Ohhhh, thanks. I feel dumb now 
1 Like
New version (1.23) is out!
- Fixed a bug where the ending could loop endlessly in one of the endings, if certain conditions were fulfilled.
- Fixed a bug where a Steel Blade would disappear from inventory in CH8.
- Some maps recieved slight visual polish.
- An optional endgame unit has seen his growths massively buffed.
As always, thanks for playing!
2 Likes
Wow, I have to finish playing this, I remember I just managed to get to ch.2
1 Like
Buffed character
Is it Jaeger? 
1 Like
Love the new Chapter 14.
Result this Time:
Perfect Pacifist; no Sleep Staff needed. (As a note, I cleared the chapter in 3 turns, but I can’t help but wonder if it might be possible to do it in two given the steps… ah well. You maybe could, but you’d likely get a lot of your units killed + a fair chance of killing Blaise’s soldiers as well… or at least that’s the case at the time of this writing. I’m going to see if I can’t do it in two knowing what I know now…)
1 Like
Whaaaaat? A second review? Well, I just enjoyed it so much that I wanted to play it through again. This time on the A-route, again on Hard, with the additional rule that any character I used on both playthroughs had to be promoted on the path I didn’t use before. I also inverted most of my story choices. Spoilers, obviously.
Story etc.
You already know my thoughts on the story and setting, but I wanted to add that you do some really good foreshadowing work, especially early on. I know I already said this, but Vert really is exceptionally well written. Part of why a lot of the plot points feel so right when they happen is that you set many of them up ten or more chapters in advance with various bits of what genuinely looks like throwaway dialogue. That kind of seeding is quite hard, and so is deserving of high praise.
Route A biz
There are some really cool chapters on this route. 29A was especially sweet, and I greatly relished the challenge of trying to finish it in 19 turns – on my first run I was just one tile short of the exit 
Never did figure out how to recruit Jaeger, but I was fine without him.
Aces
This time around I focused on creating full-on aces rather than trying to fix all of my team’s weaknesses.
Honorable Mention: Blaise
Blaise’s stats aren’t great, and his growths are terrible, but he has three key abilities that earn him an honorable mention anyway. First is Provoke, which opens up all kinds of strategies that mightn’t have been available otherwise. You’ll notice his Resist is capped; that’s because I fed him five talismans so he wouldn’t get sieged to death. Second is Armored March. Noir is a high-mobility armor unit, and careful positioning early on in several levels allows her to cross most of the map in one turn. Third, dude’s got three Leadership stars, making him the best in the game in that regard.
Mid Guard: Lowell
Lowell’s job on the team is to stand out in the open near the middle-front of my formation and attract high-mobility attackers and siege fire. He is very, very good at this. His high speed meant I could drop Wary Fighter in favor of Impale, and his defenses are so high that killing him in one turn is pretty much impossible. He’s wearing the Cidelith Robe from Sally for a bit of extra protection, and like everyone on my team he has a Hoplon Shield. Aegis and Pavise provide yet another layer of defense.
Siege Mage: Elizabeth
Elizabeth is an excellent siege mage, with her giant Skill stat ensuring accurate strikes and her unique passive providing her with an extra 35 points of Crit to bring her total up to a pretty scary 72. Even with that in mind, she doesn’t do quite as much damage as Sally did (Adept, Tomefaire, and Deathblow together narrowly edge out Light Slash). However, as a Messiah she has access to Powerstaff, arguably the most powerful ability in the game, which allows her to fully heal the party every turn in addition to attacking, and also makes her the fastest-moving infantry unit with an effective speed of 14. Thanks to Slayer, her attacks are also super-effective against a large percentage of endgame enemies.
All-Purpose Fighter: Sei
I don’t really have much to Sei here, except that Sei is generically very good despite her somewhat lackluster personal skill. Triple-S weapon skills let her use most magics and any staff, so she kind of switches off between damage dealer, healer, and backup siege mage. Very occasionally I use her with the Lightning Rod to soak up enemy siege spells, but I bought plenty of talismans in chapter 21 to make that much, much less necessary going forward. She and Shade are both somewhat overshadowed by Noir as dark mages, and Shade has a much (much) better innate skill, so I’m not sure if I would commit to nurturing her again, but she didn’t disappoint me.
