This is like the South Park episode where a baseball team spent all summer training specifically to lose against the main cast. Killing your units is easy, but killing them optimally is a whole other beast.
This both explains a lot and is hilariously horrifying in context. You can't just be a bad or even awful tactician, you must be a Bloody Stupid Johnson level of tactician.
Man, to be able to do this challenge you'd have to be some sort of *Fire Emblem* fanatic with an *Excel Spreadsheet* to keep track of everything you've done. If only someone like that existed!
All you want to do is sacrifice as many teenage soldiers to Moloch as you can, but in your quest for the worst all you find is the path to (below average) success. Damn, I trust in your tyranny Excel.
In theory it'd be possible for someone knowledgeable and skilled enough to make a patch for FE7 to track Tactician Points live, right? Now the problem would be finding them and arrange something.
Great breakdown! It's cool to see the guts of a game like this, the inner workings the developers didn't plan to show off. Good luck on the run of meticulous stupidity, you're going to need it.
As I suspect some of them are at odd with each another. What I didn't expect was the minimum score grant and that you don't have enough character to kill per map.
I can get 1 star in everything at the ending ranks and just declare victory. As for tactician stars I'll just go for the lowest anyone's gotten and challenge people to beat my record.
FE7, but the tactician is a massive Yandere, who desires to have (Insert your favourite FE7 Lord here) all for themselves. And so they go on a journey to methodically kill everyone on their path, regardless of being friend or foe, after all, none of those bastards deserves to even look at the person of affection of our main character. Sorry, after watching this video, I understand that to get minimal ranking you can't just be a bad Tactician, you need to deliberately and methodically ruin everything on purpose, so I felt the obligation to add some role-play flavor into it.
So basically, playing the game wrong (if that's even a thing) is harder than playing it normally. That just reminds me of Ducktales and Luigi's Mansion, where the worst ending is harder to get than the best ending, because you basically can't touch any money.
capped units don't gain xp and thus don't count. The main problem on my end is the leadup to that as the exp requirement for 1* is very strict early on
Will this be HHM? I guess putting all the exp on a single character (Marcus, may also be Hector or Lv9 Oswin) to reach the level cap will be the way to go for the Exp/Combat ranks.
An additional addendum to my Matthew comment from last video, from a conversation I had on Mekkahcord: "ATHATH - Yesterday at 6:55 PM oof so is it possible to keep matthew and/or marcus alive for a while without losing out on stars in the cumulative view you get a lot of fodder early on, no? and ch. 11 doesn't count fire pop waist flower snow moon - Yesterday at 6:56 PM you don't normally get a display until ninian and nils join and then it's only in chunks of 12 resolution but it does show the exact total in the end-of-game record so is it possible to keep matthew and/or marcus alive for a while without losing out on stars in the cumulative view well in ch11 since you're forced to A funds/exp that means if you get min tactics/combat you would get an extra star for everyone surviving vs matthew doing you go from 310 points to 285 because the thresholds are 550/450/300/200/100, cf. [serene's forest link] if you're failing everything else you want to target 3 deaths in a chapter (85) or zero deaths (150) ATHATH - Yesterday at 8:05 PM so shouldn't matthew be preserved until a chapter where you can axe 3 people at once? oh, wait I don't think he's counting the overall rank just the individual categories for both individual levels and the final cumulative score fire pop waist flower snow moon - Yesterday at 8:32 PM nah because ch11 isn't a chapter where you can fail everything else ch11 is a chapter where you're forced to get perfect funds and exp so with min tactics/combat you get 225-310 point range depending on deaths and ofc you can only get one death here because two deaths would be a game over, but one death in this case is optimal anyway this is the case for most HM-only maps" Depending on how the optimization routes out, this might mean that you'll need to kill off Matthew in ch. 11 to lose the maximum number of overall tactician stars from his death, which in turn would mean no level 20 Matthew strats. Another fun quirk of sac'ing Matthew in ch. 11 of HHM (if you end up needing to do that) is that you won't be able to directly open any chests until DRAGON'S GATE. You'll need to escort enemy thieves to chests and then gank them to "loot" them, as HHM just... doesn't give you any door keys until ch. 20 if you don't have anyone who can steal them from enemy thieves. That, combined with the funds rank restrictions keeping you from carrying too many possessions over from chapter to chapter, could make things... interesting.
