Othin

5/10. Nothing much to say; he's decent but nothing more.

Huh, alright then. Money wasn't really an issue for me. I just used it to buy a bunch of Door Keys and S Drinks in Ch14; I don't think I actually needed the Door Keys and I never used a single one of the S Drinks. (I used a few I got other places, but I finished the game with the exact same amount as I had bought.) So you didn't use movement stars? How'd that work out?

Okay fuck it. Sometimes, things go better or worse than expected, and sometimes, that's largely or entirely out of your control. Are we in agreement that with regard to virtually everything in real life, this is true?

If you think the results of training can be entirely predictable, you're deluded. Stuff happens for plenty of reasons. Random injuries, major or minor, can disrupt the results of training or its ability to happen in the first place, as can a multitude of other factors. I don't know a ton about athletics, but I know enough to understand the existence of a multitude of relevant factors that we just can't track or control properly. You say competitions are not random; I bring up baseball again. Or tennis, or anything else that involves a number of games against the same teams/players, all or some under what "should" be the same conditions. If the most skilled team would always win, there would be no need for multiple rounds; they would just win every time, or at least every comparable one. But they don't. They just rely on the larger number of games to try and balance it out.

Banzai, we made it one of our priorities to not succumb to the failures of this project, such as wasting time on such disputes. There's no reason for us to make them waste more time. And get in the Google Docs.

Now that you mention it, that's precisely what "perfect" LTC playthroughs seem to approach. They care about turns rather than absolute speed, but when savestates are used for RNG abuse, it seems they're trying to create the same sort of playthrough. Now, I think TASes can be great to watch. But it's my understanding that TAS players don't even seem to act like a TAS actually entails playing the game, just performing it. As such, TASes do not actually replace playing the game. They supplement it, but they stay within their place. This, I think, is what LTC should do, or go back to doing. dondon: Is that the only chance you have? You can't attack him with Fin or something to finish him off, or get a second round with Eyvel? I don't remember this chapter very well, but it can't have been that limited, can it?

Wait, what required crit in Ch2? I don't think I ever needed that. I'm sure I didn't, because resetting for Leaf to gain Move was hard enough. I got 4 turns for that chapter; did you go faster or something? Gains you get from exercising aren't entirely random. But that doesn't mean they're entirely under your control, either. Sometimes, things just go wrong. That's how all of life is.

Let's say there's a race coming up. You need to improve your running skill by an arbitrary amount, let's call it 5. You have eight weeks to prepare. Maybe eight weeks is enough "levels" for you to gain five "points" in running. But maybe it turns out that it isn't. If it isn't, you don't get to do those weeks over; you'll just have to train for more weeks. You have to gain more "levels" instead of redoing the ones you already had, and maybe it won't be easy, maybe it'll cause problems, maybe you won't have enough "points" to do as well as you wanted in that particular race, and you just have to live with it.

Congratulations. You've just demonstrated that there was no good way to address the reveal with the existing setup, necessitating deeper changes be made to the story, precisely as Banzai explained. In other words, you missed the point of our suggestion entirely. Do note that I already explained this, earlier in the discussion. Precisely. I believe what Banzai and I were thinking is that Ashnard didn't like the constraints on what he could do or fight personally as a king. Presumably he had a bit more freedom in those areas when he didn't have to be protected all the time. Donning the armor and being able to move semi-anonymously under a new identity, teleporting anytime, overseeing events personally, etc. would all give him even more freedom than ever, something it seems it would suit Ashnard to desire.

