Fire Emblem 1 0% Growths Run - Chapter 4: The Prairie Battle

Channel:

Master Knight DH

Subscribers:

1,950

Published on January 17, 2017 5:24:17 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41R6C74jNCs

Game:

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (1990)

Duration: 13:06

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3

In memory of dondon151's laptop and consequently his FE12 H2 0% Growths Run, though at a later point in time he might recover it, but he's not holding his breath. You know how thieves are freaking conniving pests, as I learned the hard way at the age of 10 when a bunch of kids conned me out of $400 worth of games under the pretense of borrowing them and being my friends. What a bunch of liars.

So this is a Fire Emblem 1 0% Growths Run. The objective is simple: beat the game, no casualties, when my people have 0% Growths for level ups. I hacked the ROM to set every PC growth to 0%, with one exception that should speak for itself, and I don't intend to use the character in question anyway. At the very least, we can find the good things about FE1's design that got lost to the absolutely antiquated balance job.

Chapter 4 is where the game stops being so easy. While it hasn't quite loosened the kid gloves when what is among what it throws at you is a few mooks similar to the ones in the first 3 chapters, there's also Thieves who require speedy attacks to intercept and silence, and you inevitably have to deal with a rush of Social Knights and Horsemen as well. The Social Knights bring up what I was doing: I was trying to see how to budget my stuff throughout the entire run, because the 7 Physical DEF that they have even at Level 1 will inevitably wall Iron weapons, and believe me, it's only going to get worse.

The irony is, the 2 generic Social Knights who are aggressive are the ones with 10 ATK. Thus it's not like they'd have been particularly dangerous. However, it just brings up that Fire Emblem 1 thinks to add Fake Difficulty to the genuine difficulty that is already there. You know how you can do a lot of things in Preparations in most Fire Emblem titles? Yeah, be glad you can, because all you can do in FE1's is choose units, look at the map, and that's it. You can't even change your units' positions, or even directly manipulate them like you can in the Super Famicom remake. And you certainly can't move around items during Preparations, which would have really helped in light of the 4 total items per character limit and inability to have characters just take items from each other in the battle itself. Even Thracia 776 at least lets you change around items in Preparations, and it had each character able to carry up to 7 items.

You see the logistics nightmare that befalls anybody who dares consider taking on this game on a Self Imposed Challenge. It becomes a mercy in 0% Growths that enemies don't become so much more powerful that you can't keep up. Though that doesn't mean they can't slow things down by being annoying to finish off, even if part of that is me trying to kill-feed Sheeda and Gordon while I still can and not have to worry so much about their God awful attack power. However, the other part of that is blockading enemies who make it inconvenient that unlike in the DS version, Maric is in the north Village where he'd get sniped by the Social Knights who stayed back, while the south Village has the girl pleasures money, meaning I have no alternative to using the Armor Killer on the blockading Armor Knight. But hey, it's not like I'll have to worry about a chapter full of enemies with even higher Physical DEF and virtually nothing doing extra damage to them.

I become glad there was still plenty of EXP to feed to Gordon, because Benson's 9 Physical DEF took me by surprise on a practice run, and thankfully with only 12 base ATK and 3 Fight Speed, he still kept following my point that FE1 bosses are generally Stone Walls. Maric happily made use of that, and isn't it handy that magic also ignores terrain Evade boosts in this game. Yeah, see where I'm going with that? Also, looking at the Knight Killer, it'd be much better against Social Knights than an Iron Lance if it didn't have AWFUL durability--of course, enemies don't even care about durability. Huh. Now I'm appreciating the durability system better.

Shame this isn't all good news, because a programmer oversight causes the Knight Killer to not have the +10 ATK bonus on Paladins. That is going to hurt me later on.

Total EXP:
-Sheeda: 626
-Gordon: 831
-Oguma: 340
-Kain: 384
-Abel: 237
-Maric: 14

Total used weapon uses:
-Iron Swords: 137 (1 broken)
-Iron Lances: 11
-Iron Bows: 29
-Steel Swords: 6
-Bow Guns: 3
-Freeze Tomes: 2
-Live Wands: 1

Other Statistics