Problem Solver: Crescent
Crescent is a much better archer than Zero. Both of them have access to unique bows; while the Runic Bow is very handy in the early chapters, there are more than enough magic units to make Zero sort of irrelevant as the game progresses. Crescent, on the other hand, has phenomenal skill growth to go with her two very powerful skills, Sure Shot and Luna, and her unique bow compounds their power even further. Once I had access to Giantsfeller, Crescent solidified her position in my team as the Problem Solver – she has the highest attack power of any of my units by far thanks to her skills and gear, and is able to dish out hits with a base damage in excess of 90. If someone tanky is in the way, Crescent just makes them disappear.
The Invincible: Schwarze and Noir
On my last run, I put both Lords on their support paths, as part of my larger plan to grant Staff access to most of my fighters. This time, I committed both of them to becoming true aces. Between their excellent natural growths, roughly 250,000 gold worth of stat items, and all of the Juna Fruit in the game, I managed to nearly cap both of them and they did not disappoint.
Noir switches between Avalon in melee and Luxterra at range, disintegrating all comers with ease. She reached her power saturation much earlier than Schwarze did, and carried the team through a significant chunk of the game while I nurtured him. The Arena in Albertheim contributed considerably to this – over the course of the ten turn time limit I was able to allow Noir to fight in the arena sixteen times, which actually gave her enough stats to overpower Vert’s barricade in Ch17. Her insane mobility also allowed me to complete certain map objectives in far less than the usual time, securing an S-rank on every map (except Albertheim, where I gave up the S in exchange for an extra ~10000g). Resolve would make her into a true god if her health ever actually dropped below half, which it generally does not.
Schwarze took a bit longer to rise to power, but once he hit his stride he became the strongest unit by far. He has no need for any weapon except for Knell, so his inventory is packed with stat-boosting items to push his power to the limit. Aether allows him to continuously heal himself, which is what puts him ahead of Noir, who must rely on an ally when she needs to recover. Moreover, his Genji-boosted Skill stat gives him a 32% chance of activating Aether with each attack – this rises to 62% if his health ever dips below 45, all but ensuring that he makes a full recovery.
The two of them together were capable of a 2-turn clear on the Endgame with no other units. So, let’s call that experiment a success.
N'aces
I tried so hard to make these guys good and it just did not work.
Abandoned: Tolkien, Cecil, Jin
Both runs I really tried to make Cecil work. In this one I even got him to 20 as fast as I could for an early promotion, but he’s just sort of middle-of-the pack and there are a lot of really good units in this game. He’s a fine paladin, but by comparison to the others he just doesn’t cut it. He does provide excellent support for Noir early on, and I might have kept him just for that if Elizabeth didn’t have the same ability.
Tolkien is cool and his passive is rad as hell, but he joins just a little bit too late and his stats are not quite up to par. I love axe fighters and I had planned to use him from the beginning, but in retrospect I wish I had just gone with Maria.
Forcing myself to pick Jin instead of Rose was the hardest thing I did in this run. Rose is an invincible death goddess, and Jin is… fine? I guess? His growths are pretty deece, and he gets a free +2 to a few stats to help him in the midgame, but there are so many mages in this game that I just had kind of a glut of better options.
Not Sally: Hall
Sally was one of my aces on my last run. Hall is not Sally. Three of his passives only work when attacking, but he’s also pretty fragile. As a Falcoknight, he’s like halfway between a support class and a combat class, but his Magic is terrible and there’s no way in hell he’s getting to B staves for Physic in any reasonable time frame anyway. Rowling is a better Falcoknight by nearly every metric. As a Wyvern Knight, I imagine he’d be kind of like a weaker Hermes. Without leveling through Wyvern Rider, though, he doesn’t have access to Savage Blow, which is Hermes’s most valuable ability and arguably the main reason to field him.
