We continue immediately to our next map. Sacred Stones has a break period between maps, but it won't introduce it yet.
Our next map is this one, fitting all on the one screen. Those soldiers might be the extent of the force, there might be an extra soldier sneaking in somewhere or something.
Say hello to Princess Tana of Frelia, the most badass character on this continent. The game does not agree with my assessment of her power level.
With that said, it's important to keep your limits in mind, and not having a defense or even a plan prepared is a valid reason to be concerned.
Most Frelians seem to like trying to stick Tana in Castle Frelia where she's safe. Where the enemies are safe, more like.
Tana's going to make sure Eirika gets out of this mess OK at all costs, even if she's one of them.
Now if only the enemy gave you the time to pick them up. I think the idea is that Tana holds out while this guy runs.
Don't worry, she'll be just fine.
Breguet is more of a character than O'Neill, but not by much.
He is in full belief that Grado's might will be able to overcome Frelia. He does not seem to be open to the possibility that this is a thing they shouldn't be doing.
...Nor does it seem he's open to teamwork. Perfect tutorial villain!
His flunkies seem to take it in stride. I wonder if they're counting down until he gets fired and they can get a better boss.
He certainly gets results. Crit is rolled after hit, so I think this had ridiculously low odds of happening, but I can't seem to recall what formula I need to check to find out how low. One thing that didn't have low odds of happening was this Frelian losing this fight: Given infinite turns, Breguet is eventually going to win. (Also- Breguet only has 2 Skill, so this Frelian has to have zero luck for a crit to be possible.)
Knight crits are also the best thing ever. GBA Generals are even better. I don't plan on using a Knight, but it is possible.
He's also a boastful child about winning.
Huh, so the six guys were the total force of the battle.
If Tana uses an Iron Lance (which I assume are somewhere nearby even if she didn't think to bring one herself), she does 5 damage a hit, while doubling, and is worried about 9 damage in return, if he can push past some high-50s hit odds. Give Tana the gate and Breguet is screwed.
The game will have you believe Tana is in any sort of danger. Granted, those Fighters might make her think twice.
zBreguet is not impressed.
How did I get two perfect blink frames in a row? I assume this is the same blink, but damn, girl.
Breguet continues to not be scared of Tana's threats.
Because as far as the plot's concerned, Tana's threat level is calling for Hayden and Innes and getting them to do the actual damage. Mechanically, this is a poor idea: You try putting an archer into the thick of combat and coming out OK. Even assuming perfect evasion, surround them on all four sides and they're screwed.
Part of the reason people are so interested in getting Tana back home is because it's immensely comforting to Hayden to have her around. Even if Tana was the perfect princess, this seems like a bad idea, because eventually she's going to get married off to Ephraim and probably sent to Renais- and most of the same people who want Tana sent home are the same people shipping Ephraim/Tana. I assume the quiet part is "stay home until Hayden dies and then go marry Ephraim".
Considering how easily Breguet does this, I have to assume Tana is unarmed in some way, but even then, she has to have her pegasus, right? Thracia says unarmed opponents are easy marks, but Thracia also says you can't capture someone on a horse.
At any rate, the game is nowhere near as interested as treating the stakes mechanically as I am, so let's just pretend "Tana is captured by tutorial fodder" is reasonable.
Eirika is here to save the day!
Grado having invaded Renais is one thing. Grado invading Frelia is a pattern. And it escalates the situation- as if "invading one country" wasn't plenty escalated enough!
...Seth? What are you judging that on?
Eirika's counterargument is emotional in nature.
Genuine question: When did we bump into that? I thought we took a back route straight to Frelia? This is going to come up later, but we'll have actual time to explore Renais when we do so.
Like, seriously, where is this coming from? All we, the player, saw was half the sacking of Renais's capital, and only half of this is relevant to that.
Like, seriously, the game sets it up that Fado dying in Renais is a surprise, but if we're establishing Grado as this kind of conqueror, we're not only assuming that happened to Fado too, we're thinking that Fado was the establishing setpiece.
Eirika wants to make sure as few people as harmed as possible. That's her approach to this whole conflict.
How many soldiers can really be here in Frelia? Surely most of the army is tied up in Renais.
Time for Eirika to sack a castle with four people. Well, just herself, we're in the All-Girls file.
We start immediately, because we still don't have much reason for prep. We can see an assortment of new terrain features, such as houses (can distribute short blurbs of information- lore or tutorial- and nothing mechanical) and fortresses (good for 20% avoid, 2 Def and 20% healing per turn). You do have to use 2 points of movement to enter one, but it's a good staging point for an attack.
