Welcome to our character guide, focusing on Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon characters. We’ll be breaking down each of the characters and their classes, and providing our verdicts on which of them deserve to be in your team!

We’re back once again to answer another Shadow Dragon question: Who is the best Pirate & Berseker in the game? It’s a class that we’ve always enjoyed, tending to consist of units high in health and strength but low in defence, but also coming with the bonus of being able to walk on water and an increased critical rate. It’s a class that might make you reset the game a few times, but it’s worth it for building a beastly axe destroyer.

If you’ve been keeping up with this series, you may have noticed we weren’t exactly spoilt for choice when it came to the Thief class. Well you’re in for a treat here, so join us as we consider the vast choice of unit that you’re given to pick from.

It’s a good job you can reclass in this damned game, honestly…

Darros

Darros joins your group in Chapter 2, often managing to complete the smoothest recruitment ever by immediately talking to Marth before you’ve even noticed. This might not sound so bad, one less unit to go chasing after you might think, but let us first consider a few things: His base stats aren’t the best – they’re not truly terrible, but not great. He also comes with a Steel Axe, something his ok-but-not-great stats can’t really handle yet, thus hampering his speed. Finally, he often recruits himself frightfully close to multiple deadly enemies which, difficulty level permitting, will easily kill him.

Still, we’re not about to let an awkward recruitment put us off, so what about using Darros in earnest?

Well… Things don’t exactly get much better. In one sense, his performance throughout the Pirate levels and into Berserker do make a certain amount of sense – he’ll hit very hard due to his high strength, you’ll just be crossing your fingers that he does hit and doesn’t suffer a retaliation. These issues are, respectively, due to his remarkably low skill and speed ratings, the latter in particular causing him to be double attacked by enemies throughout the game. His defence might not be the worst we’ve seen, but the fact that he’s taking multiple hits to the face just compounds things.

We’ve often been proponents of making anything work in Fire Emblem. – with enough effort and preparation you can usually get away with using whoever you want. Sadly Pirate Darros is the exception here, those poor statistics dragging him down far too much. That’s to say nothing of the higher difficulty levels, which see him reduced to a comedic meme and nothing more. You can maybe get some use by switching him over to a Knight, but should you do so then expect to have to babysit him all the way to mediocrity.

VERDICT: Not good enough… For anything at all really..

As you might imagine, this leaves us in an unusual position: There are no other default Pirates or Berserkers available to us. There are of course plenty of fighters to choose from to reclass, but Barst is taking the Warrior route, Cord is our pick for a Hunter and Bord is well… Bord. Luckily, there’s a pre-promote just crying out for a class that let’s him flex his giant growth rates…

Wolf

Yes that’s right, whilst his comrade-in-growths Sedgar is off becoming a walking brick wall, Wolf makes the ideal candidate for a Berserker. He joins just early enough to make this worthwhile and, after a very short period of exp-feeding, you’ll find he’s already up to speed with your current units.

Once reclassed he’ll be gaining a guaranteed +2 Health per level up, and at least +1 Strength. Often he’ll also level the rest of his stats, eventually culminating in a hard hitting, double attacking, axe toting slayer of men. He also has the higher luck growth of the two mega-growers, resulting in more of those sweet axe one shot kills.

Additionally, we’ve recently found that he’s the ideal target for your stat boosting items. Should you be so inclined, you can load him up with everything you can find and positively walk through the majority of the late game. Sure, he’s not going to cope with absolutely everything, but if you drop a powerful forge on him and tape a healer to his side, get ready to watch those red units disappear on enemy phase.

VERDICT: The one true ‘Zerker king. The best Pirate unit in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon.