Part 13: Chapter 3 Part 3: Silvail-Orgahil

Chapter 3 Part 3: Silvail-Orgahil



And we're back in Agusty. When we left off, Lachesis was finally ready to promote! Let's get right to it.





Oooo, I can't wait!



Bam. Immediately you can see she got a horse, automatically making her promotion awesome. Let's see what else she got.



Before…



And after! In addition to her horse, she got +7 Strength, Skill, and Defense, and + 4 Speed. At first glance it looks like she only got +2 Defense, but the before screen's 18 is actually 13+5 from the Defense Ring. And that's still not all!



She now has an A in every weapon type except Light and Dark. And you don't even get a Light or Dark tome in the first generation (besides Deirdre's Aura). She can now use ANY non-holy weapon besides Aura. You can also see that she now has Pursuit. She is now one of our best fighters, right up there with Sigurd and Lex. The only thing holding her back is her lack of a Hero weapon, but she still has a Silver Sword. And if we wanted to, we could give her the Hero Axe or Lance, but we'll keep those where they are for now. Now, let's have here trivialize the rest of the arena real quick, since she didn't before.



Yea that was a piece of cake.



So let's have Lachesis and Fin move out and catch up to the combat in the north. It's kind of funny, now Lachesis actually has to slow herself down to wait for Fin.



And back over by Silvail, Ethlin can talk to Cuan.




Here.

Ah! The Gae Bolg? How did you get it!?

Your father gave it to me. He wanted me to give it to you if things got too out of hand.

Boy, I'm going to clean up shop with this! So... why did you wait until now?



Yeah, but...

Ethlin, trust me. Anyway, this battle's about over with. We can soon return to Lenster. We have to get back to our little Altenna.

Yes, we do. Cuan, no matter what happens, we'll never be apart, right?

Huh? You must be worried about Deidre. But we'll find her soon.

Yeah, I want to think so, too. But...

Ethlin? Why are you crying? You think something bad's going to happen?

I'm just... It's so sad to think those two may never see each other again. They were so much in love. How could such a horrible thing happen to them!?

Ethlin...

As far as I know, the legend of the Gae Bolg is never explained in game. However outside sources give a rather detailed explanation of the legend. You see, Dain and Noba (the two lance crusaders) were two siblings who were envied for having such a close relationship. They ruled of Thracia, presumably with Noba ruling the Manster district (northern Thracia where Cuan is the prince of) and Dain ruling the Thracia Peninsula (southern Thracia where Trabant currently rules). Noba eventually married a knight, and Noba's husband and Dain eventually got into a fight. Noba tried to break up the fight, but accidently ended up killing her husband, impaling him with the Gae Bolg. Dain then died a mysterious death. Dain's death was actually the event ended up splitting Thracia into two separately districts. It was then said that the Gae Bolg and the Gungnir (the lance of Dain) were linked, and that the Gae Bolg is said to cause great love and great sorrow, hence Ethlin's hesitation at giving Cuan the lance.

I also remember reading a long time ago that the Gungnir and the Gae Bolg were destined to war with one another, so that the owner of one would often kill the owner of the other, though I can't seem to find a source to back that up. Go figure. Anyway…



When Cuan gets the Gae Bolg, his sprite tilts a bit and starts flashing gold.



Let's take a look.



Bam, +10 Strength, Skill, and Defense just from holding the weapon. Not too shabby.



And just like Eltshan's holy sword, the Gae Bolg has 30 Mt. Well, really all holy weapons have 30 Mt, but other stats vary. The Gae Bolg actually isn't great for a holy weapon, though it's still a holy weapon, so it's in a whole other league than normal weapons.



Now then, our mounted units start heading to the north.



Now in the north we have Dew taking on some pirates. This is pretty much the best way to level him up, though I kind of fuck it up in this chapter by getting greedy with other units and killing the boss before he goes for reinforcements. But that's not really important, because Dew still sucks when he gets promoted. The only reason I would want to bother grinding him up is for the Experience Rank (you need a ridiculous amount of levels across all of your units to get an A for it).









So yea, getting greedy with other units and destroying the incredibly weak pirates. Wait a minute, is that the Give command I spy?



Well look at that, Holyn and Aira are now lovers! As such they now have all the lover bonuses (+hit and avoid, lover crit, the ability to give money), and will have some children for generation two.



Anyway, I decide to have Holyn back off and try to grab some experience with Dew. Anyway, let's take a look at the boss.





