Kelik is actually the best written character this community has ever produced.
That’s why he can shoulder the trial of time.
Fresh, original, not the usual Mary Sue, has strong interactions with other characters,
leaves his mark in his world.
I’ll just drop this here: Turken from Vision Quest. Okay, so he’s an incompetent worthless first-chapter boss with barely anything memorable about him. And then he’s an Axe Armor, so you’d assume he doesn’t move, right? Well, here’s what happens. You’re fighting through the chokepoints to get to him, and then he suddenly darts in and wrecks whatever unfortunate unit you had out front, so now you’re forced to restart or carry on with a dead unit, because this one asshole armor knight made himself way more annoying than he had any right to be. It’s like ambush spawns, but they happen at the very end of the chapter and come from a purple recolor of Debias. YOU HEAR THAT, TURKEN? YOUR PORTRAIT ISN’T EVEN UNIQUE! GO HECKING DIE IN A FIRE TOME, A KATZBALGER, OR BOTH AT ONCE!
Titus. He’s an insufferable prick that will do anything to achieve his goals! How does Storch put up with him??? And let’s not talk about the hair… he’s supposed to be a lord, not a princess.
He’s unavailable on some critical maps and it’s more than slightly annoying. Also his levels were pretty shaky in my first playthrough and I didn’t know all the random shit you had to do to get his true prf sword.
Whereas Kelik nearly capped all his stats and was reliably there for nuking overly tanky bosses/enemies. Hard to hate him when he’s carrying pretty reliably.
Kelik’s not even really that much of a Sue. He’s just an obnoxious edgelord. Sure he has character growth, but it’s hardly enough to make him some standout amazing character. It’s just enough to make him tolerable in the late game.
I could rag on Shon for his stats that seemingly have a 4% strength growth or how a lot of his dialogue consists of “DAAAAAD”. His bigass prf sword at least makes him more usable in the late game.
No, the thing I despise most about Shon is his character arc. He seems to have the classic arc where he’s supposed to learn and grow and overcome adversity and eventually surpass his father. But at the very last moment, on the very last map.
…he wimps out and completely throws it all away. He has learned nothing, and he has surpassed no one. I will never know why this was done (to subvert a story cliche? to make sure that you can’t just Silvans the final boss away?); but the end result is a legacy of mediocrity, one that Shon will carry for the rest of his whiny life.
I’ve had this opinion long before I watched Egg’s LP of TLP. Hilariously, he didn’t even notice that Shon wasn’t deployed until after the chapter was done. Classic Egg.