*SPOILERS* Bracers' [in]competence

[Dragon]

This post will contain SPOILERS.

So far I played up to the point in Chapter 3 where Agate gets shot trying to protect Tita.

At this point, the Bracers have let so many villains escape that I have to call their competence into question.

They let the Sky Bandits escape multiple times.

They also let the mayor escape.

Then they let the ninjas escape multiple times too.

If they are supposed to be professionals who are great at what they do, well this pattern of repeatedly failing at the same exact task greatly undermines that notion.

Agate was so full of it when he blamed Tita for causing the ninjas to escape. Oh please. We all know he was going to let them escape regardless of whether Tita was there or not --- just like the game has already shown him doing multiple times before the Tita incident. By the same token, why didn't he forsee that Tita would follow them? That's a very obvious, common sense deduction that anybody of reasonable intelligence could have seen coming long before it happened. He should have recognized that and therefore ordered her to be put under house arrest with a Bracer guard, or something like that.

On a similar note, this stuff also begs the question: why are the villains able to get up and escape immediately after the Bracers just knocked them out? Obviously they needed to be knocked out a lot harder. So why weren't they?

Why didn't the Bracers tie them up while they were knocked out? And confiscate their weapons & gadgets at the same time?

This is the kind of stuff that makes no sense, if we are assuming that the Bracers are competent at their jobs. But it makes a lot of sense if they are supposed to be incompetent at their jobs.

[myhr2]

Classical anime trope. Embrace it, or leave it be, it's not really here to make sense but more for the dramatic effect, and it's far, faaaar from being specific to Bracers, or to this game, for what it's worth.

[Dragon]

Yes, I can see how it has some dramatic effects...but maybe they should have varied it with different dramatic effects instead of repeating the same exact one over and over and over and over again?

Because the tradeoff of repeating the escape theme constantly is that the heroes start to feel like buffoons, as if I'm playing as an incompetent clown like Inspector Gadget or something like that. But that doesn't seem to be the overall vibe that the game is trying to instill in the player's emotions.

[myhr2]

Heeeee, matter of perception. I sure never felt that way, because I'm used to this trope, and I'm not to the point where I think it's a cliché, but ymmv.
Plus, Bracers are professional FIghters, not Spec Ops, they spend at least half their time fighting monsters, which are not the brightest beings to begin with. The one instance where the opponents really shouldn't have escaped is the one with the Sky pirates in the woods, at the very beginning, and Shera aknowledges her mistake. For the rest, you have apprentice Bracers, and Agate, who is definitely more on the Fighter that on the Investigator side of things, as far as Bracers go.

[Mizufluffy]

To be fair, Estelle and Joshua are only junior bracers. It's true they get help from senior bracers but as good as they are with their jobs they are still only human. A lot of times the antagonists often use unfair means to escape or have prepared a way to escape beforehand. For instance the mayor was using an artifact and he also already had his yacht ready.
On the other hand, the sky bandits rely a lot on their smoke bombs to escape. Sure it's one of the oldest tricks in the book but that doesn't make it less effective. However, bracers aren't as imcompetent as you believe, they did well with infiltrating to the sky bandits hideout by hiding in their air ship. What kind of villains would let them do that? And the mayor wasn't exactly careful either with who knows how many leads he gave away before he got caught.

All I'm saying is that if you feel like the bracers are incompetent then it'd be easy to say the same about the antagonists. Sure they may get away a few times but the fact they even need to get away means the bracers were good enough to stomp on their tail.

[Oguzhan]

Yeah I was never bothered by this. Bracers are not killers. If they go too hard they might do more DMG , if they do wreckless act people might get hurt. A good example of this is at the beginning of the game and with your choices in some of the quests.

First Estelle and Luke. She drops her guard and almost pays the price.
Another one is with one of the escort missions , if you choose the wreckless one you get a harder battle.

They have to make sure no one is overly injured while also keeping themselves safe.


If you don't like it well too bad , in trails no good guy (with the exception of a few who are willing but rather not ) wants to kill someone no matter how evil they are , they rather have them pay for what they have done via the means of the justice system.

I have seen your other discussions too , and this series is probably not for you.
Just saying.....