Breguet is a Knight, and his job is to be incredibly annoying to take out with physical weapons. And nothing else. Eirika has an ace in the hole, though. He's also standing on a Gate, which heals him for 10% a turn, to make fighting his Defence an unappealing prospect.
Eirika, of course, moves forward. She can't reach the fort on her first turn.
Seth can't move any further without attracting attention from enemies, but he can visit the house and get out of range.
He's talking about Mulan, incidentally.
This guy talks about gates as terrain. Gates give +3 Defence, and either +20 or +30 Avoid. There are two kinds of gates, and I don't know which kind this one is.
Yes. "Fierce".
As far as the game is concerned, he already has a princess- he's daring enough to expect he can claim a second.
Well, you see, the thing about that is-
...Never mind. Fortunately, the soldier wasn't interested.
On the "plus" side, Franz has arrived with reinforcements!
And by "reinforcements", we mean "one guy". Even outside challenge rules, I'd rather have Tana than either of these two.
This is not a favourable position in which to show up.
Gilliam can't tell what's going on and who has the advantage while being close enough to stab the nearest enemy.
...I'm just going to move on from this, because I'm not sure what the game is trying to say, both in terms of what's going on in the story and what relevance knowing this has.
Franz and Gilliam will join the battlefield!
When possible, Gilliam should be at the front of a formation. The problem, of course, being "when possible".
Franz and Gilliam are fairly textbook examples of a cavalier and a knight, respectively, and if you know what those classes can do, you know what to expect from Franz and Gilliam. I'm told Franz is pretty good, but I never got much luck out of him. Gilliam, on the other hand...
Regardless, this is the All Girls playthrough, and thus I want to get these two to occupy as little space as possible and hiding in a corner.
Eirika walks over here and pops a Vulnerary.
Seth rides over and deposits his Silver Lance. There will be reinforcements from the starting position, and Seth is running out of places to stand where we won't be influencing the outcome of the battle.
So he's going to stand here. I think the Fighters will attack Eirika, even if the soldier will not, but after this turn, Eirika can establish a chokepoint for Seth to hide behind.
Eirika hasn't had enough EXP to really influence these outcomes. Although maybe a point in Strength could've helped...
There's that point in Strength, then.
Aw, one of the Fighters went for Seth anyway. Ah well.
These guys showed up now anyway.
Seth can Talk to Franz, and might as well pass the time.
At least Franz managed to pull off the feat of getting the hell out of dodge to safety, and bringing back help.
Especially not if we just run away from any fight one might lose in!
As opposed to... where does he go home to? His home has been destroyed!
"I will valiantly hold the bench, sir!"
GBA Soldiers are pathetic and can be defeated with ease by anyone that can swing a weapon. Since Eirika has WTD on them, though, she's still actually kinda scared of their spears.
...Kinda. This miss was amazing and helps me out immensely. Later on, Eirika will be expecting to deal with this out of Soldiers.
Franz can also Talk to Eirika.
Eirika is happy to see Franz managed to make it out OK. No matter what he did, he at least lived his way into doing it.
You met with Gilliam? So, you didn't make it to Hayden?
I suppose "Tana is right in the danger zone, we should get her out of there" is a reasonable conclusion to draw from the information available.
Eirika wasn't aware Tana was here, and now that she is, she's even more eager to get moving.
Franz has an Iron Sword Eirika might use, and I assume I traded it, but inventory management can get funny sometimes.
Clearly I stuck with the Rapier.
Now then, Seth and Franz are safely out of contributing range, let's go wild.
...That is not what I expected and I approve wholeheartedly.
STRENGTH! Stop leaving fighters on 1 HP!
Also don't get hit by them, too.
Eirika coming in clutch. I really wish I had a healer.
Just focus on healing...
And I think Seth still needs to visit that house.
The freeze frames you get from GBA animations.
Did those points in Avoid save Eirika's life? I don't know, but I'll assume they did.
Heal up...
...It's just a Knight.
How can you say a Knight's armour is impressive if you know about anti-armour weaponry? There are five major anti-armour weapons: the Rapier, the Armourslayer, the Hammer, the Heavy Spear, and the Reginleif. This is not including the other anti-armour weapons in the series, including the humble Fire tome.
We have a Rapier, thankfully.
Eirika doing just fine taking on the soldiers.
