lets make LOTS effortposts a trend lol, we need to match the hags
3 Likes
I promised a certain man I would write an effortpost about one of the units in his project after I finished AVT, so here we are. I should note that AVT was the first Fire Emblem romhack I’ve ever beaten, as I often get distracted by trying to juggle multiple romhacks and then never finishing any of them.
AVT is a really interesting game, numbers-wise. Very rarely do enemies threaten you because of their stats, since all stats but HP cap at 20 in this game. What you need to be cognizant of is enemy inventories, both from the perspective of a player who wants to capture some shiny new toys for their training projects and a player who wants to keep said training projects safe. Naturally, the existence of capture requires you to have units with high enough Con to capture bulkier enemies. Capture also cuts your Spd in half, since Capture is effectively the equivalent of Rescuing an enemy unit.
Now, there are many units in AVT that can reliably Capture, whether it’s Carmela with her AYE AYE! or Alva with her 7 mov and access to a crazy array of toys if you put some favouritism into her. Both of these units were characters I enjoyed playing with in my playthrough, but they’re not who we’re talking about today.
No, today we’re talking about the very laconic Armor Knight, Marzano.
For the uninitiated, Marzano is a really funny character. He joins you in Chapter 3, but only if you free him from a Chest that you unlock, which rewards you a Vulnerary. There is no sign-posting or talk events for this recruitment–he just thanks you for freeing him from the Chest and joins your squad near the end of the map. Since I was playing blind, I almost forgot I had left an unopened chest in Ch 3 before I cleared the map. Imagine my confusion when I obtained a Vulnerary, and then my mirth when after said Vulnerary I recruited Marzano!
If there was a word I’d use to describe Marzano, it’s reliable. 5 Mov Armor Knight aside, Marzano has everything he needs at base to perform to Endgame. First of all, he has B rank Lances at base in a game that has no shortage of great lances. He may not be the best recipient of those Lances at all times, but when you have weapons like the powerful Devil Spear or the Glass Spear (which cannot miss in a game where Hit is capped at 99), you can trade around those powerful lances to him whenever you need to do some decent damage or land a guranteed capture.
Ah yes, the real reason I enjoyed using this Paragon of an Armor Knight in AVT:Capture. In a game where Capture cuts your power and accuracy down when taking out an enemy, something drew me to using Marzano. I never went out of my way to show him favouritism or Rescue Drop him closer to the enemy so he could do Armor Knight things, but he continued to impress me with his reliable hit rates whenever I realized my Capture attempt would have risked a unit dying next turn otherwise.
12 Base Strength is only 8 away from capping in AVT, and all he’ll ever really need. Enemies in this game are not known for being extremely bulky. Naturally this leads to Marzano never being too far away from something he can contribute to fighting, be it to weaken or finish off someone threatening or as I mentioned before; participate in a capture.
You might be chuckling and shaking your head at that very prototypical Armor Knight Res base, and you’d have every right to in most circumstances. However, Roze took special care in crafting the variety of Anima tomes in the game to a point where I found that if I played well enough I could have Marzano be in range of a Mage on Enemy Phase and be fine, no Barrier staves needed. Marzano truly is that guy.
I should also point out that in a game where money is tight and mostly obtained by stealing Grey Gems or selling captured Loot, you really don’t need to worry about promoting Marzano. Promo gains as a whole in AVT are minimally to the point where if you are promoting it’s because you’re giving favouritism to a unit you love or you’re doing it for increased MOV or a new weapon type. Marzano has no need for either of those things, or even any stat boosters. Certainly he would have been an even bigger help in my play-through if I had the funds to promote him (I almost bought another Master Seal in Chapter 8, but opted for a Physic staff instead), but those things are hard to come by in this game and are only sold on one map. Save your funds, buy a strong Lance for Marzano instead.
I want to close this Effortpost by saying that in a sea of bittersweet or downright tragic Epilogue endings, Marzano actually gets a really happy and pleasant one.
Would I say he was my favourite unit when I played the game? No, but he certainly left a memorable impression on me when I played; and that’s something I strive to do in my own projects.
This is all to say I want YOU to try using Marzano in your next AVT run if you haven’t already. He’s a lovely man and honestly a really cool unit that reminded me of how much you can do with a character that gets as little spotlight and dialogue as this guy.
6 Likes
Wyler (Shackled Power)
I usually don’t like trainees. More often than not, they are a liability to train and the payoff is just an above average combat unit, and by the time they pop off, I already have so many other strong trained units that the trainee isn’t remarkable. Shackled Power’s trainee Wyler is no different in many ways from the classic flunky trainee that just isn’t worth it, yet despite this he ended up being one of my favorite units in the game and I was very glad I took the effort to train him. So what makes him special? When I recruited him in ch9, glance he looks like a guy with bad bases and good but not good enough growths. He actually used to be worse than this; when I started my run he had only 2 base luck. Thankfully this was buffed to 8 making him more reliable early.
A fair point of comparison is Hute, an armor knight who joined back in the very first chapter. Hute’s bases and growths look quite similar to Wyler’s and his worse (but not terrible) skill and luck are easily fixable with cheap buyable secret books and goddess icons. So why would I use Wyler when I’ve got Hute and plenty of other solid trained units?
