Part 104: Cost

Time for more FMW2 chat! Last time I brought up the WP system, now I want to mention Cost.


_{The characters I've censored are ones that are actual surprises. Everyone else should be a "oh, duh, they join" to people familiar with Touhou or "I have no idea who this is but you probably fight them next game" to people who aren't.}

First off, I would like to reestablish that FMW2 ultimately gives you 30 characters to use. And unlike FMW1, you can't deploy all of them on every map. You have to choose who you want.



And by now you've probably noticed that while some characters share roles, there are clear best units. This isn't that much of an issue in FMW1 since you can use everyone anyways, but if you had to actually choose who you wanted what reason is there to pick, say, Rumia over Keine? That's where Cost comes in. All of the players units in FMW2 are sorted into three tiers of Cost: 1.5, 2.0, and 2.5. (There's one character who's a 3.0, but she's just a cameo so who cares.)



Weaker characters like Rumia and Dai are 1.5,



middle of the road characters like Cirno and Nitori are 2.0,



and excellent characters like Reimu and Marisa are 2.5. So right away, a character's Cost tells you how good they are. What does this have to do with character choice?



In FMW2, you're not asked to pick X number of units per chapter. Instead, you're given a number, and each character you pick has their Cost subtracted from that number. By the way, the number of units you get usually isn't anywhere near that high (though it's not really low either; past the midpoint, where a lot of characters join, it's usually around 20.0 to 24.0 IIRC), but that's from the final chapter and per SRW tradition they opened the floodgates for unit deployment.



Anyways, if I pick my preferred units (most of which are 2.5s and 2.0s) I can get 15 units,



but if I pick solely from 1.5 and 2.0 (and Reimu because like hell am I ever not bringing her) I can get 18. This may not seem like that much of a difference, but ask anyone who plays Strategy RPGs if they'd like having three more useful actions per turn (and possibly more if you factor in Support Attack), and I'm sure you'd get an enthusiastic yes. Plus, on ordinary stages you can get a difference of up to maybe 5 more characters.



The final thing to note is that while Rumia is much weaker than 2.0 or 2.5 tanks, she's the undisputed 1.5 tank queen. The same applies to a lot of other characters; they may not be the best at what they do in the game, but they're the best in their Cost tier. This really does a lot to make characters better, though there are still a couple of units who are bad even in their tier.

As a conclusion, Ryza and I have both tried doing challenge runs of the game using only characters in one tier, and believe it or not I found that the easiest playthrough is a 1.5 run! You get most of them at the beginning of the game, giving them time to grow, and having Dai around as well as a bunch of Alerts and Grits meant they could not die. The 2.0 run was the second easiest (easiest in Ryza's opinion since you get more characters) since they got the game's MP restorers as well as the best debuffs, and the 2.5 run was the hardest because all they had to replenish resources with were Spirits and items. Sure most of them could murder everything they could blink at, but that's not enough once you hit the harder parts of FMW2.