Board 8 > Gauging interest in a Fire Emblem ranking topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

Sorry for the hiatus, I'm a bit undecided on one entry onto this list and have been kind of distracted by, ironically, playing Fire Emblem games <_< Just did a Thracia playthrough (for some reason) and now I'm doing New Mystery Lunatic for fun and profit. And stress. Man I forgot how brutal this mode is. I'll be starting the underrated units list soon, I swear

---

Alright, after an awful lot of delaying and dragging my feet, here we go, the top ten underrated units list! The criteria for this list is simple. Sort of. It features underrated units. They're not necessarily listed in order of most underrated or best overall, just whatever order I felt would make sense to discuss them in. And depending on where you get your Fire Emblem discussion fix, some of these units may not seem underrated to you at all. They're all units that I've seen a fair amount of low opinions of, but they're all appreciated in some quarters for the same reasons I like them. The nature of an under/overrated list will probably always work out that way. So, let's get started.

10. Vanessa (Sacred Stones)

Ah, early game pegasus knights with shaky strength and defense, always a good place to look for "controversy". Vanessa generally gets some credit for flying over the mountain in chapter 2 to rescue Ross, but tends to be written off beyond that in some quarters, considered at most a unit that might be useful to LTC players but too weak to matter for more ordinary playthroughs. She's commonly compared to Tana and found lacking by people who love Tana's unusually high strength growth (45%) for a pegasus knight, especially since Tana is also faster than her. Very slightly at high levels, but hey, that's a thing people tend to note. How fair is this comparison though? Is Tana existing enough to write off Vanessa forever?

Well, obviously not or she wouldn't be on this list. First off we'll address the flight part. Chapter 2 is obviously a good flight map given the need to save Ross from himself and visit the south village for a Pure Water (itself an often underrated item). In chapter 4, Vanessa is the only way to get to the south east area quickly, either rescue dropping someone or fighting the enemies there herself (something she can do on her own fairly well, needing only a Vulnerary to win out) and possibly recruiting Lute a bit early if you're inclined to actually use her. It also has plenty of forests that are nice to ignore. In chapter 5, the combination of flight and canto lets her get to villages faster than anyone else and ignoring the walls gives more flexibility in positioning. Chapter 6 brings some rough terrain at first, though beyond that she's not doing too much (killing the boss before the spider can eat people is very easy). Chapter 7, of course, is a roundabout map where the roundabout part can be entirely skipped by just dropping people across the river, allowing for a quick clear that doesn't even cost you the Energy Ring if you don't want it to. These are all things that are useful in any playthrough that's attempting to move somewhat quickly, not just carefully planned out LTCs, and no amount of Tana (and Cormag) joining later can ever take it away.

After chapter 8 you get the route split, and Tana will join in time for the next flight utility (she joins later in Ephraim chapter 9, but that map isn't flight friendly). Does this hurt Vanessa at all? Not really. You generally want multiple fliers anyway on a lot of maps, and even when there's only one needed it's not like Vanessa can't do it, especially given something I'll be talking about later. On Eirika's route, chapter 9 has water to bypass for a village and possibly to set up an early boss kill, and you might need both to clear the path safely. Chapter 10 can be cleared super fast via flight, albeit it's very unreliable due to needing to dodge ballistas while rescuing people (this requires both flyers as well). Chapter 12 has a winding path that can be bypassed and Mogalls that are ideal for a pegasus knight to face, while chapter 13 can require some rescue-canto trickery for a smooth first few turns (as long as you clear the ballistas turn 1, it's all safe). Over on Ephraim's route chapter 11, the infamous Phantom Ship, has a lot of water for flyers to hang out over (though neither pegasus can likely challenge the oddly powerful boss) and 13 is pretty much built on using flight to skip over all the rivers.

Post route split you of course have the desert of chapter 15 where you need all the flight you can get, then chapter 17 is very flight friendly, especially if you're not warp skipping it, chapter 20 can be mostly ignored with a mixture of warp and flight and the final chapter has some room for flight tricks as well. So there's an awful lot of maps throughout the game where flight is extremely useful, and even if Vanessa was the worst flyer possible she'd still have value. And this isn't even getting into standard mounted unit stuff like rescue chains and canto-trade strats that pegasus knights can do just as well as any other class!

Then, on the topic of combat, Vanessa is not actually as bad as people often suggest. While she's pretty frail, she can still take a hit from basically anything ever, and she'll double almost any enemy in the game. She 2RKOs most enemies, which isn't great when guys like Seth exist but it's still respectable, especially early on when only Seth is outright deleting everything he fights. Her high speed makes her a good candidate for the first Energy Ring, as she gets essentially +4 damage out of it and her movement means she can get into a lot of combat (the Angelic Robe is another thing she's a good candidate for, as it can turn her durability from sketchy to above average on its own and again, she can get a lot of combat exposure if you want her to). Most importantly for the purposes of this conversation though is how she stacks up against the competition that supposedly outclasses her so hard in the minds of many. How does she stack up to Tana when the latter finally joins?

Turns out...pretty well, actually! A level 8 Vanessa is almost identical to base level Tana, with a 2 speed gap in her favour being the only meaningful difference. And level 8 is a pretty low estimate if you're actually using Vanessa for combat, especially on Ephraim route where Tana is out of action until the end of chapter 9 instead of joining right at the start. Chances are you're looking at something more like a level 10 Vanessa, who has +1HP, strength and defense and +3 speed, on top of some other minor leads. And since they both join with the same lance rank of D, Vanessa will be a ways ahead in this category, already at C and likely close to B by this point, giving her access to the killer lance (always a favourite of the low strength, high speed pegasus knight class) and axereaver.

And because of the level lead, Vanessa can promote at pretty much any time with the chapter 8 Elysian Whip. Wyvern Knight brings an extra 3HP, 2 strength/speed and 1 def/res, a huge four points of constitution which is always welcome on units that get weighed down by everything (it hurts rescue a bit but there's not that many good units who are big enough to not be rescuable any more, pretty much j

Flight is always useful, and the idea that you can only have one pegasus knight is an outdated mode of thinking. In games where Peg Knight or Cavalier is a good class, you should want to have as many Peg Knights and Cavaliers as possible, yeah.


---

Having just a moment ago finished New Mystery Chapter 7, where everything is a forest and the only way to get all the treasure before the thieves run away is to reclass everyone to Dracoknight and let the Altean Air Force run amok...yes. Very yes.

---

Yeah, Vanessa has a lot of advantages on Tana. I like Tana more but it's not for any gameplay-related reason; she needs a lot of babying to catch up to a Vanessa you've already invested in.