This also begs the question of Hectors 0 requirement chapters. For true minimal ranked play, would the best mode to play be Eliwoods since the 0 requirements chapters will force the exp, funds and combat ranks to increase?
For the survival rank it counts the restarts isnt? I mean if a unir dies and You restart the map the casualty is still counted, and appears in the profile of the character as a lose
it actually doesn't count. I think the loss-byte is just a weird stylistic hold over from the jugdral games, because one was able to save mid-chapter in FE4 and iirc, losses that were resetted through those midsaves were actually counted against the rankings.(though I may be wrong about that)
@@lpfan4491 yes i remember that deaths were still counted if You re load a sabe file in fe4 and the only way was yo restart the chapter, maybe I got it mixed
Damn this is way more complicated than one might think. Has any FE player managed to get an E rank in this game before? Sounds really hard to be honest.
Could a minor hack be made that displays your rank between maps? As far as I can tell, the optimal way to do this is painstaking math and counting and checking your numbers multiple times so maybe you can just use an edited version to keep the focus more on gameplay instead of counting? Debatably, it could be better to also be able to retry individual maps in cases where you see that you missed an optimization
You have to try harder in fucking things up than you do in trying to get the best score? I don't know why you'd try this but good luck, or... bad luck?
If you're playing FE7 in an emulator, you could theoretically have someone make a lua script, use a memory viewer, or use a cheat engine tool to find the tactician points. I wouldn't know where you would begin to make this, but maybe someone on Serenes Forrest or FEUniverse could help? Then again, I could have no clue what I'm talking about.
I've looked into analyzing it myself via differential analysis of multiple save files but I ultimately concluded that it's a huge pain in the ass and I'd rather just count numbers by hand as I play the game. I should be able to estimate them after chapter 14 in Hector Mode using the Fortune Teller, though for Lyn mode I'll just have to math it out.
On any of the hard modes, it's easy to one star Exp. The last few chapters have an absurd requirement, and you can easily go from 5 star to 1 star in a single chapter of you didn't abuse the arena. But on a per-chapter basis, yeah... good luck. Let your archer get surrounded in a forest to neuter your Combat tank, I guess.
44, but only 42 are available in any given playthrough. Even then, two more are exclusive to Hector mode (though Excelblem seems to indicate in another comment that he will do that). Lyn mode (which he will do first) has 13 playable characters. I doubt it’s possible even in Hector mode, though. With 39 characters who can die without getting a game over, divided by 3 equalling 13 chapters where 3 characters can die, and there being way more than only 13 chapters even ignoring gaiden chapters? Nope. Averaging 3 deaths per chapter? Maybe. I don’t know how that math would or if it even could work.
Surely there's a memory address to track the Tactician stars somewhere, right? Obviously you wouldn't want to actually modify anything cause that'd be cheating, but it seems like it'd be way too much of a pain in the ass to track it manually.
Surely you can wrangle someone from the FE GBA hacking community to whip up a tool for checking on all of the benchmarks that the game is going to be hiding from you over the course of the run?
This is like the South Park episode where a baseball team spent all summer training specifically to lose against the main cast. Killing your units is easy, but killing them optimally is a whole other beast.
This challenge run is your worst nightmare, one where you can’t just sacrifice all but the lord units.
Yeah its going to be strategically killing off those characters instead, instead of instantly murdering them right away
This both explains a lot and is hilariously horrifying in context. You can't just be a bad or even awful tactician, you must be a Bloody Stupid Johnson level of tactician.
Woah, I didn’t expect a discworld reference here. God tier taste my friend
Sounds like a job for me XD
I guess the spirit of Kaga managed to live in these games one way or another.
Man, to be able to do this challenge you'd have to be some sort of *Fire Emblem* fanatic with an *Excel Spreadsheet* to keep track of everything you've done.
If only someone like that existed!
Instant regret does not fully express Excel's pain
Things are getting out hand. Deploy the reinforcements
i love reading niche fire emblem wiki articles so my surface level knowledge of this topic is greater than others, makes me feel so powerful
1 star in all sounds impossible now that you've pointed out the ranking mechanics...
