However, I think the unit I’m going to discuss is distinct enough from the vanilla counterpart that it still warrants an effortpost.)

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Colm is a unit whose status in vanilla, or lack thereof, is well known. He’s not a unit the more devoted fans use for combat, unless they are meming. He’s generally a tool with which you steal a couple of items, open a couple of locks, and maybe pick up a desert item. You can also use him as a mobile torch on fog maps. All in all, that’s certainly not the worst package, but it’s not anything too exciting. It’s normal Thief things. Matthew can do all of that in FE7.

In Sacred Stones Reforged, however, which is one of many reduxes of FE8, Colm is a significantly more exciting unit. And most of it boils down to the skill he starts with. Shadowstep.

“Hides this unit” is NOT Shade, unlike what you may believe. It’s not that enemies will not attack Colm unless he is the only available target. This skill provides true invisibility. Even if he is the only target in the enemies’ range, they won’t move toward him or attack him. He’s treated as if he isn’t there.

This is the centralizing skill in Reforged Colm’s toolkit, and it’s also a big reason why he’s fun to use. As long as you can get him to kill an enemy on each turn, he can be basically invulnerable, moving around the map and assassinating targets one by one without ever being threatened. And assassinate he does, because if you promote him to Assassin, he also receives the following skill:

You might think landing a critical hit is unreliable, but there are ways to make it a lot more reliable. Chief among them is a dagger called Black Fang, which has 50 Crit and can be bought in the midgame for 6000 Gold. Because weapons are unbreakable in Sacred Stones Reforged, once you buy that knife, Colm can spam it forever. And spam he did – in my playthrough on Lunatic Mode, I used it to kill countless enemies and prepare Silencer for future combats. In fact, every time I deployed Colm (which was on every map since he joined), the gameplay pattern was the same: walk him 6 tiles forward, kill an enemy, walk him 6 more tiles forward on the next turn, kill an enemy, and all while never having to bother with checking enemy ranges because he would never get attacked.

Colm also has other options. As mentioned above, Thieves can use daggers in Reforged, and while they can still use swords, I didn’t bother with that. Colm starts with a low sword rank and daggers don’t raise his sword rank, so I would’ve had to avoid using daggers in order to let him use better swords. I didn’t want to do that, especially since I was already using Joshua for my sword needs. Instead, I just spammed daggers – because Black Fang is not the only good dagger in the game.

One of the best weapons in the game, in my opinion, is Stiletto – the dagger Colm joins with. It has unremarkable stats, but it has a very crucial effect – it ignores the target’s Def. With Silencer active, Colm can deal damage equal to 4 times his Str to any boss in the game except Fomortiis. And it turns out that this amount of damage one-shots almost every boss in the game, despite Colm not being known for a high Str stat. I used Silencer with the Stiletto to have Colm one-shot Selena, Vigarde, Caellach, and Orson, to name a few bosses. It also certainly helps that daggers ignore the weapon triangle, the effects of which are more pronounced in Reforged; I could utilize its Def-piercing properties with impunity even against targets who used lances (like many of the bosses I just mentioned Colm one-shotting). Moreover, on the Selena map in particular, I walked Colm across all the rivers one by one (because Assassin can Riverwalk) and killed Selena in one hit with Stiletto Silencer without any of the enemies ever being able to attack Colm (because they could never detect his presence). It felt like an actual assassination – the only time an FE unit made me feel this way. Reforged Colm, to put it succinctly, is the assassin fantasy put into an FE context – and it’s the best-represented assassin fantasy I’ve ever seen in a romhack.

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One more thing that benefits Colm in Reforged is the fact it’s much easier – and quicker – to build supports. I had him build an A support with Neimi in no time at all, and it had a meaningful impact on their performance, as the offensive bonuses the support provides are remarkable. You might wonder “but why would I want to use Neimi just to buff Colm,” and the answer is “because Neimi is also awesome in this hack.”

That’s right, this is a double feature and a double whammy. I’d also like to discuss Neimi from Sacred Stones Reforged.

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Much like Colm’s usage is oriented around two skills – Shadowstep and Silencer – Neimi’s usage is also oriented around two skills, although one of them comes from a weapon and not from her own toolkit. Her personal skill is this:

This is Bowrange +1, and if you thought it was good in Three Houses, it’s arguably even better here. The maps and enemies of Sacred Stones were NOT designed around the idea of your units having access to perpetual 3 Range, and you can really feel it while playing this hack. Zethla’s Heir lets Neimi attack almost every enemy without having to worry about getting countered, which makes her low durability a significantly lesser concern. And while you might think her offense is insufficient to kill things, based on her miserable performance in vanilla FE8, you’ll be surprised; in Reforged, she’s more than capable of killing things, partly because she can build a Colm support in no time, partly because her stats were buffed, and partly because she can snowball a lot. The reason she can snowball is a weapon you can acquire at the end of Chapter 4:

(feat. Neimi giving you a final look before she kills you)

A Galeforce bow combined with the ability to avoid counters allows Neimi to reliably pick up kills, and often multiple kills per turn. I was playing on Lunatic Mode, so the enemies were the strongest they could possibly be, and she was still more than capable of getting two kills each turn for most of the game. I did not grind her levels – and in fact, this is impossible to do outside of the arena, because the Tower of Valni doesn’t unlock until Darkling Woods. She is just that good.

What additionally snowballed Neimi’s performance was her ability to promote to Ranger. Just like in vanilla, Ranger is a 7 Mov cavalry class that can riverwalk, but with Neimi being able to attack from 3 Range and refresh her turn once by using Stormbow, she had immense flexibility. There were many, many enemies I killed across a wall with her that nobody else could, many fliers she took down in one round, many other enemy types she made look like a joke. I believe that at the end of my run, Neimi had the highest killcount by far, because the ability to kill two enemies each turn without the need for a Dance snowballs into a large killcount very fast. She could even perform hit-and-run attacks, because with an effective range of 10 tiles and the ability to self-refresh, this wasn’t difficult to achieve in the slightest. Reforged’s Ranger class doesn’t have access to swords, but that was completely irrelevant. I honestly forgot Neimi couldn’t fight at 1 Range, because it was never necessary. Her job was to kill things on player phase, and that she did.