I've no good guesses for the clue except maybe Alec and Naoise? They definitely get overshadowed by, uh, every other horseman in FE4.

---

Those two were definitely on my mind as contenders for this list, though whether they made it in the end or not remains to be seen (to you guys at least. Obviously I already know). But this example is a bit more modern than that.

---

I don't use a lot of pegasus knights in general, since many of those who join early tend to be as durable as wet paper. Maybe I should give them another chance next time.

---

There is a non-zero chance you'll be seeing more than just one pegasus knight on this list <_<

---

Jumping back one game on this one. These two? When an entry is two units, do you refer to it as "one" because it's one entry or "two" because it's two units? These are the questions that keep me up at night...

9. Erk/Lucius (Fire Emblem/Blazing Sword/Blazing Blade)

Once again we're talking units who often get overshadowed by a later counterpart, though in this case the counterpart joins later than Tana did and is also actually conclusively superior once he does join. I'm also not including Canas on this list despite thinking he's probably the best of the three (and my personal favourite of the bunch) because he tends to get a fair bit of credit, albeit for the wrong reasons I think. His good qualities get underrated but people give him a lot of praise for stuff that doesn't matter much, which might make him an interesting dude to talk about (definitely have never seen a video on this subject, no sir) but not exactly underrated.

So, Erk and Lucius. Commonly perceived as living in the shadows of the mighty Pent, it's not unheard of to have people say there's no point to using them, especially Erk (presumably because he's the same class, which shouldn't matter but seems to be a thing a lot of people harp on), when the mage general is going to show up later anyway. And make no mistake, in this case Pent really does kick their asses once he shows up. Lucius might be able to match his speed (if you don't promote him early) or staff rank (if you do) but not both, neither is likely to match his attack and neither approaches his durability even before factoring in his automatic support with Louise that gives him -3 damage taken and negates crit rates from almost everything. Pent is pretty nutty once he finally shows up and few units can match his performance at that time.

That said, it's not until chapter 26 that Pent joins the team. There's only ten real chapters left in the game at that point, and that's counting chapter 30 where you get to deploy a whopping one character besides Hector. Lucius has effectively 11 chapters (ignoring his join map because he never gets to fight on it and ignoring 19xx because who unlocks that shit?) before Pent even joins, and Erk has another 4 before Lucius joins. These guys literally double the availability of Pent and have as much or more time before he joins as he does in his whole existence. So the idea that Pent outclasses them ends up being a pretty weak argument, because no matter how good Pent is he can't help you in maps he's not playable on and it doesn't make sense to not deploy good units on maps they can help you on just because they might not be as high a priority to deploy later on (this would make a lot of Jagens bad units because they fall off, and make every single cavalier in Binding Blade "bad" because Perceval shits on them all in the end even though they're some very useful units).

Instead, the question to ask is how good they are on their own merits before Pent joins, and also whether they're good enough to still be deployed anyway once he does show up. And the answer is...they're pretty respectable! Erk joins on a map full of cavaliers that Marcus doesn't always double and hits hard enough to combine for a kill on most of them with a silver lance hit, and he doubles the knight near his starting position for most of its health, possibly all depending on exactly how much HP he spawned with (and if Erk got any levels in Lyn Mode). He can fairly realistically reach the point where he's doubling weighed down enemies and borderline on ORKOing some of them, and when enemy AS drops after chapter 20 he doubles all kinds of things, and is particularly nice against the bulky wyvern riders, though naturally his durability isn't good. Lucius is a similar story with a later joining time, able to double slower enemies and chip in fairly well during a stretch where few units are ORKOing, and his speed grows very fast (though his magic is sadly held back by light tomes being rather weak) to the point that he'll be doubling almost every unpromoted enemy.

Another nice thing about these two is the always overlooked benefit of promoting early. Erk gets a huge durability increase that can actually let him survive two hits from some enemies, opening up his enemy phase utility significantly and bringing healing to the table. It's entirely reasonable for Erk to reach C rank by the time Pent joins, maybe even B if you really focus on it. Giving a solid combat unit staffs is always a big boost in versatility, and that holds even truer for Lucius who gets to have C rank staffs automatically as a Bishop, giving him immediate access to the Restore and Barrier staffs that make Genesis (23x) a bit less hellish, helped by his high resistance meaning he has less need to fear being a victim of the same things he's trying to save others from. Going from early combat unit to late game staffbot that can chip in some solid offense here and there is pretty good.

Even in the late game, while they can't compare to Pent, you start to have enough deployment slots to be more free with who you deploy, and even a promoted magic user who has fallen behind a bit on levels can always find a use as a staff user, especially on maps like Night of Farewells (28x) and Cog of Destiny (29) that throw a ton of magical threats at you that require staffs to handle effectively, with the latter also giving high resistance units a solid combat niche at luring enemies in with their high resistance. While they can't do much damage to a lot of the strongest enemies, they don't take much either, making them very helpful at keeping those nasty Valkyries away from your frailer units in a pinch.

So overall, these two units are able to contribute quite a lot over the course of a FE7 playthrough. You'll usually probably only be able to find room for one of them (or Canas) but whichever one you pick will be pretty consistently good. You could make a solid argument they're actually better units overall than Pent simply due to the massive availability gap in their favour, even. Don't let the fact that they'll be outperformed later on distract you from how solid they can be before that time ever comes.

Up next: A bit of a reversal of fortune as we move on to a unit often seen as terrible and overshadowed by an *earlier* counterpart instead of a later one, despite being a solid choice that tends to be even more worth deploying than their actual quality as a unit would suggest

---

I think the biggest problem with them isn't their competition with Pent, it's their competition with Canas and Priscilla for the Guiding Rings. Canas gets +4 AS and staves on promotion, and Priscilla gains another level in staff rank and some offense (even if it's pretty weak). Ironically, Pent may be what holds them back since he might kill the monk with the third Guiding Ring before you can steal it.

My guess is Niime. I don't know if she's really considered overshadowed by Raigh, but the rest of it fits.

---

Isadora?
---

It's probably not optimal play but I've always tended towards more magic users rather than less. Catch me outside fielding Erk, Lucius, and Canas (and benching Pent for no good reason).

Tanith is my guess. Definitely overshadowed by Marcia despite having one of the most interesting abilities in the series.

---

My mind went to Tanith as well, but I figured that might just be my Tellius bias bleeding in.

---

Some pretty good guesses here, but none of them quite got it.

