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[JoshuaFH]

Let's wrap up the thrilling conclusion to this chapter!

This is Reptor's force, it's a very diverse grouping of armours, archers, mages, and the like, with Reptor himself standing in the center with TorHammer, ready to inflict lightning-based death on anyone and everyone.

Take note that Reptor is Tiltyu's uncle or something. I forget, but it's not important.

Before we engage in the ultimate battle for this chapter, we can do some things which are sentimentally important. Depending on who you pair up, you get different conversations, along with a few predetermined conversations you get just for keeping those characters alive.

Here we have Dew and Jamka, where Dew takes the time to apologize to Jamka for originally stealing things from his family's castles, and helping to kill his brothers. Jamka accepts the apologize but notes that this is very uncharacteristic of Dew. Then we have  Lex and Aira, with the two taking the time to converse, talking about their newly born children, and how they should be back protecting them, but both want to help Sigurd right until the end.

Now, this final battle might seem that it would require the help of every single person you've accrued thus far, along with their arsenal of weapons and skills that they've been stockpiling for the entire game, but this isn't true. In fact, that's an amateurish strategy that will likely get several people killed unnecessarily.

These are the only three characters you need: Sigurd, Levin, and Brigid. Anyone else is just slowing you down as you slog through the desert terrain, the most difficult to move through terrain in the entire game.

once your characters exit the desert and walk into the lone entrance to their cliff-protected haven, their offensive AI triggers!

Oh, and Ida's betrayal AI triggers!

Looks like Magistrate Ida intended to backstab Reptor from the very start! Ida transforms from a red hostile enemy unit to a yellow friendly allied unit.

We also get to watch Meteo's cool animation as her mages ping Reptor's statistically superior soldiers. They're no more than a minor annoyance to him as he marches forward to attack us.

Now, you'd intuitively think that you'd need to battle all his soldiers, but that isn't the case. You see, there's a trick that makes this battle pathetically easy. You see, all units are tied to a leader unit or a leader castle. When the leader unit or castle falls, all the units tied to it go POOF and disappear. Presumably, this is to simulate all of them losing morale and fleeing the battlefield or something. Now, looking at Reptor's stats, you can see that he's a FOUR star leader, and he doesn't have a castle anymore.

So, what I want to do is: lure Duke Reptor OUT of his protective barrier of underlings. Then kill him through the combined efforts of our three Holy Weapon holders.

I get him out, and Levin is the first to jump on him.

I just really love the animations for the Holy Magics.

Sigurd get's a special conversation with him upon attacking:

Which boils down to him talking shit about killing his dad.

And Sigurd gets the finishing blow!

And POINK! all his soldiers disappear. I may now continue to the castle unimpeded. Let's have a chat with Ida, and find out why they decided to turncoat in our favor.

She tells him that it was actually Duke Langbart and Reptor that were running everything, and that Alvis had no part in it. A total lie, but Sigurd eats it all up.

Also, it would seem that Alvis has prepared a celebration for Sigurd's triumphant return.

Snazzy?

Apparently, the king, who Alvis was talking with just earlier today, has already fell "Ill", and he's handling the business of the Kingdom.

OH MAN! TOTAL DOUBLE-CROSS! DIDN'T SEE THIS COMING!

Alvis then brings out the brainwashed Deirdre, presumably to be a total bastard.

That's some cruel, cold-blooded persecution right there.

"Oh hey, here's the love of your life. She's mine now. Everything she ever knew about you is gone now. Prepare to die."

Total bastard.

Alvis then has his Meteo Mages perform a Meteo x10 to kill all of our guys, and then finishes Sigurd off himself with FalaFlame.

Then everything goes black and white, and scrolling text elaborates on the fact that Sigurd just got his ass handed to him, and that the world is now entering a new era.

So yep, every one of our characters is dead now. Totally.

Well, technically, only Sigurd, Cuan, and Ethlin are "Confirmed" dead, everyone else "disappeared mysteriously". This is true, since some of them make an appearance in the sequel, Thracia 776, which I won't be going into.

