Ahh yes, it isn't a true Dark Souls experience if you don't find Bed of Chaos to be the most horridly executed, half-baked idea in the entire series because even FromSoft feels that way about her.

I'd say lower than that and pre-owned tbh. It boggles my mind that we have action game staples like DMC, Bayonetta, MGR, or even going in the ARPG direction I would say (modern) Ys, or any Team Ninja game recently (Nioh, SoP, Wo Long, etc.) are fine examples, and yet somehow Elysium just manages to bungle almost everything that the genre had already defined and perfected upwards of 20 years prior. This was kind of meant as a "haha would be funny to play this as filler for the real tri-Ace game a month from now" except I stopped laughing at around Chapter 4 and whatever little good comes from the game from here on only seems to get completely overshadowed by the game's fundamental flaws or something really stupid cropping up that makes me blow a gasket because who on Odin's Green Midgard thought [insert absurd level/enemy/boss design choice here] was a good idea. This isn't even getting into the story...

Yes, the elemental races are immune to any "mind-controlling effects" which does include charm (this includes the spell Ghost Light, dunno about Bokohn's Marionette skill), so taking one is never a bad idea, especially for Rocbouquet and the final boss.

Iris are great as support characters due to having some of the highest base speed in the game across most generations, and a good number of them also happen to boast good INT and low DRK, which makes them surprisingly competent mages. Most other non-human units (moles, nereids, salamanders, etc) unfortunately don't get to really shine like Iris do due to stuff like awkward/outright bad weapon typing/stat distribution, buuuuuut this is also SaGa and you can make just about anything work with enough persistence and maybe a little bit of grinding.

I see you have also embraced Iris supremacy like I have.

You can meet the mermaid, can even trigger the events up to the point where you learn she is one, but you literally cannot finish the sidequest as Gerard since you cannot travel further than that...which means that it's literally impossible to finish the quest if you trigger it as Gerard. It's really funny, but also bizarrely tragic in a weird way.

Hey at least you didn't try to woo the mermaid as Gerard because that's totally a thing you can do and watch it amount to as much as you think it would.

Ehh, I had some downtime as I was onboarding at a new job and waiting for people to be available to ramp me up on their teams. Even so, it's a shame it isn't available.

Also, while I never bothered with the main story, I still pull up HOMM3 occasionally for a fun match against the AI. Such a great game. HOMM2 as well, but 3 improved on it in nearly every way. For some reason though, the later entries never captured my interest the way that 2 and 3 did.

It looks like there's actually a version of the original artwork without the characters: [Link]

Not that I probably spent an hour over the last few days off-and-on looking for a copy of it...

Stumbled on your backlog and was just thinking that your banner looked an awful lot like the forest scene from Chrono Trigger (plus a few additions, of course), though it's been long enough since I played that I can't say for sure. Is it, or is my memory just fuzzy?