Pretty easy stats, decent HP and Defense, but he'll have a hard time hitting our sword users. What's important is that Leg Ring he's carrying. We'll be wanting to set up Sylvia for a kill so she can more effectively dance for our units. The hard thing is, Sylvia will only do one damage to Pizarl. But more on that later. Let's take a look at our new units now.







Brigid has great stats, Pursuit, and Major Holy Blood. Her only problem is that she's locked to bows. Well that and she doesn't have a horse. Still though, she's a very solid unit overall.



But right now she's being chased by pirates, so she should probably run for it. Let's look at Tiltyu now.







Wow, joining at level 3 this late in the game. And she's still better than Dew. Hell she's actually pretty great, once you get some levels into her, which isn't too hard thanks to her skill. She has Wrath, which means she'll always crit when she's at below half HP, and minor Tordo blood, which will let her use Tron, a pretty great tome. What this means is that she'll have no problem clearing the arena, because she can always enter, lose, then come back with 1 HP and crit-kill the enemy. She also has a pretty good promotion. I also like the way her hair looks. Something about maybe the color, or just the hairdo just appeals to me. Anyway, enough about her, let's look at Claude.









As we already know, Claude's Holy Valkyire staff can be used to resurrect any dead party member. Sadly this doesn't apply to Allied or Other units, so we can't bring back Eltshan. Now he also comes with the Reserve Staff, which will heal every ally within 10 squares of Claude, excluding Claude himself. He has no skills and no weapons though. He's pretty much a dedicated healer.



Now these two fall in love pretty easily, and I don't want that at all, so I'm making sure to keep them away from each other for now.



On enemy phase, pirates keep chasing Brigid to no avail.



And Dew keeps bottlenecking the pirates.









Tiltyu nimbly evades and attacks with Tron, which looks pretty badass. I should get off my ass and make some animated .gifs one of these days. Oh well.



And crap, the pirates are attacking the village. Well, Brigid can probably stop them when she gets over there.



Back on player phase, we're gonna have Fury go help out Tiltyu, Brigid, and Claude by flying directly over the water to the shore where our frailer units are. They really do put you in a kind of difficult spot here since you have three units, two of which are incredibly frail, and two of which can't counterattack.











I desperately try to actually get a kill for Dew, but still fail. Well, there's always enemy phase…





So Brigid pretty easily saves that village from that pirate. However her pursuers grow ever closer.



And Tiltyu finishes off the guy from enemy phase.



Next turn, we see yet another new Give command!



Midir and Aideen are now lovers! Also Midir can apparently talk to Brigid even though he shouldn't be able to now that he has a lover. Next turn his talk option goes away though.









We advance Dew a bit so he can get double the EXP on enemy phase. Not too much interesting happening over here.



Now, Tiltyu took some damage on enemy phase, so let's have Claude heal her.



A whopping 85 EXP from one use. It's gonna be really easy to get Claude up to level 30.



Now, that town will give +20 evade when Brigid stands on it, so we'll have her visit it and try to evade tank the oncoming enemies.



We've got absolutely nothing to do with Grandbell OR Agustria! If they must fight, they should do it somewhere else.

Some way to thank us for saving you. Well I guess Brigid isn't really a part of the Grandbell army yet, technically. Fine old lady, have it your way. We'll go fight a war in some other country next chapter!





So she starts to get surrounded, but it shouldn't be a big deal. She has decent avoid and can take a few hits.



Here the pirate mooks actually move out of the way to let Pizarl come in, surprisingly enough.



Let them enjoy the fear that is the Orgahil Pirates!!





We get a luck dodge, and land a devastating blow to the boss.



Oddly enough he only has 3,000 Gold, while all his mooks have 5,000 Gold.



Tiltyu gets hit down to below half HP, which means…



Automatic Wrath crit! That'll take him down easily.







So we clear some of the enemies around Pizarl out, and have Aira go in to weaken him. Luckily no skills activate, so she takes him down to exactly 1 HP, setting up Sylvia for a kill in a minute.









More fighting, and for the first time Dew actually activates Sol and gains a whole 5 HP.







Sylvia grabs the kill and the Leg Ring, making her the ultimate dancer now.



And Jamka grabs a kill for the first time in a while.





Blah blah fighting and healing. Fury catches up with the others.









