Challenger Deep (Day 325)

It's possible I'll play a little Vagrant Story tonight, but what's on my mind for the moment is this Fire Emblem game. Now that I've made a little progress (I'm on mission 3x), I feel like I can start making some choices on characters I'm going to use in my final roster. I think I've already pretty much decided that I'm going to use all of the pegasus knights the game throws at me. I've always really liked the class thematically and functionally. I enjoy hard-hitting highly mobile units that nevertheless drop to a stray breeze and pegasus knights fit that archetype to a T.

At the moment I only have Palla and Catria, but I've heard of a third by the name of Est and of course there is Marth's fiancee Caeda who has already appeared in the prologue missions. I can only assume she'll eventually become a permanent fixture of the squad. I'd also really like to use Cecille as my only cavalier/paladin. This has traditionally been one of my least favorite classes, but I do tend to find female paladins more interesting. Marth himself is a requirement but I'm sure I'd be using him regardless--and there's also the character the game tasks you with creating. I named her Brea and made her a myrmidon. It has proven thus far to be a decent choice because myrmidons have so far been in relatively short supply. Then again, I haven't come across any mercenaries either.

I'd like to have a good fighter or two because I've always really enjoyed axe-wielding characters because they hit ridiculously hard and can take some punishment. However, I find Cord and Bord to be incredibly boring. Barst from Shadow Dragon evidently returns for this game, so I'll probably end up using him. It does make me wish I could have made my "main" character a fighter though, but unfortunately that option is not available for female characters and I was unaware of that at the time. I should have known though, considering there has never been a female fighter in the history of the series--nor a male pegasus knight, for that matter.

As for archers, I think I'm definitely going to use Warren, mostly because he has the unusual Hunter class. Although similar classes would resurface in future games, that exact class has not been reused since. Hunters evidently promote to mounted archers, which is nothing really all that special when you consider nomads from the GBA games and bow knights from the Gamecube/Wii ones--but it's still pretty cool. Warren also seems to have a bit higher strength than his standard archer counterparts.

New Mystery of the Emblem is supposed to be pretty short at only 24 chapters, but considering the amount of time I've spent on just the first three, I can't imagine I'll get through it at less than 20 hours. I could easily be wrong here, but I guess we'll find out.