Yep, which is why I plan to minimize tactician stars instead
All you want to do is sacrifice as many teenage soldiers to Moloch as you can, but in your quest for the worst all you find is the path to (below average) success. Damn, I trust in your tyranny Excel.
Who knew succeeding at failure would be more difficult than succeeding at success
In theory it'd be possible for someone knowledgeable and skilled enough to make a patch for FE7 to track Tactician Points live, right? Now the problem would be finding them and arrange something.
Quoth Fire Pop:
"it's in bits 4:13 at gRAMChapterData+0x2c
which looks like 0x202bc24".
Napkin math strikes again.
Great breakdown! It's cool to see the guts of a game like this, the inner workings the developers didn't plan to show off. Good luck on the run of meticulous stupidity, you're going to need it.
1:20 Tresholds are indeed fixed, if you look into the game with FEBuilder you can edit them for each chapter individually
oh boy, Excelblem gonna have to break out the Excel sheets again!
HOLY GUACAMOLE TACTICIAN AFFINITY AFFECTS SOMETHING?!?!?
As I suspect some of them are at odd with each another.
What I didn't expect was the minimum score grant and that you don't have enough character to kill per map.
if there where just a certain archer you could recruit at will whos nme start with j and ends with itaro. that would make this a lot easier.
False, Jitaro would make this an instant 5 star run.
I have faith in your ability to play the game perfectly terribly
My goodness! Bless you for still taking on this challenge
Some people have fun by playing video games, some people have fun by doing math. Some people combine both and have no fun at all.
This is so fuckin cool. Can't wait for all the elaborate explanation videos
Best thing to do is solo early maps with Marcus and then if it’s a seize map just let end turn for a few hundred turns
Combat rank would be 5 stars, since Marcus kills everything so fast.
@@theultimatepielord8697 true but for the boss fight he can fight the boss with no weapons equipped
@@theultimatepielord8697 Going unequipped into combats should provide non-victory battles at the cost of only 1xp each.
Gotta get that Excel sheet ready
I came for an explanation of a mechanic
I stay for the huge hype of seeing Excelblem trying something very hard
I wish you as much luck and patience as necessary to tackle and conquer this optimization monster
I feel like you already failed this challenge before it even started lol
I can get 1 star in everything at the ending ranks and just declare victory. As for tactician stars I'll just go for the lowest anyone's gotten and challenge people to beat my record.
FE7, but the tactician is a massive Yandere, who desires to have (Insert your favourite FE7 Lord here) all for themselves. And so they go on a journey to methodically kill everyone on their path, regardless of being friend or foe, after all, none of those bastards deserves to even look at the person of affection of our main character.
Sorry, after watching this video, I understand that to get minimal ranking you can't just be a bad Tactician, you need to deliberately and methodically ruin everything on purpose, so I felt the obligation to add some role-play flavor into it.
So basically, playing the game wrong (if that's even a thing) is harder than playing it normally. That just reminds me of Ducktales and Luigi's Mansion, where the worst ending is harder to get than the best ending, because you basically can't touch any money.
Oh gosh oh dang oh no you'll have to recruit people just so you have more sacrifices per map? Who would ever do such a thing.
Dumb question:
If a character that has maxed out exp does anything that grants exp, does that count towards the "exp gained" star?
capped units don't gain xp and thus don't count. The main problem on my end is the leadup to that as the exp requirement for 1* is very strict early on
This is like the holy grail of scuffed runs jesus lol
Maybe you could pick the brain of one of the LTC maniacs for tricks to run your FE7 campaign into the dirt.
Marcus, we need you.
Badly.
But leave your sword. Can't kill anyone.
Getting all 1 star ratings is harder than getting S rank actually (mostly 5 stars)
The only thing more demonic and evil than Blood Emperor Marth: Math.
Will this be HHM? I guess putting all the exp on a single character (Marcus, may also be Hector or Lv9 Oswin) to reach the level cap will be the way to go for the Exp/Combat ranks.
The man, the legend
Why is it so hard to suck at the game.
This sounds harder than a maximum rank somehow.