Turns out I used him because he “looks funny.” Now something important for Wyler is his join time. You recruit him partway through chapter 9, which is a long fog map notorious for having the hardest boss in the game. The boss is a paladin on a throne with high stats all around, equipped with a spear and brave sword, and to top it off he’s immune to effective damage. He actually has a battle conversation with Wyler, though Wyler has no business fighting him without rigging a kill.
Anyway it’s a massive pain to kill him reliably and it’s likely a several turn ordeal. This also means you have plenty of time to farm experience on Wyler! Unfortunately his combat here is quite bad; he dies in two hits, gets doubled when using anything heavier than an iron, and has iffy hitrates even with the slim lance he joins with. However, there is a silver lining: this generic lieutenant (bow/bomb promoted class), who I believe is the first promoted generic enemy in the game.
Obviously if this guy attacks Wyler he’s just gonna kill him. However, since he doesn’t have a melee weapon, it’s very easy to set up chip and kill exp for Wyler, which can give him over an entire levelup alone. Aside from this guy, there are a few generics that Wyler can safely attack without risking death like the sword cavaliers and guerillas (unpromoted lieutenants), so between all of these I got him to level 5 by the end of this map. By this point he still sucks and is still a total liability, but he at least isn’t risking getting doubled as much and has slightly better accuracy. But fortunately for Wyler, the next chapter is a defend map that cannot be ended early. This means it’s a perfect opportunity to train him, and Nello, the new paladin you get on this map, is pretty good at setting up kills for him. After this, the next few maps aren’t particularly great for him, but he at least grew out of being a liability and into a real contributor a lot faster than I expected him to. I promoted him at level 20 (he is a trainee after all), which he reached in chapter 16.
Now this is a real unit. Gone is the flunky who needed to be fed kills, replaced with a killing machine. Of course, I have several other similarly powerful combat units at this point, so what is it that makes him more than just another infantry combat unit? His class, halberdier, is one of three promoted mono-weapon classes that have +25 crit, the others being swordmaster and berserker. On top of this, he supports Prosel and Nello, the lord and the arguable best unit in the game respectively. An A+B support with these two results in a nice +12 crit. Late game Shackled Power enemies have enough bulk that it is often difficult for even your strongest units to defeat them in one round without effective weapons or critical hits. Also enemies in this game tend to have very low luck making crits more reliable than usual. Anyone can fish for crits with a killer weapon and/or supports and you even have access to a killer light tome for 1-2 ranged crits, but Wyler has a unique combination of properties that make him shine: high offense stats, 1-2 range, high crit rate, and bulk. While there are good units in the other two +25 crit classes, none of them can replicate both his bulk and crit rate. Unlike what you’d expect from a trainee soldier with good growths, by lategame an invested Wyler is by far the best unit in the game at 1-2 range enemy phase combat due to being able to reliably survive and crit often. Armed with the humble javelin, he can mow down hordes of both melee and ranged enemies on enemy phase without risking death.
In case you’re thinking “wow this unit seems crazy,” he is still far from infallible. He is ultimately a lancelocked infantry unit which means his movement is poor, his weapon options are limited, and he is vulnerable to effective damage from the lanceslayer sword. Furthermore, despite all these green numbers, his resistance stat is notably terrible and his speed cap is low enough that he will not be able to double several enemy types by endgame, especially if his weapon weighs him down. In the end, he excels at his role, but he will never do anything outside of it. He won’t obsolete anyone else because all he wants to do is throw javelins and occasionally kill something with an effective weapon or killer lance on player phase. Players who leave his level 2 self on the bench will not miss him, and once they beat the game, they won’t think “man I really wish I used Wyler,” but for those who put in the time and effort to train him, he’s a very rewarding unit to use.
19 Likes
KEVIN LAST ROMISE IS THE SINGLE GREATEST UNIT OF ALL TIME
I may sound crazy but he soloed many maps in my last promise run
You may need to sacrifice the gaiden chapter to feed kevin more exp BUT he is really blessed
MY KEVIN HAD MAX OUT SPEED WITH ONLY 1 SPEED WING (He is an armor knight)
And he supports with rex and hes also pretty good
What am i saying is that kevin last promise os one of the best units of all time
Heres what peak kevin performance looks like
Kevin appears as an enemy in chapter 4 (or 5) of siegfried mode to recruit him just talk with siegfried
He easily can kill the boss of this map for the exp do to his high defence and also its an archer
Kevin makes a good first impression and will do pretty good on the rest of siegfried mode (maybe not letting you to go on the gaiden chapters but you dont have a convo anyway)
Anakin mode is where he shines the most
He is the first unit you gain back and acts like a mini oifey
You get the knight crest REALLY early so you can quickly promote kevin to turn him into a beast
He on some chapter recruits rex a pretty good unit to use as a support buff
Giving kevin the emblem lance and just throwing him at a wall is a really good tactic
This is my ted talk about kevin last promise the BEST unit in fire emblem
5 Likes
Hrolf (Fire Emblem Advance: Homecoming)
What is the value of a human life?
