TearRing Saga (PSX) - Zeek's Last Mission + Recruiting Loffaru
6I've had this video waiting to be uploaded for a while. Another TearRing Saga recording I wanted to share so that more people would play this cool game.
This time it's Runan's team that's in the spotlight. Runan is your average Fire Emblem protagonist that gets stuck to using swords (there are long-ranged magical ones in this game too though, available quite early) and starts with a Rapier that hurts knights. Unlike the bow-using-thief-pirate-dude Holmes who can freely walk around the map when the storyline shifts to him, Runan is very much restricted and can only move from the previous location to the next one.
You can select which of the current party members will go to Runan's party and which will form Team Holmes, and for various reasons I ended up with most of the overpowered units on Runan's team.
First you have Zeek. He's a mysterious, cool-looking dark knight that joins you and later turns out to be your enemy. Gafgarion comes to mind, except the personalities appear to be different from what little I understand from TRS's storyline (Zeek/Zeke seems to be a tragic hero of some sort and not a scheming brute). Zeek wields axes and spears, has kick-ass base stats and best growths in the whole game. His combat skill set is impressive and is complimented by having Elite, which makes him level up incredibly fast. You can train him to lv. 30 and up easily without trying, though it makes more sense to train the people who'll actually stay until the end of the game.
Then you have a guy like Narron. You get to choose one person out of four at one point in the storyline and Narron is golden, no pun intended. He has Elite, levelling up very quickly, and promotes to the class Gold Knight that's not available to any other unit in the game. What's so special about this class? Its promotion gains are ridiculous, +5/+6 in all the stats you care about and unparalleled in the game. Crazy stats, access to lances and swords, quick levelling up... Promote him before lv. 12 (meaning, at either l v. 10 or 11, probably the sooner the better) using a Knight Crest you get quite early, and he'll learn Blazing Wind when he reaches lv. 12 as a Gold Knight (a skill that pretty much always KOs the enemy). Give him a Super Proof so that he can level to lv. 40, he really does level up crazily fast. He really needs to cap his Strength seeing how his Strength cap is above the rest.
There's also Raffin. He's a prepromote but has no trouble gaining experience and he actually promoted once more, to Dragon Knight class. This is a storyline event that's easy to trigger which is pretty cool, because the girls need Dragon Flutes to promote from Pegasus Knight to Dragon Knight. The first flute costs 10K which is unreasonable (unless you grind on random encounters which I abstain from doing) and the second one is acquired much later.
I'm also training Rennie, who also gets the Elite skill but, most importantly, she is an Archer with CHARGE. This is an active ability that, when selected during player phase, extends combat to 2-5 rounds. Since bow users tend to get no counter attacks on player phase with a lot of enemies, this essentially gives Rennie a good chance to one-turn KO some of the toughest enemies out there. That, and there are some really broken bows in the game, shooting up to 4 turns per use, or having up to 4 range. Oh, and she actually has a movement stat growth of 10%. I had Rennie gain 2 movement ups in a row once. So, while she needs a bit of babying to get strong, she's worth it, I think.
Anyway, for the mission... Most action takes place in the beginning because we're placed very close to the boss and the most destructive of his minions. The boss possesses AoE magic (quite rare for Fire Emblem though not exceptional) and it's a good idea to kill him fast. There are also dark mages with 1~3 range spells around him, which is pretty dangerous seeing how we WILL have to survive it on the first turns if we want to quickly assault the boss (which we do). Then there are all the summons summoning monsters of all sorts from all over the map, and things get quite ugly.
In this mission we can recruit Loffaru (Rofarl) who helps to fight off the monsters as a guest at first, and later gives a Runan a great blade. He joins as a unique class called King's Knight with good bases but unimpressive growths. The King's Knight class is able to wield all weapon items, which is pretty damn great, so I guess Loffaru is a nice replacement for Zeek when he leaves.