An additional addendum to my Matthew comment from last video, from a conversation I had on Mekkahcord:
"ATHATH - Yesterday at 6:55 PM
oof
so is it possible to keep matthew and/or marcus alive for a while without losing out on stars in the cumulative view
you get a lot of fodder early on, no?
and ch. 11 doesn't count
fire pop waist flower snow moon - Yesterday at 6:56 PM
you don't normally get a display until ninian and nils join and then it's only in chunks of 12 resolution
but it does show the exact total in the end-of-game record
so is it possible to keep matthew and/or marcus alive for a while without losing out on stars in the cumulative view
well in ch11 since you're forced to A funds/exp that means if you get min tactics/combat you would get an extra star for everyone surviving vs matthew doing
you go from 310 points to 285
because the thresholds are 550/450/300/200/100, cf. [serene's forest link]
if you're failing everything else you want to target 3 deaths in a chapter (85) or zero deaths (150)
ATHATH - Yesterday at 8:05 PM
so shouldn't matthew be preserved until a chapter where you can axe 3 people at once?
oh, wait
I don't think he's counting the overall rank
just the individual categories
for both individual levels and the final cumulative score
fire pop waist flower snow moon - Yesterday at 8:32 PM
nah because ch11 isn't a chapter where you can fail everything else
ch11 is a chapter where you're forced to get perfect funds and exp
so with min tactics/combat you get 225-310 point range depending on deaths
and ofc you can only get one death here because two deaths would be a game over, but one death in this case is optimal anyway
this is the case for most HM-only maps"
Depending on how the optimization routes out, this might mean that you'll need to kill off Matthew in ch. 11 to lose the maximum number of overall tactician stars from his death, which in turn would mean no level 20 Matthew strats. Another fun quirk of sac'ing Matthew in ch. 11 of HHM (if you end up needing to do that) is that you won't be able to directly open any chests until DRAGON'S GATE. You'll need to escort enemy thieves to chests and then gank them to "loot" them, as HHM just... doesn't give you any door keys until ch. 20 if you don't have anyone who can steal them from enemy thieves. That, combined with the funds rank restrictions keeping you from carrying too many possessions over from chapter to chapter, could make things... interesting.
what happens when you give a lot of EXP to a unit and then kill it off?
does the EXP count with the ranking, or is EXP of dead units ignored?
AFAIK dead unit xp and dead unit combats for combat rank still count. I'm only sure about the second one though.
Could we kill merlinus each map to lower the survival ranking for said maps?
Merlinus doesn't count, sadly
Will there be lyn mode? Would the strat have to mean training all 3 lord's to kill Athos but have enough power to kill the dragon?
Yep, I'll play through Lyn Hard mode first. Going to use it to gauge if my ranking math is correct.
How did we go from **intending** to do a normal FE11 run to this
Tactical sacrifices are more difficult than expectdd
Seems like you'll have to go back to your origins, go back to Excel
You think funds is a problem? Just keep discarding every weapon and your funds are gonna be just fine
but he can't discard too MANY weapons, or else he won't have anything to kill his enemies with
@@athath2010 yeah then maybe all he should discard is a white gem
Godspeed
Math, not even once
I to know I want music this is, it sounds so familiar but I am unsure.
Is it possible to get one star for turn count on defense maps?
Some defense maps actually force you to get a 1 star tactics ranking unless you finish them early (say by defeating the boss)
If people made a mod to check the info after every chapter this would be more doable.
Probably best to as few gaiden chapters as possible you mad lad.
At this point it takes less effort to be optimally good than to be optimally terrible. You are just becoming Evil Mangs at this point.
This also begs the question of Hectors 0 requirement chapters. For true minimal ranked play, would the best mode to play be Eliwoods since the 0 requirements chapters will force the exp, funds and combat ranks to increase?
Technically yes, but it's a separate mode and not as difficult as hector hard mode. What's the point of doing a challenge run on an easier difficulty?
For the survival rank it counts the restarts isnt? I mean if a unir dies and You restart the map the casualty is still counted, and appears in the profile of the character as a lose
it actually doesn't count. I think the loss-byte is just a weird stylistic hold over from the jugdral games, because one was able to save mid-chapter in FE4 and iirc, losses that were resetted through those midsaves were actually counted against the rankings.(though I may be wrong about that)
@@lpfan4491 yes i remember that deaths were still counted if You re load a sabe file in fe4 and the only way was yo restart the chapter, maybe I got it mixed
i owe you $10
gl
Sounds like using statboosters the map you get them on one of the lords, cus otherwise it adds to funds, right?
I honestly want to know if Oswin gets upset when reviewing your ranking. Any idea where I can find quotes like that?
Not really, at the minimum rank I think he says something like: "it's difficult for me to ask, but you must redouble your efforts."
Damn this is way more complicated than one might think. Has any FE player managed to get an E rank in this game before? Sounds really hard to be honest.
Could a minor hack be made that displays your rank between maps? As far as I can tell, the optimal way to do this is painstaking math and counting and checking your numbers multiple times so maybe you can just use an edited version to keep the focus more on gameplay instead of counting? Debatably, it could be better to also be able to retry individual maps in cases where you see that you missed an optimization
1:01 Asset 9999999 G S rank in 12 Hours
Is it possible to learn this power?
it is, just download a save file from gamefaqs
I mean, he wanted "Fire Emblem 7, but I win in the worst way possible". It might not be easy, but being the absolute worst never is.
this feels like trying to be a 9 to 5 worker in an Ideal communist society.
You have to try harder in fucking things up than you do in trying to get the best score? I don't know why you'd try this but good luck, or... bad luck?
If you're playing FE7 in an emulator, you could theoretically have someone make a lua script, use a memory viewer, or use a cheat engine tool to find the tactician points. I wouldn't know where you would begin to make this, but maybe someone on Serenes Forrest or FEUniverse could help? Then again, I could have no clue what I'm talking about.
I've looked into analyzing it myself via differential analysis of multiple save files but I ultimately concluded that it's a huge pain in the ass and I'd rather just count numbers by hand as I play the game. I should be able to estimate them after chapter 14 in Hector Mode using the Fortune Teller, though for Lyn mode I'll just have to math it out.
@@Excelblem I asked Fire Pop on Mekkahcord, and they said:
"it's in bits 4:13 at gRAMChapterData+0x2c
which looks like 0x202bc24"
@@athath2010 That actually seems to work. Thank you!
On any of the hard modes, it's easy to one star Exp. The last few chapters have an absurd requirement, and you can easily go from 5 star to 1 star in a single chapter of you didn't abuse the arena.
But on a per-chapter basis, yeah... good luck. Let your archer get surrounded in a forest to neuter your Combat tank, I guess.
okay ima minimum rank FE7
damn FE7 got hands
Why do you do this to yourself?
Ah yes my fave game optimised in the weirdest way
I understood absolutely nothing let's go
Wow... managing to make the worst playthru of FE7 is going to be a trainwrek on itself.
Will the sessions be streamed or just edited videos?
How many playable characters are even in the game? Killing 3 or 4 per chapter sounds unfeasible.
44, but only 42 are available in any given playthrough. Even then, two more are exclusive to Hector mode (though Excelblem seems to indicate in another comment that he will do that).
Lyn mode (which he will do first) has 13 playable characters.
I doubt it’s possible even in Hector mode, though. With 39 characters who can die without getting a game over, divided by 3 equalling 13 chapters where 3 characters can die, and there being way more than only 13 chapters even ignoring gaiden chapters? Nope.
Averaging 3 deaths per chapter? Maybe. I don’t know how that math would or if it even could work.
Maybe play the game on normal instead of hard to at least get rid of some of the pain? The Challenge is more for educational purposes tbh.
I ain't no casual
@@Excelblem Godspeed
...is this the fire emblem equivalent of a shiny hunter?
yea just do the lowest u can as much as possible. then next run go for 5 stars
Surely there's a memory address to track the Tactician stars somewhere, right? Obviously you wouldn't want to actually modify anything cause that'd be cheating, but it seems like it'd be way too much of a pain in the ass to track it manually.
Once again I'm gonna why do you do this to yourself?
This finna be Radiant dawn all over again
This game's idea of a good tactician is one that actively discourages units from building supports with each other?
Bruh
Yikes
Surely you can wrangle someone from the FE GBA hacking community to whip up a tool for checking on all of the benchmarks that the game is going to be hiding from you over the course of the run?
May god have mercy on your soul excelblem