I believe you can see how Neimi’s toolkit makes her synergetic with Colm as well. Apart from them having a very fast support, they are also both player-phase units who can reliably one-round, and both of whom can riverwalk. Neimi can kill two enemies at a time, Colm can kill one and hide himself. I was often able to send them both down a path and they would systematically kill the enemies there without taking damage, just because they were so flexible in terms of potential positioning. Neimi could clear the way for Colm, Colm could kill an enemy threatening Neimi, and they could do that while benefitting from their mutual offensive support bonuses.

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All in all, I have never had as much fun using Colm and Neimi as I did in Reforged. Not in any FE8 redux, and certainly not in vanilla. Reforged made these units FUN – and I was playing on Lunatic Mode, so I’m not shilling their performance on a difficulty where anyone can perform. Colm is the assassin fantasy personified, and Neimi is a mobile, player-phase, bowrange-abusing killing machine who reminds me the most of Beryl from Souls of the Forest. Whenever I replay Reforged and decide not to use them, I’m certainly going to miss them.

But to you, reader, who may not have played Reforged – if you do decide to play the hack, give Colm and Neimi a shot. I promise they are far, far unlike their vanilla incarnations in both potential and fun.

[Parrhesia]

There is a concept that shows up every now and again, particularly in pedagogy, called the ‘deficit discourse’. This is when a discussion around a certain topic centres solely on negatives, which despite the best of intentions can entrench a narrative that views such and such a group or demographic as being solely defined by the (usually very real!) issues that beset them. At worst, this can foster a ‘white saviour’ narrative (or wealthy, or in some way privileged) or enable a learned helplessness in the community in question.

For instance, there’s opposition within the Aboriginal Australian community (by no means unanimous, I should stress, and probably not even a majority - but I had Aboriginal convenors in university who were influential to my own thinking in the matter) to the long-running ‘Close the Gap’ initiative, which has been policy since at least the Kevin Rudd years. This has focused on the genuinely appalling gaps in health outcomes between indigenous Australians and other groups, and so aims to ‘close the gap’ in these metrics (such as life expectancy). While the gap is very much real and closing it should be a national priority – nobody is suggesting ignoring the disparity! – the national conversation around Indigenous people, by now a small minority in their own land, is excessively centred around this deficit in outcomes and leaves little room for narratives of Aboriginal excellence or culture. Well-intentioned chardonnay socialists are prone to writing off Aboriginal Australians as an already-lost cause, rather than as people facing systemic injustice (while of course, those without even good intentions simply feel they have their suspicions confirmed time and again by the media). An unfortunate consequence of this has been the recent referendum for a Voice in Australia, which in the interests of brevity I will summarise as a complete shitshow. An American example might be the ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy, infamous for its negative impact on the children it was theoretically supposed to benefit most.

With all this in mind: Vesper from Shackled Power is not a very good unit.

She was a late addition to the campaign, added because there were only two unpromoted bow units and one joined relatively late. With one of them being Strength-focused archer Lou and the other being the Speed-focused nomad Lilim, Vesper slides uneasily into the position of being the, uh, Resistance-focused one. She has a marginal skill lead, but Lou has more than enough to hit everything. And this isn’t some situation where classes are completely irrelevant; SP has class-specific promotion items, and it takes a while for the second Orion’s Bolt to arrive, let alone the third (if it even exists, I don’t recall). She makes up for these deficits by having inferior promotion gains to either of the other two, and inferior caps compared to the other Sniper.

This extends to her story relevance. Lou is one of a trio of town militia who get sporadic acknowledgement through the game, and the final map quotes even have a minor conditional for if they’re all deployed. Lilim is a significant secondary character and your main link to a relevant city-state, and a significant antagonist that comes with it; her character arc is a key part of the midgame, with significant mandatory plot scenes devoted to its setup and payoff. Vesper shows up in a yellow house.

Nevertheless.

There are plenty of things Vesper can do.

There was an issue in Shackled Power’s original cast, and Vesper does help solve it. If you aren’t using Lou, hell, someone’s got to lug these bows around. Shackled Power has a reputation for a deployment crunch, but I’d say this is more of an issue when late-midgame prepromotes start coming in; early on, there’s plenty of room to just have Vesper around on the fringes.

And she can do a job, too. Vesper’s bases are more than respectable, outside the clear weak point of atrocious defence. She hard-counters two enemy types: fliers (she’s strong enough to swat pegasi, she’s easily fast enough to double wyverns) and magi (her speed and resistance are high, even without factoring the longbow in). SP has plenty of both of these enemies, ones which pack a punch, and almost no ‘mixed tank’ units to fire and forget. She even starts near a couple of magi she can trivially kill, and on a map with a large contingent of fliers that includes the boss.

And that can be all, but if you take a shine to her? She joins with lowish bases, but
a low level to go with it; sure, that sounds bad, but it means she levels quickly even if you’re making no real effort to train her. Given some love, and a bit – okay, a lot of luck (I can’t imagine the average Vesper caps strength and speed at 18/17; mine only had one Energy Ring and Talisman!) – Vesper’s more than capable of hanging with the team for the long-term. Even if she doesn’t truly pop off, her strong points remain in place and remain valuable, as lategame has a lot of place for fly-swatting; unpromoted enemies pack a punch if left unattended but can be brought down even by B-listers like a neglected Vesper. And, while SP merely has vanilla longbows, they’re still immensely useful in a lot of positions.

Further, while she may not have the continued plot relevance of Lou or Lilim, this doesn’t stop her from having a memorable recruitment and a clearly defined personality. You probably hear about her before you see her; someone in a red village asks you to check out the graveyard, and because it’s the daytime, the gravekeepers are probably asleep, so gives you a Restore staff to wake them up. It’s a cute joke that, fortunately, doesn’t need to be played out mechanically; you need only visit her house in the graveyard. Vesper, the gravekeeper, grumbles about how this fighting is costing her valuable sleep and says she’ll help you drive off the filth.

That’s pretty much it for her forced lines, but the game doesn’t forget about her, either. Being a gravekeeper, Vesper believes the dead should stay in the ground, where they belong; the next few chapters do have you squaring off against undead a couple of times. She has boss quotes with the early undead bosses you face where she outlines her beliefs. It isn’t just a straightforward matter of hating walking corpses on principle; she resents having to defile the corpses by sticking arrows in them, and reserves her hatred for the source of their reanimation.

And of course, she has supports.