Some philosophers say all lives are priceless, that a human soul is worth more than any mortal wealth or possessions. In 2020, the United States’ Federal Emergency Management Agency valued the sum total of a person’s life at 7.5 million dollars[1]. In world history, human lives have often been bought and sold for far less, from bride-prices to chattel slavery to the grim calculus of war.
In Fire Emblem, the value of a unit’s life is… well, it varies. Player units, and their unique faces, tactical roles, and contribution to the story, are typically beloved and well cared for. Most players are willing to restart chapters over and over to ensure they all make it out alive. By contrast, generic units are puzzle pieces at best - just obstacles that need to be cut down to save the lives that matter. Sometimes, they’re not even given the privilege of posing a threat, and are just chaff placed only to die. Even green units, notionally the player’s allies and friends, get mocked and thrown away in the pursuit of fleeting tactical advantages.
Maybe there is no one answer that can satisfy all our needs. But to Hrolf, at least, it’s simple: the value of a human life is 400 Gold per chapter.
In Chapter 4 of local thread-maker Parrhesia’s latest campaign, Homecoming, you can recruit a wyvern-riding mercenary named Hrolf. While his access to flight isn’t unique - you’ve already gotten a Pegasus Knight by this point - his stats are a cut above most other units in your army, especially this early on in the game. His growth rates are competitive, too, so a well-trained Hrolf will stay useful all game long. He has mobility, strength, defense, and an incredibly cool mug - so what’s the catch?
Well, it’s like I said before. To Hrolf, the value of a human life is 400 Gold per chapter.
At the start of each chapter, if you have Hrolf deployed, he takes 400 Gold from your inventory. If you don’t have the cash, he leaves you permanently after the chapter’s end.
400 Gold on its own isn’t much - about the cost of a single iron weapon in the preparation screen shop. It adds up, though. There are about 20 chapters[2] between Hrolf’s recruitment and the end of the game, so if you deploy Hrolf at every possible chance over the entire campaign, he costs you a total of about 8,000 Gold.
Hrolf’s a strong unit, particularly for the price he demands, but he’s not without weaknesses. His Resistance is lacking, and archers can shoot him down as easily as other fliers. There are lots of maps, particularly indoor ones, where deploying might not be worth the money. If you do bench him, though, then he’s not gaining experience, and thus might have trouble keeping up on maps where you do deploy him. On every map, the choice of whether or not to pay Hrolf’s fee adds a whole new layer to Homecoming’s long-term strategy.
Later in Homecoming, you can hire another wyvern rider - a pre-promoted titan named Eskuldur - who instead asks for 10,000 gold up-front. She joins near the end of the campaign, though, and so has much less time to make herself worth the price. (Is she worth the price? That’s a question, and maybe an effortpost, for another time.)
Whether or not you recruit Eskuldur is a one-and-done choice, though. You make your call when she first shows up, and just live with it for the rest of the game. Managing Hrolf’s cost, by contrast, is a fun little minigame that never goes away.
Due to the way Homecoming is structured, Hrolf doesn’t really have much narrative presence. That said, he still has a fair bit of implied backstory. Wyvern Riders in Homecoming hail from a country called Sjoersund. While you never visit Sjoersund during the main campaign, it has a role in the game’s wider political landscape - mostly as an ally of the antagonists. Hrolf has no loyalty to his homeland, though - only to money. He has a few lategame boss conversations with Sjoersund commanders that show his commitment to leaving his homeland behind.
In place of affinity, Homecoming has a Dungeon & Dragons-like system where all characters[3] are aligned with Law, Neutrality, Chaos, or “evil” variations of the three. The latter - Tyrannous, Hollow, and Anarchic respectively - mostly show up on villains, with scarcely any player units having them. Hrolf’s amoral greed is conveyed even through his alignment of Hollow. This detail not only makes him stand out relative to the rest of the cast, but it also underlies characterization and completes the picture of Hrolf as a person in a way that only Homecoming could possibly do. The finishing touch is his quote if you deploy him for the final battle - the punchline has to be seen to be believed.
He also has a cool portrait. Can’t forget the cool portrait.
[1] https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/fema_bca_toolkit_release-notes-july-2020.pdf
[2] To be specific, at maximum, you’ll be charged for 19 chapters worth of Hrolf usage. Stuff like the shopping map, and his drawback not mattering in Endgame, complicates this a bit.
[3] Except for the skeletons. Weirdly, despite being literally Hollow, they have no alignment at all.
14 Likes
Enrhyn (Fire Emblem Advance: Homecoming)
Ests kinda suck shit. I think they rock and will use them at every conceivable opportunity and then send screenshots of their green numbers to my friends to shill whatever hack they’re in, but objectively they’re a bit shit. Because of the opportunity cost of letting them steal experience and the time cost of getting them to catch up, yeah, but most of the time they never offer anything you don’t already have. Nino one-rounds everything a few chapters after she joins, but Pent one-rounds everything zero chapters after he joins and also has a cooler sprite.
