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Chapter 2: The Magical Village
A small change we made in Project Exile is the placement of portraits on the little word map exposition sections. It took us a while to figure out how to place them, and when we did, it became apparent that it was kinda under-utilized in the original game. Some world map sections would have none at all, other would have them in mostly nonsensical places, and a few had portraits awkwardly sliding around through map transitions.
So portraits positions were changed a bit to reflect factions, who's traveling with who, their current locations, and so on.
Or like, how Leif is looking at the village of Ys right now, instead of to the left. It's all very minor, but hey, it's all about the details.
Once again, we get a sneak peek at the boss. Augustus is the High Priest, which is.... close enough. Bucks is Leif's promotion, a Prince.
We are fighting Bucks, the fucking buck-toothed prince.
When suddenly, springing forth from the watery depths, mages! Pirates on this map have been replaced by mages, so we're gonna see... a whole lot of 1~2 range reinforcements... 
And the three Hunters have been replaced by Soldiers, who will be our prime Capture targets.
See, there are only 4 unmounted classes in the game who can use lances, and 3 of them have immense Con, so you can be sure that I'm going to grab every single Soldier that stands in my way, and pry their spears from their cold not-dead hands.
I don't think I've ever had any difficulty saving the villages here, even in like, Super Thracia. The enemies are slow to come out, lose some more turns from swimming to the shore and are all easy to chokepoint.
Then again, I've never had the pleasure of having all Pirates replaced by fliers, either.
To avoid getting all these dudes stuck in the middle of the sea (or in the mountains, in later chapters), I've turned on the “All Terrain Movement” option of the randomizer, which makes sure any class can walk on any terrain, as long as it's passable, generally with high movement penalties.
It means that yes, riders don't technically need to dismount indoors either, although staying mounted does severely limit their movement.
I believe this is Tanya's first taste of combat.
She's uh... she's Midir. Just a green, generic male bow cavalier. Yawn.
Most of the mages have Fire or Thunder tomes, with occasional Pure Waters and Bridge Keys. There are a few that are carrying Lockpicks, too. I'm not gonna bother capturing most of these guys.
Unless hey, if there's one I can just casually one-shot with Dagdar, I'm not gonna stop myself.
Marty runs up to dances Finn...
… Finn dances back...
And just like that, Marty is closer to the front lines. Aren't dancer trains a beautiful thing?
Though it doesn't really matter, since they all prefer attacking Eyvel, even at the wrong range.
Eyvel certainly appreciates the enemy phase action.
Marty duels one of the remaining mages and gets a very Marty level.
Making good time, and capturing a bunch of guys. This is a pretty chill map so far.
Leif, Finn and Eyvel are going left to recruit Ronan, but not before visiting this village.
Villager portraits were also switched up a little bit in the patch. Thracia has a ton of civilian portraits, yet keeps reusing the same 6 or 7. Like, a good half the villages use [url=
]this lady[/url], so we've spaced them out a bit more and you don't always see the same faces. This dude is the FE5 version of the weapon repairsman in Genealogy of the Holy War.
This... is actually kinda useful. This will allow Eyvel to weaken enemies without doubling (or Master Bow-ing) them.
Also, somewhere before recording this, I seem to have grabbed the wrong savestate, and Marty will need to spend a turn re-applying his Magic Ring. Except he's Dancing every turn, so that may take a while...
On the way to fight the water mages, Orsin gets healed by his bro who... gives us the first staff miss of the LP. Nice.
And now for an actual, non-sarcastic “Nice”.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who misses the “Thanks for pissing off the pirates, guys.” dude. This line's still accusatory, but it does lack a bit of the snark.
In Japanese, his lines roughly translated to something like
quote:
What'd you go and do that (unnecessary thing) for?!
Now all the pirates will come back and kill us all!
What have you done?!
so the snark was definitely an addition by Neonclover, the translator who did the village dialogues in Shaya's translation patch.
Still, “pissing off” doesn't really fit our tone, so the line might need some brainstorming? Our lead playtester, KrashBoomBang, suggested something like “Look who it is, our heroes!” as an opener, which I kinda like. We'll see when we resume doing script revisions.
Anyways, here's a magic trinket.
It's a Necronomicon. Nothing big. Just a bauble we had lyin' around.
We haven't even reached the first swimming mages and there's already three more at the bottom. One of them is carrying a Lockpick.
Up there, Orsin is finally in range of the mages. He's not that great at fighting them, having only 3 Magic. At least he can dodge...?
The support crew is in range, now, so Marty will be dancing for Orsin while he goes back and forth, and Halvan succeeded at doing his one job.
On the left, Leif is going to be luring these Soldiers over for more captures. And Eyvel is just in range of the house of...
Our boy! The most meme-except-kinda-good(?) unit in Thracia: the Mage Killer Resister, the Double Mover, the Man Who Crossed a Continent in One Turn...
… the─oh, he's a mage now. How convenient for the archer with a 55% Magic growth in a game with no Shining Bow. These are some trashy stats, and even trashier weapon ranks, but...
There is potential. First, his offensive (Mag/Skl/Spd) growths are 55/45/55, which is quite decent for a mage. Second, he's got a Sage promotion coming up, which is always great. Third, he's an Astra Pavise mage, why wouldn't I use him?