The exposition then explains to us that after the battle, Alvis manages to unify every country on the continent, and is hailed by the people as the first true Emperor of Grandbell.

Fast forward sixteen years!

Aside from getting noticeably older, Alvis is now a heartless tyrant that's been ruling over everyone with an iron first. The people of his less favorite countries like Isaac are basically a slave class, and the nobility appointed to lord over them live in the lap of luxury as the common man starves and suffers.

On the right, we have Shanan. Remember the little kid that left with Oifaye in order to protect baby Celice? That's him now. The blue haired guy on the right is now 19 year old Celice, currently still in Isaac, slowly forming a resistance movement to finally depose Alvis and avenge his father's death!

We'll get to that next time though! We're officially half-way done with the game, here's to the second, more challenging half!

[Haspen]

If Dew's not going to appear, dibs on Shanan!

Also, Shanan and Celice should have pairing for best buddies or something.

[JoshuaFH]

Let us begin the new era!

We start our new adventure in the country of Isaac.

Here we have King Dannan, Langbart's son and Lex's brother, ruling over Isaac, and currently chewing out his subordinate about finally snuffing out the Rebel Army! He tells him that spies have confirmed Shanan to have left the country, and is currently in Yied Desert for some reason, and Oifaye left for somewhere else, leaving only Celice and his followers in Tiltanogogue, their hideout, making this the prime time to attack.

We zoom into Tiltanogogue:

Here, we have new characters, Lakche and Skasaha. Skasaha's worried about them attacking us, while Lackche is excited that the battle is finally forthcoming!

Then we have Lana and Celice. Lana is sick and tired of how cruelly women are treated, and wants to fight with Celice, but Celice insists that NUNS AND WARFARE DO NOT MIX!!! Nonetheless, he gives in and lets her fight.

So right off the bat, we have four characters at our disposal, two swordfighters, One JuniorLord, and one priest. Let's take a look at them:

Celice:

Here we have JuniorLord Celice. He's inherited the family silver sword, which if you remember was originally given to Sigurd by Alvis himself in the prologue (which I find to be ironic), and the barrier and Elite ring that Sigurd had on his person before dying. He has both the pursuit and Nihil skills, and both Major Baldo and minor Narga blood. Take note that even though he's technically descended from Dark Lord Loptousou, he doesn't have any Loptous blood in him. This is never explained, but I think that holy blood has a random chance to become diluted and not pass onto the next generation, although there are only a few other, character-specific instances of this happening.

Now, I should elaborate on how the children receive their stats, items, skills, and heritage. For every couple, there will be both a son and a daughter. The son receives all his father's stat growth's and half of his mother's. The daughter, on the other hand, has all her mother's stat growths, while half of her father's. This means that, no matter what, children will ALWAYS be statistically superior to their parents.

Now, notice that Celice has the pursuit and Nihil skills. He got pursuit from his dad and Nihil from his mom. This is because ALL children from any given couple will receive copies of all the 'citizen' skills from both parents. You see, there are two types of skills, "Citizen" and "Profession". Citizen skills are natural, and are inherited from parent to child, while profession skills are learned simply from having a certain job class.

Alright, I'm sure that's a good enough explanation.

Lakche:

Here's Lakche, the daughter of Aira and Lex. She has a whole mess of skills. For the record, she has Pursuit, Nihil, ambush, meteor sword, and elite. She has both Minor Odo and Neir blood from her mother and father, meaning her stat growths will be very impressive to say the least. Now, Lakche is wildly popular in the FE4 community, this is because while Aira is awesome and powerful, Lakche is even more so. This is why she's often regarded as the Patron Saint of Stabbing-people-in-the-face.

Skasaha:

Skasaha is Lakche's brother. He has an identical set of skills and holy blood as her sister, meaning that he's also extremely useful.

Lana:

Lana is the daugher of Midir and Aideen, and has also adopted the job class of her mother. She's much better though, since she also had the good fortune to inherit the pursuit and charge skills from her father. Midir was but a commoner though, and so she only has the Ulir blood that her mother had. She'll be our healer for awhile.

Now, you might be wondering why Lakche has SO MANY swords. This is because, while there will be some sword using descendants, their fathers simply couldn't pass on a usable weapon to them. If a weapon isn't passed on, it doesn't disappear, but it WILL be kept from us as it'll eventually become available through the town shop, or it'll be used against us by enemy units, requiring that we beat them in order to get it back. To avoid this hassle, I just have all the swords I like bought up by the person I know WILL pass them down to their child (in this case, Aira -> Lakche) and then just have their offspring carry around a big pile of swords until the people I intend for them to have join my party, and then I can just manually switch the swords from her, to them. I've done similar things with alot of different items, so I won't go in-depth since it would be extremely meta and spoiler-y.

Back to battle!

From the get-go, we have to fight some solitary axemen that are just straggling about. They aren't very tough, but are mainly here to give our new characters some easy experience, and give the player an easy challenge with his new characters.

Two turns in, we get a special scene:

Here, riding in from places unknown, we have Oifaye, Lester, and Delmud. Apparently, Lester and Delmud had been lazing about somewhere outside Isaac, and so Oifaye had to leave Celice by himself as he went out to recruit them.

Delmud:

Delmud is the son of Levin and Lechesis. While he inherited the Holy Tome Holsety from his dad, he can't use it since magic isn't compatible with his class. I intend to outfit him with the wind sword as soon as I can though, so he'll be able to take advantage of his wind-based heritage. His major holsety and minor Hezul will guarantee that he has excellent stats. Heck, I don't think it's possible for Levin to have a bad son. Plus, I made sure he inherited the pursuit ring, which'll help a great deal.

Lester:

Lester is Midir and Aideen's son, and Lana's brother. While Midir was so mediocre that he constantly frustrated me with his impotence, Lester has the promise to shape into a very good character.

Oifaye:

Remember the effeminate man-servant that tagged along with Sigurd, and then took the duty of fostering baby Celice? That's him now, he's no longer effeminate, he's a manly man with a MANLY mustache! He starts off at a significantly higher level than other characters, with a iron cutter sword, javelin, and the pursuit and critical skills. Also, he has minor Baldo blood. Man, I forget how he's related to Sigurd and Celice. I'll have to look up the family tree again to find out. Anyway, he's like a 'baby sitter' character. He's there to absorb the brunt of the burden and make sure that the newer, weaker characters aren't easily overpowered by the sudden rush of enemies.

Alot of the new characters have conversations with their siblings. I would recommend indulging these conversations as they entail getting small luck gains for the character involved.

Anyway, that'll be all the introductions for now, let's take a look at the map:

Here's our home castle, Tintanogogue. It's at the North-western corner of the map.

To the east, we have a small, loosely organized squad of axe men and armors en-route to our location.

Further east, we have Gandora Castle. This is our current destination.

Smack dab in the center of the map, surrounded by mountains on three sides, we have Sophia Castle. It's neutral at the moment.

Further south, we have Isaac Castle. It too is also neutral.

Then finally, in the south-western corner of the map, we have Rivough castle. This will be our final destination in this chapter.

Alrighty, I spend the next couple turns killing the handful of units that are just loitering around the countryside. I get some easy level-ups due to the prevalence of the Elite skill, and I'm poised to tackle the oncoming rush of axe men.

[Creamcorn]

Uh, I get the whole thing about mostly everyone dying a HORRIBLE FLAMING DEATH! But seriously, a family of our own little killing machines would be nice. Hell, I don't care if it's in text! Also, where's Sylvia's and Ardan's runts!?

Also, gyad dayum! That is one manly man mustache if I've ever seen one, and I have! Please tell me his growth matches his mustache!


:I Also, are most of these new characters a bunch of bumbling teens?

[Boksi]

Imagine if there were a third part of the story. Incest, incest everywhere!

[JoshuaFH]

Uh, I get the whole thing about mostly everyone dying a HORRIBLE FLAMING DEATH! But seriously, a family of our own little killing machines would be nice. Hell, I don't care if it's in text! Also, where's Sylvia's and Ardan's runts!?

Also, gyad dayum! That is one manly man mustache if I've ever seen one, and I have! Please tell me his growth matches his mustache!


:I Also, are most of these new characters a bunch of bumbling teens?

Oifaye's growth rates are decent, but not spectacular. He remains a usable character throughout the game though.

And I wouldn't exactly call them bumbling. Well, ONE is bumbling, and he's in this very update. Can you spot him?

Let's get to more important matters first though:

BLOOD!

Ok, enough blood.

Here's Castle Ganeirsha, or whatever it's called, and it's defender: Harold. He's not exactly impressive, but he's a good warm-up for our characters.

After my whole party take turns pummeling him, he succumbs to his injuries and dies.

My party is progressing nicely.

Oh hey! It's Levin! How nice. It's unfortunate though, that by the time we get to him, he's a broken man, unwilling to help us. Well, maybe not, be he says that he has things to do in Lenster, so whatever.

He introduces us to a pretty girl though.

Levin runs off, and Julia joins our party. She's very quiet and soft-spoken at the moment.

Julia is of the shaman class, which might as well be a priest as far as I'm concerned. She has Pursuit, continue, and Nihil, and, what's this? Major Narga and Minor Fala.

I won't try to drum up any drama with that obvious piece of evidence: Julia is the daughter of Alvis and Deirdre. What she's doing here though, is still a mystery.

Because Deirdre is her mother though, this makes her Celice's half-sister. Oh wait, hear that noise? That's the incest alert. It is a terrible noise, so I know.

If you have Celice go to the 'fortune teller', a free service that tells you what a character's romantic feelings are and tells you who the parents of a character are, then you can see something interesting. Almost easter-eggish. It would seem that Celice falls in love with Julia at first sight, but he doesn't know that she's his sister though.

Fortunately, this incest alert is a false alarm because while our new teen heroes CAN earn intimacy points with eachother, and get in relationships, whoever programmed the game had enough common sense to build in a special exception for this particular pairing. Celice and Julia can NEVER earn intimacy points with eachother, and in fact, intimacy points for eachother are DRAINED from their character each turn. This is the only instance of the game where this happens, and thank god it is.

Anyway, meanwhile in Rivough:

Dannan orders his two sons, Johan and Johalva to attack!

Here's a useful problem though, they're both infatuated with Lakche. Now, we have a choice here: We can have Lakche talk to either one and they'll join us! The only downside is that then we can't get the other. We can only get one, there's no way around it.

Before I decide though, we're introduced to new more characters, flying in from the north!

Here we have Fee and Arthur! Arthur wanted to go south, because he heard that he could find his sister there. Fee then gave him a ride on her pegasus, since she was traveling south anyway to join up with us, since that's what she heard her mother do, and wanted to follow in her footsteps.

Let's look at their stats:

Fee is the daughter of Alec and Fury. She's quite a bit more useful than her mother, since with the Nihil skill, her weakness against arrows is nullified completely. Plus, she's been pre-outfitted with quite a few useful weapons. This includes a NEW weapon that we haven't seen before, the berserk sword. When hitting a unit with it, it'll inflict them with the 'berserk' status. This means that they'll attack whomever is closest to them willy-nilly.

Arthur:

Arthur is the son of Ardan and Tiltyu. Ardan was unable to pass anything useful to his son, he only gets a default wind tome, but he DOES have the wrath + ambush combination. What this means is that, whenever he hits 50% or less health, he will ALWAYS attack first in combat, and he will ALWAYS deal a critical hit. Done properly, he can have whole squads of enemies run into him, and he'll kill them all them all before they can act. Very cool.

Unfortunately, they both spawn right next to Sophara Castle (not Sophia castle like I said earlier), and they're behind enemy lines. Arthur isn't strong enough to take anyone out, and I mistakenly have accidentally antagonize all of Johalva's troops, who are now all backpedaling in order to attack Arther and Fee. I plan on mitigating this attack by having her fly about in the mountains and forests near them, causing them to get preoccupied with attacking her when they obviously can't.

