Fire Emblem 8 Sacred Stones: Low Level HM - Chapter 4: Ancient Horrors

First of all, many thanks for giving me feedback in the first video! Didn't expect I'd receive so much.

One thing I concluded is that I'll be taking Ephraim's route. It's interesting to note that there's no unanimous consensus that Ephraim's path in the game is the hardest one, which I assumed to be the case without much doubt. Interesting. Nobody's exactly saying Eirika's is harder either, though, so I'll be taking Ephraim's route as planned, and that's the one most people do see as having the trickier maps. It's mostly Phantom Ship that people view to be really hard, but the one map with Amelia and Gheb is also pretty hard because of all the Cavalier reinforcements, I think.

As for the battle animations, I'll have them on for now. People who have played the game too much usually turn them off to save time, because they already know very well what hit rates they will be seeing, or they've replayed the stages so many times they remember the rates by heart.

I'll be playing with animations for everybody besides the healers and dancers (those get attacked too sometimes, though), since most importantly, I like seeing what hit rates I'm getting. It also makes for a better experience, in my view, because you react to what's going on - an enemy missing an 80% accurate attack will make you grin, and on the contrary you'll shout when that 10% accurate axe attack hits somebody in the head. Critical animations are fun to watch, too.

I'll be keeping track of my active party's levels before each battle, for record's sake:
Eirika 8(79)
Garcia 4(31)
Moulder 3(45)
Franz 3(30)
Colm 2(83)
Artur 2(0)
Neimi 1(70)
Vanessa 1(67)
Lute 1(0)
Ross 3(89)-10

This is the first map with MONSTERS, which we'll see plenty of in this game. Some of them are weaker than soldiers with 0 speed and defence, but others are a lot stronger than that. Watch out for the Mongalls which have flight and dark magic, and Gargoyles later on. But what you should be afraid of is when you get attacked by a dozen enemies when you can't see your surrounding in a Fog of War map... This'll be 'fun' later on.

This isn't a particularly hard map, though if several inaccurate attacks connect in a row, we may find ourselves in an unpleasant situation. Vanessa travels to recruit Lute, and the rest of the party slowly fights off enemies and the reinforcements (Revenants and Bonewalker skeletons).

I give Ross as much experience as I can through kills (he starts doubling the 0 attack speed enemies with a Hatchet now), and try not to kill anything with Franz because he'll be really useful in the next map - even at a low level. Much of our preferences should focus on keeping utility units - cavaliers, fliers and Colm - low-levelled, so that we have them around when we need to travel to somewhere far away, open a chest or have better vision in fog. Keeping Franz low-levelled is not easy though - in a normal game I usually concentrate on making him my second Seth in the first 8 or so chapters, and then have him, Seth and Duessel, and maybe Vanessa/Tana/Cormag, LOL at the rest of the game.

I omit the parts of the video where I work on some supports. Unlike earlier games like FE6, there's no limit to how many support points you can accumulate here - so I get some units to C support, then keep supporting so that I can get B immediately on the first turn of the next map. Ross and Lute have horrible offence right now (though Ross has been procing speed like crazy, which is nice for a 30% growth) so they should support each other. It's a good idea to have more supports as opposed to A ones for everyone, because we'll come across many instances where supported units aren't both fielded due to their level difference.

Oh, and it seems like VBA corrupts recordings longer than 10 or so minutes, so I have to stop recording 8 or so minutes in and start a new one. You'll know when that happens in the video, but what I should add is that in that one second that's not recorded I'm not save stating or using cheats or hacking or doing anything else nasty lol.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• fire
• emblem
• eight
• fe8
• the
• sacred
• stones
• tss
• ss
• eirika
• seth
• franz
• ross
• lowest
• level
• llg

[LightningLord2]

Ancient Horrors is my absolute favourite mission - you get phat lewt/Lute, there's a lot of monsters ripe for picking their EXP, and Lady Arachel gives the best line ever. On another subject, do I need to be in a certain mission to have certain supports?

[MoogleBoss]

@LightningLord2

No, you can start building supports in any level. Max support level between two characters is 3 (A highest, C lowest), and you only have 5 slots for supports, so one character could have A support with one character and B with another, or B-B-C, etc.

[Toothache42]

Probably better to look into a lossless codec as well. Camstudio Codec 1.4 seems to work nicely with the Fire Emblem GBA games, I found. Lagarith is also an option if you want something more well known.

Also it is up to you, but I'd prefer if you turned animations off. Personally, I'm more interested in the strategy used, and the animations fill up so much of a video, as well as getting seen 309583983 times.

[MoogleBoss]

@Toothache42

Thanks, I'll check those out!

I'd hate to see no hit rates on enemy phase, but yeah, it can get repetitive. It looks like a lot of people do enjoy watching the animations, though. I'll see how it will look if I speed up the battles 2x-3x next video, been considering that since I started.

[Kainmaster]

10 minute long videos = 2 gb

2 gb = corrupted video

The VBA I use splits movies up after around 4 minutes or so (each movie is in that case around 1 gb big) which is helpful.

Also, I have a question: Are you going to allow stat boosters or are those just going to be sold?

[MoogleBoss]

@Kainmaster

Mine splits files too, but I get corrupted ones in the end anyway.

Depends on the boosters. If it's something like Goddess Icon or Secret Book, I'll sell those, but ones like Angelic Robe or Dragonshield are too good to be sold.

[gunnil751]

expect to see some 1% BS RNG crit from the enemies during your attempts xD gotta love the RNG

[heroteen16]

You should try VBA-M. I like it more but i havent tried out the newest VBA.

[MoogleBoss]

@Toothache42

iirc I have the latest one, but I'll be sure to check again. I also experience slowdown and buzzing audio, but the product of recording doesn't seem affected by this.

[Toothache42]

Only older versions of VBA have issues with the AVI capturing. It is better to look into the latest rerecording versions of VBA, either v23 or v24. I can PM you a link if you're not able to find it