# 6 - Levin (Genealogy of the Holy War)

                    Ah Levin, one of my favorite FE characters of all time, it's so nice being able to talk about why one of my favorite characters is awesome. Levin is one of those wonderful, rascally characters who never ceases to entertain, and one of the best parts is that he's a pretty good mage.

                     Levin has the best offense of all your infantry units in the first generation of Holy War. Levin starts right off the bat with a 34 % chance of procing Adept and a 12 % chance of landing a critical hit in a game where virtually nobody can land critical hits. Levin also has a very high base speed combined with a 90 % growth rate allowing him to be a dodge machine in a game that uses only a single RNG. Levin also joins your army conveniently placed next to the villages in Chapter 2 and will most likely be your means of saving them. One of these villages contains the super useful Bargain Ring, which means that Levin nets you a rare ring that saves you an awful lot of money. Go Levin! Once Chapter 4 rolls around Levin gets the almighty Holsety tome and becomes an unstoppable killing machine with it. For those of you miserable souls who haven't played Fire Emblem 4 yet go play it right now and put everything else in your life on hold until you finish this masterpiece of a game  let us take a moment to ogle over the Holsety tome's stats:

Holsety:
Mt - 30
Hit - 90
Wt - 5
+ 10 Skill, + 20 Speed
(http://serenesforest.net/genealogy-of-the-holy-war/inventory/fire-thunder-wind/)

           Just to give you an idea of how ridiculously fast Levin is with the Holsety, a Holsety wielding Sety is the same class as Levin and both characters literally have the same exact attack speed at max level. Levin has an attack speed of 45 when he's equipped with the Holsety tome. Sety, who has the exact same attack speed as Levin, has literally double attacked all of his enemies in every Deadliest Warrior Battle that he's ever participated in (except for one, but the point still stands) and mind you, Sety has gone up against Lunatic mode Grima and the Radiant Dawn versions of Ike and Tibarn. All of these characters come from games with significantly higher caps and yet Sety is the one double attacking them instead of the other way around. Since Levin has the same attack speed as Sety we can logically conclude that Levin would double attack these characters as well, provided he wields the Holsety tome. It goes without saying that Levin equipped with the Holsety can not only double attack every enemy, generic or otherwise, in his own game chances are he's double attacking them while they can't even touch him.

          Just so we're clear, Deadliest Warrior Battles are NOT to be used as gameplay metrics here, but I am using this example to demonstrate a point. Levin equipped with the Holsety, is one of the fastest characters in the entire Fire Emblem series. Combine that speed with a 30 might weapon with 1 - 2 range that targets resistance and you've got overkill in one heck of a sexy package.       

              Levin is also one incredibly lucky dude when it comes to his love life. He is the best father for Corpul, Arthur and Sety (he's the only guy in the first generation of Holy War who's the best husband for THREE different women) so it is in the player's best interest to get this guy to bang one of these chicks so he can pass down the Holsety tome to his future son resulting in some overpowered offspring (lucky jerk).

                  So some of you may be asking 'if Levin's so powerful, why is he this low on the list? Shouldn't he be higher up?' Well, here's the thing. Contrary to what some people might believe, stats aren't everything in Fire Emblem. There are multiple factors that account for a unit's worth and Levin's proof of that. In particular, there are four negatives that Levin has going against him:

• Levin's first issue is the fact that he lacks the Pursuit skill. Fortunately this is a minor problem that can easily be solved because, as luck would have it, the player gets the Pursuit Ring in the same chapter that Levin joins. Also, I would like to argue that Levin is your best candidate for the Pursuit Ring from an objective standpoint. I mean, who else can use it better than Levin? Cuan's attack speed is lower than Levin's due to lances weighing a lot, Ethlin's combat won't be anywhere near as good as Levin's and Lex has the Brave Axe. Levin, by contrast has a very high speed stat and will most likely wield wind magic which weighs as light as a feather, so Levin's attack speed will definitely be higher than Cuan or Lex's. Also, Cuan and Ethlin leave in Chapter 4 whereas Levin sticks around. Plus, depending on who you pair Levin up with, his potential offspring could need the Pursuit Ring too so even from an inheritance perspective it makes perfect sense to give it to Levin.

  

• He only gets to use the Holsety for a short period of time. Unlike any of his potential offspring, Levin only gets to use the Holsety tome for the latter end of Chapter 4 and all of Chapter 5, which is the shortest non-prologue map in Holy War (lol). He doesn't get to take as much advantage of the Holsety tome as we'd like him to which means that he spends the majority of the first generation without the Holsety tome. Sad day :'(

•  His lackluster availability. Levin joins halfway through the first generation of Holy War. This is a bigger issue than the first problem, because it isn't one that can be solved by the player. Levin wishes he could join earlier, and so do we the fans. 

•  The biggest problem that Levin has is that he is an unmounted unit in a mount dominant game. When people in the past complained about Holy War's giant maps I usually just ignored them because the giant maps didn't bother me as a casual player. However, I came across a criticism on serenesforest.net that was further substantiated by Ronaldo Villanueva and Sagit Heim that I cannot ignore when objectively rating the worth of a Holy War unit. The criticism is that Holy War's gargantuan maps give high movement characters an even more disgusting advantage over infantry units. This is a balancing issue that every Fire Emblem game has, but in Holy War this efficiency gap gets taken to a whole different extreme. What this means is that no matter how powerful a foot unit is, no matter how much utility they have, no matter how much they bring to the table, a foot unit's worth decreases simply for being a foot unit. It doesn't mean as much to be a speed demon if you can't even get to the enemies in time. For a casual player this means nothing, but for an LTC player this makes all the difference in the world. 

   
              I want to make it very clear that even though Levin is a foot unit in a game that punishes them, he is by no means a bad unit.. Levin is still one of the best units in the first generation, he just has another flaw that we casual players don't really have to deal with due to the differences in our playstyles. I for one, will continue to use Levin regardless of what anyone tells me and hopefully this doesn't dissuade anyone from using him in the future.


           Overall Summary: Levin is a powerful mage that has a great set of skills combined with one of the most overpowered weapons in Fire Emblem history. He makes for a great father, but unfortunately his contributions are hampered by his lackluster availability and by the huge maps that screw him over. That being said he is still one of my personal favorite characters and he is still one of the greatest mages in the series.