This isn't so much a review as much as it is a story I want to tell.
(Mild FE4 spoilers)
When I first played Genealogy of the Holy War, I was awed by its enormous cast. The fact that you could use every unit available to you was such an interesting concept to me that I did my very best to try and get every unit either promoted (minus Dew), or married.
And while I found most of the characters to be fundamentally useful including Arden, the blatant joke character, there was a unit that just could not seem to reach any kind of expectation for me.
Have I ever mentioned what my favorite color is on here before? The color is Red, and I've loved the color ever since I was a child. Red has always been a color that for me, represented the coolest possible things: Zero from Mega Man X, Spider-Man, Knuckes, all of these characters I have loved from a relatively young age, and still hold true to me today as representations of the color Red.
And then, then there's Noishe...
Noishe, Noish, Naoise, however the fuck you pronounce it is a character I absolutely despise. They're not cool in any sense, they only have one piece of dialogue in the entire game (two if you have him get married but we'll get onto why that's a mistake), and they can't kill enemies for shit.
Noishe is a Cavalier unit, which is what has given him the claim of being a "good" unit because FE4's maps being so large accentuates the usage of horse units, but in my honest opinion he is worse than most of the infantry units.
He doesn't have the Follow-Up Skill by default, which in FE4 means he cannot double at all, and to make it worse, he has an abysmal starting speed stat of 8, and a growth rate of 20%, meaning that even if you give him the Pursuit Ring that you can find in Chapter 2, he will still not kill units half the time.
While he does start with the Critical skill, which for some would be a good reason to have him marry one of the female units, it's borderline pointless because of how weapon kills work in this game. If you have a weapon that has killed 50 or more units, that weapon comes with the Critical skill inherent to itself.
The only way to make Noishe be up to par is to give him both the Pursuit Ring and the Brave Sword which you can get in Chapter 3 (which is actually 4 Chapters into the game, and only 2 Chapters from the end of Gen 1), but at the same time that requires him to compete with multiple other units who could use those weapons. Personally why would I have Noishe keep the Pursuit Ring when I can give it to the already extremely powerful Lewyn so he can quadruple damage thanks to having the Adept skill (which itself allows Lewyn to strike twice consecutively, that and Lewyn also comes with Critical himself. He can crit and double attack by default already making him leagues better than Noishe), or giving the Brave Sword to someone like Lachesis so she can kill enemies faster and attain that all powerful Master Knight class even sooner? Why should I give power to a mediocre unit when I can have more powerful units be even more powerful?
Hell, Fire Emblem Wiki where I am sourcing the information from says, and I quote "Naoise requires adequate equipment to surpass mediocrity." To that I say, if that is the case... why bother using him at all?
In my first run of FE4 I did everything I could to make this unit work because all of the people I asked said "Noishe is a good unit", but time and time again Noishe would simply not perform, even with things like the Pursuit Ring. He simply had terrible fucking growths.
Even after promoting him to a Paladin, the only use I had for Noishe was letting him be the only unit I didn't reset for. Letting him die to the Mjolnir tome in Chapter 5 so that Sigurd could get the kill.
Ever since I finished FE4 my hatred for Noishe continued to burn. Whenever I played other FEs and saw how the Red Cavalier units in those games were performing far better than he ever did, I just remembered my sheer disappointment and disgust I had with him. He made me feel ashamed of liking the color Red.
And so I finally reached a conclusion. After joking about it for a good chunk of the year, I decided to do the one thing with Noishe that could bring me joy and happiness...
I would speedrun his death.
Yes, what I spent most of today doing was trying to find the fastest, most efficient way to get Noishe killed in the Prologue of Genealogy of the Holy War.
It was adrenaline pumping, figuring out a strategy that required me to sell Sigurd's Iron Lance so Noishe could buy it on Turn 2, allowing for him to attack an ax unit so that he would get two shot on enemy phase and die.
The process took several hours, first I did a 1:35.4 Minute Run where I paused during the cutscene and started at turn one. My buddy Simon told me that wasn't legitimate, so then I moved on to trying to do it legit the fastest way possible.
