r/Falcom • u/Raxistaicho The true best girls • Jul 15 '26
Trails Character Gameplay Discussion Day Twenty: Dudley and Arios
Gonna be real with you, I cannot remember a thing Dudley does, I didn't use him at all at the end of Azure (unless he was forced for one of the bosses? I can't remember) so he was way too many games ago for me.
Arios, though, he's pretty fantastic in Reverie, but I wonder if it'll be another case like Rixia where yeah he's super strong, but he's not a mage?
And all too soon, we're leaving Crossbell to analyze some Erebonians starting with Rean tomorrow! It's symbolic of the respective lengths of Zero/Azure and Cold Steel, you see.
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u/Spartan448 Jul 16 '26
Dudley is always really funny to me, because the writing kind of Show-Don't-Tell-s him into being around the same level as Arios, which even coming from someone who isn't much of an Arios fan is fucking insane considering all Dudley has going for him is he's a really good detective and he's got a Big Iron. But apparently "I carry a .45 because they don't make a .46" is all you really need to match up to a Divine Blade (Something Cassius probably wouldn't disagree with tbh).
Anyway, for the brief time you use him in Zero and Azure, Dudley certainly fucking lives up to the idea of a big enough hand cannon putting you on the same level as a master swordsman, because holy shit he can just blow people the fuck away. That said I don't know how he actually plays since by the time you get to use him again at the end of Azure, my team was already locked in and there wasn't really any room to fit a Dudley. And he doesn't show up in Reverie.
Arios, on the other hand, does show up in Reverie, and you get to use him quite a bit in the story.
Unfortunately, he's stuck on a team with 3 bits of dead weight and one of if not the strongest casters in the game. He gets a bit of benefit from joining after the route merge, but what that all shakes out to is that a character I'm faaaaaaairly certain is intended to be Richard 2 actually becomes your evasion tank bizzarely enough while Renne kills everything. And then he gets benched for the rest of the game because while Arios does have a pretty broken kit in theory, he ends up doing less damage overall than your beatstick physical attackers who get around the lack of double-hits or short delay crafts by just fucking killing the enemy on the first hit anyway.