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SOMEONE needs to be the butt of the joke. Arden assumes that role with pride almost.

And if he were removed from the game, no Pursuit Ring would actually be a very substantial loss. So there is that. He's actually indirectly very useful for what he gets you that way!

Leveling him? Knight in FE4? I'd rather pull teeth. But I suppose some fun antics could be derived from showering him with favoritism and resources to perform decently.

Actually, it would seem that Arden's hulk/hick talk is being thrown out in the new translation of FE4 that's currently in the works. And I'm happy about that. Arden's got enough problems without having an accent that makes him sound like a dingus.

Perhaps one day he will find love....

Though to be fair, you can't really get too mad at Arden. After all, he's a free unit. You get him from the word go and can use him as much as you want. But of course he probably won't be able to pull his own weight, pun totally intended. But to his credit you don't have to do a huge song and dance to recruit him, which would make him a better draft pick than Hannibal, at least.

If I wasn't feeling so down right now I'd hunt for manga pictures of him, like him in puffy clothes claiming to be Sigurd from the Nuts Fujimori manga. Someone, hop to it in my place.

Also, he made it into Awakening. WHO'S THE SLOWBY NOW? I DON'T SEE NOISHE AND ALEC ANYWHERE! WHO'S LAUGHING NOW? OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!

It's Virion Week!


Thanks for posting.

The super easy summary of Virion for me is as follows:

Fantastic character. Mediocre unit.

Mediocre by Awakening standards, that is. Because virtually everyone is usable and can be made to contribute. And Virion is no exception, but when everyone is meeting the bare minimum, the new measurement is how much you're doing in comparison and Virion really has a number of counts against him.

-Locked to Mono bows before reclassing/promoting (depending on promotion path).

I had intitially thought the pair up system would finally bring balance to units with severe disadvantages like bow-lock and low movement, and it DOES definitely help them, but not quite enough to make their disadvantages meaningless (definitely for the mono bow tragedy, at least. Kellam really benefits from Pair Up and his Great Knight promotion). For the disadvantage not to matter, you have to be the support partner which makes it much harder to level up quickly. Giving Virion the front means being locked mono-bow. And the majority of combat frequently happens on the enemy phase unless you're Galeforking through something in 1-2 turns. In which case unless you contribute to the Galefork strategy in someway you're going to have a tough time leveling well anyway.

-Underwhelming Pair up contributions.

In comparison to other classes very frequently enough, at least. Skill is often one of the less important stats and other classes either offer more bonuses to more stats of big boosts to stats you want pumped as high as possible.

It's not like he's REALLY bad, but if I had to pick between just about any other gen 1 father character and Virion, I'd probably pick the alternative.

If you are using him, even for Galeforking it up, if you can push him into Bow Knight Level 5 territory by the time the Galeforking is going on he's an additional Rally groupie, which never hurts. He'll also boost movement and have good mobility which is nice. I remember doing Griffon Ridert!Cherche/Bow Knight!Virion one playtrhough and Virion's movement boost to Cherche on top of deliverer was pretty nice. Cherche saw WAY more combat though. I had to go out of my way to make sure Virion got enough kills in the front to continue to be relevant.

And bow users do come in handy for fliers. So does Wind magic which is MUCH more flexible, but you can't complain when you're getting bonus damage.

-And then his reclass options.

Mage is pretty much a waste. So it's basically just bows and wyverns. He COULD hypothetically go Bow Knight for Bow Breaker and then to a Flying class. But is it really worth doing all that when you could just to avoid an occasional counter you can play around? Probably not. Especially if he has to go back to E rank weapon levels. By the time you'd get to that point the game would nearly be finished.



For post-game, having access to a Faire skill IS always a plus, so he's at an advantage against many of his gen one peers there already, at least. So at worst he could rock Limit Breaker/Aggressor/Bowfaire/filler/filler. Unfortunately, he doesn't have particularly good filler options for an overall impressive skill set. I suppose he could take Deliverer as a Bow Knight for impressive mobility and Lifetaker to have... something. Aside from the Bowfaire he really doesn't have any exceptional skills wanted for post-game for the most part.