Almost Amazing: Grey
Grey has so much potential. I’m hoping that he’s the late-game unit that got his growths buffed, because he could use the stats. He has two main problems that hold him back from being really really good. One, he just does not gain experience, like, at all. Enemies that were giving 70 experience for my T3 units barely put a dent in his XP bar. I fielded Grey aggressively on every map from the moment he became available, and this is the result (I also gave him my last two talismans). Two, his truly abysmal Resistance makes him a serious liability, as siege mages are an every-map occurrence by the time he finally joins. This strikes me as an intentional weakness, and I think he could naturally overcome it through his other virtues if he was able to level up.
Hiryu
Yeah, Hiryu gets his own section. His stats aren’t really anything to write home about; he’s a serviceable assassin who is gravely overshadowed by Hazel as a combat unit.
What Hiryu has going for him, however, is the ability to steal things. You’ll notice above that I gave him the Body Ring. This is very, very important, as it greatly expands the list of things he can take, and adds some really spicy stuff to that list.
First off, I never once bought a Physic or Fortify staff in this playthrough. Hiryu can steal more than ten of the former, and at least four of the latter. That left me a lot of leeway to spend that money on stats other things. Sleep, Berserk, and Silence can similarly be acquired in this way.
Remember the Body Ring? You know what has a weight of exactly 10? Master Swords. You know what else has a weight of exactly 10?
You’re too kind, Your Majesty.
You can also swipe an upgrade for Grey. This is probably not intended, but it’s a super cool hidden buff and I will be very put out if I find out it got removed:
He didn’t need two sets of teeth anyway.
You can also steal Stone and Demon Surge in this way, which does awkwardly give any character the ability to use Dark magic. Dark is much more accessible in this game than it is in most others, so that’s less of an issue than it might otherwise be.
Stone is super overpowered so I just kept it as a trophy.
The last thing I stole is almost definitely not meant to be stolen, but you know how kleptomania be.
Now I am the Weapon.
Idle Musings
Just some random thoughts I had while doing this run.
- It would be neat if Josephine got a leadership star after the time skip. She’s been leading the knights for three years while the rest of the party has been languishing in prison, after all.
- Hiryu’s Assassin map sprite has red hair (presumably Joshua’s), and Hazel’s has light purple hair (presumably Marisa’s). This understandably causes me no small amount of confusion.
- If you take Lillina’s Warp staff in Ch17, she says “Good thing I always carry two staves.” Is that a reference to the ProZD sketch about not having choices in games? Because, if so, it was perfect.
- It upsets my aesthetic sensibilities that Dark Druid (uniquely?) doesn’t get a sixth skill. It probably doesn’t need one, but the asymmetry makes my brain itch.
- I deeply, desperately wish that the Rally command was lower down in the action menu. I hit that button by accident at least once on every map, especially when I’m trying to have my fliers rescue someone.
Bugs and Other Aberrations
I kept a closer eye out this time through, since I already knew the story and maps and therefore had more cycles to spend on other things. Pretty much everything here is very minor.
- Is Lethality meant to give a bunch of extra experience whenever it triggers?
- Occasionally Lifetaker didn’t restore as much health as it implied. I forget what the restrictions are on it in the flagship games, so maybe it’s working as intended.
- If you defeat Vert in chapter 17, he still calls for the warp and the knights still come to defend the line if you cleared Ch14 peacefully, except he’s not there to be warped. Also, the music stops playing after a little bit.
- Sometimes T2 units appear to gain points in stats they’re capped in.
- Bonnie and Clyde very generously neglected to charge me the agreed upon 10,000 gold after I hired them.
- If you visit the Shade with Sei in chapter 20, he gives you the opposite of whichever item you pick.
- Giantsfeller pierces the Fili Shield. Honestly this makes sense, but it did surprise me.
- Sally says her death dialogue in 21-A twice. Also, in the next cutscene, Vert refers to her “fighting to his last breath”.
- Noir’s Acrobatics seems to work differently than the assassins’. They can, for instance, run across the lake in 21-A, but she cannot.
- As a General, Lowell is capped at five skills instead of six. Promoting him to Baron fixes this.
- In Chapter 22, Tolkien’s conversation uses Crescent’s art instead of his own.
- Also in Chapter 22, several Talk commands seem to be missing. Maria can’t talk to Noir, for instance, but is listed as being able to. Similar problem in 29-A.
