Sacrifice: James Mission 10
Though what a difference James forces make. By which I mean what a difference Rhinoks make. Seriously, they make a joke of the mission.
Though speaking of heroes, a couple of points to note; even though Gamel and Faestus both died in the previous mission, Faestus is still here, and Sirocco isn't here. That latter point might not seem notable to you, reader, but the first time I did a mono-James run she abandoned me partway through the campaign and then showed up here for no obvious reason. That's what I was alluding to about showing off something regarding her a while back: I was expecting her to be here, just like that time. I'm frankly baffled.
Faestus, I suspect this has to do with him wigging out and not firing missiles in prior missions. There's a Persephone version of Faestus and a Pyro version, and in those prior missions his weapon behavior was the Persephone version. I suspect the game doesn't properly distinguish between the two and ended up giving me the Persephone version (With the Pyro version's skin...) in prior missions and when he died the game went 'well, the Persephone version may be dead but that has nothing to do with the Pyro version'.
Anyway, on a different note, I went into the initial pre-credits bit to show off: we unlocked Mithras instead of Marduk, this time. Also the pre-credits visuals are different, too, with a different line-up of units and all. I'm spoiling it partially now: you get Marduk unlocked for siding with an 'evil' god and Mithras for siding with a 'good' god.
On some other notes; first of all, I showed off that, yes, Marduk has an Altar. It's... weirdly easy to find, too. The first time I found it, I was just curious what the blatant island off in the distance was about. It hadn't crossed my mind the game might simply be hiding Wizard Altars. It's not actually possible to get over there that I'm aware, so it's not exploitable, but I'm genuinely confused as to why it isn't better hidden. Though this is a good opportunity to point out that you can't order units into the shroud via minimap and you can't order fliers to a point above the abyss; I had to get the camera looking at the island and click on the ground to send a unit out there.
Second of all, I'm fairly confident that Marduk in specific or campaign AI wizards in general are cheating on mana generation. You can see toward the end of the video that Marduk is somehow constantly spamming spells, including tossing out Death just before he's killed again, even though he's got absolutely no mana generation in the area. Given how often I see AI wizards fail to die to Desecration for prolonged periods even when they have no Manahoars and aren't near a Manalith, I strongly suspect AI wizards in the campaign just plain generate mana from nothing at all times, with Marduk just being set up in a manner that makes it particularly likely to blatantly show up.
Thirdly, I abyssed Marduk; the wiki claims that if a wizard falls into the abyss, they'll be teleported to their Altar instead of killed. I'd been wondering what would happen to Marduk given that his Altar is off on that isolated island. I was half-expecting him to be teleported to that island -and now that I'm thinking about it, maybe he was and just used Teleport to get back? Now I'm wishing I'd kept a Gargoyle posted on his Altar the whole way. Oh well, something to maybe test another day.
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Anyway, James retrospective.
I can kind of see what James is meant to be, but the way he comes out in practice is odd.
I described Charnel as 'the mario' god, and it's worth clarifying that I meant that in the positive sense of the dynamic and versatile option that alternatives beat out in specialized areas, ensuring everything has a place. James is more the negative manifestation of this archetype; his stuff tends to be bland and generic, relying on raw stats to carry the day and so tending to be beat out by more min-maxed options. His spells have very few interesting things to give them unique niches, and collectively this means James is fairly predictable and narrow in his strategies.
Part of this comes back to his core statline. +20% HP isn't really that great; the value is uncomfortably low, enough so there's plenty of situations it doesn't meaningfully matter that James units are supposed to be tough, healing and regeneration mechanics reduce how valuable it is (James units would be overall tougher if they instead had +15% to all resistances but base HP, with their HP regeneration not taking longer to reach max health and healing effects actually going farther instead of needing more to get back to full health), and a detail I haven't mentioned because it doesn't matter to the campaign is that when you're Converting units you get experience from the process based on how much HP the unit has. So in multiplayer, if a James player and a Charnel player have a few skirmishes where souls keep shuttling back and forth, the Charnel player will be pulling ahead on experience!
