I promise I will finish this game at some point.

Stage 14

This is the first “defense” stage, where you just have to survive for a set number of turns. It’s tough, though — there are a lot of enemies, a bunch of ballista that restrict your movements, and the initial wave of enemies contains a boss that can easily take out a character.

After a number of failures I used a cheap tactic someone told me on the discord, shown in the screenshot above: you take three horsemen and remove all their weapons. Mounted units can’t be captured, and as long as you heal any damage the horsemen take, most of the enemies will not be able to get anywhere near you and the 10 turns will run out. Mounted units can be used to recruit Homer and visit 3 houses.

Stage 14x

In this stage you have to lead the villagers through the mountain pass up to the exit. Each villager you save gives you a nice S drink (which lets you deploy a fatigued character). The enemies are sorcerors with rewarp staffs and pegasus knights, meaning they can reach you pretty easily and it’s hard to block them. This is another stage where I relied on a walkthrough strategy — the Japanese walkthrough recommended staying right at the beginning until all the reinforcements are exhausted (which only takes 20 turns). This worked, and then I headed up through the pass. It’s still tough though because of the bosses:

The magician boss has a range 10 Fenrir spell, and Eichmann has a Killer Axe. I tried a bunch of things to beat this but could never do it without someone getting killed either by Fenrir or the Axe.

Eventually though I just set someone on a forest who could survive a Fenrir shot and ate all 5 uses of it, using a couple of healing potions (a few shots missed).

I still did not have anyone who could use a Warp staff at this point. This may seem surprising but if you don’t know how important Warp staffs are to the game it’s not all that hard to believe — healing staffs don’t give you that much experience, and if you are switching between Nana and Safy like I did, it spreads that XP around.

Stage 15

It is so nice to get a breather here; this stage is quite easy (so easy I guess I didn’t take a screenshot). Basically all you have to do is recruit one of the NPCs and then get Leif to a church, and the stage is done. The only reason I had to do it more than once is that the NPC kept moving away from Leif (and the first time I didn’t know bandits would destroy the church).

I chose the left/A route.

Stage 16A

I feel like it’s a waste of space to say “another tough map” because they’re all tough. The first challenge is here, where Ilios has a very long range magic attack that can one shot many of your guys, and also very high movement. What eventually worked for me was to move Karin up into the sea (she has a high magic so isn’t an attractive target for Ilios). Make sure Ilios can’t target anyone he can kill, and then once all the other mounted units charge after your characters, Ilios will retreat far behind them, leaving things open for Karin to recruit him.

Next is this situation. The enemies do not move unless you attack the boss, and there are 5 ballista to deal with. Possibly I could have used Ilios’ 10 range spell; I don’t entirely remember why I didn’t do that. In any case, the only working strategy I could come up with was to waste all the ballista’s shots, making sure that my guys weren’t in range of more than one (or most two) at a time. Once this is done, the fact that the enemies don’t move at all makes it very easy to take them out, and Kempf himself is no problem.

I killed Conomoor, and then took the castle.

Stage 17A

This is the first map I warp skipped.

I used Repair on the sleep staff and then put Moore to sleep. With him out of the way it was much easier to get my fliers up to the houses at the top to grab the Warp and Rescue staffs, and then capture Moore for the additional goodies. I then visited the church to recruit Sara, put Misha to sleep so I could capture her, and then used two Warp staff uses on Asbel (to kill the boss) and Leif. Saias did make one appearance and was able to use his sleep staff on Finn, but that didn’t matter.

Stage 18

This has the most ridiculous recruitable character in the series; I just ignored it entirely — I also didn’t bother with the chests (other than unlocking the Nova Book). Ilios was surprisingly hardy and able to take on the armor knights.

The boss has this stupid “big shield” ability that blocks all damage randomly. I had to reset once because of this but Asbel succeeded in blowing him away the second time.

I have 7 more chapters plus 2 gaidens, so given my pace so far we’re probably still looking at another two weeks on this game.