Fire Emblem Stuff

@Dirty Bit  
I’m waiting for the “recruit everyone” runs before going that route myself.

 

@Meanlucario
 
Warp is handy, but:
 
1 - it only has a couple of charges.  
2 - if something needs to die NOW, it’s generally Lysithea herself that needs to get into striking range if possible, not whoever she’s slingshotting.
 
It’s nice to have a means of circumventing the maze-maps (yeeting Anna into a room full of treasure chests or onto a convenient ballista comes to mind), and the utility adds to her overall value as a unit - but nothing and nobody hits harder than Lysithea when the chips are down. If she can hit an enemy without being hit back, there’s very rarely a better use for her turn.

@Kazapsky  
Watch a LTC, since her power is usually overkill and there are better uses of that magic than damage.

@igotnopicks  

@Meanlucario
 
There is no “overkill”, there is only “does this kill consistently or not?”, and Lysithea is one of the first characters to answer that question with “yes”.
 
And what version of the game are you playing (or watching, for that matter) where Lysithea has enough non-damage spells to take more than a small handful of useful actions per battle? At Rank-S in both reason and faith, she has Warp (only two shots), Heal (handy, but there are many better healer options), and a shield buff which is more likely to redirect an attack onto her squishy butt than help someone survive. Everything else is some variation on “kill something”. Which is just fine since “kill something” is the win condition for every map in the game.

@Kazapsky  
LTC is a low turn-count run (lowest turn-count possible without cheats, usually with all unit recruited and chapters done or without), and in the one I watched it was the boss-killers doing most the combat, who were mounted units (mostly wyvern riders). It’s not power that’s the issue, but mobility, and she’s better at making others more mobile than she is herself. The run I watched did it on the Blue route which is practically the same as all the other ones pre-time skip. Here the playlist if you want to see what I mean, though after the time-skip it is spoiler heavy unless you went through Blue yourself.

@Meanlucario
 
That’s impressive, in the same way as speedruns that exploit game physics in weird ways to complete missions in a fraction of the usual time are. I can appreciate the effort, and the results. But I just can’t get into that mindset.
 
I’m one of those crazy folks who likes playing RPGs and TBTs the way they were designed to go - level up, man up, and take the enemy army down with your army. Call me a role-player, I guess; decapitation strikes rarely win real battles by themselves, if they’re even possible. Most such attempts IRL tend to go the way Dimitri dies in Verdant Wind.
 
Actually, that’s one of the reasons I like battalions - it’s a little acknowledgement, game-mechanic-wise, that no, a couple dozen people CAN’T win a war without an army at their backs (to secure captured ground if nothing else), as fun as that power fantasy is.

@Kazapsky  
But doing the objective without glitches is the intended way, it’s just done in a way where they’re on a turn limit. Not their fault that the enemy army folds over once their leader dies on most maps. And there still are more than a few kills and level-ups, and they also do the monastery stuff, though we’re told what happens instead of see it since that would be a lot of time watching bust-work. And it’s not a speedrun, so they do save and redo chapters if they fail to get the kill or something. There’s also the 0% growth version of a LTC, but that’s something else.

@Meanlucario
 
And good for them for pulling it off, like I said. Especially in a franchise with as vindictive an RNG as Fire Emblem.
 
I just can’t enjoy myself playing that way. I have a bit of a completionist streak - not enough that I have to collect everything/recruit everyone, but I do have to try and get what looks feasible. Leaving goodies ungrabbed, or major enemy assets intact, just BUGS me. Yes, I COULD warp Claude or Leonie ahead to (possibly) snipe out the commander (or more likely die trying alone), but this demonic beast is tying up half my team and Seraphim will strip an entire health bar off it so I can hit him en masse next turn without Godzilla’s ugly niece in the way.
 
I’m kinda like the title character of Cautious Hero - I gotta have all my ducks in a row before I feel comfortable taking a shot at the boss.

@Kazapsky  
I could never speedrun or do an LTC myself, but I do love watching them. Helps that the LTCs Ive seen so far (the one I linked and Dondon’s 0% LTCs) play them on the hardest difficulty (other than Dondon’s FE12 since the mechanic of the enemy always starting combat was too much for him, so he had it on the second hardest), so staying around is a bit of an issue at times. You also learn a few things yourself, like swapping weapons for enemy phase or for link attacks in TH using the trade mechanic to swap the desired weapon to the top, where it becomes equipped. Just because you don’t do LTCs, doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them.
 
And they do calculate thresholds, so it isn’t as dangerous as you think they are, more often than not.

I think I’ll play TH again when I finish Dragon Age 2. Think I’ll start on Yellow before finishing Blue.

 
Jeralt did raise a God without knowing it.

@igotnopicks  
Byleth being smug is OOC.

@Meanlucario  
You can’t be out of character if you’ve never had a character in the first place.

@Meanlucario  
Who says Byleth was being Smug.

@igotnopicks  
Last panel.

@igotnopicks
 
Of course, when you’re dealing with stuff relating to dragons in Fire Emblem, the difference between angels and demons is basically one shitty week.

@Kazapsky  
She’s not a dragon, though. The voice in her head, on the other hand…

@Meanlucario
 
S’why I said “relating to”. She also got a heart transplant from the same one.

For all of 3H’s problems, it’s music isn’t one of them.

@Meanlucario
 
Can confirm.
 
I’m super bummed they didn’t add God-Shattering Star to the Smash soundtrack

@Dirty Bit  
Or Heroes when they had Nemesis added with his own map.