Then there's a non-explicit point: in the same way that Charnel usually has somewhat above-average damage, James usually has somewhat below-average damage. This directly offsets the HP advantage, making it even more problematic how minor James' HP advantage actually is, and it intersects awkwardly with the game's tendency toward ranged blobs murdering each other from afar. After all, it's pretty routine, whether micromanaged or not, for ranged groups to end up with a fair amount of overkill damage on individual targets anyway.
This isn't a fully consistent point, thankfully, but that leads directly into the issue of the highly uneven quality of James' units. The Icarus is the best melee flier at being a melee flier, with its inexplicable advantage against spell damage backed by being unusually lethal for a melee flier, whereas the Taurock is difficult to justify in no small part because its damage is godawful.
Spells-wise, I already touched on this point but it bears repeating that James is very limited when it comes to what he can actually do with his spells, especially considering awkward points like his idea of a stun/slow spell is one that actually hitting a wizard with is gifting them souls. The main thing in James' favor in this regard is that he's surprisingly lethal with his spell damage, but this has two problems: first of all, two of the gods we haven't covered yet are better than James at killing things with their wizard. Second of all, James' damage spells tend to be slow/awkward/obviously telegraphed. In theory, Bore should be able to instantly turn a match in your favor by wiping a large portion of the enemy's soul stocks. In practice, actual human opponents are going to notice it. Rock is slow and prone to catching itself on terrain. Erupt gives several seconds of warning and isn't even that lethal unless something happens to be abyssed. Etc.
Given James' 'bad manifestation of the mario archetype' nature, it's also not surprising I can't really talk about strategy as far as his overall functionality. The core statline is pretty clearly shooting for a straightforward scenario of James struggling to force confrontations with his enemies but tending to win when a confrontation does occur, but this is not only undermined by his tendency toward inferior damage but even if it weren't that's barely a strategy at all in a more tactically-focused game like Sacrifice. In a grand strategy game, that kind of strategy can be distinctive and interesting, but Sacrifice is not such a one.
He's got some very solid units and spells, don't get me wrong, but that just means rainbow builds should consider splashing in some James stuff.
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Plot-wise, the only new stuff to really talk about is... well, more than you might think.
I hate the James ending. The full fury of my hate must wait until we've gotten to another god's ending, but for the moment I'm going to point out that Persephone's fate went completely unaddressed in this ending. Is she dead? Did she manage to win her fight and we just haven't heard from her? Nobody cares, apparently, never mind she's the only other god left.
Another contextual element that I'm instead skipping the waiting on: remember how, back when we sided with Charnel, we got asked to make a choice during the end bit? Notice how that didn't happen with James? Thing is, every non-James ending has the game basically asking if you want to stay with the god or leave, with it being pretty clear that leaving is on the idea that the god is reprehensible and you're not putting up with their crap. The James ending is the only one where Eldred just randomly automatically decides to stick it out with James, as if the developers couldn't imagine that Eldred might dislike James' methods or even have some other reason to want to leave. No possibility of Eldred deciding he still feels guilty about Marduk showing up and thus leaving? No scenario in which Eldred decides he can't stand the sight of another Marduk-ravaged world? No possibility of Eldred feeling that subjecting the Glebe to him is awful, given his checkered past?
Really?
And even without comparing the James path to other gods' paths per se... why is Eldred suddenly lying to James and telling him to have Mithras celebrated as a hero for his truthtelling? This is especially bad given that James' route is the one where James has a confrontation with Charnel on the basis of Mithras' lies, but it's just confusing in general, especially when we do go back to cross-route comparisons -Eldred never feels the need to have Mithras celebrated as a hero in any other ending. Why this one?
It's pretty clear the James ending is meant to be And They All Lived Happily Ever After, a good and happy route in which Eldred has moved past his demons, both metaphorical and literal, but I consider it inarguably the worst of the endings. It fails thematically, it fails logically, it outright involves Eldred suddenly breaking character for no reason, and there's other reasons to hate it I'll be getting into down the line.
But okay. We've seen what happens when Eldred joins forces with the darkness to fight evil, and we've seen what happens when Eldred, uh, goes with the hick of a god? The spirit of Earthworm Jim's past? Whatever, point is...
... what if he played with fire instead?
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