Part 10

Ah, 9, a chapter of many firsts. It’s the first Fog of War chapter (sort of, more on that later). It’s the first level with a promoted enemy. And it’s the first with a boss who very definitely does not deserve for Lyn and company to leave him in a pool of his own blood.

Chapter Summary:
Eliwood, a shrewd diplomat, saves Lyn and her merry band by convincing all the local Lycian cities to remain neutral instead of helping Lundgren. As part of the agreement, he can’t help her directly, but he doesn’t need to now since Lundgren doesn’t have many loyal forces available. So Lyn hurries back to Caelin, passing through the fief of one General Eagler. Lundgren’s machinations force Eagler to try to stop them, at the cost of his own life, even though he knows them to be innocent of the charges leveled against them. Lundgren has also sent another old Caelin officer to capture Lyn, apparently counting on the man’s stubbornness and tendency to strike first and ask questions never, but this one turns his coat and joins her cause, sealing Lundgren’s defeat.




This may be the first time we hear Eliwood’s lovely leitmotif, One Heart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQp7ekauEGc




AND THEN ELDERLY GENERALS ATTACKED
Wallace ambushes the group and says he’s there to capture Lyn. The cloud of testosterone as Kent, Sain, and Wallace all bluster at each other becomes so thick as to cover the map in Fog of War.




A pair of guys like Sain and Wallace would probably have gone on for most of an hour boasting about how the other has no chance if Lyn hadn’t interrupted them.




And he likes her eyes so he joins up.

Battle Preparations & The Map




There isn’t actually much to do in the way of preparations. I leave all my junk units behind except for Kent. You see, Eagler has some unique dialogue if he attacks Kent which I’d like to see.

Count ‘em up, only 5 enemies + the boss on this map. As you would expect, it’s not that simple. You’ll fight approximately 20 reinforcements coming out of the various forts. That forts are possible enemy spawnpoints is a consideration to bear in mind for the rest of the game.

The only other complication is that a couple of turns in, fog settles in and cloaks the map. On this level that doesn’t really hurt much since there’s so few enemies and you know where they’re coming from, but it will be more of a problem later on.

Characters:




“Ha ha ha haaaa! Look! A giant walks among you!! My defense is impenetrable! Come! Break your weapons against me!” –Wallace, Chapter 9 Normal Mode Only

The first character to join the group in a long while and the last in Lyn’s story, Wallace basically just joins up to be a living example of the power of promoted units for new players going through on Normal difficulty. An old general of Caelin’s rather pathetic army, he’d retired and become a farmer until this crisis began and Lundgren called him back to service.
He’s loud, proud, and has vowed to put down the plow till the enemies of Caelin are broken and cowed.
Honestly I’m surprised he doesn’t talk in all caps. There isn’t much to him other than loudly boasting about his combat skill and laughing uproariously at his boasts about his combat skill. His reason for joining your group is stupid, his reason for doing pretty much everything else is stupid, he apparently is so dumb that he wanders into the wrong country every time he tries to travel anywhere, and he more or less pops up for no reason and hijacks the spotlight as often as he can. I’m not really fond of him.

Wallace basically doesn’t exist. He joins at the very end of Lyn’s story, then vanishes until very late in Eliwood or Hector’s story. Or possibly he’s never seen again. If you take the route I’m going for, he’s never seen again. Statistically he actually shapes up decently compared to Oswin of the same level, but is slightly worse overall. Inferior stats + greatly inferior availability means he’s terrible compared to Oswin. And I’m not, honestly, that fond of Oswin anyway.




“Go… Go quickly… Please… for the marquess… for all of Caelin.” –General Eagler, Chapter 9

Kent and Sain’s teacher and a man both of them respect, Eagler is the general of Caelin’s forces. The people of his fiefdom are quite fond of him and it’s made clear that the only reason he’s fighting you is that Lundgren has some of his friends or family hostage. Sadly, we never find out just who those people were or whether Lundgren actually left them alive or not. It’s clear that Lundgren had a spy watching Eagler even during the fight since he makes sure to loudly repeat that he will not let you pass and that you’re definitely just pretenders to the throne. Lyn, apparently, does not even consider just taking some different route into Caelin and sparing this poor man. As I’ve said before, she really has no qualms about killing people under any circumstances as long as it’s convenient for her.

General Eagler is the first promoted enemy you fight and he is BAD. This guy’s stats are nearly as terrible as Jeigan’s in FE1. Worse in some ways. His only real asset is fairly solid defense, but you’ve been fighting lots of Knights and the strategies that work on them work on him. The game wants you to crush him with Wallace, but you can just as easily run him over with a decent level Lyn or Sain or Kent as long as you trick him into equipping the wrong weapon before you attack.

Playing Through:



First things first, got to visit that village and grab the torch. Torches are excellent items in real fog of war chapters, but I’ll talk about that when I have a real fog of war chapter to deal with. More importantly for me, they’re worth 100 gold per use, so I am NOT using this one.