- Chapter 26-A is marked as “Chapter 25: Defiers of Death” in the save menu.
- Chapter 27 didn’t tell me I S-ranked it, but it’s okay: I know it in my heart.
- I can’t change my formation in 29-A or Endgame A, except by noting the units’ positions and deselecting/reselecting them to put them in the correct spots.
- Several conversations in the game refer to “inmortality”; that word is usually spelled “immortality”.
Again, absolutely amazing stuff. Now time for me to go back to being a productive and responsible member of society.
3 Likes
Nice writeup, though I can answer some of your questions and maybe question some parts of your review as well.
Reviewing your Review
Is Lethality meant to give a bunch of extra experience whenever it triggers?
- Yes, Lethality gives extra exp when it triggers similar to GBA Lethality.
Occasionally Lifetaker didn’t restore as much health as it implied. I forget what the restrictions are on it in the flagship games, so maybe it’s working as intended.
- I think it was around 50% health recovered with Lifetaker.
If you defeat Vert in chapter 17, he still calls for the warp and the knights still come to defend the line if you cleared Ch14 peacefully, except he’s not there to be warped. Also, the music stops playing after a little bit.
- …Chapter 17 might be called “You somehow KO’d vert, now watch as Blaise’s Knights stand around and do nothing”
Giantsfeller pierces the Fili Shield. Honestly this makes sense, but it did surprise me.
- Huh, TIL
Sally says her death dialogue in 21-A twice.
- Sally: Shadows die Twice
If you take Lillina’s Warp staff in Ch17, she says “Good thing I always carry two staves.” Is that a reference to the ProZD sketch about not having choices in games? Because, if so, it was perfect.
- King Adam sends his regards. (Warps Vert)
I deeply, desperately wish that the Rally command was lower down in the action menu. I hit that button by accident at least once on every map, especially when I’m trying to have my fliers rescue someone.
- I feel your pain as well
- Keep in mind, if going Route B, in Chapter 27B: Shooting Star, they will be force-deployed into the map after a few turns has passed, so I seriously consider training them up a bit, especially Cecil.
Grey has so much potential. I’m hoping that he’s the late-game unit that got his growths buffed, because he could use the stats. He has two main problems that hold him back from being really really good. One, he just does not gain experience, like, at all. Enemies that were giving 70 experience for my T3 units barely put a dent in his XP bar. I fielded Grey aggressively on every map from the moment he became available, and this is the result (I also gave him my last two talismans). Two, his truly abysmal Resistance makes him a serious liability, as siege mages are an every-map occurrence by the time he finally joins. This strikes me as an intentional weakness, and I think he could naturally overcome it through his other virtues if he was able to level up.
- That’s because the game subtly encourages you to feed him Juna Fruits, which levels him down, which in turns allows for additional EXP to be gained. That being said, Grey does learn a skill at Level 20, and it’s pretty useful, so I recommend feeding him Juna Fruits after reaching that level, and chipping enemies to death while doing so.
I don’t really have much to Sei here, except that Sei is generically very good despite her somewhat lackluster personal skill. Triple-S weapon skills let her use most magics and any staff, so she kind of switches off between damage dealer, healer, and backup siege mage. Very occasionally I use her with the Lightning Rod to soak up enemy siege spells, but I bought plenty of talismans in chapter 21 to make that much, much less necessary going forward. She and Shade are both somewhat overshadowed by Noir as dark mages, and Shade has a much (much) better innate skill, so I’m not sure if I would commit to nurturing her again, but she didn’t disappoint me.
- I find your opinion understandable, as there is a literal game-breaking bug in which as a Summoner, phantoms have a tendency to glitch for some reason. If that bug were to be fixed, she might shine much better. Maybe it has to do something with Supply turned on for them?
Lowell’s job on the team is to stand out in the open near the middle-front of my formation and attract high-mobility attackers and siege fire. He is very, very good at this. His high speed meant I could drop Wary Fighter in favor of Impale, and his defenses are so high that killing him in one turn is pretty much impossible. He’s wearing the Cidelith Robe from Sally for a bit of extra protection, and like everyone on my team he has a Hoplon Shield. Aegis and Pavise provide yet another layer of defense.