Besides, I don't know if I'll even get a lot more mages, and Marty is spending his time dancing, so hey, might as well.
Anyways, Ronan is getting closer to the mage action. This is our positionning before enemy phase, with Dagdar blocking the west side, and Orsin luring mages closer.
Can you spot the glaring tactical mistake?
Whoops! 
The balls on this guy, though, to jump right in there at 1 HP to capture a dude.
He gets stabbed a bunch for his bravado, Halvan gets his stuff back and Orsin gets some offensive stats! 
You know you've got a really sad unit when it's hard to tell who's who in the combat forecast.
On the other hand, he's got an absolutely fabulous battle sprite??
I've never seen that palette before. Wtf Kaga, there's a pink mage in Thracia and you can't play as them????
On the other side of the river, after having captured, stripped and released the first soldier, Leif baits the next one in.
… and gets poisoned. Man, I love seeing the slow poison animation every turn, until the end of the map.
The thing about the All Terrain Movement option is that enemies will retreat back into the sea to get a terrain bonus, which is fairly annoying for our accuracy-challenged mages.
So Ronan joins them into the great blue for a marine battle of thunder magic. Or on the shore, at least. This is a nice combat background.
With some help from Eyvel, Leif captures his second mark, gaining Speed!
That's... 2 water mages out of the 12 total that'll join as reinforcements on this map.
Three more show up in the middle, and Orsin's gonna go and harass them a bit, before they reach land.
Wh- again?! I know they say never to trust that 5% Crit on Thunder mages, but come on!
Phew! She barely survived that encounter.
Dagdar is going to take care of the boss hile this is all happening. Capturing directly is out of the question with these hit rates, but at least the boss isn't too threatening either.
Prince Bucks over there doesn't have much aside from his Speed and a 3% chance to recover health with whatever low damage he can land. Prince bases are baaaaad.
“You think you can stand up to Bucks the Beast (born from a life at sea)?”
*tink*
Tanya is going to get experience dealing zero damage to Bucks, boosting her dad as he slowly whittles Bucks down, taking no damage in return.
Okay, so, the next 10 turns or so are going to be my trainee team slowly taking down 9 fucking mages, while Dagdar whittles down a boss that can't hurt him, and Finn goes shopping. If that's all right, I think I'm gonna skip the details and go straight to the highlights:
Mage suppression team:
The mages are really bad at fighting, and always pick the worst targets.
They tend to hide in the river for terrain boosts, so we get to see this cool, rare background a lot.
At some point, I don't fucking care anymore about babying the trainees or capturing for money, and just start murdering them liberally.
That's the end of the mages. They gave a bunch of experience:
More Strength would be nice, but I'm not gonna complain about fixing his accuracy.
Not great, but I do like that Speed.
Bad healer growths! Also what the hell, your Str growth should be 5%!
Great! More Speed!
This is Finn after dancing and this is good. But he needs Skill, a lot.
This is Marty, after dancing. It's... well, it's a Marty level. That poor boy is definitely going to need scrolls, I think. But hey, whenever I obtain some, I can dance-spam him to greatness!
Bucks bullying team:
Bucks refuses to engage Dagdar on his phase. Probably because of the whole “can't hurt him” thing.
He still goes down very quickly. Dagdar takes off 10 of his 22 HP a turn, then decides to trigger a movement star, so...
Yeah, it's a quick wrap.
There was some hesitation as to whether Bucks is sincere about becoming a fisherman in the Japanese version. Because this map and the next kinda set up some of Thracia 776's “shades of grey morality”, Cirosan thought it more appropriate to interpret him as genuine, and expanded upon it in this release quote.
It's a nice and heartwarming moment of humanity that you wouldn't expect out of a FE bandit chapter.. I really like it. 
Finn's commercial endeavors:
The vendor on this map would be tremendously useless in a normal run, but here... well, it's the last vendor we are guaranteed access to (we need additional door keys for the chapter 3 one) until chapter 6.
... This is ominous.
Yeah, I am not taking any chances with randomized fog of war.
In fact, Finn came back later and bought 4 more. Just in case.
We're still getting shittons of money from all those tomes and lockpicks, so by the time we reach ch6, the Manster team should be able to stock up.
Marty is going to go all in on Thunder magic, since he's got a D rank in it. Thunder God Marty, the Dancer.
Ronan is going to be the fire to light our darkness. Marty is hogging all the thunder, so he's going to use Fire magic, since he's got all E ranks anyways. Hopefully he can use our Elfire tomes by uh... chapter 12 or so... at best?
Orsin broke the first weapon on those stupid mages. I'm also selling the Fenrir for money. The odds of getting a dark mage with A Dark are exceedingly low, and that weapon's damage output isn't worth carting around through Manster.
Leif and Marty finally get the rings I said I'd give them. And with that...
Leif destroys another public building, and we're off to the Corsair Isles!
Yeah, it's literally “Pirate Islands” in Japanese, but this is more flavorful. And after that, we're heading to “Kerberos's Gate”, instead of... “Kelbeth”? Wow, that was a missed reference and a half.
Next time:
