As you may have guessed, I've made a patch that sets all characters' growths to 0% (or lower, but zero is zero). It is probably impossible to complete the game on Lunatic with this setting due to high enemy stats and dearth of good characters past earlygame, but Hard/Maniac should be much more reasonable.
To apply the patch you'll need to do a few things since I'm a sham. First you'll need these things on hand:
- A FE12 ROM with the fan translation V 3.01 applied. (Or the untranslated J ROM, but I'm assuming the translated version here to be safe)
- DSLazy.
- This UPS patch meant for FE12Data.bin
With these, use DSLazy's NDS Unpack function on your translated FE12 ROM to split up the contents of the .nds file. You'll be taken to a "NDS_UNPACK" folder within the root DSLazy folder once it's finished.
Navigate to NDS_UNPACK\data\data; there you should see a file named "FE12Data.bin". Apply the UPS patch to this file and save it back to NDS_UNPACK\data\data with the same name, overwriting the original. Finally, use DSLazy's NDS Packer to repack the contents of the FE12 ROM...and that should do it! Now you'll have empty levels for days.
If you want a slightly easier time of it, try the Softcore patch. It improves upon the bases of the weakest characters, mostly the later-joining prepromotes, and slightly reduces the max Def/Res for Hardin and Medeus. Essentially the goal is to make Lunatic a bit less absurd to complete, while not making Maniac/Hard cakewalks. The method for installing is the same as the regular version.
A big thank-you goes out to VincentASM's documentation on character growth cyphers, without which I likely wouldn't have finished this little project.