Does anyone have an AAA ranked log or video of Seisen no Keifu?

[FionordeQuester]

I really want to watch or read one. Especially if it's a speed run type.

Is it possible to manipulate the RNG of this game? It seems almost set in stone. Even when I reload from an old file save during the middle of the chapter, events always play out the exact same way...

Edited November 18, 2010 by Sirius

[Aquilae]

Have a scrub like Ardan stay in the castle and keep entering the Arena to burn RNs.

[Mekkah]

nicovideo has some parts of AAA runs, but not everything.

[FionordeQuester]

You know, I'm starting to wonder. How do I navigate Nico Nico? I've got my account, but when I type in Fire Emblem AAA ranked run in the search bar, or speed run, it says no results were returned. When I type in Fire Emblem, it has 20 Fire Emblem videos, but none of them have to do with the AAA rank run.

Does the Nico Nico search bar work under different dynamics than the ones we know?

[Balcerzak]

Yeah, you have to search in Japanese.

ファイア エムブレム 聖戦の系譜 yields over a thousand videos.

ファイア エムブレム 聖戦の系譜 評価 A brings it down to about 40 or so. I haven't watched any, but I assume these would be the ones you'd be interested in.

Edit:

http://www.nicovideo.jp/playlist/mylist/7874925?sort=0

Is probably going to be what you really want.

Edited November 18, 2010 by Balcerzak

[FionordeQuester]

Thanks. But, why didn't it work when I typed in Japanese? Was it because I used a translator to translate my words into Japanese, then copied and pasted the translation? Maybe the translator wasn't effective?

[Jaybee]

Japanese translators almost never work.

[FionordeQuester]

I see.

About the speed run, the only thing that bothers me is how often he seems to have to manipulate things, including the stat gains his characters get. I still can't believe the programmars for this game made the RNG completely static. What an unbelievable oversight...

[Aquilae]

The RNG for FE4 generates one long string of RNs at a time, and the RNs in the strings are random. It isn't set in stone like the original FF1. It's in fact harder to manipulate the RNG compared to the GBA games because you can't control the number of RNs you burn with Ardan in the Arena, and of course you can't burn RNs in Prologue and Chapter 6.

[FionordeQuester]

I see. Does that mean that, when starting a game of Fire Emblem 1, you would get the exact same results if you always did the exact same thing every playthrough?

[VincentASM]

AFAIK (and this is just repeating stuff that Nitrodon told me), FE1 to 3 have a fixed formula (basically +X to the last RN) to generate an infinite string of RNs from a starting point. I'm not sure when a starting point occurs, but I'm assuming it might be stuff like loading the game after closing it (although I believe FE2 generates a new RN before determining a random item drop).

There's a few consequences to this. One, once you know one RN, it's possible to know all the others, at least until a new starting point occurs. Two, there are a finite number of stat gain patterns during level up (eg. if a character has 10% in all growths, normally there's a very small chance that you can gain every stat, but in FE1-3, that will never happen).

EDIT

I haven't done any hacking yet since that last message, but I can tell you right now that the "stat up patterns" arise because FE2 and FE3 (presumably FE1 too, but I haven't done any hacking on it) have a really bad RNG, at least if you want to generate multiple numbers at the same time. The RNG basically consists of "add 5 eleven times" (why they thought this was better than "add 55" is beyond me), and relies on time between battles for entropy. The item drops seem to reseed the RNG between the two checks, so that actually works properly, but perhaps levelups don't do that.

The RNGs for FE4 and later do not have this problem.

The generated numbers are in the range 0-255, and must be converted to 0-99 (by multiplying by 100/256 rounded down) before using them to determine stat growth.

As for the order, I gave Alm one level and the probabilities used were 50, 30, 20, 30, 40, 35. It seems FE2 does it backward relative to the order in which the growths are stored. To resolve any ambiguity, the next person in the list (Celica, based on the numbers) would be 30, 20, 40, 30, 40, 25.

In FE3, Marth (book 1) is 50, 40, 50, 70, 20, 3, 90, 40, and Sheeda (also book 1) is 20, 70, 90, 70, 20, 3, 50, 80. The applicable FE3 RNG appears to be "add 13 eleven times" instead. (Both RNGs exist in both games.)

Edited November 20, 2010 by VincentASM

[Nitrodon]

The RNG in FE1-3 advances 60 times per second, so there's no real way to predict future RNs. The simplistic RNG algorithm causes the aforementioned patterns in levelups, but you can't map out an entire battle in advance or anything like that.

The FE4 RNG does not use time as a source of entropy; the only thing that affects it is using up RNs in battle. As a consequence, doing exactly the same actions will always give exactly the same result, and unlike FE6-8 you can't draw a lot of arrows to manipulate the RNG quickly.