8. Cecilia (Binding Blade)

Talk about making a bad first impression. Cecilia does get one moment to shine in the story early on when her and Perceval show up to drive Narcian away, but then your next run in with her is seeing her get annihilated by Zephiel, and then the next map she becomes playable...and it's a desert map. And she's a Valkyrie, so she has pretty limited movement. And because she joins automatically she's one of the two units at the bottom of the deployment order (along with Sophia), which matters because there are status staffs on this map and Binding Blade enemy AI is for some reason obsessed with targeting people who are low on the deployment order. So Cecilia's big debut limits her mobility, normally a strength of hers, locks her into being a prime sleep/silence target and just for kicks, it's a fog of war map with several enemy types hanging around that destroy her (Heroes and most Mercs double and 2HKO her, and Manaketes OHKO her). And if you're coming from the prequel you're aware her fancy title of mage general used to belong to Pent, who is not the easiest guy to escape the shadow of (as my last entry covered, and I didn't actually realize until now that I had "overshadowed by Pent" twice in a row on this list). Not the best way to introduce yourself, huh?

Making matters worse, people love to compare her to Clarine, or more specifically, a hypothetical Clarine who has somehow gained a ton of levels in a game where staff users level up very slowly. This theoretical 20/1 Clarine matches Cecilia's magic and is twice as fast with way more luck, though her physical durability is actually still a fair bit worse. Something about an already promoted unit joining halfway through the game with stats that barely break into the double digits just doesn't quite feel right, does it?

With all that being said, Cecilia is still fairly good on her own merits. The Valkyrie class, with its 8 move, canto and access to tomes and staffs, remains a great one as always, and is probably the ideal class to be in if your stats aren't great (besides dancer, but that goes without saying). She also brings good weapon ranks to the table. Her A in anima gives her immediate access to Aircalibur and Bolting, the former being a great chip damage option against Binding Blade's nasty wyverns (she has 35 attacks against them at base, which reduces unpromoted ones to single digit HP and does 2/3s or so to the promoted ones, and remains legit damage even to the end of the game even if she never gains a point of magic) and the latter being a fun tool to play with when you need to find some extra damage. C staffs brings the always valuable Restore, as well as some other cool stuff like Barrier and Hammerne. It's reasonable for her to eventually hit B rank for Physic access as well. Won't happen right away but you should be able to get several chapters out of it even if you're playing pretty fast.

So Cecilia turns out to be a very useful unit overall. While she obviously doesn't dominate in any way, she brings great chip against one of the nastiest enemy types, accurate and still decent chip against every other physical enemy type, a good staff rank for healing and other utility, and the usual rescue utility a mounted unit in GBA FE provides. With Binding Blade having pretty big maps where the objective is always seize, carrying people like Roy and your dancer along is very helpful for speeding things up and letting you keep as many of your good units in range to contribute as possible, and it doesn't hurt matters that most of Cecilia's other uses aren't hindered by the stat penalties of rescuing. You're keeping her away from enemy attacks anyway so not much changes if she needs to keep Roy in her backpack for a few turns.

Now, one extra thing that's nice about Cecilia is that she provides all of this for no investment. Binding Blade has limited promotion items, and a strong incentive to not use all of them because you can sell them in order to fund your eventual trip to the Boots shop in chapter 21 (and possibly to grab the other stat boosters that are available in infinite quantities too, if that's your thing). And staff users gain experience quite slowly, and staff rank is even worse to increase due to all staffs only giving one Wexp per use, unlike most other games where some give more, often quite a bit more. Converting a magic user who doesn't start as a staff user, like Lugh, into a user of higher level staffs is impossible without grinding the arena or reinforcements or something, but the ones who start as staff users level up so slowly and then also struggle to build their weapon ranks to be more effective attackers. So Cecilia showing up and doing a bit of everything on the magical side while also being mounted in a game where you usually want to be deploying tons of horses is very welcome, and means almost every playthrough will feature a team that can make room for what she has to offer. Even if she's not strictly great, just good, she ends up being an easy choice to plan around using anyway because you'll almost never have units to replicate everything she does without needing more deployment slots than just the one.

And while it's mostly tangential since there's no law saying you can't use multiple units of the same class, I still feel like going back to the comparison with Clarine that gets brought up a lot. With how slow staff users gain experience, Clarine is unlikely to be any higher than 12/1 or so by the time Cecilia joins. At this point, she's actually losing durability big time, around 4-5 HP, 2 defense and 1 resistance behind. And while she does double a lot of enemies, her E rank in anima means she's stuck to Fire tomes while Cecilia can use the stronger Elfire. Clarine has only around 13 attack to Cecilia's 19. Against a 1 Res enemy that Clarine doubles but Cecilia doesn't, it's only a 6 damage difference in Clarine's favour. Against a 5 Res enemy, it's only 2 damage. Clarine's offense is better, but not actually by as much as you might expect, and she's not even close against wyverns/pegasus knights due to lacking Aircalibur. Clarine will eventually pull farther ahead offensively as she gets the rank to use Thunder, but it just goes to show that there's more to look at for determining offensive performance than just whether someone doubles or not.

It took me a while to really pay attention to Cecilia, as at first I was one of the people who tended to always promote Clarine myself and I didn't give this new Valkyrie much of a second look. But then more recently I realized that wasn't really necessary. I could save myself a Guiding Ring to promote someone else or for the Boots shop, and Cecilia would cover 90% of what I would have otherwise done with Clarine anyway. Cecilia may not look impressive

Eda?
---

Oh no wait its Saias obviously
---

Indeed

7. Saias (Thracia 776)

Saias (or Cyas if you prefer the older translation) is a pretty strange unit in the grand scheme of things, given that he joins you for one chapter but then leaves if you recruit another character that you will always get unless you warpskip, even though there's no compelling reason for why he would stick around in one case but no the other. And the alternative is Ced, who comes with the broken as all hell Forseti tome, the same staff rank, only one less magic and movement star, and two fewer leadership stars. Unlike some of the other units on this list who are arguably or clearly superior to their counterparts, Saias is legitimately inferior. There's no reason to even keep him instead of Ced. So naturally, people don't use him and he gets relegated to the dustbin of history as a unit no one cares about. Which is funny, because he's actually good, and in practice...he's not inferior to Ced by as much as you might think.

So the benefits of Saias are simple - 18 magic and A rank staffs. He also has three leadership stars for +9 hit/avoid to all units (it's five stars for +15 in chapter 23 for some reason) but that's just gravy. This topic has covered how broken staffs are in Thracia already, but to summarize again - they have infinite range and status staffs work on anyone with less magic than the user. And you can get a fuck ton of the things. You can get literally six Warp staffs from 21x on top of the ones available earlier, 14x and 18 both allow you to farm some Rewarps if you want, there's a fair number of Sleeps and Silences to go around and even a Berserk you can easily get in the process of ignoring 22s infamous bullshit (Thief staff the boss' Master Lance, warp a flyer to auto-capture him because he no longer has a 1 or 2 range weapon, warp Leif, take his Blizzard and Berserk, seize, hooray), on top of some more stuff you can pick up in 24 and 24x if you want. With the power to teleport people wherever you want (useful in a game that doesn't let you decide where to deploy people despite having maps blatantly designed around putting people in the right spots for turn 1...) and shut down almost any enemy instantly with a permanent status effect, staff rank is the single most important stat in late game Thracia.

So Saias brings the best thing to be good at in the entire game. While he's hardly unique at the point he joins, he's still yet another A rank staff user for maps where you need a lot of them to proceed smoothly, and his high magic is quite nice. He can target two of the final chapter bosses with status effects despite the magic boosting floor they stand on by default, and with Ensorcel he can get another two, leaving only the two who cannot be realistically dealt with in this manner (one of those he can theoretically target, but he needs to be in a boss room for the +10 magic and have an Ensorcel boost, which is dubious to set up when you could just hit her with Blizzard instead). Many staff users can reach the 15 magic to Sleep the warrior boss, but the 18 needed to Sleep the sniper is a bit tougher (notably Ced actually misses this one at base, though he has high magic growth for some reason), and she's important to sleep because it lets you capture her for a free win that bypasses her usual Miracle bullshit. A lot of the generic dark mages in the boss rooms will have enough magic that Saias can Silence/Sleep/Berserk them but many others can't. And he has 10+ skill so his staffs never miss, always a boon in these staff spam heavy chapters.

So...dude is good. I don't think it's really that much of a secret to be honest, but he still qualifies for this list just for the novelty of being a legitimately great unit who dominates the section of the game he exists for who nonetheless is almost never even used beyond his join chapter (where he's free to use even if you get Ced after).

Going back to the comparison with Ced for a moment, while Saias is obviously the inferior of the two, it's not really by *that* much. Ced has stupidly good combat, but you don't actually need to fight much of anything in the last three chapters, and what you do is mostly either unimpressive or untouchable for him anyway (Reidrick). Chapter 24 only requires two stretches of real fighting, and one of them is set up pretty much perfectly for Galzus to handle it as soon as he's recruited (the other can be handled by any competent Nosferatu user, which Ced is [why does he have A in light magic?] but he's not unique). Chapter 24x has the doom room in the middle that ideally you warp two or three people into, not just one, to take out all the status users quickly, meaning Ced won't even get targeted much, and several units can handle this duty (Linoan, Sara, Asbel, Galzus all come to mind). The final map can literally be beaten without attacking a single non-generic enemy, though Ced is quite nice if you fight Veld conventionally.

So ultimately Ced's monstrous combat isn't even *that* big a deal. It's still nice to have just in case and he can replicate pretty much everything else Saais does, but in the end his value is also mostly in staff utility rather than combat, no matter how hilarious his stats may look for the latter.

And of course, if you're playing for the lowest possible turn count then Saias is your man because it costs a turn to recruit Ced and he doesn't save you a turn, which is kind of a fun thing to note.

Up next: A unit who doesn't get overshadowed so much as have their possible performance ignored because a lot of people just plain don't like them and don't want to know, and a bit of a rant on how a certain game mechanic is not the great balancer people like to say it is

---

Mila's Turnwheel/Divine Pulse for the mechanic?

---

I'm thinking of a mechanic that is commonly described as "making it so there's no bad units" or "making everyone viable" and so on. Which is actually kind of a prevailing theme across the series in some ways.

---

Panthera posted...

I'm thinking of a mechanic that is commonly described as "making it so there's no bad units" or "making everyone viable" and so on. Which is actually kind of a prevailing theme across the series in some ways.

This has to be reclassing in some form, right?
---

Reclassing is an example that fits what I mean about a prevailing theme, but it's not the one I'm thinking of

---

Could be BEXP. At least the FE10 implementation with guaranteed 3 stat-ups.

---

Sounds like Deen but I don't know what the mechanic would be if it isn't the turnwheel. The mechanic sounds like pair up or class change but I'm not coming up with anyone from the newer games that fits the rest of the hint.

---

Micaiah?
---

Ooh BEXP is a good one. Maybe it's Meg's time to shine!

---

I was thinking Meg or Makalov but I have no idea if they are good if you use them.
---

Meg and FE10 Makalov are definitely not good enough if they're used to make this list.

Micaiah's a solid guess, though.

---

Sounds like you need to go out of your way to keep Saias.

---

Raka_Putra posted...

Sounds like you need to go out of your way to keep Saias.

Yeah. The event to get Ced triggers if you have a unit wait close enough to the seize point, even if they don't actually end their turn there (whether due to dancing or rescue or whatever). So you have to either kill the boss without having set foot inside that fairly large area first, or get Ced to show up but then don't talk to him with Leif, which also means you have to rescue him off the gate before you'll be able to seize. You'll pretty much never keep Saias unless you're deliberately trying to (or Ced dies, but he has to get hit a bunch of times at 1% hit rates for that to happen)

---

It's funny, the only reason he can die there is because Thracia's minimum hit rate is 1%. In any other game, Forseti would make him unkillable.

---

Well, the right guess did sort of get made, just not quite the right game

6. Makalov (Path of Radiance)

Hated by many for being an obnoxious loser, Makalov makes a poor first impression in gameplay as well with his poor base stats and being locked to swords. You're liable to kill him by mistake if you're not aware of his presence lurking in the fog, ready to suicide into you on enemy phase. And then the first map he's really available for is a desert, always a sad place for mounted units. With stats so far behind the curve and being stuck with the worst melee weapon type in the game until promotion, Makalov seems pretty awful. And in most games...he would be.

But Path of Radiance is a little bit silly and has this mechanic called bonus experience (bexp for short) that you get for beating maps, particularly beating them quickly and possibly completing other side objectives or challenges. You can dump it into whoever you want and unlike in the sequel Radiant Dawn, it produces perfectly normal level ups. What this means is simple...by a certain point in the game, base stats are surprisingly unimportant because a bexp dump can make anyone strong, leading to the scenario where being in a good class is the most important thing because if you can have your choice of strong units, better to have a strong, say, cavalier than a strong myrmidon, right? And Makalov is, of course, a cavalier. In a game with combat canto. Where cavaliers, upon promotion, get to pick which weapon type they want to learn to use, and for some reason, iron, steel and hand axes are all E rank, meaning even a sword cav can suddenly be an axe user the moment they promote. Fair and balanced!

