FE3H - Maddening Blue Lions Playthrough
It has been a while since I've had the chance to really write about anything, either VGC related, or FE playthrough related, so I figured that this would be a good time to do another playthrough log. This time with the newly released Maddening mode for FE3H.
Since I've been pretty caught up with other things over the last few months, with the final courses and exams for my accounting program, along with daily mobile game upkeep, and watching events such as EVO, or Pokemon Worlds, or various Smash Ultimate tournaments, or catching up with watching the Kusogrande Invitational, and stuff, I haven't even gotten around to finishing playing the Golden Deer route or Blue Lions when Maddening was released.
I was about 1/3 the way into a NG+ run with the Deer and decided to finish that up first, but finishing the run took way longer than I thought it would due to the added effort to fill out all available supports by the end of that run. Now that we finally got that out of the way, I can focus my attention for this Maddening run. The goal is for me to get this run done in time for Sword and Shield's release. We'll see how that goes.
Starting the Game
This run will be nothing too fancy. Just beat the game on a fresh file playing Maddening Blue Lions. No DLC, not like I've purchased it yet anyways. And I guess I'm not going to go hard out of my way to try to set up grind weapon levels or something against an enemy on a heal tile or something, since that's pretty boring to do.
I'll keep track of my usages of Divine Pulse and full resets in maps. I'm not going to keep track of times I reset while doing stuff in the monastery. I will probably reset on failed certification exams, but will not be resetting to try to roll for "Greats" when doing stuff like faculty training. I'll probably write some brief notes with regards to anything noteworthy that I get from free time, eg. character recruitments, statue upgrades, class promotions etc.
Basically, I'll be writing more details for main chapter maps and paralogue maps. And will write brief notes if anything noteworthy happens with regards to exploration or any auxilery battles I participate in.
Now, let's get started:
Prologue - An Inevitable Encounter
The most difficult part for me is always deciding to choose a name for my protagonist character. After a while I just decided to go with an older anime character and just go with Rikka. I suppose Byleth has amazing latent powers residing in her, so that's close enough to being chuunibyou.
Battle: A Skirmish at Dawn
Anyways, this chapter isn't much to note about. The enemies are definitely stronger than in Hard mode, and there's a few more of them, but that's about it. By using combat arts more liberally, and patching myself up with vulneraries it's not too difficult to handle the enemies, even if the sword users can 2x hit my units. Once Jeralt starts moving, I just let him take the initiative vs Kostas and the last few thieves then clean up. While there were a few 60-70% attacks that I was throwing around, I hit what counted and the battle went smoothly.
Resets: 0 (0)
Roster:
Rikka - L2
Dimitri - L2
Chapter 1 - Three Houses
Monastery Exploration
We go through the intro story stuff then start the blue wave. There isn't too much flexiblity of what can be done at this point so I just go through with it. I suppose I can talk about my tentative plans for recruitment:
Characters I will try to put some effort into recruiting:
Lysithea
Bernadetta
Dorothea
Lorenz
Marianne
Petra
Caspar
This list is mostly tentative aside from putting in some effort to get Lysithea as soon as I can. I will likely try to recruit a few more characters if I can if it isn't too far out of my way to set Rikka up to do so. Also, I don't think I'm actually going to try to get Lysithea powered up to try to erase the Death Knight in the chapters that he shows up, because that does take a considerable amount of effort to go for, but it's not completely off the table as a thing to consider.
Battle: Rivalry of the Houses
The other students in this map all have Dex +4 as a skill. They are also all pretty durable which can be an issue when I am only allowed to bring 5 units to the map. Normally I'd bring my healer along with me, but I decided that Mercedes, having no offensive magic spells, would be a bit of a liability to bring. So the three units I brought along were Dedue, Annette, and Felix.
Dedue's personal skill giving +4 defense allowed him to safely stand in range of some of the opponents. Felix's personal skill giving him a free +5 atk, coupled with rally str from Annette provided some much needed firepower for the team to be able to quickly take out opponents on my turn once they approached. I took the time to rearrange equipment, taking both bows with me and loading up on the vulneraries, then started the fight.
Overall, this map went smoothly. I opened the chapter by getting Lorenz to attack Dedue and Dorothea to attack into Felix, then took them out as well as Ignatz on the following turn. I then headed left, got Hilda and Claude to start moving by standing Dedue in range, and cleared out the left side. The Black Eagles went on the move once Hanneman was taken out and things went mostly as planned. There were a number of instances of 3% critical risk all throughout the chapter but fortunately none of them happened.
I nearly threw the game near the end of the map where I got a bit too aggressive and put Rikka in a dangerous spot where she was exposed to being 2x hit and KO'd by Edelgard, but managed to save myself by standing Annette unarmed in Edelgard's way so that Annette could tank an axe to the face and stop myself from taking a casualty.
Resets: 0 (0)
Roster:
Rikka - L3
Dimitri - L3
Felix - L2
Dedue - L1
Annette - L1
Mercedes - L1
Ashe - L1
Sylvain - L1
Ingrid - L1
