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Chapter 8: And Then There Were None
Time for a bandit chapter! In the dark! Not that it's that big of a deal, considering how easy this map is. At least it's not Super Thracia's abomination.
Source is from Ephraim225's SSLP over on the Romhackeria thread. Go check it out, if you're enjoying this Thracia LP, 'cause ST776 is such a wonderful trainwreck. One guy on our server even played Super Thracia with randomization, the madman.
Today, we're bringing along a bunch of scrubs who need to catch up. Orsin will be carrying the Njörun scroll to get some defense, and Shiva the Hezul Scroll for maximum beef. Hicks barely has enough fatigue to come along, and will be doing his usual thing.
I sold a bunch of garbage and now I'm rich!
Off we go. We've got two tiles of visibility, which sucks, and Carrion Callion. I don't get why the Choose Your Legends poll would dare call this precious babu after a rotting carcass. If there needed to be any proof that the CYL poll's names for FE5 are trash, this is it. Also Machyua.
Dorius, “Dorias” in Japanese, is named after Darius the Great (and Augustus/August after Caesar Augustus). We almost called him Darius, but FE Warriors has a Darios. So Dorius is probably the most distinct we could go for. I'm kinda neutral about it, but I can see why it bothers some people that we chose Augustus's original name, but went with a variation for Dorius.
This chapter goes by really fast, by the way.
Callion is... well, he exists. For his level, he has good Con, and decent Str/Spd. Having one extra Mov is nice too. But fuck man, I'm not training a level 1 archer with 3 Skl and no skills.
Halvan lights the place up, and reveals... more bow armors. What is it with this seed and bow armors?
Remember when Finn was Papa Brigand to Leif? How the tables have turned. Leif might be able to one-shot him, nowadays.
Callion, Ronan and Shiva will lure people in, while the fliers just kinda hang around, ready to swoop in.
Another few good lines. It's neat that even with filler bandit chapters like this, Thracia manages to mix things around, with this desperate soldier dad, ready to risk his badge doing shady deals.
Here's Callion's generic combat sprite (which actually somewhat suits his hair color). We won't see it again.
Here's Shiva Wrath-critting. We will see it again.
Not off to the greatest start, there.
Oh! And this is fun! Did you know that generic enemy stats in vanilla Thracia are partially randomized? Did you know that random enemies might have more movement than they should?!
That would have been an embarassing turn 1 reset, but I mean, c'mon, why would you randomize movement in a strategy game? 
Oof. Ronan is definitely feeling the level difference. He's gonna need some catching up before he gets to double things again.
Still, it's good to see this pink lil' guy again. 
There are two sword armors down there. I am not gonna have Shiva equip his Hammer for extreme overkill, because it's inaccurate as balls, and one of the armors has just enough AS to double him.
While he's doing that, Safiya is going to harass this guy who can't move.
And Hicks is gonna do his thing.
If you had any doubts about Shiva's ability to kill armors with a simple Iron Axe, don't.
Marty also tries his hand at defeating his archrival, the Cain to his Abel, the Kieran to his Oscar, the... Kane to his Alba?
He's still the same old. Note, if you too want to play Thracia randomized, that if Marty is left unarmed in the vanilla game, he will go and buy himself a new axe from the nearby family store that invests in the local community, rather than giving his money to Thraciamazon and funding the upper class undermining our democr
But yeah, that's a thing the AI does in this game! However, if the store doesn't sell Marty's weapon type, then he's just going to leave! Thankfully, if you have a flier, you can just go around and pick him up. Marty will auto-recruit when he gets captured, a method of recruitment that barely any website mentions, actually.
My Marty still has his old tome, so I'll just have Orsin talk to him. That's a lot of menu commands available, by the way! The maximum amount the screen can fit is 13 commands, which is just one less than the maximum amount you can have at once. 
Although, that does require a mounted Thief Dancer with Staves, which isn't an actual thing in the vanilla game.
There's an interesting little bit of translation trivia for Marty's first dialogue box. In Japanese, he uses some onomatopeia for sneaking around, which... isn't exactly a thing in English. So instead, here he's just talking to himself, “Patrick Star-style”.
Here's another translation tidbit. There are some embellishments that I think really don't add anything, and are in fact a bit off the mark. This is one of them. Marty never mentions guilt-tripping or Orsin's dad in the JP script, and I'm not sure why he would, considering Orsin spends more time threatening Marty than guilt-tripping him (that'd be what Halvan does).
But Cirosan said he really wanted to establish that connection. And so he did.
Anyways, back to our regularly-scheduled program where Hicks steals everything that isn't nailed down.