So what this means is that Makalov can very quickly turn into your typical strong Paladin who kills stuff and never dies and has amazing mobility. He's not the highest priority for bexp when units like Jill exist, or Astrid with her great bexp efficiency thanks to Paragon (people tend to realize Astrid is good more than Makalov, which is funny, albeit unsurprising, given that she starts off even worse than he does), but you still should have enough to quickly get him to the point where he's a real help, and from there it's not long until promotion and he becomes yet another solid mounted unit in Horse Emblem. If you're playing the Japan-only Maniac Mode he takes a big hit due to bexp rewards being cut in half, meaning his status as a lower priority choice than arguably every other mounted unit (except maybe Titania, who is likely too high level to be worth the cost at this point) is a bigger problem, but in Hard you're swimming in bexp and there's plenty to go around as long as you don't go spending it on bad units.

Speaking of bad units, let's talk about bexp. People often argue that bexp means that units in PoR can't be that bad because you can always give them bexp to make them stronger. This is a common argument throughout the series - you hear it for stat boosters in general, pair up bots in Awakening/Fates, damn near everything in Genealogy, etc. Most people tend to dismiss this argument when it comes to stat boosters ("give Boots to General" is practically a meme in some places), but even some of those people will then turn around and say that scrolls in Thracia mean everyone is good. Problem is...all of these arguments fall apart under scrutiny.

The issue with all these resources you get to spend on making your units better is that you can't just look at the effects they have on a unit in a vacuum, you have to consider the competition each unit has for access to these things. Path of Radiance bonus experience is a good example to focus on (not just because I'm trying to keep this topical, I swear) because while it's true that you can give it to whoever you want, it's also true that some units give you a better return on it than others. No amount of bexp will ever give Rolf the ability to counter at 1 range, but a bexp dump can allow Marcia or Jill to fly across rough terrain and just ignore map design by killing things that were supposed to be hard to reach. Giving bexp to Rolf is actually taking it away from those other good units, meaning if anything the existence of bexp makes bad units even worse because they have less claim to making good use of it and are therefore even farther behind than they would be if someone like Makalov couldn't just use it to bypass his bad bases and become a better unit in the process than the bad units could ever be.

What Path of Radiance bonus experience really does is make being in a good class be even more important than usual. If your class allows you to have great mobility and access to 1-2 range for proper enemy phase actions, you're basically guaranteed to be a good unit unless not just your bases but also your growths are horrible to the point that you just cannot ever attain the stats necessary to be able to do anything. And there are very few units in the entire series that even approach that kind of ineptitude. If your class forces you to have low mobility and 1 range or 2 range lock forever, you're pretty much bad by default unless your stats are utterly phenomenal (Stefan) because giving you the bexp needed to become great at combat would mean not giving it to another unit who also becomes great at combat but does it with much better mobility and flexibility in weapon choice/range.

This kind of logic works most games in the series too. Sure, resources can be used to make a weak unit more functional, but they can also turn already good units into powerhouses, and that usually makes more of a difference. If I have a defensive stat booster and my most durable unit is 1 point of defense short of being able to tank an entire group of enemies that is otherwise hugely bothersome, giving it to that already bulky unit allows them to trivialize a tough fight, whereas giving it to a frailer unit does very little to help.

This applies to star shards in New Mystery, which could make a bad unit able to survive but are better spent on letting good units have the extra oomph they need to hit important benchmarks for a given map. It applies to scrolls in Thracia, which can turn weak units into strong ones over time but are essential to put on your best units due to their crit-negating properties and will also result in those units capping out stats even faster, meaning all it really does is emphasize things like PCC, skills and bases because scrolls can fix growths but they can't change certain innate properties. It applies to all kinds of stuff in Genealogy that can make some random foot unit better but can also improve the performance of people that can actually reach the enemies. These kinds of optional resources can be used to improve bad units for the purpose of entertainment, and that's obviously a fine way to use them, but from the perspective of discussing ho

That reminds me a lot of the old arguments about SSBM, where some people would try to claim that items were a character balancing feature that would let low tier characters compete with high tier ones. But realistically, high tier characters are mostly the fastest ones, so they can actually just reach items faster than a low tier character, meaning items just make Fox and crew even better!

And yeah, Makalov is definitely a "don't care if he's good" unit for me, but it makes sense that BEXP could redeem him.

---

Hell Fox even has a (minimal commitment) reflector to ensure that in most matchups, he can use items against you freely but you have to be very wary of doing the same in return

---

Society may be kind of sort of shutting down for a while, but this topic isn't. I mean, I need *something* to do that isn't trying to figure out how to deal with New Mystery chapter 19 on Lunatic without resorting to cheese strats, right? Might as well talk some more underrated units!

5. Shanna (Binding Blade)

Or Thany if you like the old translation better for some reason

You could copy paste like half the Vanessa write up here and have it apply, especially if you edit out the names <_<

Anyway, much like her Sacred Stones successor, Shanna gets a bad rep in some quarters for her unpleasant looking base HP, strength and defense, along with poor growths in all those areas. Like pretty much all GBA pegasus knights she gets some flack for low constitution resulting in her being weighed down even by iron lances, though as usual this comes with the bonus of being able to rescue some bigger dudes...though granted there aren't many good ones in this game. As usual, I think most people are generally aware that flight makes her super useful for faster playthroughs but many tend to dismiss that as only relevant to a tiny percentage of players who plan everything out, an idea I'll come back to later in this write up.

First off, we'll talk combat. Shanna is actually not that bad at first. She survives a hit from almost any non-bow user and her ability to either double with a slim lance or attack with an iron lance (or double with it against slower enemies like soldiers) lets her chip in reasonably well. She's not great, but few people are in early Binding Blade with its unintentionally buffed hard mode enemies. She's only one point of strength behind base level Lance, who rarely seems to get the same kind of criticism even though his lower speed makes him a bit worse offensively. She does enough damage to combine for kills with one of your good units on many enemies in her first two maps, and by chapter 4 she's one of the many units that needs to gang bang a cavalier to actually kill it, except she has better accuracy for finishing off low health ones with a slim lance and can go up on the northern cliffs to attack from tiles other units can't. Starting in chapter 6 the enemy stats get back down to where they're supposed to be and her offense is noticeably better against anything but high defense enemies, and she's particularly solid against mages.

Her big combat advantage comes when you get the Elysian Whip in chapter 8. Lots of people hate promoting too early, but it's so often a good idea, and Shanna is one of the biggest examples possible and probably the number one thing that makes her interesting to talk about. Her biggest problems are durability and attack power, and extra levels don't salvage those much for her. But the promotion to Falcoknight? +6 HP, +2 Strength, +2 Defense, as well as +2 Skill/Speed/Res and +1 Con and Move. This is the equivalent of 14 levels of HP growth, 7 levels of strength growth and 19 levels of defense growth, in addition to the other bonuses. This is an utterly gigantic upgrade that instantly buffs her combat to good, especially as she gets an extra lance rank out of it as well that might even be enough to get her to A for silver lance if you've been using her a lot. And we're not even getting into the best part!

