Something about Shinon that gets overlooked a lot is his chunky base defense. It's on par with Titania's, the man can take a hit and the main advantage of using him over Rolf is that you don't really need to be careful with him. For some reason his Defense growth is also better than everyone but Gatrie
Have you ever noticed that the Greil Mercenaries levels are somewhat aligned with their "canon" skill levels relative to their position / battle experience in the mercenary company? Mist and Rolf are level 1. Rhys is 3. Soren is 5. Titania is 16. Shinon is 13. Oscar is 12. Ike is 11. Gatrie is 10. Boyd is 8. Mia is 7. And when I say canon, I mean that in Radiant Dawn they tried to have their cake and eat it too. In order for it to work as a stand alone game (because even sequels are viewed from this angle during production if their predecessor didn't sell phenomenally well), they wanted to introduce these characters as if they hadn't all fought a year long war full of every type of travel and hardship and dragons. This keeps their unit feel relatively the same across the games of PoR and RD. Your unit analysis here, aside from some RD specific equipment things, more or less would match PoRs almost to a T. Like + or - 10%, ya dig?
So mist has this little easter egg where if you some how get her to kill an enemy you get to see one of the best victory animations in the history of the franchise.
Funny story about Rolf: I used him on my first playthrough and gave him Corrosion for funniness, and the only time he procced it, it was against the guy who drops the Double Bow.
One interesting thing about healers in this game compared to Path of Radiance (aside from the power of healing items) is the number of healers. Path of Radiance has the lowest number of possible staff units of any Fire Emblem at a total of 6 (Rhys, Mist, Soren, Ilyana, Tormod, and Elincia) which gives each one way more value especially in an Ironman scenario compared to other games. Meanwhile, Radiant Dawn has a total of 13 healers, and one of which is mandatory for endgame (Micaiah) which devalues the long term usefulness of bringing other staff users. This is amplified in the endgame situation since a staff user would be the second healbot on your army and they now have to compete with Elincia’s flying, canto, and combat potential for that spot.
My favourite use for shinon is to give him crossbows and brom's disarm skill and just throwing him into a pile of enemies. If he disarms someone, then heather can come in and steal the weapon. Kind of a cute way of giving the greil mercenaries more weapons/money
Ok, now that I'm home from work, it's time for long winded Boyd propaganda! Everything you two said about Boyd is true. His speed is low, especially without a transfer, and it's harder to trigger his avalanche than it is in PoR (Devouring all the enemies as Raisins puts it). However! Boyd is actually the only Greil Mercenary that can kill The Black Knight without a tier 3 promotion. He does not accomplish this alone, but via Bond supports with Rolf and Mist, as well as through capping his STR and SKL and SPD. Higher luck helps a bit too, to seal the deal. Against the BK with a hammer, Boyd with capped STR and Mist A support will hit the BK for 32 damage per swing (31 on Normal or lower). With Rolf Bond only he will have about 7~8% crit chance, higher if you have transfer Mist Bond(+5% if you can get her adjacent). This means that Boyd can potentially OHKO the BK with a crit even before Tier 3, something Haar or Gatrie don't have a means of doing. But even without doing that, you can set up a Haar kill on the BK rather easily by utilizing Boyd and Reyson. Boyd chips down the BK with two hits for 64 damage, and Haar finishes BK off. Suffice it say, they start Boyd off kind of lack luster, because he's a "potentially best" combat unit, rather than a, "Best by design." Always a solid investment, but also always makes you work for it.
Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn is hands down the best FE game. Addictingly fun gameplay mixed with an intriguing story, something FE really struggles at(Although I think Engage's story was fine, gameplay was amazing. 3Houses had astonishing narrative design, innovative to the genre, but the level design was quite shit and it was terribly bad at replayability)
Radiant dawn has some logic issues, but it's the same thing with an old fairy tale or epoch. In any case, it's still a very fun game with some of the best gameplay in the series
Shame how I worked my ass off for high strength and sword proficient Mist in POR for one Black Knight fight and have to almost instantly bench her in RD lmao
One thing in Soren's favor is that capping Mag, Skill, Spd and Res in FE9 is pretty easy for him w/ bands, and he notably walks into FE 10 with Skill and Res capped and Mag and Spd close. Why is this good? It means that he uses BEXP pretty well to get to lvl 10, potentially even getting some HP and defense in there, which he desperately needs. And like you two said, crowning him at 10 works just fine because he can actually use the Spd boost plus sendovers to double many Pt 3 enemies, plus staff utility and an unchained Mag stat that will at least do decent work. He's probably the best mage in the game, and that's really sad to say. EDIT: Lol you actually said that right at the end there.
The only issue with this is that not everyone has path of radiance. 😢 I still have only my RD copy (physical game) and I can't do transfers. I think transfers screw over sothe as well?
Okay I think I figured it out. There was a person who complained about mounted units being bad bc of thier stats. The counter being thiers plenty of examples of mounted units being good I argue that perhaps they were saying that the mounted units were bad because they make the other units look worse in comparison.
Soren may not be the best in this game, but he's also my favourite character in the entire series and he's at least functional so you can bet your butt that I'm always going to get him to Endgame
Some day I'll do a character analysis video with you based on the characters themselves. That's my fever dream, anyway. It'd be so easy to go overboard though, easier than going overboard talking about their statistics and uses as gameplay units.
Something about Shinon that gets overlooked a lot is his chunky base defense. It's on par with Titania's, the man can take a hit and the main advantage of using him over Rolf is that you don't really need to be careful with him.
For some reason his Defense growth is also better than everyone but Gatrie
It's his racism
So happy you brought this back!!!!
My favorite characters
Have you ever noticed that the Greil Mercenaries levels are somewhat aligned with their "canon" skill levels relative to their position / battle experience in the mercenary company?