The obvious solution I’ve been seeing a lot of hacks doing lately is to give ests some sorta niche other units can’t fill, whether through giving them a gonzo PRF or nutso stats in a setting where that actually matters. Most ests get both.
Enrhyn gets both, but unlike most situations, both factors actually matter.
Without getting into anything spoilery, Enrhyn already has it pretty bad in her first appearance. She shows up at the start of lategame in an interlude where you can choose from 2 of 5 units to recruit. There’s some good units in that pile! There’s Eskuldur from the last post! Enrhyn looks like this!
She’s very obviously off her ass on something!
She’s even getting dissed in the tutorial box!
I honestly took this completely at face value and thought she was a fallback monk in case you needed another one for some reason. I brought her along because I thought it would be funny if her growths were massive, and they actually were. I definitely would have used her to endgame regardless because ests are fun, but she’s got two things going for her because of some Homecoming-specific quirks.
The First Thing: Her PRF really is that good.
Every mage in Homecoming gets a PRF, and they’re all really good. However, most of them fall off, and a lot don’t really do anything new. Elionwy’s 85 crit tome does a lot of boss killing early on, but she has enough speed to kill low resistance enemies with normal tomes regardless, and her low magic combined with the low might of her PRF doesn’t do much to the exceptions. Trefor’s 1-3 high crit luna is incredible, but with his low speed, he’ll start running out of things to one-round with it. Enrhyn’s PRF instantly slaughters problem targets and never stops.
Enrhyn promotes into a Hexe, a mage with 6 movement who uses occult [dark] and arcana [anima] magic. Hexes are one of the most obnoxious enemy classes to fight, as most units have dogshit resistance except for mages and pegasi. Homecoming’s magic weapon triangle is a magic weapon line, where occult is effective against arcana and no light magic exists, so mages have a hard time pushing against the combined weapon triangle disadvantage and existent resistance stat. Hexes also have just enough bulk to get an incredibly powerful counterattack off most of the time, which is made extremely apparent when one of them has this hack’s version of Nosferatu, and may double slower units that have enough strength to take them out immediately. Ignoring the possibility that they may have a 1-3 range tome equipped, the only safe options for taking Hexes out are Warriors with expensive weapons, Paladins with expensive weapons, and Brilliant Aurora.
Brilliant Aurora has a bunch of secondary effects that seem like a parody of overtuned est PRFs at first, at least to me, but they end up being the best argument for bringing Enrhyn with you. Reaving occult magic is exclusively an upside, and the +50 avoid she gets from doing so makes her the best answer to it on enemy phase. The tome is also effective against occult users, even when they aren’t actually using occult, giving it 39 might against them while also targeting their weak defense stat. Brilliant Aurora is also effective against undead enemies, which make up a large chunk of the enemy forces during her first few available maps.
Just as an example, here’s a 23 strength paladin with a silver lance VS base Enrhyn.
get fucked lorcan
Enrhyn would be great if all she did was kill Hexes and monsters. She does more, which leads into my next point.
The Second Thing: Her stats really are that good.
Enrhyn has a niche already, but it doesn’t take long for her to usurp every other mage’s niche. As I was saying earlier, most mages in Homecoming have iffy stats. The only non-prepromote mage with good magic and speed is Quistan, who sucks ass. The prepromotes have passable statlines that are rapidly eclipsed by your physical fighters, and while the healers have great offenses [albeit low skill], they don’t get PRFs. Enrhyn takes two chapters at most to reach promotion level, at which point she’ll probably have higher stats than most of your magical units, ‘probably’ becoming ‘definitely’ if you keep using her. This would be good regardless, but her growths become really noticeable when they turn her into one of the only units that can one-round consistently in the latter half of Act 3. Stat leads don’t matter in a setting where everyone has massive stats, but in Homecoming, she’s the only realistic option for killing endgame minibosses with Bolting.
i also drew fanart of her because i got bored
22 Likes
For vanilla fans, there is Wil. For lovers of stats, there is Crowe. For lovers of protracted arguments about tiering, there is Sam. But for me, there is only
Marcello (Temple of Ardesia)
Marcello is a man with a funny mustache. He talks constantly about his “peerless skillz”, which include his hundred-arrows technique. He is, in fact, full of himself. But is he wrong? His stats seem to indicate one arrow, really. He has high Strength and a decent Strength growth, and reasonable Speed but a middling Speed growth. Wherefore, then, does he speak of a hundred arrows?
That’s right, this guy has an in-story super technique that’s represented immediately in gameplay by his prf. At first blush, this is already a pretty fun prf. It has low Mt, but it’s brave with 50 crit, and comes with a chance of Astra. However, what the game does not immediately inform you is that a chance of Astra in this case means 100%.
As a reminder, Astra hits 5 times in a row at 1/2 displayed damage. Combined with brave, this means that each Blitz Bow attack fired off deals a minimum of 5x displayed damage (with some damage loss due to rounding errors), before factoring in the 50% base crit rate. Combined with his mighty might, Marcello is a delete button, plain and simple.
Now, a delete button is not particularly interesting on its own, but how does this play out in game? The Blitz Bow has massive 96 uses. If you ration carefully and get lucky with crits, you can usually spend 2-4 uses on on-par enemies that are just out of range of your shortbow or longbow and get an otherwise undeserved kill. However, you can also choose to blow 10-20 shots on a single target in order to kill a boss that is otherwise far outside of Marcello’s ORKO paygrade. Temple of Ardesia is a long hack, and although Marcello is not playable in Part 2, nobody in the cast has perfect availability, and the fact that he’s in your starting team means his availability is as high as it gets. In other words, the decision to nuke with the Blitz Bow becomes a genuinely meaningful one across Ardesia’s massive 33 chapters (+19 gaidens, the majority of which follow chapters where Marcello is available).
This resource management minigame even extends to individual chapters, rather than across an entire run. Siege warfare eventually becomes a core component of lategame Ardesia chapters, and many maps have ballista that can create an advantage. Generally, you have a good number of units that can attempt to double enemy siegers if they’re holding a ballista or bulky siege tome. However, Ardesia has no shortage of status staves too, and these enemies are not guaranteed to be weighed down by their weapons. That’s where a likely unintended side-effect of Marcello’s Blitz Bow comes in handy: Blitz Bow’s Astra is applied to ballistae that Marcello rides. At the cost of additional shots from a given ballista, you can secure a kill on targets otherwise outside of ballista ORKO range, making him a unique siege tool that can either help chip existing siege targets, or, if your action economy is already overextended, spend your chapter-limited siege ammunition to absolutely nuke some guy right now.
Marcello’s gameplay intricacies extend into his friendships as well. He’s part of a trio of buds with Sero and Nazir, your thief and pirate that both have the ability to steal. While other games have triangle attacks, Marcello, Sero, and Nazir have a different unique dynamic. You see, most lategame Ardesia bosses come with Hoplon Guards, but are not innately immune to crits via skill. As such, one potent strategy for dealing with bosses is to first rip off the Hoplon Guard with one of Marcello’s two buds, and then unload into the boss’s face with the Blitz Bow. You can also choose to simply fire into the boss for 5x damage, but, again, this costs a lot of uses.
“Does Hammerne break this guy in half?” You can actually buy Hammernes at one point, they cost 21k a pop and there are better targets, like the S-rank wind tome that has Galeforce attached. I still repaired the Blitz Bow once, though, and with careful management, that’s all you should need.
Narratively, Marcello is one of the more well-defined and funny units in Ardesia. He is every bit the braggart in his character description, up to the point where he speaks in the third person because “Marcello is too strong to use only one person to speak. He needs two more.” He has incredibly random battle quotes where he will just challenge bosses he has no relation to whatsoever to showdowns to prove his skillz are superior. At one point, the lords invite everyone into Marcello’s house and then one of the steeds shits on his floor.
Truly, the perfect romhack archer.
Also he spells skillz like that in-universe.
18 Likes
Dogs. You know them, you probably love them, and most FE games have the common decency to not expose them to the horrors of war.
Luckily for us though, The Unbroken Thread is an FE game that is anything but common.
Flower the dog is a unit that joins in the earlygame of The Unbroken Thread. You might be wondering why I didn’t list a chapter number; that is because The Unbroken Thread is a living, breathing open world, where you have the freedom to go left OR right, choose your own path, and tell your own story. (Flower’s map is like, chapter 4-5 if you wanted to know)
While there are other mechanical differences with The Unbroken Thread I could bring up, mainly poise, it really doesn’t affect Flower that much, Flower has a hard time poise breaking and is very hard to poise break herself.
Let’s do something a little weird, and start with Flower’s endgame stats.
You might notice that this game’s stats are a little weird. Where’s strength and defense, you might ask? Simply put, they aren’t here, on allies or enemies. All damage comes from your weapons.
Now, this is both good and bad for Flower. As you can see, she has myrm-adjacent stats, meaning that her strength and def would’ve likely been garbage if they were included, to make up for the fact that she is nearly invincible due to her high avoid (which is augmented even more by tomebreaker once promoted) and incredibly deadly due to her high dex giving her pinpoint accuracy and decent crit. However, the downside is that Flower, being a dog, has only 2 total weapons that she can use for the entire game.
The sharp claw is a light, but strong weapon, and the Banefang (unlocked by completing Flower’s loyalty paralogue) is a mage effective weapon, which is absolutely massive in a game where damage-per-strike rarely exceeds 12, even in endgame. It also helps that the secondary weapon triangle (bows beat monsters, which beat tomes, which beat bows) makes Flower your only WTA mage breaker/killer for the entire game (no, the bird does not count).
Still though, the weapon sitution is unfortunate, and it has the effect of making Flower strong, but not overpowering. Tristan, for example, is a unit with a very similarly strong offensive stat spread to Flower, who ends up outpacing her in terms of damage and utility by virtue of being able to swap from silvers to killers to reavers to javelins.
So, while Flower is a good addition to any party, and a powerhouse in theory, she is balanced out by the game favoring weapon diversity and utility over raw stats.
Anyway, I think it’s time to reveal that this effortpost isn’t about The Unbroken Thread
Flower (The Unbroken Thread 0%)
Let’s go ahead rewind the clock on that Tristan/Flower comparison back to their join maps
Con and Magic are both used for meeting weapon requirements (kinda like class certifications in three houses, or the weapon reqs from souls games, some weapons have a “you must have x con to use this” requirement). Flower really does not need either, since, guess what, she only has two weapons. However, con and mag being stats that no unit can level up deals a massive blow to every other unit in the game. Take away Tristan’s “lead” in con, and you are left with a unit that is way less bulky, way easily to stagger, slower, and less accurate than Flower.
And to make this comparison more ridiculous, Tristan is a great unit, most units in the game (even some that join significantly later by the way) do not have Flower’s mix of great speed and dex and good weapon access. In fact, let’s make a stupid comparison real quick
This is regular-growths Johannes at endgame, a hero that joins you at the end of the game and has excellent stats. His stats are so good, in fact, that in 0%, he racked up 100 kills in less than 10 maps. While his hp is admittedly much better, his speed and dex are not that much better than Flower’s, and they are actually worse when factoring in Flower’s promotion and Ferocity, a unique stat boosting accessory that only Flower can use (again, I ask, what bird?)
So anyway, Flower has base stats that are comparable in 0% to a endgame unit’s. What does this mean for the game? Well, it means that by the end of the game, Flower has 136 kills, more than every other unit in the game combined (except for Johannes, who had 100). Even on endgame maps, Flower doubles all but swordmasters and one rounds every mage in the game, including the final boss. Despite missing out on speed and hp levels, Flower still routinely dodges axe hits and can always be trusted to tank a few enemies at a time, something that your armor knight can’t even be trusted with. Flower is not only above par, but incredibly viable and interesting throughout all stages of the game, despite being an intentionally simple unit to use and understand. Flower is the tree branch you kill Ganon with in the first hour of playtime
And she’s a cute dog, which is pretty cool.
9 Likes
The Last Promise is a weird hack. Infamous for both its gameplay and writing, many aren’t particularly fond of it, and considering the problems it has, I think that is completely fair.
Unfortunately, I like this strange little game way too much. So I’ll give my thoughts on two units, starting with Althares.
Althares’s join stats are actually kind of workable, even if he’s very much outclassed as a swordie by Shuuda, not to mention the lords. He has innate +15 crit, for some reason, which only really matters if you invest in his combat longterm. Unfortunately, being a swordlocked infantry only works in The Last Promise if you have the crazy stats and myriad of PRFs Kelik has access to, and Althares, while fast, has poor growths in both defensive stats, especially for TLP standards.
If that were all there was to him, he’d be a fine unit, but unremarkable. However, to make things even worse for him, chests and doors are a non-issue in this game with just how many keys you get access to, making his primary job as a thief generally redundant. Sure, there’s a good amount of stealables in Anakin mode, but there’s only really one that actually matters. So what can Althares do to stand out at all?
The Last Promise, being an old FE7 hack, suffers from the limitations of both the game it’s working with as well as the lack of advanced hacking tools at the time. Generally, this ends up causing unnecessary frustration with things such as inventory management (no convoy til Liuke). And yet, this inventory management makes the role of stealing elixirs to sell for Seraph Robes all the more fun to optimize. With no convoy access during Siegfried Mode, and the amount of items you end up receiving, units will end up discarding items all the time if you don’t plan ahead. These items will range from half-dead iron weapons to actual valuables. Althares floods your inventory even more mid-chapter with an absurd amount of stolen elixirs that you won’t be selling til you’re at the next preps screen. The reward for this inventory management, and properly managing funds through Althares’s thief utility, is buyable Seraph Robes in the final map of Siegfried Mode.
This is how it all comes together. Althares rewards the player for proper inventory management with the ability to make their investment projects even more capable for the rest of the game. There are units whose viability beyond a certain point hinges on these Seraph Robes, such as Cia, and Althares lets you invest in a notable amount more, should you only utilize him properly.
Althares wouldn’t be as exciting of a unit if he wasn’t limited by the lack of a convoy. Thanks to this clunky limitation, though, he ends up as one of the premier stars of Siegfried mode without being a combat standout. And thanks to him, you can help Shon, one of the game’s lords, scale better into the midgame, his worst section. Speaking of…
Shon, at base, is a complete wimp, fitting with his character. He doubles very little, hits like a wet noodle, and can barely take any hits with his atrocious 17 HP. His growths are also nothing standout for TLP, and his bulk in particular can often end up a major weakpoint. In the lategame, he gets an uber-powerful PRF that turns him into a playerphase monster, but that’s not a terribly interesting unit to use either.
Shon doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though. The earlygame of TLP is extremely axe-heavy, and the low-defense, low avoid enemies make for perfect candidates for Shon to mop up once they’re weakened. His availability is amazing, so training him seems appealing. Your reward for doing so isn’t an unkillable wall, nor a particularly impressive nuke until he gets Silvans (which isn’t around for long). The reward for training Shon is having a reliable, but not oppressive, secondary tank for Siegfried mode, despite his poor start.