[Berahlen]

These are junior civilian go-fers, going up against heavily armed organized crime with armored vehicles and actual career military spec ops. And they still have a pulse. I'm not sure how that fact alone places them as anything less than competent.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If anything, I've always felt that 'Sky's cast actually hyper-competent in comparison to Cold Steel's cast. Outside of her personal quest to protect her family and become a Bracer, Estelle is never faced with actual adversity; the villains won't actually harm her and she is escorted by very powerful fighters and the kingdom is protected by the skilled people in Zemuria, to the point that there'd be very little consequences (if any at all) if Estelle was crippled or otherwise decided to give up.

Mean while, over in Cold Steel, the under-skilled heroes are regularly pitted against terrifyingly powerful foes without the safety net backup Estelle had, and when they lost, it hurt. They couldn't just expect to be carried to victory when an adult tagged along for a few minutes; they had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps just to even survive, and even then, they still had to settle for a compromise.

[Oguzhan]

Originally posted by Val the Moofia Boss:

If anything, I've always felt that 'Sky's cast actually hyper-competent in comparison to Cold Steel's cast. Outside of her personal quest to protect her family and become a Bracer, Estelle is never faced with actual adversity; the villains won't actually harm her and she is escorted by very powerful fighters and the kingdom is protected by the skilled people in Zemuria, to the point that there'd be very little consequences (if any at all) if Estelle was crippled or otherwise decided to give up.

Mean while, over in Cold Steel, the under-skilled heroes are regularly pitted against terrifyingly powerful foes without the safety net backup Estelle had, and when they lost, it hurt. They couldn't just expect to be carried to victory when an adult tagged along for a few minutes; they had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps just to even survive, and even then, they still had to settle for a compromise.

That being said Estelle does become someone reliable with time , even more so than Joshua even.

[Stabbey]

Originally posted by Dragon:

This post will contain SPOILERS.

So far I played up to the point in Chapter 3 where Agate gets shot trying to protect Tita.

At this point, the Bracers have let so many villains escape that I have to call their competence into question.

They let the Sky Bandits escape multiple times.

They also let the mayor escape.

Then they let the ninjas escape multiple times too.

I think you're being a little too critical, and blaming the Bracers for not having psychic powers and knowing about the bad guys prepared tricks in advance.


The first time the Sky Bandits escaped, it was because they brought in an airship with a minigun to a staff, dagger and whip fight.

The second time the bandits escaped, it was because one pulled off a smoke bomb trick.

The third time I'll grant you, they should have been better prepared for the second smoke bomb trick, but on the other hand the Bandits didn't exactrly get away - they were captured.

The Bracers didn't know about the Mayor's secret room of monsters or his secret time-stop orbment, and the Mayor didn't get away that time either. But even if he had, the Bracers sucessfully put an end to his scheme. The Mayor was totally screwed.

As for the ninjas, they clearly seem to be highly trained. The first time, the Bracers were unwilling to risk the life of a totally innocent bystander to capture them.

Agate on his own was up against an opponent who completely outclasses him.

The third time, on the rooftop, they had an idea to try and stop the escape, but Tita screwed it up by distracting everyone.

By the same token, why didn't he forsee that Tita would follow them? That's a very obvious, common sense deduction that anybody of reasonable intelligence could have seen coming long before it happened. He should have recognized that and therefore ordered her to be put under house arrest with a Bracer guard, or something like that.

As for placing Tita under House Arrest, even if I disregard whether or not the Bracers actually have the authority for such, they certainly don't have the manpower for such tasks. And thirdly, Tita is not, in fact at home. You can't find her anywhere after she runs out of the guild, so you can't very well keep track of someone who is nowhere to be found, and searching the city for her would waste time they definitely don't have.

Why didn't the Bracers tie them up while they were knocked out? And confiscate their weapons & gadgets at the same time?

Let's look at opponents who were knocked out after a fight, who the Bracers had the opportunity to tie up.

No one in the first three Sky Bandits encounters, except for maybe some of the other bandits, but they could have gotten themselves loose while the Bracers were off deeper in the fortress, so that doesn't matter.

They never knocked out the Ninjas to have the opportunity to hog-tie them. nor the mayor, either. So there was no one they could have tied up.

[Berahlen]

Originally posted by Val the Moofia Boss:

the villains won't actually harm her

lolwat.