Now then, time to deal with Breguet, and ooh, that's a close margin. There are a lot of rule of thumbs one can have about RNG, but a rarer one I'd like to apply here is "never count on the same odds working for you and not your enemy". Breguet has 2.46% less hit odds on us, I do not want to play the "I hit twice, he doesn't" game.
So we heal.
I notice Eirika is running low of Vulneraries, and Seth sets about rectifying that.
You and me both, pal.
...Did I seriously wind up gettting the best outcome? I had to have taken an extra turn or something, right?
If the game wasn't biased in your favour, you would've gotten killed by a pegasus knight. One who I don't think has ever seen combat before.
This has all the makings of a darling Eirika.
The victory condition here was "Seize"- so we have to get Eirika to the square formerly occupied by the boss. This was the default victory condition in classic Fire Emblem, but between FE7 and this game, "Rout" and "Defeat Boss" started to take hold. There'll still be plenty of Seize missions and they'll be relatively important to us, but for this one, we're outta here.
We've rescued Tana!
I highly doubt that. In all seriousness, though, Tana doesn't like to raise a fuss. She's just very annoyed that "wanting to help her friends" counts as raising a fuss amongst her all too dithering Frelian escorts.
Gilliam doesn't scold her for any errors she might've made. From the sounds of things, she was at Mulan before things went to pot, she didn't make any errors.
When we say "Renais and Frelia are friendly", that includes the princes and princesses of both countries being firmly... acquainted. Eirika and Tana are probably the only matchup of those four I would call a proper friendship, though- Ephraim kinda takes Tana for granted and Innes's head is too far up his ass to treat either Eirika or Ephraim with basic respect.
Oh hey, Renais was under attack when she left. Regardless, she wasn't strictly speaking acting recklessly until she crossed the border after Mulan- and despite all evidence to the idea Tana would jump on that, she doesn't seem to have prepared to do so here.
At least Eirika is here now.
Tana has a crush on Ephraim, because he's quite the catch. Tana's actually pretty good about respecting Eirika as her own person and not just "her future sister-in-law"- a character whose sole purpose was to be Ephraim's girlfriend would've asked about him before checking on Eirika herself.
The current news we have on Ephraim- none- is very alarming and a good reason to take some kind of action.
Frelia has a very competent spy network. Say what you will about Innes as a person, he takes his job seriously.
...That's a world map. We'll actually be spending a lot of time looking at this map, but right now, we're just doing plot. The explanation of the map will be next update.
We get a two textbox narration. This is GBA, so no VA on these things, but they fill the same role. Also, Eirika moves around on the world map, but she's usually done before the text is done printing.
Say hello to King Hayden of Frelia. He'll be the main helpful NPC of the story.
I knew a kid named Hayden when I was a kid. I hadn't seen him in years when I first played Sacred Stones, but I still can't take this guy's name seriously anyway. Probably because all the other Kings have badass names like Fado and Vigarde- the sorts of names you won't find on real people today.
No prizes for guessing Tana later disobeys this command. I get the fear, especially in this exact situation. Probably a good idea to keep an eye on your important people when a sudden invasion has just happened to another nation and the invaders have entered your lands.
There's never a bad time for good news.
Eirika being alive is excellent news for Frelia as a nation, Hayden as a friend of Fado's (...I think the two are friends) and as a person in general.
Certainly a contrasted reaction with Tana's, not gonna lie. I don't think the game wants to say anything about Hayden here.
Eirika would like to know what happened to her father.
And it seems Hayden figured out what happened to him. Honestly, just from what he said before facing Grado, it seems fairly obvious what happened.
It's... it's kinda a little weird that Hayden says "my friend Fado" and not "your father Fado" in this situation. Sure, he's entitled to mourn the loss of his friend, but maybe don't bring it up when you're telling his daughter?
Seth is also thinking about his relationship with the man.
Frelia will do whatever it can to ensure that Grado does not get to continue as if nothing amiss just happened. I wouldn't expect anything different.
And, much like his reaction to Tana, his reaction to Eirika is also to tell her to sit down in safety and let the practiced warriors handle the war. Again, like Tana, this is not an unreasonable position for him to take. He may not have personal authority over Eirika like he does over Tana, but Eirika is not a warrior, and she has just experienced an emotionally upheaving event. She should spend some time in Frelia setting her affairs in order.
Eirika seems to have other ideas.
So what can Hayden tell us about Ephraim?
This is surprising: Ephraim knows the situation with Grado is hostile, and is actively fighting it from the inside.
