Langrisser I & II: Character Creation Guide

A feature of Langrisser games, is that the game begins with the Goddess, Lucilis, asking you a set of questions. On previous versions of this game, these questions determined a wide range of things about your main character, Elwin: His starting class, his starting recruitable mercenaries, possible starting items and spells, starting attribute levels, and could even affect crucial story decisions. In this remake of the game, the scope of the questionnaire is more limited and bounded: Specifically, your answers to the Goddess’ starting questions will determine your starting Weapon, Armor, Accessory, and Skills.

Your answers to the starting questions will mostly affect your power and performance in the early stages of the game; by the middle stages of the game, you should have replaced most if not all of the starting equipment and skills you started the game with.

The high-end items you can start the game with are much better than what’s available to buy from the Shop for the first several stages, but not as strong as the bonus items you get if you choose to accept the Easy Start the game offers you after the questionnaire. Even if you accept the Easy Start, you still start the game with 2 characters and only one exceptionally strong weapon and armor, and Easy Start does nothing for your Skills, so answering Luciris’ questions judiciously will still be of value.

If you reject the Easy Start offer, then the rewards from the starting questionnaire become that much more significant, and you’ll want to get the best rewards possible.

The way the questionnaire works is, you start with a baseline Weapon, Armor, Accesory, Skill 1, and Skill 2. Each of those 5 categories has an in-game hierarchy of rewards:

You start with the Tier 1 reward, and can change that for a higher-tier reward if you choose answers that improve that category. So for instance, the baseline weapon is the Knife, which can be upgraded to a Great Sword, a Stiletto, or even to a Lochaber Axe depending on how many answers you select that improve your Weapon.

Note that this is not necessarily a hierarchy of the QUALITY of the rewards. This hierarchy is assigned by the game. Sometimes it makes sense; the Weapon and Armor hierarchies offer rewards of increasing quality, for instance. But when it comes to Skill 2, the hierarchy makes no sense; the lowest-tier Skill 2, Pride, is strictly superior to the Tier 2 Skill 1, Way of the Sword. But if you “improve” your Skill 2 all the way from Tier 1 to Tier 4, you end up with Ancestry of Light, which is equivalent to Spoils of War, the lowest-tier Skill 1. Spend your answers on “improving” your Skill 2 at your own peril.

The most enduring reward from the questionnaire are the starting skills, and unlike Skill 2, you can improve your Skill 1 substantially. The tier 5-7 rewards for Skill 1 are markedly superior to the lower tier rewards, but the tier 8 reward is (a lot) worse than the tier 7 reward, in my opinion.

20 questions. 3 possible answers to each question. Each answer determines not only which category (Weapon, Armor, Accesory, Skill 1, Skill 2) you’re improving, but also which question you’ll be asked to answer next. Depending on your answers, you’ll answer between 8 and 10 questions in total:

First observation: Some answers will give you a fixed item instead of improving the item you’ll get according to the hierarchy table. For example, the first answer to Q6 will replace your starting accessory with a Chunk of Gold, and no amount of Improving your Accessory further will change that. The other fixed rewards you can get are: Magic Wand weapon from Q8, Boots of Wind accessory from Q10, Chunk of Gold accessory from Q11.

Second observation: Answers that improve two categories (like how Answer 3 to Question 5 improves both your Weapon and your Skill 1) do NOT dilute the improvement between the two categories. They’re just better.

Third observation: If you select an answer that Improves your Weapon, it does NOT guarantee that you’ll increase the tier of the weapon you get in the end. One “improvement” roughly coincides with a reward one tier higher, but not always. There are systems and numbers and granularity behind this that I have no hope of figuring out just from picking answers, documenting results, and extrapolating what each answer does by looking at patterns. There are 10,935 possible combinations of answers, and I am but one man. The answers that “Improve Nothing” look suspect to me, but if they do improve something, it was not something that I could measure with my testing.