Path of Radiance Act 2-1: The Laguz Tribes

When we leave the clearly defined Act 1 and head into the rest of the story, easy divisions are hard to define. Which is probably why PoR doesn't bother to have any explicit structural shifts at all, in contrast to Radiant Dawn and Three Houses having explicitly defined Acts separate to Chapters. With that said, the Chapter 8-12 set has a focus on laguz and the racial relations they have with beorc, so this is where I will define this collection of analysis.

• Chapter 8: Daein's heavy assault. We're still mourning for Greil's death, and have to handle a massive Daein force without Shinon and Gatrie, before being rescued by the laguz and confronting Soren's racism head-on. While Chapter 4 is the wake-up call from a player level, Chapter 8 is the wake-up call for the characters, and also for the player in terms of how the characters are working. If you don't have the tools to deal with this map, you are going to be chewed up later and should probably consider finding a way to get better characters. Fortunately, the next few maps can help with that.
• Chapter 9: Travelling to Gallia. This mission, while not as hard as Chapter 8, requires you to make an active effort to win- with Chapter 8, you can at least cower and technically pass the map. You have an easier south path and a harder top path that's sandy and basically a "no Titania" zone (also no Oscar, poor guy). If you do go up the top path, you get a test of dealing with a bandit preparing to burn a house. While Chapter 8 forced you to get passable or die, Chapter 9 forces you to get good or not get a valuable Restore staff- at least you can buy one later if you remember to check Aimee's stock.. Lethe and Mordecai are also neat safety nets. And now you have Marcia. You want Marcia.
• Chapter 10: Prison break. A neat gimmick, if tricky to handle if you aren't prepared- and honestly, it's not really that helpful as a teaching tool. Hiding from stronger enemies usually requires using meatshields to create safe spaces, and that's not what you can do to deal with these guys. Not being able to break doors and having it be so hard to steal keys is also not really something I'd say is good for examples and mostly just enforces the gimmick. Other than this, this is an expansion on chests and a relative breather map (not that Danomill is easy to chew on) to help you start building your army.
• Chapter 11: Port Toha. Oh man, if just talking about racism so far has been too real- and trust me, there's some dark stuff just hiding in text here- there's nothing like seeing Ranulf get beaten up by the people we're trying to save. We also get to see the Black Knight in full force, and it's very difficult to have someone survive a round with him. Making him the game's only proper same-turn reinforcement is definitely a rude move, since there's not really any reason to expect the Black Knight turning up on the map (he did say he was going to keep his nose clean), but at least that one house is where you'd expect him to show up. Mechanically, this map is basically Chapter 9 redux- now that you have a much wider cast of characters, the game expects you to be able to handle anything it can throw at you with at least some of them. If Oscar didn't turn out, you have Kieran now. If Boyd is falling off, try Nephenee instead. And so on.
• Chapter 12: The laguz of the south. We get to meet the Shipless Pirates, the only represenation of the bird tribe laguz on the world stage of Tellius, and also the isolated dragon tribe of Goldoa, and start to look at how we can't judge countries as inherently good or evil. Crimea is not a good place, so maybe there is more to Daein, Phoenicis and Kilvas, maybe Gallia and Goldoa are not as nice as they have presented themselves. Jill is readying us for Daein's humanisation, and Goldoa definitely started off with a chip on their shoulder we need to explore before we can say we've solved the problems facing Tellius today. Mechanically, this is the first time we've fought laguz, and is a very good demonstration of their terrifying power- and also that you won't always have the option of engaging their untransformed state. Tellius is very good about not letting you fight untransformed laguz regularly, and the extra EXP a transformed laguz offers incentivises trying to secure the kill on the stronger shifted state.

This part of the run, gameplay-wise, is about getting you all the units that you haven't been getting from the early chapters, rounding out your party and giving you the tools you need to make sure you can keep these units in play- even if you don't savescum BEXP, the system in general can shore up your characters.

Story-wise, what we're doing here is setting the stage for the issues with beorc and laguz across both Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. Path of Radiance was very definitely written with the idea of Radiant Dawn in mind, and in addition to going through it's "relatively normal Fire Emblem plot" story, it is laying bricks here and there to ready Radiant Dawn's more complex plot. I am honestly of the opinion that, while both stories are good and can be read independently, they are very inextricably linked and extremely worth reading in order and using one to support the other. Now that we're on the world stage, we're starting to see things that have laid these hooks, explicit and minor.

One thing I'm not prepared to talk in great detail about is the theme of racism that is Tellius's claim to fame. Namely, what racism looked like in 2005 and how Tellius in particular did stacked against its contemporaries when preaching against the idea. What I can talk about is how this message works in 2021, when works that tackle racism are plentiful and some of the ways this has been done in the past have clashed with current understandings. One flaw with Tellius's portrayal is that it uses "Fantastic Racism"- using a fictional, non-human race to demonstrate persecution rather than divide the lines as they are in the real world. And one of the reasons for this is that fantasy races have different needs, and the beorc and laguz are no exception- you should treat them differently, because they legitimately are different. For what it's worth, within the concept of beorc and laguz that has been constructed, the actual themes as relevant to the characters are given the correct, and ample, weight, and where the themes touch on behaviours that real people use to avoid persecution, the game does not shy away from making it clear how awful it is these behaviours are necessary. But just as they have used metaphor to construct their world, so too do the messages we take have to be translated back from metaphor into usable advice.