Game:

Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (2002)

Duration: 1:39:18

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9

The final extra stage, gotten by beating the last stage within 25 turns and having Melady and Zeiss still alive. Not particularly difficult, just split into two and advance, dealing with reinforcements as they come from behind. Fliers could go across the stream in the center and advance quicker, but if they can't handle counterattacks, it's probably not worth it. You can lure some enemies closer to the stream's edge though and take them on with your archers, and when reinforcements come from the starting point, you can use the stream to your advantage to shoot them from across it and whittle down their advance.

There's some cheeky traps here too. A few of these chests have Manaketes inside them, which can be very bad if the last thing you do on your turn is open a trap chest so the Manakete moves immediately and murders someone. Like at 57:23...

For beating this stage, we get Apocalypse, a Dark tome with +5 Mag and bonus damage against dragons. +5 Magic means this thing is gonna hit haaard. Very nice. Really good. I almost never use it though. Niime almost never gets in range quick enough and I can use her to heal from a safer distance rather than risk her dying to any potential counterattacks, while units with better move like Alen and Lance can just run ahead and clear out enemies well before she's caught up. But, hey, the option's there.

We also get a Saint Scroll in one of these chests, which is a neat little item that boosts ALL stats for a character, including Mov and Con. Pretty cool, something you'd probably just want to give to your favorite unit. I thought about it for a while here, but eventually gave it to Rutger. If you haven't noticed by now, you have to use items mid-stage, can't use them in base camp, so I had to decide what to do with it here rather than off screen. Which is really annoying, especially when you have a bunch of stat boosters you want to apply to people.

Oh, and we also get the Binding Blade. We could have gotten it at the end of Ch. 21 if we hadn't beaten it fast enough to get access to this extra stage. Binding Blade is Roy only, 1-3 range sword, effective on dragons, with +5 Def/Res. Very nice.

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