Kngt: Olympic athletes don't roll dice, but it's absurd to suggest that there are no random variables that may impact their performance. But they don't get to run the race as many times as they want just because they weren't in their best condition for whatever reason, or something else went wrong. That is what RNG abuse is: it is asking for perhaps hundreds of attempts at the 100-meter dash and being able to count your best one. Sometimes, the more skilled Olympic athlete really will lose, and they just have to accept that, move on, and maybe try again another time. Take a look at baseball. Teams play several games, because the most skilled team won't necessarily win every game. Teams can't just make up for the random factors involved by demanding to redo their innings in a game until they're satisfied. In the same way, draft players must be willing to accept their loss in some drafts and make up for it in others. aku chi: In reality, luck only becomes such a huge factor when you're moving so fast. Finding hidden items is the only place where funds requires much luck at all, and it's only a factor in one chapter in most games, while thieves can ensure an item pickup. If you're going for funds and Exp, you have to be moving slow enough that you'll have a bit of time to get your thieves where you need them and probably have other characters try a couple of times to get other items. And if they need a bit more time to get those items? You'll be losing time, but time won't be as huge of a concern, while funds can remain unaffected if you keep trying. This same idea applies to the other few times when luck really can make a difference with gaining Exp or funds. Meanwhile, you won't need to do the insane two-mages-against-ten-enemies-in-one-turn thing Kngt mentioned earlier that can become "necessary" for LTC runs; you already have to slow down, so you can use a sane, more reliable strategy instead. As for my assertion that balancing three variables is far more difficult than simply optimizing for one, I believe this is self-evident. Any example of working with multiple variables at once should suffice as a demonstration; surely you are familiar with a few. Or, to address it more directly, let's say we're going by percentages. By FE7's standards, 3 turns are worth just under 1% of the Tactics rank, while 1% of the Funds rank is 8,470 gold. So perfecting this would require, for example, finding any instances when you could trade a turn for ~2800 gold - and that doesn't sound too rare. Or trading that turn for a few levels, not sure about the exact amount. Or trading those levels for funds, or vice versa. This is like a computer trying to calculate a perfect chess game: there's just too much to think about; getting the perfect answer just isn't possible.

Hero Axe, Elite, and Ambush is damn nice with both of those things. He can be especially terrifying with the Pursuit Ring, if he's passing it to Delmudd or someone. 9/10

Meanwhile when they add the motion controls and "better" graphics in Trilogy they take away the hand bones. That bugged me. Sometimes, this stuff has costs.

1) Six ~30% misses is ridiculous even if you cram them into one map. 2) Well that sounds very impressive. Regardless, those double moves are immensely helpful, and if FE5 were to receive the same level of LTC focus as some of the more recent games, I'm sure we'd find that any run that would appear "decent" by their standards would use an enormous amount of them. 3) I was modeling my run after the ChinaFE run, especially that chapter. I brought in the same items as that run did (didn't try to match up the order, but I might have by accident; I think bringing in the same items was an accident anyway), and found that the chests had limited arrangements: I believe I was able to tell from just looking at the arrangements of the chests in a couple of rooms, that when they matched up with the ChinaFE configuration, that all the items would be in the same places. I left two chests, I think the Vulnerary and the Javelin, and was able to get all my characters out in somewhere in the 10-11 turn range I think. I brought a number of items, definitely including the Lockpick and Light and Flame Swords, but I don't remember what else. 4) I thought of that, but I was trying to specifically refer to points that were neither dodging attacks nor abusing for level ups. I personally RNG abused for Leaf's Move in 2 and 11x, but it would have come in handy in 11.

RNG affects more than dodging attacks, too. Almost every chapter on my FE5 SSS run, I had to RNG abuse for something or other: getting random double actions, getting staffs to hit, getting my staffs to miss, getting crits, getting Salem to not cast Sleep as an enemy, getting the chests in Ch4 in just the right configuration, getting Asvel to kill all the mages at the start of Ch5... the list goes on and on. I won't say all of these were necessary, but at many times throughout my run, I had a good reason to do one or more of them. You're correct that FE5 is particularly luck dependent, but there are plenty more things along the lines of some of these that matter for the other games, as well.

It shows that the "official" romanizations might be flawed. It shows that while they can be considered, they should be judged solely on their own merits as a name, with no preference given whatsoever on the basis of their being "official". That is all. I do not intend to post in this thread again; I have nothing more to say about these matters.

No. People did not move on to efficiency; they were already there. Every discussion over character quality or effective strategies ever made discussed efficiency, even if they didn't call it that. But what they didn't discuss is LTC - the thing people like you have twisted the word "efficiency" to mean as if their playstyle is the only one that requires careful planning. Efficiency is getting the most for what you put in. Ranked runs focus on efficiency in terms of ranks: for FE6/7, that means being efficient with regard to turns, funds, Exp, combat, and survival. The latter two are easy. The other three aren't so easy, and ranked run players have to get a balance between the three, making sure that none of the three are entirely sacrificed for the sake of any other. Granted, playing to the exact standard of each rank, there is a limit of how much efficiency can be measured, and past that point, it stops mattering. But that's not necessary; there are ways to expand how we look at it past what the ranks will say. In much the same way, the same standards that comprise the ranks can be applied to games without ranks themselves, or with more limited ranking systems. LTC takes that same expanded view, looking at the exact number of turns taken rather than only going to a limit. But it dismisses the other standards. With LTC, no longer is there any meaning to actually getting items or recruiting or training characters unless they fit into this narrow standard of strategies, and the strategies are so precise that they can require ridiculous amounts of RNG abuse to work satisfactorily. Countless strategies are discarded in the process, and huge swaths of the game become irrelevant. Meanwhile, on a run attempting to balance multiple categories such as turns, funds, and Exp, anything can matter. No human can "solve" a run attempting to be efficient with regard to those three categories together to the extent that we would get strategies anywhere near as certain as LTC players have now. And that's a good thing; it means there's so much to think about on each new run as we play the game, responding to situations rather than simply acting out a pre-planned performance.

The current LTC drafts being discussed here? To me, yes, quite shocking. I cannot complain about people liking LTC. But when LTC begins to stamp out all other FE discussion, I'd say that's within my right to complain.

Personally, even with all my experience with FE, I feel perfectly able to play games in a fluid manner, responding to events rather than having things all planned out. And yet when I talk to players such as Anouleth, they seem to have no comprehension of how to get to where I am from where they are. Perhaps you're right: For some players, Pandora's Box has been opened, and there's no going back. But this is not an inherent disease of the series when played enough; it is merely the price of giving in to LTC, that when immersed deep enough within it, it can make it impossible to ever play the game as it once was again. (See the thread asking about what it would be like to be "blind" again.) This, if true, confirms LTC as the disease that can become impossible to cure, permanently draining the life from FE. If this is the case, then for FE to live, LTC must be kept from spreading and from infecting anyone else. You tell us to adapt, but all there is left to "adapt" to would be this pitiful, empty shell of a series, its countless options all scorched down to so few for no reason at all.

2/10 for Pursuit Ring. Absolutely nothing else worth noting.

Yeah, this is what it looked like to me: Drafts were good because they added randomness and uncertainty, so you wouldn't have the necessary characters to just stick to the same cookie cutter strategies you used in other LTC playthroughs. But RNG abusing takes that away, as you just get new cookie cutter strategies or make slight changes to the ones you have. Bal: Personally, I've found that with the things I've wanted to do (more along the lines of minimal resets or ranked tier lists than drafts), I always get the impression that there won't be enough interest among the people here to bother with. Who knows how true that may be, but eh.

And you don't see the problem with that? A playstyle forcing players to spend that much more time in order to be able to be effective, while using no actual strategy or thought in the process?

This, I think, is the core of the issue, and why it really is everyone's business. It's not simply existing alongside other discussion; it's replacing it.

I concur. What the hell, Snowy.

While most of what I posted is clearly poor translation, nor Romaji (while still being relevant to the matter at hand, as I noted), the focus was on the "Dark Load" part. This was certainly translated from the katakana you posted, and it seems to me that in the case of katakana like this, the line between romanization and translation is blurred, as that katakana appears to be whatever a "reverse romanization" would be called. Now, I'm going a bit outside the scope of what I've learned in class here, so I realize that there might be some subtle distinction I'm missing, and I would appreciate anything you can explain about it. But I believe we can understand that if any mistake has been made, it is the result of a lack of education in these subtle distinctions, not a lack of skill.