For parenting, I DO use him for my post-game file in spite of all the negatives I've just said about him. To Inigo. It's arguably more about character than stats, because the mods aren't anything special at all. The hair color is super close to Inigo's default hair and I do really love having the womanizer of gen 1 father the womanizer of gen 2. He gives three classes to Inigo of mostly useless skills but giving Inigo skills to inherit isn't really important because he gets sooooo many good ones through his mother already. All he really needed was Bowfaire since he's a Bow Knight for me and my designated Gen 2 Bow user, so it's nice for him to choose between Bow or Swordfaire as I need him to.

Pairing-wise, while I think he makes a lot of sense as Inigo's father, as a husband Virion/Cherche is a pretty straightforward choice with a lot going for it.

I'll talk about Virion's character later. Because it probably deserves its own post. Fantastic character.

Short story long, Virion has shown me that unless the series takes some drastic changes to be more like Gaiden, mono-bow users by necessity will never be towards the top. Just the way it's going to be.

Although Longbows ARE awesome for Lunatic mode.

No prob FD. I'm always happy to contribute! xp

Yeah, I kept it as Virion week for two weeks because Awakening is the one game most of us have played and the most people would been able to talk about. I'll keep them all down to the regular week going forward it looks like.

It's now Arran Week. The FE11/12/1/3 unit. Not to be mistaken with a Soldier of Daein of a similar name.

Nice of you to start things off Tiki~ wink
That is a terrible ending indeed... Although I do love the CG art endings for Mystery of the Emblem...

Arran oh Arran...You certainly had the short of the stick. Although, his portrait is kind of cool I guess? Anyways, originally Arran/or Alan as some may call him, made his appearance in Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light. He's basically the 2nd pre promote choice candidate you'll get in the chapter of liberating Altea. There's two villages that can be saved, if you decide to take the left village you'll get Arran, a level 1 Paladin, and over on the right is the blue haired hero Samson.(And well he's kind of ehh... But we'll talk about him later).

Personally If it were up to me, I would definitely take Arran over Samson. One of the advantages he has is that well, he's a mount and he's at least usable in the ds remake as far as I'm concerned with the reclassing options available. Unfortunately I never used him in the original, so I can't really talk about him much. Maybe someday I'll use him and get a better opinion of him.

However, book 2 Arran on the other hand I have used quite a bit in the original Mystery of the Emblem. It's true that he is a mediore paladin unit, but to his credit he's at least very useful early on in the game. Like particularly in the chapter where you need to recruit Rikard, you'll really need both him and Sirius more than ever in order to block those thieves from getting away. Also, back then you couldn't set up your formation like you could in later installments of the series. But after that chapter you get Rikard, his usefulness dramatically drops.

Statwise, his bases isn't exactly very impressive. He does have alright res for block some of the earlier enemy mages which can help in situations, low luck, and the rest of his stats are just average. Plus. he has 0% growths like Tiki had mentioned already, so the only way he could possibly become better is if you abuse some orbs on him. Or stat boosting items... But really what is the point of doing that? Arran is totally outclassed by so many potentially better mounts you could be using. There's Luke, Cecil, Rody, Sirius, Cain, Abel... You're kind of already set here.

In the DS remake of Mystery of the Emblem, I could see being much better in that game. Like with Shadow Dragon, there's a reclass system to give him variety and you actually have a lot of time to use him. But again, with so many units to choose from he's still very much inferior. But I could still see him being used consistently as a unit.

I haven't gotten any supports so I can't speak on as a character there. From what I can tell, he just seems like a young experienced serious kind of knight. At least, that is what I'm getting from his expression of his mug. Although, what Tiki said about his first support conversation does intrigue me as a character.