Renvall is a fortress close to the Grado/Renais border. We'll be getting names for places, but Renvall is probably the one you most want to write down.
One thing you will quickly learn about Ephraim, if you did not know it already through sheer osmosis, is that this is Ephraim's defining trait: he doesn't know how not to behave like this.
I don't doubt this, but you're telling me you know this because some pegasus knights saw it? I assume "great price" means some of them got shot down on the way back, which raises the question of how they got to Grado and why they were there.
Fado and Ephraim apparently share some character similarities. Fado's a bit too peripheral to the story for these to amount to much, but they certainly explain a lot of faith that people have in Ephraim- it clearly worked for Fado!
...Ignore the fact he is now dead.
Unfortunately, we know what Ephraim is doing, but not how he is. It's highly likely that the situation is going to change surprisingly.
Eirika decides that the course of action she intends to take is to go to Ephraim's side. Saving Ephraim seems to be a fairly reasonable strategy for both morale and effectiveness. It also means we know exactly where the people we should worry about are.
At this point in the story, Eirika intends to travel with Seth and Franz.
I repeat, her plan is to travel in a party of an inexperienced diplomat, an injured war veteran and a greenhorn still wet behind the ears.
Moreover, leave this war to the people likely to survive it.
I can't believe I'm agreeing with an old man telling a woman to stay out of something she wants to do...
Hayden is truly doing the best he can. Purely practically, he's probably doing the best thing he can do.
But this is not an argument of reason, this is an argument of emotion.
And there can be no leaving Ephraim's safety in the hands of anyone better, even if they are better suited.
Hayden points out that Eirika can't back up her plans with sword arms.
And Frelia is short-staffed. Their own war efforts on Grado will require all hands on deck- and Innes is certainly that.
This line makes it sounds like there's more people than just Seth and Franz. Fire Emblem's number one weakness as a narrative is properly depicting scale- Eirika's "retinue" is probably significant, but we certainly won't be seeing anyone other than Seth and Franz.
Eirika has made her choice.
Hayden knows when he's beat.
And he calls three people into the room. Or perhaps these people already were in the room and have just politely kept out of the conversation.
Remember the "mechanically, Eirika brought just three people" thing? Hayden has supplemented that army with three more people. A 100% improvement, and one Hayden is very open about being meagre, but if Eirika's retinue is supposed to be a thing, I'd expect these three have their own battalions. Then again, that would contradict "we haven't a brigade to spare".
Vanessa and Moulder have some dialogue at the start of next chapter, but they are otherwise exclusively gameplay units and their sole purpose is making our army feel like less of a lowman. I've played a lot of lowmans, but somehow I don't actually know what the "threshold" is on that. Possibly six, I've usually always seen it as "when I'm deploying less people than the game allows me to."
Gilliam, not so much, since Knights are doomed to suffer as gameplay units. Moulder is a Priest and Vanessa is a Pegasus Knight, and both of these classes are excellent additions to any army.
Hayden does give us several useful things mechanically.
This is an incredibly valuable thing to receive: this is the Convoy, and if we receive an item (...which we haven't actually done until now), we can automatically send it into the convoy instead of needing to make room in the inventory. Path of Radiance is by far the cruelest game about making you wait on this, and Sacred Stones is probably the most lenient.
Hayden hopes that, if we must go at all, we come back with what we left for.
Eirika promises to do her best.
We also get 5000G in spending money. Fire Emblem is also relatively bad about managing an economy where you must make decisions, but I partially blame the fact that Fire Emblem is also a series where all attacks cost resources. Failing the economy is a softlock, not a burden.
Tana, to my surprise, is actually kinda on Hayden's side here. She has a different approach later, which makes me wonder what caused the change.
She also really likes Eirika as a person and is very concerned for her safety.
...Eirika, not gonna lie, this is not much of a counterargument.
Tana figures the best direction to vent is at the situation for causing these problems in the first place.
That's certainly the big question. Grado's invasion, while similar to many FE invasions, doesn't have much in the way of motive. Most villainous nations satisfy themselves with "because they wanted to."
Grado is not a nation for whom this argument works. Vigarde and Lyon are as kind and generous as they come.
So what changed?
Unfortunately, we have no answers, and we must proceed regardless of that fact.
Let's make sure everyone who can make a difference is safe, and then we'll talk about what form that difference will take. Tana always finds the best frames to blink frame.
Next time: We actually see some of that devastation that's affecting Renais.
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