She’s portrayed as… well, it’s clear enough that she isn’t exactly used to talking to people. Furthermore, used to the literal graveyard shift, she’s ill-tempered due to the hours she’s now forced to keep. She’s suspicious of people (doesn’t trust Orville as a turncoat, doesn’t trust nobility to respect people like Lou…) and overall very standoffish, but does display a playful side, which makes her, well, more interesting to listen to, and leaves some room for interpretation (is she genuinely blind to Cyrus’ flirtation, or just ignoring it to fuck with him while keeping him around for his utility?). She’s a pretty straightforward character in a cast with a few genuine standouts, but you want someone like Vesper to be pretty ‘straightforward’, with a few consistent elements. She doesn’t have time or space for the emotional arcs of the main cast, and SP knows better than to pretend she will.

In any tier list, Vesper is probably circling the drain, but she’s still worth a dozen Sophias; hell, she’s comfortably better than all nine capital-A Archers from FE5-10. When you make your campaign, someone will inevitably be propping up the tier list for you, too. But that doesn’t mean you should give up on them. Give them something to be good at. Give them a solid, consistent character to refer back to. Give them a connection to the greater story. Make sure, ultimately, that someone could come back years later and write an effortpost about them.

[Madzz]

Often times I find that hacks fall into two categories. They’re either very fine tuned and balanced, or super zany and fun. That latter category can be very hard to get right, because if you’re cast is too busted the game stops being fun. Cerulean Crescent though- it’s got to be one of the most rediculous and goofiest hacks I’ve played, with personal skills, personal weapons, additional tomes, shove, and the list goes on and on. Yet somehow, it all still feels so well balanced. So finely put together. And I think this element of it’s design is best exemplified by it’s leading lady: Ellerie.

At first glance Ellerie comes off as just your bog standard Lance Wielding Lord. Her bases and growths aren’t anything spectacular. Her growths stick around 40% in most areas and bases are simply on par with those her join her. She has staves as well, but there are so many stave alternatives early on and throughout the game that this is more of a flourish than anything. All in all, when you look at her statscreen, she just seems like an average filler unit…

That is, until you hover over and see the skill she comes with. I’m not exaggerating when I say that “Lead by Example” singlehandedly changes the entire way Cerulean Crescent is played. What it does, is that it refreshes every unit adjacent to Ellerie when she gets a kill. That sounds busted, and it is. When triggered perfectly, the skill functions as an FE4 style dance. In fact, it can be better than an FE4 dance, because Ellerie is not only refreshing units, but killing enemies as well!

Of course, that’s with the caveat that everything needs to go right. The majority of the time, you’re not attacking at two range with Ellerie, you’re attacking at one, meaning you can only refresh three units at a time. And these aren’t typically going to be perfect setups either. If Ellerie is killing a unit, chances are the units you put near her, aren’t always going to get to make the most of their turns anyways. Most of the time, this skill equates to gaining additional movement on a couple soldiers, maybe a couple extra kills. But I’d argue, that this finickyness to her personal skill is what makes it feel balanced.

It’s the same with her personal weapon: the Fengyan. She gets three uses of this lance every battle, and it’s quite a fun tool to dick around with. Fengyan adds Ellerie’s luck to her attack, defense, and resistance, when initiating the attack. The lance is extremely heavy, so you won’t be doubling, but her base 10 luck, as well as her 50% luck growth means that the lance will be getting plenty of uses. And since it auto repairs just like all personal weapons in the game, you can use it guilt free. Allowing Ellerie to use that “Lead by Example” skill in places she might not be able to otherwise.

Now, there’s one important question that needs to be brought up when discussing lords, and that’s promotions. Story based promotions can really screw with a lords usage. But thankfully, Cerulean Crescent also dodges this issue by not making 20 the cap for any class. Ellerie will have pleanty of time to grow, and by the time she’s about to cap a few stats, she’ll already be promoting to Chieftain. And Chieften- well it just makes Ellerie that much more rewarding to play with. Horses are always nice, but having a mounted unit with “Lead by Example” is just so much fun. The additional movement just goes that extra mile to make her skill just that much more versatile. It’s such a good promotion, and it helps that the story moment to go along with it is just really solid.

And really, I could call it there, but there’s one more additional thing you can get towards the late game- I just had to talk about it. Towards the end of the game, you can have your body physically altered, changing Ellerie’s stats dramatically. You can also give Ellerie souls to give her unique abilities she couldn’t gain otherwise. It’s just a minor mechanic, but it really changes how she plays towards the endgame depending on what you did. As an example of how crazy things can get, I’m going to show my endgame Ellerie. With some soul purchases and body modifications I was able to cap her magic and skill, that and I taught her light magic! This makes her play completely differently then she did with lances, but throughout the rest of my game, it made her personal skill that much easier to trigger!

Anyways, that’s about all my thoughts on the gameplay side of Ellerie. As of now, she’s by far my favorite Lord I’ve ever played with, and that’s really thanks to how unique she feels to use, how customizable she is, and how she represents her games identity as a whole. If you haven’t played Cerulean Crescent yet (well sorry I just spoiled a bunch of minor stuff but) you should really play it. It’s such an amazing hack, and that’s without me even getting into the characterization or the story

[Fringus]

So I played a pretty crazy hack recently, and it’s lord has consistently shone bright in a way I don’t often get to see.
Spoilered for being Long

Search For Seiso (Amelia Watson)

S4S or: how I learned to defeat evil by standing next to a guy with a gun real good

Often in talks of lord design, I’ll see people push towards very capable and self-reliant lords. For obvious reasons, they’re the one certainty you’ll always have, it cushions negative sentiment (jobbing in gameplay can lead to negative unit opinion elsewhere), and avoids frustration of a walking lose condition.

But what if, someone tried to risk all the above concerns, and give you a lord who wasn’t very capable in a fight? Someone notable for what she does for others in combat rather than herself?

Well, you’d have Search for Seiso’s very own lord, Amelia Watson.

To demonstrate her weakness in action, let’s compare her to a unit who joins one map after the game starts.

Plainly, she’s frailer, weaker, and slower than even the earliest competition. With the smallest of leads on skill and luck. With this gap in speed notably making a huge difference in kill power on all but the slowest foes on a map.

But you aren’t “tricked” into thinking she’ll be good, per-se. The very first map tells you most of what you need to understand about her combat capabilities.

1. Even against a generally weak enemy type, Amelia struggles to clear the damage threshold needed to win in one fight.
2. She needs to be placed carefully, because even weak foes quickly bring her low.
3. If you want her to kill quickly, it requires some level of setup before she can get it done, or good fortune.