One of the reasons Shanna gets so overlooked for combat is that starting chapter 9, you enter the stretch of Binding Blade known as the Western Isles arc, named for the location it takes place in. Lasting until chapter 12/13, depending on how you want to look at it, one of the noteworthy things about it is that it features a ton of axe users. While lances are normally a great weapon type in Fire Emblem, being locked to them against axe users in FE6, where weapon hit stats are low, is extremely annoying. Unpromoted Shanna is stuck doing sketchy damage (weapon triangle disadvantage is -2 damage essentially when you double) at shaky hit rates while facing uncomfortable hit rates in return (not even the weapon triangle can make steel axes accurate in this game, but it's still more than you'd like). On the flipside, promoted Shanna can grab an iron sword and be borderline invincible, using weapon triangle advantage to face true hit rates often in the single digits while 2RKOing everything (and no one ORKOs with crits in this stretch, so this is great) with amazing accuracy. She's even durable enough to survive two hits from many enemy types, and if you gave her the Angelic Robe earlier that includes the countless steel axe fighters. This is a legitimately great unit even on combat alone.

Now granted, she'll fall off eventually, but that's fine. If you don't promote Shanna she just doesn't get much experience in the Western Isles and is thus trash when you move on, if you do, she'll gain enough experience to hold up as a sort of backup combat unit for most of the game, though as time passes she'll start focusing more and more on just pure flight utility. For the cost of a single promotion item that you don't need for anything else (there's three available, so you can always promote her and Milady and still have one left for one of the other two if you want) you get a unit that is a genuine game changer for a few maps, who also remains quite helpful for a while to come.

And this has all been ignoring her ability to fly! I've been over flight utility enough in this topic to not need to go in depth, but I'll still provide a few examples. She can utterly break chapter 5 by dropping a unit over the mountains in a place that the AI movement order doesn't allow anyone to attack if you go through the gate for the somewhat unreliable but very quick clear. She's the best choice by far to collect the right side villages in chapter 7, since she doesn't even need to face attacks if you move the right way. She can let you skip most of 8x by flying people across the gap. In chapter 9 she can drop someone across the water on turn 1, allowing you to boost someone like Rutger several turns ahead so he can go wreck everything. In chapter 11A she can drop Rutger over a wall to bait a bunch of enemies, clearing an easier path for the group that goes through the north route, and/or she can travel over the walls to help collecting all the villages. Beyond that flight utility starts to be split between multiple units, but it remains great in plenty of maps, notably the entire Ilia route and chapter 21 with its reinforcement zone gimmick that flight ignores entirely.

So, Shanna is good. Like, really really good. Her combat is passable early on and you need to use pretty much everyone to get the job done so it's not like giving her kills costs you anything, and she quickly becomes good against specific enemy types. An early promotion turns her into a borderline god for a short while, and then she helps out for the rest of the

Panthera posted...

Up next: I've talked a lot about units being seen as overshadowed, but is it possible to be overshadowed by...yourself?

Haven't played FE6 so I can't say for sure but my mind immediately jumped to Marcus. Definitely feels like a FE6/FE7 or FE9/FE10 situation where they get all the praise heaped on them in one game but we're talking about the other one here. otoh just had a fe6 drop so maybe that hurts his chances here.

---

Maybe one of the Male avatars or F!Kris
---

Time for yet another pegasus knight! Albeit this time one that doesn't have rescue shenanigans...

4. Caeda (New Mystery of the Emblem)

A year or two after being the best unit in the game, Caeda returns to look...rather dubious to many at first glance. Her already lacking strength and durability now come up against even stronger enemies on FE12's brutal Lunatic difficulty, and her vaunted Wing Spear, though unchanged, is no longer effective against 70% of the game. She joins a bit later on, the fourth prologue map and then after chapter 4 in the main game as opposed to right from the start in Shadow Dragon, and her long term performance looks a bit sketchier this time now that enemies start reaching speeds that her main two classes, dracoknight and paladin, can no longer double much earlier than they used to (it's as early as chapter 15 that dracoknight's 23 speed cap stops doubling a lot of major targets, and by 17 it doubles nothing. Paladin falls to the same fate soon after, though it retains the ability to double generals). The greater variety of enemy types has brought axe users to more than just the early game and seemingly fewer targets for any individual forged effective weapon, her old standby to ignore strength issues. And on Lunatic there's no Warp, and even on lower difficulties it comes much later, erasing her old warpskip assassination niche. Sounds pretty rough!

When people talk about Caeda in New Mystery, it's pretty much always to note how much she's fallen from the greatness she once knew. And it's certainly true that she's taken quite the fall. Pretty hard to live up to being the *checks notes* seventh best unit in the series! But in reality, Caeda is actually quite good once again.

Starting off in the prologue, she's one of your better units. Able to double everything except bosses and thieves (and even those she gets most of with a single speed level, which is likely to happen with her literal 95% speed growth) and 2RKO, she's one of the best units to take on the fast and strong sword users you face, as well as the mages, and is notably one of the few units that can really take hits from the Levin Sword thieves Lunatic adds to prologue 8. She's likely to gain a couple of levels just from her strong performance here. Upon rejoining for chapter 5 she's less dominant, but still has some very good qualities. She ORKOs cavaliers (and knights, but they're covered by the Arrowspate boss) with her Wing Spear, which only Palla and Kris are likely to also be capable of. Her trend of doubling almost everything (except for thieves due to their speed rapidly getting too high for the unpromoted speed cap, and later promoted caps, to handle) will continue for quite a while, which is once again a fairly special quality.

Her weaknesses, while more significant than in Shadow Dragon, are still fairly easy to at least partially patch over. You get a lot of stat boosters in this game, especially since beating Lunatic once unlocks the ability to buy a few extras on subsequent playthroughs, and a single Seraph Robe basically guarantees she'll never get OHKO'd by anything (except bows, but you know better than to leave her in range of them) in a game where it's often very difficult for most units to avoid getting 2HKO'd. The Robes and Energy Drops are also somewhat less contested than the Speedwings that damn near everyone else wants a piece of, making it easier to find room on your team for her than on yet another unit with speed issues (read: nearly every unit that joins from like chapter 8 onward, and plenty from before as well). Forged effective weapons remain strong...actually I think people often overlook just how good they still are. The Ridersbane and Hammer are less valuable, but anti-dragon weapons like the Dragonpike fill most of the gap. And the Wing Spear itself is still a great weapon in maps like 5, 6, 8, 15, 19 and 20.