Remember the conversations about why the commoners aren’t taking down Lundgren in the last chapter and how Kent explained it’s because they’re afraid? Now that you guys are actually here and it’s clear you have an actual chance, they start handing you gifts and wishing you luck taking Lundgren down left and right. It reminds me of something Boromir said, “Valour needs first strength, and then a weapon.” The commoners aren’t cowards, but they know they don’t have the means to fight Lundgren on their own. But when the means to get rid of him are presented in the form of Lyn’s company, they show their courage by risking his reprisals to help out.
This is just so often the way things really are, you know?

With that, the battle is joined.




Lyn nets another excellent level. She’s turned out quite well. It’s a shame I won’t be able to use her much in Hector mode.




While Lyn holds the south against the swarms of Brigands, Sain does a quick raid against the enemies I can see up north before the fog sets in. As you can see, fog of war does not hide terrain but it does conceal enemies. For example, there is a soldier 4 squares to Sain’s left, but he doesn’t appear on the map at the moment because Sain’s vision range is only 3 squares.




People get into their defensive positions to hold the line till the reinforcements stop. Lyn’s Mani Katti is running low, but by my calculations she will probably take down every reinforcement with one use of it left.
You’ll note I don’t do things like try to block off the chokepoints and whatnot because first there aren’t really many good ones on this map and second there’s no need. Enemies will always attack people in range this turn, never charge past them in hopes of hitting someone weaker next turn. So I just keep Lyn and Sain well away from the people I don’t want fighting and the AI does my defensive walling for me.




Solid and much less crazy. Sain killed a LOT of guys to get that level.




He just finished killing something like 4 guys last turn alone and there are still plenty more. This from a map where there were only 5 starting enemies.




Alright, well the sword of legend is broken and unusable, but it served its purpose. I killed a lot of enemies with it and since it was free, that means I saved something on the order of 500 gold with it. And Lyn got to decent level




The enemy reinforcements destroyed, I start advancing and Sain visits that house you might have noticed. The villagers sadly comment that Eagler is a good man and doesn’t really support Lundgren.




Because of Lyn, mostly. We could have just gone around Eagler’s estate. And Kent and Sain I guess, they could have just suggested a different route to begin with.




Wallace joins with some solid gear including a Knight Crest. This is the only promotion item in Lyn’s story and the first we’ve seen. For those who don’t know how this works, every unit in FE7 can get to up to level 20 in its class. (Almost) every class has an item which allows those units to ‘promote’, instantly becoming significantly stronger and gaining the ability to get to level 20 in their new class. So ultimately a unit could gain as many as 38 levels (start at level 1, rise to level 20, promote to level 1 of better class, then rise to level 20). Units who have done this are generally referred to as level 20/20. You’re allowed to promote a unit as early as level 10 in its base class, but doing so is often a bad idea because that’s 10 fewer total levels you can gain, so your final stats will inevitably be lower.

Most later titles let you promote units much more flexibly. In FE9, for example, your units promoted automatically when they got beyond level 20 in their base class. In Awakening you could promote and demote your units pretty freely and even have them change class to a completely different sort of unit and level up as one of those.

I’m generally fondest of 6, 7, and 8’s system though. If anything, I think 7 was too generous and they should have given you fewer promotion items over the course of the story. Limited promotion items of any given type made you make interesting choices. That required strategic thinking.




Holy cow, I thought the level was over but suddenly a brigand jumps out of the fog and attacks Nils while every else is far away.

A rescue drop of Sain solves the problem quickly enough. It’s a good thing Nils dodges so well.




As I mentioned, Eagler is the first boss to have unique dialogue with different characters. Some of these are really good stuff. Unfortunately, you can’t discover most such dialogue on most runs because it only comes up when you fight the boss and chances are not all of the characters with special dialogue are strong enough to survive a round of fighting. Eagler is so weak that that’s not a problem though.

Here he kind of implies in his conversation with Kent that if the two of them had just thought to bring something that proves Lyn is who she says she is, this whole disaster would have been prevented. Oops.







Sain has much less patience than Kent and just points out that he and his friend were only doing what the true Marquess told them to.




And his generic line of dialogue for people he doesn’t know.

It took Sain 5 rounds to kill Eagler. They just kept missing each other repeatedly




No words to describe it. They should have sent a poet. So beautiful.




Yeah, NOW she asks about that.




And Sain and Kent explain that he was their friend and teacher and Lundgren must have been twisting his arm. Lyn rightly becomes angry with Lundgren for doing something so vile, but doesn’t even stop to consider that she could have just not had the man killed.

And that’s the level! Now for one last enemy cutscene.




Lundgren doesn’t know that his neighbors are not going to send troops and that Wallace has changed sides, so he’s sure Lyn is finally done for and decides to reveal the truth to his dying brother.




And while he’s admitting to murder, attempted murder, and treason he decides to throw in some petty insults too!




There must be some sort of unpleasant history between these two, but sadly we never really learn it because Lundgren only has one level left to live.