- Funnily enough, he can instead forgo General for Halberdier, which gives him Crit+15, and can later promote into Dragonheart, which essentially makes him a flying Berserker.
Overall, it’s pretty well written for a review, and I certainly hope that Mycahel can learn a thing or two here.
1 Like
Thanks! (Again) for sufferi–I mean, playing the whole game.
I pretty much agree with Siegfried’s opinion here, but there are some points I’d like to add:
points that i'd like to add but I can't do so publicly because there are spoilers in here and it would be a shame if someone clicked on them on accident, also did I mention this section has spoilers
Hiryu is a pretty fun unit, he can steal staves, weapons and literally the ability to end the whole f*cking world.
That said, some items (Mainly Luxterra and stone) are too broken to be stealable, so I’ll have to fix that in the next patches.
I do agree, but sadly I have no way to increase a unit’s leadership after they already spawned…
(Vert’s machinations literally laid undetected for years, for he is a master of deception)
All of the below are bugs and will need to be fixed eventually. Thanks for telling me!
-End of bug section-
The way Acrobat works is that you get 1-cost movement, but only if you can move to that tile in the first place. Thieves/assassins have a unique movement type that lets them naruto-run on the water, but Noir’s movement type is that of mage units, meaning that she can’t move through water at all.
That’s because some of the Talk commands are only available under certain conditions. For example, this particular conversation between Maria and Noir, or Schwarze and Hermes, can only happen if Josephine is dead.
Once more, thank you for playing :,)
1 Like
After some more shennanigans…
About Chapter 14
I definitely think a 2-Turn Clear is possible without the Sleep Staff. I absolutely think it is. That being said, you would need the following for sure:
A Dancer.
Artemisa.
Schwartze as a Knight Lord. Noire as a Spectre.
Promoted Flier/mounted units (preferably the former over the latter).
Units with Move Assist Skills.
I feel like if you abused certain movement skills, it might be possible to indeed safely clear it in 2-Turns without using the Sleep Staff. That being said, it might not be; I can, however, confirm that it is definitely possible to safely clear it in 3 turns at the very least without using the sleep staff so long as you have Angel, Artemisa, and at least two Fliers (one of which is has to be promoted).
You may also have to RNG abuse for a safe 2-Turn clear.
3 Likes
Is it possible to sing abuse a dancer until they get re-move then manip them to take you through the map?
1 Like
Possible, but it’s better to feed them kills so that they can learn it faster.
1 Like
Oops, that was meant to be a reply to Telos about chapter 14.
1 Like
Question
What do you do with Diabolus?
1 Like
Question
Is there any use for the Agony sword ? it’s some kind of joke weapon ?
1 Like
Answer 1
Diabolus is a weapon for Grey.
1 Like
Answer 2
Yeah, Agony is just there for flavor text. You do get special dialogue in one chapter if you do not throw it away, but it disappears from the inventory automatically by CH15.
1 Like
That’s another way, sure. But that would take quite a while… and at that point, it becomes possible to do a one turn-clear too, but if you’re doing that, I can only presume your rank is taking a nosedive. (And for a LTC run, that’s definitely not an option).
1 Like
Spoilers for chap22
Is there a way to save Jaeger?
1 Like
So I’ve played through 3 of the 4 routes, only missing out on C because I accidentally saved over any chance I had to get it. Played on hard, and had slight spoilers ahead of time because I’m a dummy who always looks at tv tropes before I finish a game. Overall really fun. Probably my favorite hack, or if not tied with Vision Quest. There were lots of things I found praiseworthy, and a few that I think could have used some work. I’ll give a larger review tomorrow since it’s kinda late, but I can’t promise it will be as eloquent or insightful as KingOfAllTrades. Either way, good work.
2 Likes
Yes
He’s pretty aggro, and he’s fast – he’ll get to you before you get to Vert unless you perform some shenanigans. I just bopped him with a Sleep staff (his Resist is not great). He will flee the level, shamed but very much alive, when you kill Vert.
2 Likes