Shon doesn’t have the growths or bases to outpace the competition on paper. What he does have, however, is the opportunity to outlevel them. For the first map, he has to solo else his sidequest is unattainable. The second map, if the sidequest is started, is also a Shon solo, though a short one. For the next few maps, he is one of if not the only good combat training project barring Siegfried, as Corben is the definition of mediocre. Because of this, him and Siegfried will be taking pretty much every kill, with Corben just there to weaken enemies for the duo. It’s not uncommon for Shon to close in on his level cap during Siegfried Mode. And while Shon’s father will be objectively better throughout the entire earlygame, and Kevin is also much bulkier, when I needed a third tank to cover chokepoints in Siegfried mode’s hardest maps, he’s the only one who could do the job. His poor midgame performance is offset by being a great secondary candidate for Seraph Robes, assuming the primary one is Inanna, so he can at least sponge a bit of damage on rejoin.
On a semi-related note, Shon’s availability is…strange. As I said at the start, Shon is a complete wimp when he joins, and this hardly changes throughout the game. At any moment where he has the chance to grow, to mature and stand up for himself and his allies in a way that matters, he doesn’t. Even in the final battle, the idea of confronting his father is too much for him, and he cannot be deployed at all. This isn’t the only map where his emotions get the better of him and stop him from deploying, too. Many criticize this as a failure of the game’s writing, ruining his chance at an actual arc. Personally, though, I really enjoyed that despite every opportunity to stand up and fight, Shon wasn’t up to the task in the end. His arc may not be satisfying, but I think it was an interesting (and likely unintended) subversion.
Neither Shon nor Althares are particularly well-designed units, necessarily. But, intentionally or no, they both enhance the experience in ways I greatly appreciate.
Also here’s Zach. I was going to make a joke about how neither of the above two hold a candle to him but honestly the idea that he might warrant his own post in the future despite being the definition of a mid archer terrifies me and completely destroyed any ideas I had for the bit.
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Mr. Zach Ballista here hogging an entire mechanic to himself and nobody cares
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“Please, Mr. Zach Ballista was my father. Call me Zachie B.”
Fire Emblem is a franchise with a very broad cast. Fire Emblem is also a franchise that has to write around the potential absence of characters given the permadeath mechanic, which means that this broad cast can often feel weightless in the grand scheme of things. This mixture of ingredients can often rear its head in an especially ugly form when a mainline game, hack, or other project spends one or multiple chapters dedicated towards gathering allies or recruiting characters… only for those allies to contribute nothing to the story for the rest of the game.
This means that writing memorable FE side characters often involves piecing together how to make someone feel meaningful despite being ultimately optional. But what exactly is the formula to creating a character who feels like they contribute something substantial to the story, and how does one make their scenes feel impactful on the greater scope of the narrative?
Well, let’s welcome in the belle of the ball of today’s post and dig into this a bit.
Chandra (Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light)—making characters that matter
Chandra is a one-off boss from the cult of Ahribaal that the main plot decides to devote an entire gaiden to, and her chapter is the player’s first introduction to the cutthroat culture of Ahribaal and how they operate. This setup all leads into Ahribaal’s later atrocities very cleanly, especially when just a chapter later Orion sees what they’ve done to his homeland with his own eyes and is utterly disgusted by it.
Chandra herself is sent on a suicide mission into the home of the titular Maiden of Light and her dragon priests, which is a fact she clearly resents. She knows that she is a sacrifice in a game greater than her and she is not happy about it, but what can she really do? And if the player lacks the compassion to see her as more than the story device she is, well… she is very much capable of serving her intended purpose in the main plot through this chapter alone. The cast kills her, the player gets their first taste of the Ahribaal medicine, and then everyone moves on to confront bigger and more heinous villains.
You can tell that she isn’t recruitable because her unit description is primarily negative about her, and that only happens with bosses.
But as any interactive narrative worth its salt would do, the game leverages Chandra as an avenue to provide options for the player to shape the story experience.
If the player notices that Orion feels bad for her during the opening event and acts on that sentiment, they’ll discover that…
…the tactician is correct and there is in fact no easy talk option between them to recruit her. Tough luck.
But there is a battle quote if they fight.
And if you obtain that quote as a skilled player should, Orion knocks her out and stops the others from killing her and Chandra properly joins the party.
I really love this recruitment. I love how it’s more than just a boring and straightforward “talk” marked by an obvious indicator bubble, and how it doesn’t show its full hand until after the chapter is over. I could go on about how amazing it felt to discover on my own that this random boss with a design that isn’t conventionally attractive by anime standards was actually spareable, and how much I adore how DLATMOL rejects attractiveness as a visual indicator of playability, but you can just read my effortpost about Alva if you want more about that.
Now, Chandra is not a character who significantly alters the plot trajectory of Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light. But having her along for the ride makes the game feel different than if she weren’t there: her presence and using her as a unit adds fresh layers to the story that pretty much no other character in the game could replicate with equal effectiveness.