Brigid starts getting surrounded pretty heavily now, and starts taking damage from the archers. We'll need to get Claude up there pretty quickly to heal her. I suppose I could let her die, then resurrect her later, but that sounds like a lot of effort, taking Claude all the way back to the home castle (you can only use the Valkyrie staff there), then using up a staff that costs 30,000 Gold to repair, so I try to not let her die.



















We rip through some pirates in a flash, intentionally leaving one alive so that Dew can get some experience from slowly whittling him down.



At this point I realize I don't need to keep Midir and Aideen together anymore, so I have her warp him up to Madino.



And here I realize that I have a village that nobody's visited. Guess I'll have Midir go there while he's in the area.



It's magical. We call 'er th' Wing Clipper. It'll spell death fer anythin' in th' air.
If yeh can't use 'er, yeh can still sell 'er.





So the Wing Clipper is a sword that gets effective damage against flying units. It'll probably be helpful next chapter. As of now I dunno who I'll give it to. Maybe Fury to give her even more effective weaponry, but she'll be getting something nice at the end of this chapter as it is.





Brigid gets some lucky dodges, letting her live for at least another turn.



We slowly fight our way up the western shore…





And have our other units fight their way to the western shore.





Fury tries to decoy some enemies away from Claude while he advances as quickly as he can towards Brigid.





So a couple of enemies decide that it'd be a good idea to attack Lex. It doesn't work out for them too well.



On enemy phase Fury gets attacked by the sea, and I thought I'd show off this new battle background. I think it looks really nice, and stands out a lot from the other backgrounds.









Still fightin' our way up over here. Brigid is still out of Claude's range unfortunately. I take this opportunity to show off that Reserve does not heal its user.





And Lex works on decoying some guys away from Brigid. On the next turn…





Claude finally heals Brigid. No more relying on lucky dodges for her!













So our main force finally arrives to help out. We have Fin do some damage to get some EXP. Our current goal is to get him to level 20 by the end of the chapter.



Dew finally kills this Pirate he's been attacking for a while. Now with all the enemies besides the ones right next to the castle being dead, we kinda just moving our units around for conversations, events, and love points.



Our first conversation will be between Sigurd and Brigid.





Well, one of the villagers was telling me about the leader of the Orgahil Pirates and how she's always helping the poor. That's you, isn't it?

Ah, I see. You're Sigurd from Grandbell, right? If you must kill me, go on. Get it over with.

Hahaha! No, no. I merely came to talk to you! We'd like you to team up with us. What do you say?

You want me to fight with you!?

Yep, we need you.

You're a strange one...

Then we have Aideen and Brigid…







Hey, you're... Yes, I knew it! Brigid! I'm your sister, Aideen! Please, try to remember!

How come you know my name? ...Wow, you look just like me. ...Aideen, you say? Actually does sound kinda familiar...

Yes! I'm your twin sister! You were taken by pirates when you were just 5 years old! I've been looking for you for such a long time.

I don't know. You're going to have to prove this to me somehow.

Okay. Take this bow. Then draw.

Hm? Wow! Now that's a nice bow! Just draw it, right? Whoa! W, what is going on! Some strange power is bubbling up inside me. I... I have some recollection... Ah... my heart is burning... Aideen. You're are my sister, Aideen!

Wonderful! You remember! That bow is the holy Ichival... It's been handed down through our family for generations. It is said that only one direct descendant of a crusader is able to handle their divine weapon. And in our family, that appears to be you! Now is that enough proof for you?

Aideen... Let me see your face. How's our father? And our brother... Andrei?

Oh! I have so many things to ask you, too!

So it kinda just cuts off there, but Andrei does come back later in the story. And of course Brigid gets her holy bow after all this time.









+10 Strength and Speed isn't bad at all, and the bow has the Live skill on it as well! So we now have two holy weapons and the holy staff. Not bad at all, maybe we'll get some stuff for our other major holy blood characters soon.



Anyway, next up we have Claude and Sigurd.





Yes, but thanks to Tiltyu's efforts we made it through. That aside, my prayer at Blagi Tower proved to be quite fruitful, Sir Sigurd.

You found out who killed Prince Kurth!?





Yes. It was all a conspiracy of Lord Reptor. He had Lord Langobart murder the prince. And then he shrewdly placed the blame on your father.

I knew it!

There's more. The death of King Mananan also turned out to be Lord Reptor's handiwork. He didn't want the war with Isaac to come to a close, so he secretly killed the king.