You may be wondering about that third statement, exactly what setup is there for her to do right now? Well, it’s in her inventory.

This needle full of mysteries will, on use, at the cost of hurting her for 5 damage, grant +10 attack for 5 turns. Making her already anemic bulk even lower, but with a notable boost in damage.

With all this in mind, it may seem like there’s not too much hope. She’s expending limited resources to fight better in a game where enemies have some level of threat, it’s almost a zero-sum game. So what’s one to do? Give up on her, and leave her in the back for relative safety?

That would be the case if not for one yet mentioned section of her statsheet.

Enemies in Seiso often do have a good chunk of bulk to them. Enough that such a boost to damage is very helpful at any stage of the game. Alongside many, and I do mean many, tempting capture targets. Something which this skill circumvents the usual STR/MAG halving of through directly adding the damage.

It’s applications in both player and enemy phase are apparent enough, more damage on player phase for troublesome foes, nuking bosses, or solid positioning better letting someone handle a swarm of foes on enemy phase.

Nice Thighs, meanwhile, may seem like a gag skill, but as units come in with beneficial synergy skills (like hit/atk boosts, or a once-per-turn self refresh while adjacent to such a unit) what was useless now becomes all more of a reason to put her into the fray as a powerful supportive unit.

This is where her weaknesses show their true form, these engaging wrinkles in how and where you place her. Making you consider what can she survive, what narrow margins can you take, and what foe do you most want dead compared to those risks?

All of this as part of a balancing act between getting the large benefit of added damage. While judging where and when she can be placed to best benefit the team and make more headway against a notable issue on the map.

Once you realize all this, a central question starts to form each turn when using her:

“Where can she go to solve the biggest current issue?”

This question lets her serve as a great jumping off point for each turn. Especially as maps get more complicated, she can be put towards an issue and naturally have others gravitate towards her in turn. All in all, keeping some of the burden of overhead off the player by having someone to rely on taking that first step.

In terms of combat, she’s far from the strongest lord I’ve seen (exacerbated by my wonderfully, wonderfully strength-screwed, if still helpful, one). But as an engaging support unit? She leaves an impression that always leaves you aiming to achieve more with her with each step along the way.

She shows the sometimes unused depth to a iffy combat, supportive lord, and how in quite a few ways they can be more memorable than their more powerful variants. It largely just takes the same parts as some of the ones used in making a engaging fe game. Give compelling moment-to-moment questions of what to do, and make those questions impact flow meaningfully. If there’s any lesson Seiso can impart design-wise, it’s that. With Amelia being the most shining example of this lesson that the game executes throughout many other parts of the game.

[Trybel]

Lindros (Cerulean Crescent)

You could probably make an amazing effortpost around anyone from Cerulean Crescent, if we’re being honest. Here’s one on my favorite.

Lindros… well, I was going to say looks like your typical frail mage, but he’s extremely powerful right off of the bat. He’s got extremely high stats in Magic and Skill, decent Resistance, okay but wanting HP, Speed, and Luck, and absolutely pitiful Defense. His growths essentially reflect that 1 to 1. He also has a support with Pomelo, someone else who joins in chapter 1.

The skill you’re looking at is Lunge. I believe everyone knows what it does, but if you don’t, it’s a skill that allows you to switch places with the unit you do combat with when activated unless the unit is stationary, at no extra cost.

So far so good, but his real strength comes from combining Lunge with his Prf, Guidance. It
is a siege tome that always does no damage (unless you lower Def below zero via staves, and yes, that tome hits Def), but refreshes Lindros after combat once per turn. The yellow numbers means that it repairs itself each chapter, so you get 3 second actions with this siege tome per map.

The amount of crazy positioning you can do with this combination of tools is wild. Many units in CC have refreshing abilities that require combat. Most notably, your lord, Ellerie, has a skill that can refresh four units at once, and you can set it up wherever you want thanks to Lindros’s siege tome Lunge.

Of course, this doesn’t have to be the only use. You can drag a moving boss through a wall on a Kill Bosses map, or have him assassinate a threatening enemy using a brave tome.

You might think his lack of Speed will keep him from doing stellar combat, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. He can often hit one shots with his sky high magic and a high might Fire- or Thunder-flavored tome, at least before enemy HP gets too inflated. Alternatively, you can buff his speed with a staff or through your bard, or give him a Wind-flavored tome, which either gives extra speed or is Brave. Even with the reduced might of Wind tomes, his sky high magic is more than able to make up the difference. 60 hit on said brave tomes can hurt, but that is where his sky-high skill comes in and he easily hits 100 hit anyway. They also give +Def/Res as well, so more power to them.

Wind Flavor (awesome)

If it’s not enough, he gets staff utility after promotion as well. I personally didn’t train up his staff rank and just had him do some token healing, but you can definitely train it up as well if you want to use the very powerful staves in this game with one of the highest magic stats in the game.

TLDR: 10 Range Lunge with refresh good, speed issue very fixable.

[DATonDemand]

Okay boys lets see, hope I get this whole thing right:

Playtestin a hack recently, gonna talk about:

Melonie (Game: Liberty’s Beacon) by Cygnus

Melonie enters immediately on chapter 1 of LIberty’s Beacon and she’s basically with you throughout. Now we all know that early myrmidons have a tendency to well suck at least in vanilla fe games but Melonie does not suck, in fact I would say she’s one of the best units in your army.

How is this you wonder? Cygnus cracking the code on making myrms not suck? well as you can see gal is loaded spd wise and she’s also good str wise. The shamsir is a great weapon for her as myrm because not only does it have decent might, she often gets 2 chances to crit with it. The brave foil while not as good can give her up to 4 chances to crit.

Another point in her favour is that early game beacon is filled with many axe/sword enemies, creating an environment where she can very well contribute and have favourable match ups against most enemies. She is so good that she manages to make me bench a merc over her. AND I do not like myrms compared to mercs. Anyways play liberty beacon by cygnus and train ma girl cause she will not dissapoint.

[BandanaSplitzzz]

Nianyu (Spellthieves)

For those who don’t know, Spellthieves is a 1 chapter fangame made for CELICA, made by RandomWizard. I think Parhesia wanted people to write about full campaigns, but I’ve always asked for forgiveness before I ask for permission. I won’t try to sell you on it too hard, but I think the quickest and most efficient way to describe it is that someone read this forum thread and just tried their absolute damndest to get on here. Every unit (except Bjorn) has some utterly insane nonsense going on that makes them play way differently than their vanilla counterparts. Mages that cast with mp, mages that prepare spells, stance changing ninjas, prf-item using artificers, terrain casting shamans… I could write an article on each one, imo. Sadly, I can only talk about one. In the squad of freaks and weirdos, it feels only natural that the one non-combat unit stands out amongst the rest.