Don Capua was about three minutes from committing mass murder. Gilbert ordered the ID thugs to shoot you. The thugs in turn, who you later find are recruited from VERY shady places, took hostages at gunpoint to get away, and shot one anyway. Dalmore tried to have you eaten by rabid animals, then put a pistol to Estelle's head. Agate got shot and almost died. Amalthea was pretty much out for blood from the start. The only villains not trying to murder the hell out of you were the two lead ones, and one of them had a reason to keep you alive to further his own plans.

This isn't even getting into SC where people try to kill you for fun.

[Dragon]

Originally posted by Waypoint:

These are junior civilian go-fers, going up against heavily armed organized crime with armored vehicles and actual career military spec ops.

That's not what the game world says. I just went to Leiston Fortress and the guard inside said "Sorry, we are not open to civilians." Estelle replied, "We are not civilians. We are from the Bracer Guild."

These counter rebuttals to the storytelling problems I've outlined in the OP are incongruent with the story as presented in the game.

Bracers are not presented by the game as average civilians. Rather, they are presented as their own special ops organization, with specialized training in all manner of combat, investigation, diplomacy, peacekeeping, etc.

There is some merit to the argument that Estelle and Josh are just junior Bracers so that explains why they mess up so bad repeatedly...but that argument is debunked by the fact that the Senior Bracers mess up just as often & badly. The incompetence goes right to the top.

Even their Dad, the premier hero of the Bracers, told Agate it would be an "easy job" to track down the ninjas...so either the Dad was lying, or he was too incompetent to know it wouldn't be an easy job, or Agate can't handle the job because it actually is easy but he's just a clown. No matter which possibility it is, it doesn't look good for the Bracers.

[Hagen2900]

I'm sympathetic to your initial complaint that the villains are getting away too often. (The reason for this is usually that the authors don't want to burn their built-up bad guys too quickly.)

Some of the points you make like the one about putting Tita under house arrest or that Cassius is incompetent for misjudging the 'ninja' situation are just utterly ridiculous.

[myhr2]

@ OP : whatever floats your boat, mate, if it doesn't fit the narrative for you, that's fine. As I said, either embrace the trope or reject it, but digging too much meaning behind it is overkill, in one way or in the other.

[HunterRassius]

There's quite a few misconceptions throughout this thread to be sure but to be fair to Dragon I definitely thought the same about "letting the bad guys go" was perhaps just a TAD overdone. It's pretty bad when you start predicting when it's going to happen. The most egregious examples are not tying up the Sky Bandit minions after falling for a second smoke bomb and again not tying up a certain group of "ninjas" at the very end making it stupid obvious "someone" was going to get away. Considering how stupidly well written the Zemurian world is it would've done the writers a bit of good to have a couple realistic moments at least toward the end.

That aside...

@Val

Yea you are definitely undercutting Estelle + co. just a little bit here. If we're being honest Estelle's main "mission" throughout the 2 games is at least a Bracer Rank A... if not S considering the skills she had to employ to get everything to come together. The fact that she has "appropriate" help at times shouldn't really be held against her. Even Agate and Schera are WAY out of their league for this one and they were all in plenty of danger throughout.

The fact that the Cold Steel gang were a little too busy dealing with issues with a teenage naivety due to the fact that world scale politics were involved doesn't mean Estelle's "mission" wasn't nearly impossible to begin with as well.

@Dragon

You're making a few assumptions here that are flat out wrong. The Bracer Guild isn't even close to a Spec Ops lvl organization. It does have some world class bracers but A rank and above bracers are notably rare though it really isn't shown in The Legend of Heroes series. Guys like Cassius, Zin and Kurt are the exceptions not the "rule". Estelle's in WAY over her head at first but she slowly grows to fill out the role that is required of her (and it's literally some of the best character development i've ever seen). Secondly, you are vastly underestimating their enemy. The fact that you call certain enemies "ninjas" is somewhat laughable. Their leader learned from one of the greatest strategists on the continent. Their "associate" is probably the 3rd strongest on the entire continent. They are anything but weak.

Cassius actually has some serious foresight but an oracle he is not. He handed off the job to Agate who under any normal circumstances would've made short work of the job assigned to him. However, his opponent this time leaves no option for a win. None.

Perhaps you should understand the enemy just a bit more before you go calling all the bracers "incompetent"...

[Kyle G]

Hm yeah. Cassius seems to be the only competent bracer alot of the times. Lol.