Sacrifice: James Mission 7

For this mission, James provides...


Jabberrocky
1300 Mana, 4 Souls

The Jabberrocky is James' one other unit that deviates from his statline modifiers, and like the Gargoyle before it the difference is that it has slightly more HP than it should.

In spite of that, the Jabberrocky is godawful. Its base class of unit is already slow, and then it's cursed with James' speed reduction, its special ability is niche at best (Activating it causes it to do nothing for several seconds and then briefly knock everything around it down, as if Erupt's shockwave had hit them), and it's not nearly as lethal or durable as you might hope given those qualities. The sad thing is, in a mono-James army you'll probably be forced to use it anyway to rush artillery and the like, at least when up against eg Pyro forces, as the Taurock isn't going to do the job and Troggs certainly aren't either.

The fact that the Jabberrocky burns 4 souls is a final kick in the teeth. If it were 3 with no other changes, I'd think it was badly flawed but usable. At 4 souls it's a painful soul investment for such poor performance. In this particular mission, I consider it a good thing for the starting Jabberrocky to die, as it's more souls for you to dump into much more useful units.

This is all ignoring the Jabberocky's competition at this level, all of which is better.


Bombardment
1500 Mana

Bombardment is broadly equivalent to Charnel's Plague spell, but minus the plague gimmick. So just straight damage. Unlike Plague, it gives the enemy significant warning and has a massive delay before any of its projectiles start hitting anything, and its damage isn't as high as you might hope given that damage is all it does. The projectiles also arc from your position toward the enemy, so even if the enemy doesn't notice the rocks rising into the air it may well cause them to find you anyway by tracking the projectiles back. The wiki is of the opinion Bombardment is the best of the 'rain' spells, but I honestly can't imagine why -I'd class it as the worst, personally.

In conjunction with how godawful Jabberrockies are, I consider this James level one to avoid from a custom wizard standpoint. Which makes it annoying that in the campaign if you want anything from the prior levels you have to accept this garbage.

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The mission itself is yet another badly-designed James mission.

It's ostensibly an escort mission where you find Mithras and bring him to a destination. In actuality, the game is nice enough to immediately credit you the win if you banish Seerix, and then it's set up so that Seerix's Altar is more convenient than Mithras anyway. Clearing the way for Mithras is the thing to do if you want to challenge yourself, not if you want to play the mission the actually convenient way to play it.

More importantly, you have a woefully inadequate soul count to start with while Seerix has a proper army, and the game 'kindly' addresses this inequality by having a bunch of non-Seerix-aligned Charnel troops attack you right away before you have any chance to get even a second Manalith, with Seerix herself right on their tail with her obnoxious army. Imagine trying to get through this without Gammel! (Or, alternatively, imagine how trivial it would be if I still had Sirocco)

If you manage to get through that initial attack, though, the mission turns into a fairly straightforward 1v1 mission. One that's designed to maximize how irritating it is that James' stuff is slow... when normally you'll be on your third James mission in a row even if you are trying for a rainbow run. I mean, seriously, all the Manafounts are out of the way of the main paths or actively guarded by Seerix's stuff -Teleporting is the main way you get around James' limitations, and this mission is going out of its way to undermine that option.

Seerix herself is also irritating as an enemy in this mission, using a Persephone mass-heal spell constantly, making it so anything you don't outright kill quickly is probably going to bounce back to full health in short order -Seerix herself included. This makes it a pain to peel souls away from her... unless she randomly elects to abandon a field of corpses for no particular reason, as she did in this video.

This mission is also where I confirmed that it's not just fire in particular that bypasses resistances. Deadeye poison got Gammel killed in my first attempt at this mission, just as Pyro burning has killed him on other missions. It's kind of ridiculous how James' route is so generous with good heroes and then is designed so you're pretty constantly fighting units that kill heroes easily.

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Plot-wise, we rescued Mithras from... whatever Charnel was intending to do to him... seriously, why did Charnel kidnap him? What was this supposed to be about?

Having a mission in which we meet Mithras at all is also problematic, given as we saw with the Charnel route the game doesn't try to force a Mithras encounter. It inherently complicates the present-day scenes, as there really ought to be some impact from this not-guaranteed encounter, but since this is mission seven we've already had multiple Mithras/Eldred interactions fail to be affected by this event. And the frustrating thing is there doesn't seem to have been a real purpose to including the mission; it doesn't pay off further down James' line of missions. It doesn't semi-invisibly impact other gods' missions, such as how Charnel 1 is what leads to James 2 and 4 having the Ragman running around. It doesn't show off Mithras as a wizard -he's a playable wizard in multiplayer, albeit one you have to unlock- because not only are you unlikely to bother rescuing him but even when escorting him you won't see anything you don't see in the present-day scenes.

In essence, this mission is shooting itself in the foot narratively, with no possible payoff I can imagine. And it's really obvious that having Mithras in a mission without forcing the topic in all routes is a big problem. I'm genuinely mystified as to why Sacrifice did this.

I didn't show it off, but another odd thing is that Mithras is, in this mission, white team just like Eldred. I'm really not sure what to make of that. Like yeah, he's not aligned with any of the gods, but it still feels weird. It does make me wonder if this is meant to be Mithras himself, before Marduk replaced him; it's not like it would've been much of a spoiler for the game to have Mithras be in Marduk's team color. By the time it's been made blatantly obvious that Marduk's team color is his team color, you've also had it revealed that Marduk was Mithras. So it seems a bit unlikely Mithras was made white team to avoid tipping players off on that bit. I dunno, it is possible, and it's also possible whoever all made the map really didn't give it any deeper thought.

Anyway, Charnel protests his innocence regarding summoning demons for Marduk and James doesn't believe him. We know from Charnel's route he's speaking the truth here, and you can end up with the slightly-odd scenario of Eldred helping summon Astaroth and then failing to speak up in Charnel's defense, once again illustrating how difficult it is to keep Sacrifice's approach here fully coherent. I do appreciate the game lets us jump to Charnel here, though; Eldred may not be written to speak in Charnel's defense, but you don't have to go along with James on this topic.

It feels a little out of character how James goes straight to 'yeah sure'. James investigates things at the beginning of the campaign, and his manual quotes emphasize accepting people and whatnot. I'd expect James to be cautious but more inclined to check on the situation. It feels like the game is railroading James to cut down on the plot branches. It's not like Charnel has done anything in this route to imply untrustworthiness -he's never done anything suspicious to James that we know of, and he's not even done the Charnel route thing of allying with Pyro and almost immediately betraying him. So James' suspicion of Charnel here is just... odd.

See you next James mission.