Nianyu is a necromancer. Their stats are unremarkable (weak, middling speed, decently bulky). Their starting inventory contains a quarterstaff, which is a new melee weapon for Spellthieves, that’s “all-class”. It also contains some items that are completely irrelevant to Nianyu, and you’re better off giving them to your real combat units. Like all player units in Spellthieves, they even get shove! Though, Nianyu has better things to do. Even though Nianyu lacks any ability to use swords, axes, or lances, they can still use the quarterstaff, since it’s all-class. How convenient! This patches up their whole “no weapons at all” issue quite well! In fact, in the first group of enemies, Nianyu is able to do a staggering…

SEVEN DAMAGE MAX!!!

Nianyu stocks are up. I prefaced this that Nianyu is not a combat unit, so I should probably mention what they actually do.

Reanimation Aura is Nianyu’s personal aura skill as a necromancer. Unlike most other aura skills that buff up allies to make them do more damage, your army only benefits when units actually die near Nianyu. Nianyu really wants to get up close to their enemies to watch them suffer, then leave ASAP once they kick the bucket to resurrect more units. RA includes enemy units, reinforcements, player units, temporary units summoned by your other units… Even your game over conditions! Though you see the dreaded red screen of failure before you can see Bjorn’s ghost bitch slap some enemies. The one caveat RA has is that units must be living, which doesn’t matter much (I’m pretty sure the only undead enemies are the ghosts themselves). It also makes the enormous 7 damage Nianyu deals to enemy units kind of relevant, as thresholds that aren’t quite reached by your real combat units can be patched up by Nianyu for an easy ghost. A reminder that Nianyu has no other skills than shove and RA, which means that other than standing next to enemies and looking pretty, they really don’t have that much to do.

Lets take a look at the ghost stats now.

Those who know about how summons work in FE8 should intuitively understand how a unit like this works. Ghosts are disposable sub-units that do Nianyu’s bidding, including throwing their undeath away frequently and without regard. Having 1 hp and 0 defense makes enemies love attacking the ghosts over your squishy mages. Additionally, Ghosts actually have decent Atk, at an actually unironically impressive 17! Your ninja, Nokt, has 18 atk with extra utility, and your soldier, Bjorn, has 22 with a steel lance. With a non-zero speed stat at 12, ghosts are fairly damaging to squishier enemies, especially enemies that can’t counter. The Spellthieves’ singular map is loaded with archers and “orthodox mages”, which can’t attack on player phase, or can’t attack at one range. These goomba units give the ghosts something to do, and when you position Nianyu properly, make more ghosts! It’s so fun!

Ghosts, unlike other disposable units in Spellthieves, actually stay around forever. It’s not uncommon for Nianyu to start farming corpses for an extended period of time, and expend them all in a glorious player phase → enemy phase combo, only to start farming them up again. You never know when you’ll need your horde of corpses to dogpile a crucial enemy, or tank hits from a horde of unsurvivable melee units, or shove your actual mages to a proper position.

Oh, remember how I said all player units in Spellthieves get shove? I really meant ALL player units.

Ghosts are SO versatile and SO disposable you ALWAYS want more. Even used in their least efficient way, ghosts still get you 1 less enemy attack on a player phase, which is a godsend in such a difficult game chapter. This makes Nianyu almost like a payload you gotta maneuver around enemies to get as many ghosts as possible, and more ghosts kill more enemies or push more Nianyu’s to make more ghosts to snowball just out of control enough to get shut down next enemy phase. The cycle repeats itself. It is an utterly captivating unit design that I really haven’t seen anywhere else. Nianyu’s kit is only bolstered by the sheer insanity of the rest of the Spellthieves, who have movement techniques, AOEs, clones that die into ghosts, mass refreshes, mass STR buffs, and Bjorn!

…I guess this essay degenerated into me gushing about the Spellthieves.

There’s a couple more things I want to cover that are still cool or relevant, but things I believe are merely adjacent to Nianyu as a character.

Enemy Necromancer

Nianyu isn’t the only necromancer in town. This guy right here, on the northern path uses the EXACT SAME GIMMICK as Nianyu. All of his friends within 2 tiles, when killed, will spawn an enemy ghost! Everything that I have said in this essay minus them using shove is applicable to Mr. Enemy Necromancer. Instead of maximizing units killed in Nianyu’s range, you should minimize enemies killed in Mr. Necromancer’s range. The ghosts he spawns are frail and die in one hit, but hit like a truck, especially when they gang up on you. Mr. Necromancer can’t attack, so you should prioritize him amongst his friends. It’s really obvious game design and fits with the themes of Spellthieves, but it’s just so… cool. Most games would be scared to throw such an avante garde challenge your way, and stick to normal units, but Spellthieves aint your normal fe fangame.

…It feels a little mean to the creator to talk about this, but there’s a bug with this system. What happens when a unit dies… with Nianyu’s aura… and Mr. Necromancer’s aura?

This fucking thing!

It works just the way you think it does. A mixed ghost can’t be selected by a player, but it can most certainly be killed! By attacking a mixed ghost, you “purify” the evil ghost inside of it, and make the blue ghost selectable! While it’s totally a bug, I can’t help but find this interaction of “exorcising” a unit super cool. In fact, it feels balanced enough that if you just change the system so that it works like this without the buggy effects, I’d argue it fits right in.

Malefic Aura and Nianyu's Inventory

By leveling up once (1 time) Nianyu will gain this skill.

Now, I’m gonna level with you, I don’t think I felt this skill contribute too much to Nianyu’s performance in game. Maybe if I played Spellthieve’s singular map over and over again, I would feel how powerful this skill is, and how it changes the game, but I didn’t do that.

I kinda hyped up Nianyu’s combat performance earlier in this essay, but it’s really, really bad. To get this skill, you really gotta try whacking things with their quarterstaff a whole bunch. Ongorzul and Cardinal have other all-class melee weapons for Nianyu to use, and both of them have real attacks they want to use so they’re not bogged down by having a crummy weapon but… Is it necessary?