The two disarmed armors are going try escaping the map, and Ronan is going to throw fireballs their way until the end of the chapter.
On her end, Safiya is still harassing her bow armor. A couple more hits and he's down.
Meanwhile, Shiva misses a perfectly fine bonk.
Try again!
And now it's the level-up that he misses. Maybe with all that skill he'll stop missing, eventually...
As for Ronan, he heard I want him to double, so he too, wants to double!
Oof. The local stores are pretty damn bad. Damn you, Thraciamazon, for monopolizing resources and forcing local businesses to convert to banditry to pay off their mortg
Don't buy from empty slots, by the way. They give you bad glitchy items that can freeze the game and take up storage space.
There are four enemies left on the field. One can't attack, one can't move, one is this Baron(!), and the last is the boss. I'm pretty sure this is where the victory music started playing.
The Baron of Brigandry isn't too bad, although he's really durable and too fast for Hicks to strip down. Our Leif should be able to crack that nut, though.
He took a bit of a beating and had to pull out the big guns, but he did it.
More Strength!! 
Back to Safiya who uhm... hmm, strange. I thought I remembered this guy being lower on health.
Must be my imagination. There, almost dead!
: His mind's about as sharp as a broken javelin, but he's burly enough to knock folks around, an' that's all that counts around these parts. ...Huh? Wait, yer lookin' to give that fool the thrashing he deserves?! By Ullur's Ulcers, that's fantastic news! We poured our blood an' sweat into clearing the land for this village. Take this medal fer good luck. Earned it years ago for “mare-it-orr-ee-yus service,” whatever that means.
Have I mentioned how most of Ciro's greatest creative writing is in villager dialogues? Also, have you noticed the Crusader swears? We had Holy Heim! in chapter 3, Thunderin' Thrud! in chapter 6, and now this weird one. There is one for all 12 Crusaders, and it's pretty great.
This is another nifty blade which I'm not even sure how I'll be able to make use of it, honestly.
I burn one of my many Torches to see what's up here, since reinforcements have started to appear.
Can't deal effective damage if they have no bows to use.
Anyways, this guy is back at full health. Behold, a very confused Miacis trying very hard to understand what the fuck is going on.
Whatever, mystery infinite health or not, it's more experience for Safiya! She keeps gaining Strength, and it's beautiful.
Have you figured out the mystery yet? The next screenshot will give the answer, so it's now or never.
...
… ...
It was the boss's Fortify staff. 
The healing animation doesn't play if the healer is hidden in FoW.
Rumaigh is very (Ru)meh, with some good loot to grab. If he wasn't standing on a gate, he would be completely trivial to capture.
He also has 3 speed.
So he is still completely trivial. 
If you wait long enough, he will lose patience and jump on his mount, making it impossible to capture him, failing the Gaiden requirement, and making the “Defeat is near” theme start playing.
However, my Rumaigh cannot mount, so all it does is play the music. I still get the Gaiden even if I capture him after this event.
Time to wrap things up with some levels! Some speed would be appreciated. Not every enemy is going to stay at 5 Spd forever, Hicks.
On the other hand, this madman over here can now nab Brave Swords, Master Bows and Battle Axes.
I was expecting a bit more, but hey, magic is magic.
Orsin didn't get a single level this chapter, sadly, but now he can use Steel Lances and start doing decent damage.
: I decided that the next person to walk through my door would get a rare gift, and that's you! See, a merchant said that this ring would make me happy, and it did... for a while. But eventually, being so lucky at everything gets so... boring. Painfully routine, in fact. The ring made me lucky, but I'm nowhere close to happy! Dammit... I got swindled...
Another embellishment of a guy who just said the ring had made him unlucky... even though it's normally a Luck Ring. I like this change.
… wait, now that I think about it, this is in South Thracia, not “the North”. Dammit. The more I go in this LP, the more tiny mistakes I find in the script. I can't take this anymore!
Damn, that went by really fast. That was the last straw. This LP is cancelled!
Cancelled, I tell you!
Before I go and cancel everything forever, here's an example of a sentence that Cirosan completely made up for Leif, which actually adds value to the script because it's a very plausible connection to make. Leif literally just went through the experience of swallowing his pride last chapter, and it relates him to the boss in a way that makes his sudden burst of sympathy and forgiveness more convincing.
Through writing this update, it occurred to me that we managed to have, in the same chapter, both a really good and really poor example of expanding upon existing dialogue in localization. Never mind, this LP is cool and good, actually.
Next time:
I take it back, this is awful.