The Pumpkin Mandomizer is a fun little set of rules I’ve made for myself in order to make my Hard Mode True Ending playthrough more interesting.
Basically, while I am free to use any unit I want at any time during the playthrough, I’ve randomly selected the above team, and am required to bring them into the final battle.
I hope you enjoy coming along with me for the ride, and feel free to give strategy suggestions in the comments below!
Chapter 7: The Ostian Rebellion (continuation)
Dear Lord, this chapter stinks. I feel like they made this either fully expecting the Ilian soldiers to die, or they just forgot that Hard Mode exists.
So yeah, I didn’t get this finished, so this week will be completely consumed by strategy discussion!
First thing’s first, here’s my current strategy–it’s my last attempt of the session and the farthest I got, but screw me, I forgot about Clarine having low HP, and a 60-something miss from Marcus meant an archer survived for a 60-something hit, which meant everything needs to restart.
Now, credit where it is due, I took a lot of inspiration from Mekkah’s guide for this chapter; the fact that the first turn is so dang specific made this guide a godsend. I mean, there were a couple times where I had to reset simply because I forgot to use a unit’s canto to move them over one square, which caused another unit to not occupy that square and the entire strategy to fall to pieces. But without further ado, let me try to paint a picture for those of you who didn’t watch the vid:
(Depending on the platform, you might have to view the images in a carousel up top instead of just reading it next to the text. Sorry.)
Here’s the overall map, and here’s my personal initial setup:
At the start of the second turn, Zelot and Trec show up in the two spaces colored in green below the upper-left houses, and if you don’t stop them, they’ll immediately start running around and getting themselves in trouble. Most of the enemies in the map will immediately rush towards your position–the exceptions being the 5 enemy units that are in between the houses, as well as the middle wyvern rider. They’ll try and get you once you enter their attack radius.
If Trec and Zelot aren’t either recruited or rescued, they’ll attract the nearby knight and archer, which will both make it harder to get them to safety, and will in general increase your chances of dying to the hordes of enemies now aggroed onto you.
SO! Here’s the plan on turn 1:
Send Marcus with a Hammer over on the right, and have him kill the knight from the bottom.
Sheena trades his items around to wield Gant’s Lance, and waits on top of the house on the right.
Alen and Lance rescue-drop Roy just below Marcus.
Diecke uses the Armor Slayer to kill the Knight from below.
Rutger moves to his right and trades with him to make him equip an iron blade, and Rutger has an iron sword (dunno if Diecke’s weapon actually matters here)
Move Saul in position to heal the swordies if needed, and Clarine to heal the cavs.
Lugh and Dorothy kinda move up and to the left near the swordies.
End turn. Enemy phase turn 1:
Mercenary challenges Marcus, and gets almost half his health done with Gant’s Lance. If he gets hurt too much, he’ll get healed by the priest up top, which is no good.
Other Mercenary challenges Rutger, gets most of his HP taken out.
Soldier chucks a javelin at Roy; he’ll probably dodge it. OK if not.
Enemies start closing in.
Trec and Zelot show up but don’t move.
Turn 2:
Kill the left mercenary with Lugh, keeping him in the forest.
Kill the right mercenary with the Silver Lance on Marcus, praying he doesn’t miss the 80% because making up for it with Sheena and Allance is a pain.
Move Roy to talk to Zelot.
Trade the iron axe and hand axe from Roy to Zelot, equip the hand axe, talk to Trec, and canto to the upper forest outside of the Red Gem holding wyvern rider’s attack range.
Have Trec rescue Roy and canto back down.
Have someone take/drop Roy near the arena to recruit Noah when he comes
Move Rutger into the forest and Dieck diagonally below him, blocking that area off. They should be able to take the enemies there.
Heal anyone that needs it and attack the soldier that hit Roy if possible.
Enemy Phase turn 2:
Recruit Noah with Roy.
Wyvern rider on the left will challenge Lugh. He can 1 shot him, but it’s only like a 36% chance hit. He’ll take 10 damage in return which is not bad.
Zelot will start taking on everyone with his hand axe. He can do a pretty good job dodge tanking, but he won’t be that accurate, either.
The wyver rider on the right will challenge silver lance Marcus, but will be healed up pretty well by a physic, unfortunately.
Player phase turn 3:
At this point, it’s where it varies; I might need Rutger to come in and take out the Wyvern Rider, and someone can fill in at the forest to block out the enemy. The other one can be mostly taken out by Marcus’ silver lance (I unfortunately only have one), but yeah.
Also, Merlinus is handy as a decoy; if you have an enemy that gets too far into the front lines, you can have him run out and draw aggro and die instead of a healer or Chad or something.
The biggest frustration is that at any point a missed attack can spell my doom–the aforementioned last attempt of today was a result of Marcus missing a 67% hit, which resulted in them landing a similar one on Clarine. Super frustrating! Like Zelot can one-round the thunder mage if he hits both 50% shots, or the dude can run down and start zapping other folks if he survives. I feel like I’m also relying on a lot of dodge tanking in order to hope things go well.
If anyone has any tips on how to make my life easier, please let me know!
See y’all next week when I try again, and as always, here’s the whole gameplay!