Mist and Rolf are level 1. Rhys is 3. Soren is 5.
Titania is 16.
Shinon is 13.
Oscar is 12.
Ike is 11.
Gatrie is 10.
Boyd is 8.
Mia is 7.
And when I say canon, I mean that in Radiant Dawn they tried to have their cake and eat it too. In order for it to work as a stand alone game (because even sequels are viewed from this angle during production if their predecessor didn't sell phenomenally well), they wanted to introduce these characters as if they hadn't all fought a year long war full of every type of travel and hardship and dragons.
This keeps their unit feel relatively the same across the games of PoR and RD. Your unit analysis here, aside from some RD specific equipment things, more or less would match PoRs almost to a T. Like + or - 10%, ya dig?
So mist has this little easter egg where if you some how get her to kill an enemy you get to see one of the best victory animations in the history of the franchise.
It’s so dang cute. So worth giving her a kill.
Funny story about Rolf: I used him on my first playthrough and gave him Corrosion for funniness, and the only time he procced it, it was against the guy who drops the Double Bow.
Unfortunate
This is probably like the second unluckiest thing I've heard happen to someone in this series.
One interesting thing about healers in this game compared to Path of Radiance (aside from the power of healing items) is the number of healers. Path of Radiance has the lowest number of possible staff units of any Fire Emblem at a total of 6 (Rhys, Mist, Soren, Ilyana, Tormod, and Elincia) which gives each one way more value especially in an Ironman scenario compared to other games. Meanwhile, Radiant Dawn has a total of 13 healers, and one of which is mandatory for endgame (Micaiah) which devalues the long term usefulness of bringing other staff users. This is amplified in the endgame situation since a staff user would be the second healbot on your army and they now have to compete with Elincia’s flying, canto, and combat potential for that spot.
My favourite use for shinon is to give him crossbows and brom's disarm skill and just throwing him into a pile of enemies. If he disarms someone, then heather can come in and steal the weapon. Kind of a cute way of giving the greil mercenaries more weapons/money
Modern problems require modern solutions!
Big brain if heather can stop being bad
Hell yeah you have a great synergy with Raisins you two together are very insightful!
Ok, now that I'm home from work, it's time for long winded Boyd propaganda! Everything you two said about Boyd is true. His speed is low, especially without a transfer, and it's harder to trigger his avalanche than it is in PoR (Devouring all the enemies as Raisins puts it).
However!
Boyd is actually the only Greil Mercenary that can kill The Black Knight without a tier 3 promotion. He does not accomplish this alone, but via Bond supports with Rolf and Mist, as well as through capping his STR and SKL and SPD. Higher luck helps a bit too, to seal the deal. Against the BK with a hammer, Boyd with capped STR and Mist A support will hit the BK for 32 damage per swing (31 on Normal or lower). With Rolf Bond only he will have about 7~8% crit chance, higher if you have transfer Mist Bond(+5% if you can get her adjacent). This means that Boyd can potentially OHKO the BK with a crit even before Tier 3, something Haar or Gatrie don't have a means of doing. But even without doing that, you can set up a Haar kill on the BK rather easily by utilizing Boyd and Reyson. Boyd chips down the BK with two hits for 64 damage, and Haar finishes BK off.
Suffice it say, they start Boyd off kind of lack luster, because he's a "potentially best" combat unit, rather than a, "Best by design." Always a solid investment, but also always makes you work for it.
Tellius has the best world building in the series by far
Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn is hands down the best FE game. Addictingly fun gameplay mixed with an intriguing story, something FE really struggles at(Although I think Engage's story was fine, gameplay was amazing. 3Houses had astonishing narrative design, innovative to the genre, but the level design was quite shit and it was terribly bad at replayability)
Radiant dawn has some logic issues, but it's the same thing with an old fairy tale or epoch. In any case, it's still a very fun game with some of the best gameplay in the series
"astonishing narrative design" in reference to the unfinished shit show that is 3H is the biggest overstatement I have ever seen
Shame how I worked my ass off for high strength and sword proficient Mist in POR for one Black Knight fight and have to almost instantly bench her in RD lmao
One thing in Soren's favor is that capping Mag, Skill, Spd and Res in FE9 is pretty easy for him w/ bands, and he notably walks into FE 10 with Skill and Res capped and Mag and Spd close. Why is this good? It means that he uses BEXP pretty well to get to lvl 10, potentially even getting some HP and defense in there, which he desperately needs. And like you two said, crowning him at 10 works just fine because he can actually use the Spd boost plus sendovers to double many Pt 3 enemies, plus staff utility and an unchained Mag stat that will at least do decent work. He's probably the best mage in the game, and that's really sad to say.
EDIT: Lol you actually said that right at the end there.
The only issue with this is that not everyone has path of radiance. 😢 I still have only my RD copy (physical game) and I can't do transfers. I think transfers screw over sothe as well?
I can confirm that you cannot crown Mist in part 3.
I cri
Shame you can’t crown the crit queen
Okay I think I figured it out. There was a person who complained about mounted units being bad bc of thier stats. The counter being thiers plenty of examples of mounted units being good
I argue that perhaps they were saying that the mounted units were bad because they make the other units look worse in comparison.
I love listening to these types of videos while falling asleep
Same but for car rides
This is the premium content I subscribe for.
Soren may not be the best in this game, but he's also my favourite character in the entire series and he's at least functional so you can bet your butt that I'm always going to get him to Endgame
I like that a lot!
WOOOOOO
Some day I'll do a character analysis video with you based on the characters themselves. That's my fever dream, anyway.
It'd be so easy to go overboard though, easier than going overboard talking about their statistics and uses as gameplay units.