# 6 - Ares (Genealogy of the Holy War)

                  You know, I'm not a fan of most of the localized, translated names for the Holy War cast, but Ares is an exception. Naming this guy after the god of war seems appropriate given his amazing combat ability.

                   Mekkah's reaction upon Ares joining your army: "Really? I can have this? You know I will break your game with this, right? Well, thank you!" (http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=29384&page=9#entry1795748)

                    My reaction upon Ares joining my army: "Eltoshan's kid is joining my army? I've got a black knight on my team? OH HECK YES!"

                Aless just screams ridiculously awesome. 43 base attack with the Mystletainn in addition to Pursuit, Adept and Vantage (I'm using the modern names of the skills here. They're known as Continue and Ambush in Holy War). I should also point out that the Mystletainn gives the skill Critical and boosts Ares's skill by 20. Ares will start with a whopping 28 % chance of activating Adept (thanks to Holy War's ridiculous formula for calculating Adept) and a base 32 % chance of landing a critical hit with the Mystletainn. Keep in mind that in Holy War critical evade is always at 0 so the more skill Ares obtains the higher that crit percent chance is. Also, Holy War criticals deal more damage on average than your regular critical hits so a critical hit from Ares equates to a 1 hit KO. Yeah, that's pretty darn cool.

                       To get some further perspective on that only a small handful of units can avoid getting a critical hit from Ares. 99 % of all units in the game will get crushed in the meantime. The Mystletainn also provides Ares with a + 10 resistance boost which is pretty important in Holy War given how many bosses and late-game units are mages. It also allows Ares to ignore those ridiculously annoying status staves that enemies love to spam. I think Mekkah also provided some additional information that further proves my point:

                       "The longer the game goes on, the more important Res becomes. Ch7 and Ch8 both have Mage sisters (who looooove attacking Aless up close) and Blume. Around Ch10 is when the true magic show begins, with the Lopt Sect's Dark Mages and all their silly long range bull and accurate Jormung, an Ishtar encounter, and a Meteor shower. The Final chapter is pretty much an Aless and Celice playground, with Edda's very interesting and well designed (no) horde of Sleep staves, Meteor and Bolting. Pretty much every castle is guarded by a Dark Bishop with Fenrir and Jormung, and there's some Dark Mages standing on random cliffs. And of course there's a large amount of Sages coming with Ishtar, and Manfroy and friends..."
(Source: http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=29384&page=9#entry1795748)

Moral of the story: Resistance in the second generation is really important and Ares has a lot of it.

So to recap: Ares is a beast on a horse who's offensive prowess can roflstomp 99 % of all enemies in his game and his awesome resistance gives him long-term usefulness. I'll end with this little quote right here: "If Celice is the quarterback and Leaf is the receiver (who teleports the quarterback to his position, look this analogy only works so well), Aless is the lineman plowing through anything that stands between Team Horse and the endthrone." (Source: Renall - Rate the Unit: Aless. http://serenesforest.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=32368)