If you’re a real Spellthieves gamer, yes. All of Nianyu’s inventory is actually very attractive to most combat units. The quarterstaff actually passively increases a unit’s MAG stat by 2, a Hoplon Guard removes enemy crits, and a Vigorflow Ring passively increases stats (under certain conditions). All of these items are better suited on other characters, and since Spellthieves has no battle preps, you have to juggle these thoughts in between clearing through wave upon wave of enemies. If you trade off these Nianyu items, you may want to replace their wimpy Quarterstaff with a frying pan, or even a pocket knife. It’s… cool…

Shadow Clone and Minor Illusion

I’ve been hinting at this throughout the essay, but Nianyu isn’t the only unit that can summon extra guys to fight for them. Both Nokt and Ongorzul have mechanics that let them do this! Nokt has Summer Jutsu, which summons 2 clones in adjacent tiles that like ghosts, have 1 hp and 0 defense. Unlike ghosts, these clones inherit Nokt’s Katana, and disappear the following turn. Since they’re super strong, your optimal strategy with them is to attack the turn they’re summoned with their lives being expendible to worthless. The nature of Nokt’s skills means that you can only summon 2 of these every 3 turns, and even less if you’re not using All Of Nokt’s Toolkit All The Time. Ongorzul’s is even less flashy, letting him summon a green unit that doesn’t move, can’t be shoved, has 0 in every stat, and also disapears at the end of turn. The upside is that he can use it every turn, IF you selected the Minor Illusion cantrip at the start of the game.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

Yes, both Nokt and Ongorzul can contribute to the Nianyu ghost army. It might seem overpowered, since Nianyu’s bottleneck is how many things they can see die in a turn, but it’s reasonably balanced. Ongorzul needs to pick a maybe 3/10 cantrip to activate it’s effect with Nianyu in range, and Nokt needs suuuper intelligent Nianyu positioning to snag KOs and ghosts alike. It adds a whole bunch of depth to Nianyus kit, and when you figure it out for the first time, your first thought is “no freakin’ way!” Awesome tech.

Bjorn

I mean… how could I not talk about him? He’s in the features list!

In conclusion, Nianyu rocks. In a game full of bonkers units, they stand head and shoulder above all others with how awesome their utility is. I don’t think I’ve seen a unit that warps the game in such a unique way as Nianyu.

Times Nianyu’s Name Said: 42
Times Word Ghost Said: 27

[HeroVP]

Hartmann and Victor (The Dragon Herald)

Part 1: An Autopsy of Christmas (and the Cavaliers that accompany it)

Alright, listen, everyone knows what a Christmas Cav is, the archetype has been done to death and then some. The Christmas Cavs are a pair of two cavaliers, color coded for your convenience, that usually join in the same chapter, usually are opposites in terms of personality, with one being an uptight, knightly snob, and the other being hardly knightly at all, and they also usually have different stat specializations, usually one speedy and one bulky or strong.

Of course, this laundry list of criterion get messed with sometimes, Saizo and Kaze and the sometimes included Mae and Boey are not cavaliers, Kieran and Oscar and Sully and Stahl don’t join in the same chapter, many knightly cavs aren’t that uptight, and the less knightly cavs fluctuate from wanting to be a knight and being bad at it to not wanting to be a knight at all.

Still, the christmas cavs are largely a trope of convenience. Cavs are good, we should give the player two of them. They both have the same class, so they should have a dynamic, and a way to tell them apart character wise, design wise, and unit wise. Easy enough.

Part 2: Hartmann and Victor’s First Map

Chapter 3 starts fairly simply, the Christmas Cavs both start as enemy units under control of General Breunor, one of the main antagonists of the earlygame. Their first appearance gives them some characterization, with Victor, the red knight, barking out orders to the opposing forces to move aside, while Hartmann, the green knight, assures them that they mean no harm, and just need to step by them for a minute. The following scenes make clear that Victor generally is more well liked and well respected among the knights, that Hartmann has his doubts as to Breunor’s harsh methods, and the Victor, while he doesn’t quite understand Hartmann and is often a bit mean to him, respects him as a fellow knight.

You get into the map, check the stats, and wow, Victor’s superiority is fairly obvious (Sorry for the builder screenshots, if anyone has actual screenshots of this stuff, let me know)

Victor has leads in hp, power, speed, defense, and weapon ranks, all the stats that matter. He’s not so much better that you’d never use Hartmann, but the weapon ranks especially are a death sentence for Hartmann. Notably, enemies in DH are not really a joke, they are decently fast, and Hartmann does definitely struggle to double and one round them.

Anyway, you run up to Hartmann, recruit him, and he ends with a line saying that he should go talk some sense into Victor, makes sense. Only problem is that talking to him doesn’t work, he says that he has a job to do, and challenges Hartmann to kill him. That’s chill, combat recruitments are fairly few throughout the series, but not unheard of. You beat him with Hartmann, and get this dialogue

It’s here that we get to the notable thing about the Dragon Herald Christmas Cavs…that there’s only one of them. The strong, confident red knight is too uncompromising, too untrusting to even try to change, and that leaves the weaker, kinder green knight as the one willing to fight.

This is a very simple story, and yet it resonates to me because the archetype is so strongly in place that it’s clear this is not how things are supposed to go. And so Hartmann’s story of one half of a duo sticks out, because it can’t not stick out.

Part 3: Payoff

17 maps go by. Perhaps you’ve been using Hartmann, getting his character development as the knight that believed you from the start and is eager for people to sit down and listen instead of fighting. You get to the very end of a very sloggy map, a hybrid defend and seize a point a thousand miles away map, and as soon as you get close, a thousand ambush reinforcements pile on the defend point (that you definitely didn’t leave anyone good at). It is here, in your time of need, that Victor finally comes back. And he can do the triangle attack with Hartmann!

Is he a great unit? No, not really, filler to the max, but he’s filler when you actually really need filler to kill some berzerkers and choke a point. And despite Victor’s contributions being small, the fact that he shows up at all reinforces Hartmann’s arc, that knighthood is founded on decency, not loyalty, and that even if you have to walk the path of righteousness alone, you should walk it, and be a beacon for other people to join you along the way.

[GigaExcalibur]

I’m going to venture a guess that most people don’t replay hacks. Even if you finished a hack and loved it, the novelty of playing a new campaign will generally outweigh the novelty of playing a familiar campaign with new units and strategies (not to mention your civic duty to play WIP hacks and provide feedback and encouragement). But Dream of Five, of course, possesses its extensive route split with exclusive chapters, units, and narratives for the midgame and lategame. I was craving more of Parr’s tight map design and razor-sharp prose, and thus decided to go for another jaunt in Talis.