Is that right? So this was Reptor right from the start.

Well, it doesn't seem to be all his doing. Some kind of wicked force is working in his shadow. An evil presence so powerful that even Lord Blagi could not clearly discern it.

...Evil presence? Maybe... the Dark Sect? Claude! What about my father?

Well, he is still alive, but seems to be at death's door...

Father... Oh no!

I will hurry back to the capital and inform His Majesty all that I have been revealed. Sir Sigurd, please sit tight for the moment and try to avoid any rash behaviour.

Of course. Claude, please, I beg of you, help my father clear himself of this horrible injustice.

It's in the Lord's hands now, Sir Sigurd.

Oh crap, that's not good at all. Well, Claude said he'd clear things up back in Grandbell, so hopefully we can have justice served in the near future.



So Fin's made it over to the castle to try to get some more levels.



Dew in the meantime has been working his way towards the Tower of Blagi. On the way he gives Claude some money that he made from the pirates. Claude will need it to keep Reserve repaired.







So now Fin will just be attacking the boss until he manages to level up. Shouldn't take too long…



And Dew makes it to the Tower for yet another event that you'd have no way to know about.



















So yea that's kinda weird. Let's take a look at our new sword.



So it's pretty much the Thunder Sword, but it uses Elwind instead of Elthunder. It's actually pretty great for long range stealing.



And Lachesis and Fin have finally fallen in love! Hoo-rah.





Fin finally manages to hit level 20! Let's have him promote before we finish off the chapter.



Ethlin Returns him for promotion on his next turn. Let's get ready to end the chapter then.



We'll have Cuan try out his new Gae Bolg.



61 attack, yea that'll be a massacre.



Whenever you initiate combat with a holy weapon, you're treated with a bright flash of light. I think there was something similar to this with the S rank weapons in the GBA Fire Emblem games.



And, whiff. Weapon triangle disadvantage will do that to ya, even with a holy weapon.



But Continue activates and it's all ok.







Ehtlin then Returns Cuan to the home castle, and Aideen warps Ethlin there. Upon entering the castle, we see something kind of funny.



Yea this is one of the few things not translated by the translation patch, and I haven't been able to find an online translation. If you have a member of pair of lovers enter the home castle while the other person is already in there, you'll get a little conversation between the two of them. No idea what any of them say though.



Now, let's promote Fin.





Fin then promotes to Duke Knight, Cuan's class. He gets some good gains, though obviously he's no Lachesis. He gets +5 Strength, +1 Skill and Speed, +2 Defense, and +3 Resistance. Not bad at all.



Now, here's something you ordinarily wouldn't know to do, but with my prior knowledge of the game, we're gonna have Fin sell everything except the Silver Blade.











We'll do the same with Cuan and Ethlin. We'll see why in the next chapter. Speaking of which, let's finish this chapter now.





Hey, we got the happy victory music! Must mean things will end well for once, after the hardships we've had recently with losing best friends and wives and stuff like that.



Oifey, would you round up all our troops? I want to make sure everybody's alright.

Right away, sir.







Uh oh, this can't be good…



They along with Byron killed Prince Kurth in an attempt to take over the monarchy. Those are direct orders from His Majesty. Show no mercy to these traitors of the kingdom!



First he kills the prince... just about kills Byron too for putting up a fight. He's got some gall! Alvis sure took advantage of his cozy relationship with the king. He sure spun a good one. And to think he spearheaded our entire mission and managed to put the entire blame on the Chalphys. Hmm... Well, as long I take control of the throne. Anyone who gets in the way we'll simply do away with.

Wait, Alvis is in on this? That can't be good, he was one of the few potential allies we had left…





And Grandbell's sent troops to take me in!?

We just finished fighting, too. You were all set to go look for Deidre.

Grr! His Majesty is being fooled by Reptor and his crew. How can he believe that my father could kill Prince Kurth? Aaagh... I wish Father Claude could've gotten back there by now. First we lose Eltshan and now this. What have I been fighting for all this time!?

Sir...







Please consider retreating to Silesia until your fine name is cleared of all of this.

...Queen Rahna of Silesia? Silesia is willing to help out an accused traitor?

Sir, time is of the essence. Grandbell will be on your trail before long. The Pegasus Knights will accompany you over the ocean to Silesia.