Seeing the factions through her eyes sets the stage for later things to come: how she sees the gang sparing her as futile when she’s convinced the dragon priests would leap to execute her anyways, how her boss is a cult leader named Weaver who is more than happy to spend lives like currency, and how she makes a very peculiar observation about the Maiden of Light’s home that would probably earn her an immediate execution if Freesia was in the room.
Out of the player cast so far, all of these contributions could’ve only been provided by Chandra. Her perspective is unique from the rest of the party—sure, there technically is another Ahribaalite, but he hasn’t been home in a while and doesn’t have the same view of the Sect’s inner machinations as Chandra does. And she is acutely conscious of how the other cultures of Brauma perceive the Ahribaalites as scum and wants to piece apart how that came to be. So all the dialogues she gets past this point add layers to the story that others can’t, and in doing so she also makes the screentime dedicated to her prior feel more weighty in retrospect.
But how is she as a unit?
I benched her once, and it was by far the least fun DLATMOL run I’ve ever completed
Let’s just say that most people who choose to field Chandra will likely be motivated by reasons outside of a pure gameplay vacuum. She joins alongside a much better unit (Freesia) and probably struggles to stand up to your other magic users from before. She basically only has two stats that are good… but she excels in both beyond compare.
And fortunately for her, her story setup as a defector from the enemy forces means it’s easy for a blind player to correctly intuit that she has a number of boss quotes later down the line… and that basically amounts to a golden ticket for long term deployment and investment in my book.
It is genuinely a lot of fun to find her a place in the party and etch out approaches to maps that make the most of her niche strengths. Her stellar magic means that she can always contribute with chip damage here and there even if her ORKOs aren’t super common, and after promotion she can heal more with a Heal staff than any of your stafflocked units could dream of. And come lategame, a particular item appears that benefits her a lot: the S-rank Dark tome that you get from visiting Ahribaal.
big number good. send tweet
Dunbaalze weighs her down a fair bit, but her speed is unreliable and it’s not like she wants to be taking hits anyways. It also has huge might, good accuracy, and 3X effectiveness against monsters—and monsters are generally some of the more dangerous enemies in the game, especially in lategame where enemies are all pretty scary, so being able to do enough damage to oneshot is often really convenient. And no one else in the game has magic quite like Chandra’s, so she’s the most likely candidate to hit oneshot thresholds for a wide breadth of enemies beyond just monsters too. It’s not the kind of thing that will break the game in two, but it really helps her feel like she has a distinct niche in a nice way.
Do you need Chandra oneshots to win the game? Of course not, just like the story technically doesn’t need Chandra’s recruitment to function. But her gameplay utility and the story flavor she provides mirror each other: they add enough to the experience that it makes her feel important even if she is not structurally essential per se.
The events, supports, and interactions that she does get past her recruitment are excellent at utilizing her as a conduit, drawing out new sides of existing story beats in a form that feels like it is uniquely hers. Her presence expands upon Orion’s story in interesting ways, adding some warmly welcomed subtext to certain events in the main plot. Her familiarity with the Sect sheds light on a particular character who comes off very surface-level in every dialogue he gets… except in his interactions with her. She even gets some cute little moments of her own to shine, like when she detects an enemy ambush by realizing that their attackers are using the exact same illusion tactic on the party that she used in her recruit chapter and promptly dispels the illusions with ease.
There is one particular dialogue with her that I found very satisfying to encounter: a little scene that highlights how she is one of the very first characters who starts to catch onto a really important detail about the game’s lore. Of course, the protagonists manage to eventually sleuth it out too, and the main story makes it engaging for them to uncover the truth just as well… but it’s Chandra’s unique perspective that allows her to start putting the pieces together before they do, which also lays down a solid foundation of hints to properly prime the player for the eventual reveal. I won’t say where this dialogue is—and hell, it’s not too hard to find if you’re using her—but it’s been years since my first DLATMOL run and I still remember how thrilling it was to find it.
Get a load of this gal.
In general, I think DLATMOL is a game that rewards those who really try to dive into it, arguably moreso than a lot of projects. Some story-focused hacks like The Dark Amulet and its sequel prefer to present all of their coolest bits front and center, so that it’s impossible for a player to miss them. And I understand why a developer would want to do this! But with DLATMOL, a player could very easily just… completely miss out on so many of its coolest parts if they don’t care to search for them, and Chandra is no exception. The more you explore the game the more layers you’ll find to add to the narrative, and the story experience will be all the more engaging as a result.
I think there’s something very special about a story element that is technically optional but adds so much value to the narrative experience to the point where one might even argue that it should’ve been unmissable, and I think that DLATMOL is really good at making discoverable elements like these really rewarding and satisfying to look for. In that light, I almost kind of think that a part of what makes Chandra so cool and neat to me is that she’s missable at all despite how much she brings to the table. There’s almost an unspoken vibe of player agency here: you recruited this character, you invested in them and found them a niche despite having little pragmatic reason to do so, and you brought a new angle to your story experience as a result.
also, she is the only recruitable woman in the game who Darius apparently doesn’t find attractive enough to defect to your side for, and all that tells me is that Darius is a moron because HOW can you say no to a lady with more than four boss quotes
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