After my run of Musain, I had a rough grasp of Do5’s class meta and chapter structure. You’ll have a core squad of 16 units but there’s a deployment squeeze throughout Act 3 and a deployment loosen for the big setpiece battles of Chapters 20 and 25. Many lategame enemies sport heavy Brutal weapons, allowing even middling speed units to double them. 2RKOing enemies is the standard, but breaking out specialty weapons will secure ORKOs and let you get ahead of the action economy. There’s a steep bulk requirement, as baiting in overlapping enemy formations to clean up on the following player phase is a vital strategy. You have infinite B-supports, so synergizing team compositions to maximize support bonuses will give you a massive edge in combat.

With that in mind, I made a plan for my Onduris team composition. I wanted to use a couple of the route-exclusive units as well as the route-agnostics who have better availability in Onduris.

Like all good plans, I didn’t completely follow through on it. Nari and Conleth fell victim to the Act 2 deployment squeeze so I brought Arcus and Jauger in later, and vi’Shen was on the brink of being dropped several times but made a comeback after a great Chapter 18 showing. But do you know who stuck around the entire time? Tricia. Dear God, Tricia.

Tricia is bad in an obvious way and bad in a non-obvious way. Her base stats and base sword rank are both abysmal, but those can be patched up with time and favoritism. The real death knell for Tricia is that her stats don’t exist in a vacuum. While there are a lot of inaccurate brigands for her to poke in Act 1, the company is in no demand for fast swordies. All of them cleanly surpass Tricia’s bases and each have some unique advantage over her:

• Rena is always force deployed and has the Gilded Brand to bolster her earlygame bulk.
• Cyrille has lance access, more movement, rescue dropping, WAY better bulk, and an extra chapter of availability.
• Eilene has flying mobility, rescue dropping, and another chapter of availability.
• Chester has thieving utility.
• Marie/Alexis have thieving utility.

Now, this list is a bit misleading, as Tricia does possess unique qualities that few or no units in the hack can match. She has 7 movement, (which puts her over the likes of gladiators and swordmasters), she has supply access (only matched by Rena), and exclusive access to Swap. These are great traits to have, right? …Right?

It’s true that 7 move, supply, and Swap are very useful to have, but little of that matters in Act 1. Of the above swordies, 7 move only beats Rena. Supply access hardly matters when there are no items to be exchanging. And Swap is at its least useful in the looser positioning of Act 1 maps. These traits barely move the needle for her viability as a unit, and being forced to bench units as early as Chapter 4 means she’s probably first on the chopping block.

“Dragz, I thought the title of this topic was called ‘Effortposts Around Units we Like’,” I hear you interject. And yes, it is.

I mentioned earlier that this was my second run of Do5. As such I knew that training Tricia was going to require a lot of effort, but since I love bad growth units I was going to commit at any cost. This was the best decision I ever made.

The unique chapters in Do5’s route split don’t begin until the start of Act 2 (Chapter 7) so for the very early chapters I was treading familiar ground. And since I was treading familiar ground I started to play faster and more reckless than I usually do. This seemed at odds with my goal of training Tricia, but that made the experience so much more satisfying. I blazed through the earlygame, taking full advantage of the two chapters where Tricia’s deployment is free, feeding her as many kills as possible and eagerly awaiting every level up where she inched closer to self-sufficiency. I don’t remember at what point she started being able to eat enemies on her own, but I remember feeling immense satisfaction at having done it.

Of course, Tricia being able to one-round enemies after being trained is not the reason you bother training her. In the lategame Tricia’s unique attributes skyrocket in usefulness. 7 move is higher than the gladiators and swordmasters that might be deployed in your army, supply access is invaluable in the maps that involve a split party, and Swap is immeasurably useful to make positioning easier. This is the real payoff for using Tricia, despite what Big Green Number tries to tell you.

The last unique benefit from using Tricia, and the one that I consider the most important, is her aesthetic value. She’s the only playable Blademaiden in the hack, and Blademaiden is a class that I consider a very novel addition to the DoX canon. Since Do5 reserves its exclusive classes for the lords (Thyra is a lord do not say otherwise) Tricia having a class to herself makes her stand out a lot positively.

This way of standing out aesthetically provides an entertaining contrast with Tricia’s narrative. She joins with barely any fanfare and has zero dialogue after her introduction. If you read her supports, she’s characterized with a contentment to stay unnoticed in the background managing the convoy while the rest of the company does the killing. So by training her enough to promote to Blademaiden, and bringing her to the point of the game where her unique attributes provide a lot of benefit, you’re finally giving her the recognition she deserves. And I couldn’t be happier I did. She’s an incredibly well-designed unit.

[luminescentblade]

Cerulean Crescent is one of the hacks I’m most hyped for since I saw the LTC gameplay in the 2023 FEE3, and I’ve finally gotten some time to play it and it’s every bit as fun as I anticipated. One unit caught my eye immediately—of course, his image has been forefront in CC’s marketing, and, expectedly, I, the person who put rabbits into Dream of Five, am very much not immune to the allure of cute animal.

Of course, I’m talking about Vermillion.

This Effortpost will be based around Misery Mode.
I haven’t played normal and so I can only talk what I know. I do plan on playing normal one day, though!

Vermillion’s start is pretty rough on Misery, with only 0 base str and the enemies have nontrivial bulk. At the start, he does miserable (heh) amounts of damage. If any misery players drop him because of that, I would not blame them. I’m not usually one to baby weak units myself, and if it were a normal unit with those bases I’d have absolutely dropped them with that starting performance.

But Vermillion is 1) cute animal and 2) I know about the existence of his subplot.

And I’m very good at favoritism when I’m motivated.

And Vermillion is one of the biggest beneficiaries of CC’s core mechanics.

Enter Leylines. Leylines boost your attack by 10, and refreshes your movement. Now Verm has base 10 movement and canto+. He also has a personal weapon (Astral Strike) that’s guaranteed attack 5 times. This lets him get 50 damage off the bat for free. And that thing can crit.

I escorted him across the map and used the Leyline near Iosaf and got him The Best, because I go big or go home. If I’m about to commit to a character I don’t do it half way. He gets a level. This starts his snowballing.

I give him the fire emblem quest too, as he gets the most value out of every point of strength anyway. He also has pretty good synergy with Chalice, who drops enemy bulk.