And the chapter just ends there. So this chapter pretty much sucks for Sigurd. First he loses the love of his life, then he loses his best friend, then he's branded a traitor and is forced to flee to Silesia. But we have some powerful new allies, and some strong weapons to go with them. And who knows, maybe if we're lucky, Claude can still travel to Grandbell and clear our name.

In the manga, there's a pretty cool scene where you actually see Reptor and Langobart attack Kurth's escort, kill Kurth, and force Byron to flee. Oh, and Brigid's recruitment is done a lot differently. From what I recall, Pizarl realizes that Brigid is related to Aideen, and capture her, trying to use her as a hostage to force Grandbell to surrender to him. Aideen, Jamka (the manga has them as lovers instead of Aideen and Midir), and Dew then break into the Orgahil castle to rescue her and deliver Ichival to her so they can kick Orgahil's asses.

Anyway, that's all for now. The next chapter's a good one, but may come out a bit late depending on my schedule. I'll also be trying to redo the last part of this chapter to get Dew to a higher level and be a bit more efficient with turns taken and EXP gains. If/when I do that, I'll post a stats update.

Some things I neglected to mention:

First and foremost, while replaying the end of the chapter I realized I completely missed getting the village near Silvail (the one that Lex saved twice but never went to). I ended up having Fury get it (and the ~4000 gold in it). Here's the info the villager gives us:

Beware. Rumour has it that King Shagaal went an' hired Thracia's Dragon Knights. Every war, one side always ends up hirin' 'em. They's the most ruthless killin' machine 'round. ...like a pack of hyenas feastin' on a fresh kill.

So if we had gotten that initially, we would've had a heads up about the Dragon Knights coming in. Oh well, it's not like they caused us any trouble when they took us by surprise.

Next, I believe I mentioned that Midir could talk to Brigid, but once he fell in love with Aideen, he could not. Well that conversation would've given love points between Midir and Brigid, and any conversation that would give love points cannot be initiated if either member has a lover. This means that Midir and Brigid couldn't have their conversation once Midir and Aideen were in love. Likewise, if we had had Aira and Holyn fall in love before this chapter, we couldn't have their conversation that gives the Hero Sword.

Lastly, I briefly mentioned things about Rankings. Essentially the game has four ranks: Combat, Survival, Tactics, and Experience, each with ranks A through E. The Combat and Survival ranks are pretty similar. Survival is based on the amount of living, recruited characters you have at the end of the game. Naturally having everyone recruited and alive gets you an A, and every unit that's dead or not recruited lowers your rank by one. Combat, on the other hand, is based on how many characters you had lose in battle throughout the course of the game. Arena losses do not count towards this. If you have 3 or fewer losses, you get an A, 4-10 gets you a B, 11-30 gets you a C, 31-50 gets you a D, and any more gets you an E. The catch is, if you have a character dies and you load the game to before they died, it still counts as a loss. This is similar to how later games in the series record the number of battles, wins, and losses each individual character has gotten.

Tactics is based on how many turns it took you to complete the game. If you finish in fewer than 400 turns, you get an A, if you finish in 400 to 549 turns, you get a B, 550 to 799 for a C, 800 to 1055 for a D, and any more for an E. Now, you may or may not remember that if an enemy enters one of our castles other than the home castle, it gets destroyed. For every castle you get destroyed, your grade drops by one. Now, 400 turns sounds like a lot, but between 12 chapters, you really only have 33 turns per chapter. That means you really have to rush in a few chapters to get an A in Tactics. For example, this last chapter took I think 43 turns to complete, though this is one of the longer chapters since a lot of turns are spent farming love points at the end of the chapter.

Lastly, the Experience rank is based on the amount of levels you gain across all your characters throughout the game. To get an A you need 1000 total level ups. A B needs 800-999, a C needs 600-799, a D needs 400-599, and an E needs 399 or less. 1000 level ups is pretty damn tough, especially if you're rushing for the Tactics rank. I believe there are 1211 total possible levels in the game, however you're unlikely to get anywhere close to that. Only a few units in Generation 1 will actually reach level 30, crappy units like Dew, Ardan, and to an extent Alec and Noish, won't get many levels, Deirdre leaves early and may or may not come back later, but at the very least she'll miss a chapter or two worth of EXP, and dancers have a hard time getting EXP. This rank is the main reason why I'm redoing the last part of Chapter 3. With how I play, Dew pretty much needs to get a lot of levels in order for me to get an A rank in Tactics, and this is really the only good opportunity left to level him up.