Long term Caeda can definitely run into some issues due to all the "normal" lance classes having questionable speed caps and her being unlikely to naturally attain any sort of rank in other weapon types, although if you're willing to sacrifice dracoknight's physical superiority you can potentially alleviate this for a while with the Elysian Whip allowing you to have falcoknght and its 26 speed cap instead, as well as sword access which is not a bad thing in a game with the Lady Sword and its 13 might E rank goodness for female units. But she still holds up fairly well on the doubling front as a Paladin, particularly if you have her holding the Starsphere (anyone can benefit from it, but a lot of units can't double as much as she can with it, nor do the strength/defense boosts mean quite as much to them, so she's a fairly good choice for it, though there's definitely stiff competition and it will vary from map to map) which gets her up to 27 speed, good to keep doubling through chapter 18 and even occasionally in 19 when an enemy rolls low on speed. Forged Wing Spear becomes a strong asset even just for chip alone for a while, and then once horses vanish dragons come back to be Dragonpiked.

That said, she can definitely have some questions about what she's doing with her life in the last few chapters. This isn't unique to her though, every unit that specializes in lances runs into this issue. And many others, honestly. A game where the traditionally fast Hero class has speed issues with a cap of 26 is a game that's pretty rough on a lot of units. Caeda can at least do the usual "pick sniper/swordmaster, eat an arms scroll, have free silvers with a good speed cap" thing if need be. It's hardly unique to her and she's actually a bit worse at it than many units because those classes can make even medium speed units like Sirius fast but her low strength gets exposed a bit, but she's not a wasted slot by endgame or anything. And Paladin is actually still a solid endgame class anyway, it can't handle Wyverns or Earth Dragons (or the final boss, or chapter 20 boss) but performs well against everything else. It feels wrong for such a speed focused unit to not double, but it's effective nonetheless.

Whew, a whole pegasus knight review without even talking about flight utility! Free reclassing brings flight to the people enough to not be a huge point in favour of anyone specific, although being able to do it unpromoted is still a nice boon for female units, especially ones with actual lance ranks like Caeda has. It makes her a very helpful unit in chapter 7, as she doesn't need to eat a Master Seal to be able to join the Altean Air Force and cross the forest to strike down thieves. Oh damn it, ended up talking about flight utility anyway. Even with free reclassing and no rescue command despite every map being seize, it just somehow always finds a way to matter. She's also the only lance-focused dracoknight who can Again+Rescue cheese the c

That's got to be Niime.
---

Does it though? Does it?

Well...yes, it does.

3. Niime (Binding Blade)

Niime is perhaps the most minmaxed character in the entire series. Non-existent physical durability, no growths to speak of to get mileage out of the whopping two levels she has left to gain, and just barely enough speed to get by, Niime also brings a massive 21 magic to back up her A rank in dark and, most importantly, A rank in staffs. While she might die to a stiff breeze, she also has magic (and thus, staff range) that no other high staff rank unit will ever touch. Catching up to her in magic requires Ellen to hit 20/17, Saul to level cap and Clarine/Cecilia to laugh at you for thinking they could ever even come vaguely close. The magic attackers can potentially reach this number, but staff rank goes up so slowly that they'll probably never even reach B, let alone A. This leaves Niime as the undeniable champ of staff utility in late game Binding Blade.

And staff utility is very good in Binding Blade. It may not be as potent as Thracia, but you still have a generous staff range formula of (Mag/2) + 5 giving Niime a whopping 15 range, you have Warp and a Hammerne staff to repair it with to get up to 13 uses if need be, Physic is buyable by the time she joins and you get two Sleep staffs along with a Silence and Berserk, and their accuracy is pretty good in the hands of a high magic unit. With Warp, you can skip entire chapters. With Rescue you can solve all kinds of problems (for example, having a flyer go out to attack the ballista island in chapter 23 then rescuing them away out of range of all the other shit up there). Status staffs can shut down a lot of threats and notably can trivialize the otherwise nasty end of chapter 23 by just shutting off the enemy status staffs or having the manakete/snipers berserked into killing everyone. And obviously healing large amounts of HP at long ranges is always nice, especially once the Boots shop has come along and your units are often spread out pretty far.

While staff utility is obviously her calling card and is also obviously something that tends to get underrated by players who haven't yet seen just how potent it can be, Niime is also slept on a bit as a combat unit. Her base 15 AS with Flux is enough to double a fair number of enemies on her first two maps on the Ilia route (Sacae is a bit tougher but fuck Sacae) and there's little she doesn't 2HKO with her huge 29 attack targeting resistance. She can take a hit from most unpromoted enemies and heal it all back with Nosferatu, which she has 14 AS with, enough to not get doubled and even double a few very slow enemies. Some people even hold onto the Body Ring and an Angelic Robe (even a Speedwing sometimes!) to crank the Nostanking thing up to 11, which I personally have never bothered with but it definitely does work. Even without doing much Nosferatu work, Niime can ORKO here and there on player phase or dish out huge chip damage to promoted enemies, and her accuracy is actually surprisingly respectable thanks to her 20 skill (and 16 luck, to some extent). She can also take magic hits without much concern, though even she struggles to do any damage in return.

And there's actually a pretty good payoff to making sure to use her for combat! The S rank dark tome, Apocalypse, is a very useful tool in her endgame arsenal. Not only does it pack a massive 18 might, it also provides +5 magic when equipped. Against the low resistance wyvern riders and manaketes, it has essentially 59 might, enough to OHKO anything except Jahn. Against everything else, it's still a 23 might tome coming from 21 magic, the very definition of meaty chip damage. And that +5 magic bonus has a nice added effect of counting towards your staff use. So long as you remember to have Apocalypse equipped, Niime has effectively 26 magic for the purposes of calculating staff range, status staff accuracy and healing. Those three extra tiles of reach can really help out for letting you pull off a specific Warp strat or sleeping a given enemy from safety, and the added healing/status accuracy is certainly not unwelcome.

Much like Cecilia earlier, Niime is a unit that's very easy to fit on your team, except in this case it's not that you're unlikely to have someone who perfectly replicates what she does, it's that you literally will not ever have anyone that brings what she does to the table (without a massive arena grinding spree, at least), and what she brings to the table is really damn good. Niime joins too late to be one of the best units in the game, but she's definitely one of your best options for the entire time she exists. The low durability that turns people away from her is a real weakness, but it's nowhere near enough to outweigh all the benefits of using her.