Before we continue on though, let's have Lana talk to Julia:

And Julia gets a free Relive staff! Now we have a second healer, and an excellent one at that!

Now, the main difference between Johan and Johalva is that Johan is a mounted unit and has ambush, and Johalva is a non-mounted unit and has Charge

I think the choice is obvious:

I'm having Lakche talk to Johan, because having one more mounted unit is always great. Normally, I'd summarize conversations, but this one needs to be seen in it's full glory to be believed:

Oh yeah, now that's how you hit on women! But, how come the incest alert is still wailing? Oh yeah, this is because both Johan and Johalva are Lex's nephews, and seeing as how Lakche is Lex's daughter, this means that Johan is sweet talking his first cousin.

Who cares though, we have an Axe Knight on our side now!

Johalva, as I've predicted, becomes insanely jealous and sicks his men on us. Johan's men on the other hand, become friendly neutrals.

Let's take a look at Johan's stats though:

He's basically a Lex wannabe with slightly improved stats and no Elite skill.

Here's our current position. I'm going to go ahead and beat the shit out of Johalva and sack Sophara, saving the cornered Arthur in the process.

[Akura]

If Julia is the incest baby of Alvis and Diedre, wouldn't she have major Loptousou blood? Her status screen doesn't show it.

[Creamcorn]

If Julia is the incest baby of Alvis and Diedre, wouldn't she have major Loptousou blood? Her status screen doesn't show it.

I can barely follow.

[JoshuaFH]

If Julia is the incest baby of Alvis and Diedre, wouldn't she have major Loptousou blood? Her status screen doesn't show it.

Apparently, in the FE4-verse, the holy bloods have a chance of not being passed down at all. This explains why a parent can be a major blood, and the child can only have minor, while other times the major blood passes from parent to child without needing to be an incest baby at all. Genetic theory is only loosely elaborated on in the game, but I kinda wish that it was more in-depth.

There's also a glitch in the game where one of the enemies has the wrong holy blood, and it switches back and forth between the correct blood, and the wrong blood from scene to scene.

[JoshuaFH]

Oh god, I just bothered to look up the family tree for this game. Feel free to gaze upon it's mind-warping complexity:

http://www.serenesforest.net/fe4/Jugdral%20Holy%20Blood%20Family%20Tree.PNG

Don't worry if you don't understand any of it. This is because alot of the characters in their are NEVER EVER mentioned in the game, and was probably only assembled after thorough study of this game and Thracia 776. I like how the replacement characters are mentioned as well but that's just the sort of humorous pedantry that I enjoy.

Anyway, I just wanted to show you that to confirm that Oifaye is simply a distant cousin to Sigurd and Celice. Because I care about shit like this.

Let's finish up this chapter.

Dannan orders his right hand man Schmidt to attack us since his son's are impotent pansies.

And because he has the Hero Axe, he must DIE!

Well, Johalva and his bitches go down so easily that I don't even bother capture an image of his defeated troops.

Elsewhere, at Isaac castle:

Schmidt's troops capture Isaac castle. This causes all of Johan's friendly axe knight guys to go POOF! No worries though, they weren't that awesome to begin with.

Back at Sophara:

I capture Sophara. This isn't that significant since it doesn't trigger anything remotely necessary, but it DOES unlock some conversations that'll prove useful.

Aw man, while I was fupping about over at Sophara, Schmidt's guys went behind my back and DESTROYED Ganeshire Castle! It's time to get back at them for destroying something I didn't really need anyway!

Be careful with these guys, because not only does their leader have a Hero Axe, but they all have throwing axes, giving them a long range tactical advantage, even IF throwing axes are piece of shit weapons.

Just be sure to have the battle on YOUR terms. That, and keep Oifaye equipped with the javelin he starts out with. This causes their AI to fubar and all gang up on him, even though they can barely hurt him.

Now that wasn't so hard, now was it? Just be sure to have Johan finish off Schmidt, so he can get his hands on the Hero Axe and start using it right away.

Funny story: when I first played this game, I had no idea what I was doing. When the Hero Axe hit 50 kills and started doing criticals, I thought that was a natural ability the Hero Axe had and I just never noticed it before. I had this HUGE UNNECESSARY reliance on Johan, simply because he was the only one doing crits. Oh, how I've learned since then.

Now, there is NOTHING standing in our way.

Let us make a straight line to Rivough and kick some Dannan ass.

First though, let's get some conversations out of the way. You can have Celice talk to Lana, and then to Julia:

Lana gets a 3+ max HP bonus, and Julia gets a free Aura Tome! Now she has some attack magic...

Jesus fucking Christ! I mean, yeah, sure it has 20 power, but it also has TWENTY weight! How big is this fucking book? This gives Julia a very strong attack, but her pursuit and continue skills might as well not exist, and this totally messes up her evasion.

I might sell it just so she can evade attacks better.

Also, there's a free item we can pick up in one of the villages:

A skill ring! I have Delmud pick it up so he can critical more reliably.

Anyway, walking all the way to Dannan's castle takes forever and a half since the map is so flipping huge, but we finally get there.

He's level 25, but I won't take the opportunity to grind. You know, just to give myself SOME challenge. He also has a droppable thief sword, if you care about that stuff.

He doesn't have a long range attack though, and so you can feel free to prick him to death with long range attacks if you want. Also, having Johan attack provokes a conversation where he gets more dumb dialogue.

Celice finally manages to get to the castle, and he successfully kills Dannan. Dannan's actually really tough, since he has so much HP and defense that alot of attacks don't phase him, and he's so strong that can two-hit kill anyone in your party. So be careful is what I'm trying to say.

Levin's back, and he tells us how proud he is that we've liberated Isaac. He then tells us how the Lopt Empire is slowly reviving itself, and that the entire world is in danger if it does. He then starts laying on the 'IT'S YOUR DESTINY' talk really thick, and Celice can barely talk back to him. Celice just goes along with it and accepts that it's his DESTINY to stop the Lopt Empire. Levin then joins our party... NOT as a character, but as an advisor, so we have someone cool and experienced to guide us and narrate the story.

He also confirms my belief that we can PIERCE THE HEAVENS with the holy Tyrfing!

We then get a short story of what's been happening in Lenster. Oh hey, Fin is back! and Cuan's son, Leaf, is with him! This short few sentences summarizes the events that happen in the sequal, Thracia 776, where Leaf and Fin try to win Lenster's independence back and fight the Lopt Empire, but fail miserably and now have to make their last stand here. Good thing we're just rolling in through the back door.

Make your guesses now, HOW MANY CHARACTERS ARE GOING TO JOIN OUR PARTY IN THE NEXT CHAPTER? No cheating now! Only people that haven't played the game before can guess!

[Untouchable]

I'm gonna bet that 7 characters join next chapter.


Also, god damn you Fire Emblem you incestuous bastard of a game.

[Jim Groovester]

Oh god, I just bothered to look up the family tree for this game. Feel free to gaze upon it's mind-warping complexity:

http://www.serenesforest.net/fe4/Jugdral%20Holy%20Blood%20Family%20Tree.PNG

What is this I-

Oh! So the evil reincarnation of the dark lord or whatever is going to be some kid named Julius?

And that is a disgustingly tangled family tree right in the center where Dierdre and Alvis are.

[JoshuaFH]

Yes, Levin mentioned Julius, but I forgot to bring him up. He's only says that while Prince Julius is the current heir to the throne, the throne rightfully belongs to Celice.

Julius, though, is one of my favorite videogame villains of all time. Why? You guys'll find out eventually.

[ToonyMan]

Wow so everybody dies and a time skip happens...

YOU DASTARD

[Creamcorn]

Wow so everybody dies and a time skip happens...

YOU DASTARD

Hey, everyone dies eventually. I'm also guessing nine characters join the next chapter and about seventy two useless enemies die as a result.

Also...

WHERE THE HELL WAS HE KEEPING THAT!?