And then, at about level 7, I noticed I’m no longer feeding him kills out of favoritism–he’s straight up just become my best boss killer. He’s snowballing out of control at that point—becoming quite a bit higher levelled than the rest of my team, because he’s become my best bosskiller, with a combination of being able to reach them from very far away, and being able to retreat into safety if needed, and just the +50 free leyline damage is quite huge. Of course, Leylines are a limited resource, so he can’t use it to kill every enemy, but there’s other ways to boost attack too. Chalice’s personal, as mentioned before; Aigo when he joins–and hell, Aigo probably deserves his own post, and buyable Invigorate staves are all good options. Now, at this point, Verm has snowballed into a point where he doesn’t even really need the damage boost to kill all but the bulkiest enemies, but it is Misery, and some enemies get pretty bulky—and he still has plenty of ways around them.

Plucker’s gift is also an excellent item on him. He already has a lot of mov but being the best user of Leylines and Leylines refresh movement, he can cover an insane amount of ground and just delete whoever you really need dead. It’s not like he has bulk, either–though with Tethia’s support, he can also then canto on to defensive terrain and his avo rates get pretty reasonable there.

At this point I should also talk about his other weapon, Feather Fury. It gets less usage compared to Astral Strike, but it’s situationally pretty useful. It disables counters–which synergizes with Vermillion’s Poison Strike as a safe chip option, and it also lets Verm take 0 damage from ranged. So–Enemy too bulky? Feather Fury. Want to bait some mages? Feather Fury. Killed a boss but can’t quite get out of ranged enemies range? Have someone tradeswap to Feather Fury. Setting up kills for Ellerie’s refresh and perfectly position himself after? Feather Fury.

And he just keeps snowballing.

Now, as I mentioned before, there’s a whole subplot around vermillion’s journey in the vein of a chinese xianxia novel, and I won’t go into detail about the plot itself because chicken gaiden is nothing like anything I’ve experienced and I want everyone to experience it for themselves, but mechanically, there are 3 optional chicken enemies along the game progression, and each time vermillion defeats one, he gets a promotion. Each of these promotions give him +3hp and +2str, and +2 str is +10 damage in practice for him. He does this 3 times. The last of these promotions, he gains miracle–which helps give a layer of security to when he dodgetanks as well. Even the narrative helps him snowball.

So, at this point, this is quite in the lategame now. I normally don’t care for units with significantly lower bases than jointime demands, because I’m pretty lazy normally and I don’t find their pay off that strong to be worth it, but hooooh, Vermillion’s performance ceiling is something else. Take both uproot trees chapter. The first one I did in 3 turns because Vermillion just solo’d 3 of the bosses up top by himself moving from leyline to boss to pillar to next leyline to boss to pillar, while the rest of my whole team took on the remaining tree. The defend/uproot map after, vermillion clears out another 3 bosses with only a bit of staff support–at that point he’s gained miracle, so even if he fails a dodge, he won’t die.

And this isn’t even peak Vermillion yet.

Even the gameplay of peak Vermillion’s a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll put it under tags. If you did the chicken subplot, you know.

Major Lategame Spoilers for CC including Chicken Subplot

Vermillion ascends into godhood at the climax of the Chicken Gaiden, and with that, his discarded worldly desires takes his place as a unit. Even his discarded worldly desires achieves some sort of deification, however, and he promotes to Pseudo-Deity. Now, as the shadow of his worldly desires don’t really have a corporeal form, though it can form something resembling his shape…

He can now go through walls.

His HP also goes to 80, for that matter, if he wants more security while dodgetanking.

Vermillion has this form available for Endgame A and Endgame A-2. In endgame A-2 he can pretty much entirely ignore the stairs mechanic and just phase through walls, which lets me just pretty much camp the rest of the team at the starting position and have chalice speed up moving him along with rescue staff.

I mean, look at this.

Peak comedy.

At the end, he takes out Qiulan in a god-vs-god showdown.

Statscreen of his final numbers. Honestly he could be even more busted, but I actually got him to level30 too fast because he just kept on killing everything. Suffering from success?

Also he gives Mince provoke because of all the times Mince tried to eat him and I think that’s peak comedy as well.

So in short, Vermillion as a unit closely follows his character progression with his subplot, balances cuteness and murder, and is one of the most fun units I’ve ever played with.

[luminescentblade]

@luminescentblade

Aigo probably deserves his own post

It’s been less than 24 hours but I really want to write this, so I’m going to write it. This too, will be based on the context of Misery Mode.

Aigo is first introduced giving Ellerie some quests to gather documents in exchange for combat tomes. Aigo later joins you as a Gold Knight with all 3 melee weapon types at A rank and his highest non-HP stat being magic. Weird statline, right?

Then you get to his skill.

Between that and Canto+, he can chip and set up kills for the rest of your team. Misery enemies can get quite bulky and outside of your strongest combatants, most units will struggle to ORKO without braves, especially since enemies tend to be pretty fast.

Now, going back to Aigo’s weird statline for a second–he has high mag. Then look at this weapon:

While he’s still unlikely to ORKO with this–and honestly, often you don’t want to, for reasons I’ll get into later, but he can also spread free 33% hp damage on to enemies around whoever he targets. This means player units then only need to do 34% of a enemy’s maxHP on their own to secure kills.

Here’s some enemy stats from E-B2. This is endgame because I dont have earlier saves to look at, but enemies have hit pretty high speed tiers for a while now.

With 59 HP, this is a certified chonker.

this guy may only have 8 def, but he has a whooping 71HP and cannot be crit. He would not be the target of flame sword itself here, but taking 33% spread damage off flame sword means he’ll take 23 dmg for free.

56HP, also a chonker.

This guy has 65 HP and 171 crit and also cannot be crit.

Anyway you get the point. Aigo spreading flame sword AoE makes securing these kills so much easier, and that’s already really cool by itself, but there’s even more to it.

This weapon.

In theory, being able to self-refresh is good on ellerie, because she can move after her refreshing everyone else. In practice, it does shit for damage.

Until Aigo shows up and he chips down an enemy, cantos to a good position, and she’s doing 48 damage with this thing and she can refresh a bunch of people and also move up to use rescue staff, or kill another guy, or, you get the point. The possibilities are endless. Aigo brings out a lot of the cocaine-type plays CC is known for to mid-lategame misery mode.

Also he just wants everyone to have free knowledge and that’s awesome. Truly, the Aigoat.