Up next: A unit that would probably be bad in a lot of other games, but exists in one that provides certain tools and access to something very unfair that makes them one of the few units worth seriously caring about in their game

---

Salem?

---

Mewtwo59 posted...

Salem?

Salem only fits the first part- there's plenty of good units in Thracia. Perhaps its Ricken, and the tool in question is Rescue, but I'm not sure.
---

Alternatively, maybe Gaiden Lukas?
---

First thought was an archer, maybe Midir or FE10 Shinon. But they don't fit the last part of the clue that well.

---

I'm not sure FE10 Shinon is very underrated, either.

---

Hbthebattle posted...

Salem only fits the first part- there's plenty of good units in Thracia.

That's true, but Panthera has said multiple times how he considers Thracia to be warp-skip central, so I could see him only considering staffbots and one or two other guys as the only ones worth caring about.


---

Hey, an entry that wasn't guessed at all! Either I'm a genius for giving such a tricky clue, or I'm an idiot because the point of clues is for people to figure them out.

2. Sumia (Awakening)

Oh look, another pegasus knight. Sensing a trend here...but like Caeda, at least it's not another "flying rescue is good, yo" write up!

Sumia does follow in the footsteps of the other pegasus knights on this list in one way though, in that her base strength and durability are pretty bad, and her growths in those areas aren't impressive either. She's OHKO'd by a few (non-archer!) enemies on her join map even, which is pretty rough, though the majority don't quite pull it off and no one except Robin/Frederick can survive two hits anyway so she's only a bit sub-par in this regard. Her big advantage, of course, is speed. Sumia is just one or two points short of doubling almost everything, and her high growth will allow her to gradually get better at it over the course of the game.

Now, a pegasus knight who doesn't even naturally double half the map sounds pretty bad. And in most games, it would be (for combat, at least). But this is Awakening. I have a phrase I like to use for several games and Awakening is where it seems to apply the most - "This isn't GBA Fire Emblem". I think I've referenced this concept already actually, probably in the Robin write up. I feel like a lot of people have a tendency to approach every game in the series like it's the GBA games, where the stat screen shows you all a unit is currently capable of and there's no skills or outside tools to help. Many games have more than that though, and Awakening is definitely one of them. By GBA FE standards Sumia is hot garbage at combat, but there's a lot more to the story than that...

First off, pair up is incredibly strong. I talked about this one for sure with Robin so I won't go into too much detail here, but basically your combat units should *always* be paired up. The bonuses are too strong to ever pass up. It might sound nice in theory to have more units available to act in case you need them, but in practice that essentially never happens outside the Tiki paralogue. And since you'll always be pairing up, Sumia can very easily get the speed she needs to double right away - Chrom lets her double everything but mercenaries for example, and Frederick gets her to double a few enemies while also patching up her strength/defense. Fred is a great combat unit at this point so it's hardly free but you can still manage it sometimes, or use Kellam temporarily for the defense/strength (though sadly no speed, but Sumia can cover that on her own quickly enough) until Frederick falls off for combat and can switch to being Sumia's backpack full time. Keeping the right pair up partner on Sumia gives her good offense and average durability right away, and with so many other units having speed issues it's helpful to have one that doesn't need as much help in this regard from speedwings and specific speed boosting pair ups. And dual strikes, once you build her support rank with someone (Chrom/Frederick are the only real "optimal" choices) can patch up low attack quite nicely.

Second of all, you of course have tonics in this game. They're easily affordable if you're careful with your cash and can really help out. Sumia is obviously not the only beneficiary of this, though she is above average at benefiting from it because her high speed means a strength tonic is effectively +4 damage for her against most enemies instead of just +2 for slower units. I think tonics, in both Awakening and Fates, are among the most underutilized tools in the series. Hell, I forget to use them as much as I should too!

Of course, this is Awakening where funneling almost everything into Robin is ideal, so a unit needs a compelling reason to really be fed kills to carve out a niche for themselves, and luckily, Sumia has just that by virtue of getting eventual access to Galeforce, the second best skill in the game (behind Veteran). The ability to move again after killing an enemy just breaks so many potentially tough situations in half, and of course since Falcoknights have staffs in this game, once you get Galeforce you can reclass away from Dark Flier and combine Galeforce kills pushing you forward with the Rescue staff for some serious cheese. Sumia's magic isn't great but she can still help out a little in this regard, enough to be of use.

You'll need to spend some time as a Dark Flier to get Galeforce, which can sound a bit sketchy on a unit with low magic, but fortunately most enemies have low resistance and dual strikes are a thing, which results in Dark Flier Sumia surprisingly having respectable offense with tomes (ideally thunder to push the crit rate as high as possible). Her ideal pair up partners are Chrom (if you don't do female Robin with him) and Frederick (if you do), both of whom can bring multiple kinds of effective weapons to the table for big damage against specific enemy types, and during the Valm arc a large percentage of the enemies you fight are weak to Beast Killers or anti-armor weapons. You can often have a decent chance of ORKOing an enemy that you do single digit damage to per hit just by virtue of a high crit rate (from your support bonus + thunder tomes having some) and effective weapon dual strikes triggering. Once again, this kind of thing would be utter trash in most games in the series, but Awakening is not most games.

Sumia also had the added benefit of being the only non-Robin option for getting Galeforce passed down to Lucina without copious grinding (which is not really a thing on Lunatic, at least not without DLC, and which I generally ignore anyway since grinding makes everything trivial), which requires some commitment but is definitely doable (I've had both Robin *and* Sumia with Galeforce by the end of chapter 13 when it matters. Took a lot of careful focus on it so I wouldn't recommend it to most people, but it shows you how much leeway you have to get it on just Sumia if need be), which is always convenient. And of course her class gives her eventual Rally Move and Rally Speed, which are great tools to have. Pegasus knight just never seems to stop being godlike, does it? Even when it can't chauffeur people around it still manages to find a way.

All of this adds up to Sumia not only being one of the few units with a seriously valuable payoff to training them, but also a pretty strong unit (by non-Robin standards) along the way. It's kind of funny that people have a tendency to put a bit too much weight on growth rates and not enough on base stats, but then one of the units that often gets maligned for her mostly crappy base stats...is one where the base stats themselves don't tell anywhere near the whole story.

Up next: The final entry covers two units that

Alec and Noishe.

---

Yeah, probably Alec and Naoise. Every other list has ended with FE4 at the top, why stop now?
---

Hey, the worst chapters list didn't!

<_<

---

Yeah, probably Alec and Noishe. If we're convinced it's FE4 I think that Larcei and Ulster could fit, but if anything they're overrated.
---