As the first person to attempt the Noishe Death% Speedrun, I learned a lot about the optimal strategy. It requires skills not tied to Fire Emblem, if anything I'd say it's more akin to Mario Party.
Step 1.
Mash as much as humanly possible.
Mashing the start button is the only way to skip dialogue, and if you do it fast enough, you won't even see portraits of speech bubbles. The scene will simply fade in and out instantaneously.
This is the ideal scenario as given the map movement cutscenes are entirely unskippable, being able to fully skip dialogue scenes is imperative to saving time on the run.
Step 2:
Put everyone except Arden into the castle on Turn 1, while also changing your options as quickly as possible.
In FE4, you cannot change options in the main menu, and are required to do so once you are in play. This requires precision so as to not slip up and accidentally waste time.
The menuing is required simply because removing animations as well as raising enemy speed reduces the amount of time enemy phase takes, allowing for a better time.
Putting all of the units into the castle on Turn 1 prevents enemies from targeting your other units, that way they won't be killed when you send Noishe out on Turn 2 in order to finish the run.
It also allows you to fulfill the requirements for successful completion of the run on Enemy Turn 2 by allowing Sigurd to sell his Iron Lance for Noishe to buy, giving him a disadvantage to the enemy Axe units whom he otherwise would have a high avoid rate against.
That's not Noishe being good but rather Axes' being shit against Swords. Giving Noishe the Iron Lance also gives the enemies as 100% hit rate against him, guaranteeing death in three attacks.
Step 3:
Mash even harder.
This is the second hardest part because after turn one, there is an entire 25-45 second scene where you have no control while characters move on the map and have multiple lines of dialogue. There is even a fight which is animated, even if you have animations off.
Simply mash as fast as you can to skip dialogue so that the movement goes faster, allowing for enemy phase to actually start, which should go smoothly if you successfully menued to make enemy movement faster on Turn 1.
Step 4.
Menu the Iron Lance as fast as humanly possible.
This is the absolute hardest part and requires exact precision. Any mispress and you will doom the run here. You need to go into the castle, sell the Iron Lance with Sigurd, exit out of that menu, and press down to select Noishe.
Then immediately after go and buy the Iron Lance for Noishe, exit that menu and send him out to attack.
Step 5.
Attack the Axe unit closest to the castle.
By attacking this unit with the Iron Lance, you are guaranteed to take 11 damage, which is more than enough for Noishe to get two shot on enemy phase. After the attack, move Noishe to the left close to the next axe unit to deliver the coup de grace.
Step 6.
Watch him die.
At this point, you just watch as Noishe dies painfully to two slashes of the axe, ending your run.
By doing this you will have successfully completed your Noishe Death% run, killing the whitest unit in the army with more effort than it takes to actually beat the prologue of this game.
And I know what you're probably thinking: "Wow, this is such an extremely petty thing to do over a video game character from one game in a franchise of 17 mainline games and multiple spinoffs," and to you I say, yes. Yes it is petty. But it was so worth it.
You can call it petty, you can call it a joke in bad taste, call me a shit eating bastard who is not worthy of the ground upon which he stands or the games of which he plays but that will never make me feel ashamed of the absolute pop-off I had when I got a Sub 3 Minute Run.
Pettiness results in some pretty special moments.
(Mild FE4 spoilers)
When I first played Genealogy of the Holy War, I was awed by its enormous cast. The fact that you could use every unit available to you was such an interesting concept to me that I did my very best to try and get every unit either promoted (minus Dew), or married.
And while I found most of the characters to be fundamentally useful including Arden, the blatant joke character, there was a unit that just could not seem to reach any kind of expectation for me.
Have I ever mentioned what my favorite color is on here before? The color is Red, and I've loved the color ever since I was a child. Red has always been a color that for me, represented the coolest possible things: Zero from Mega Man X, Spider-Man, Knuckes, all of these characters I have loved from a relatively young age, and still hold true to me today as representations of the color Red.
And then, then there's Noishe...
Noishe, Noish, Naoise, however the fuck you pronounce it is a character I absolutely despise. They're not cool in any sense, they only have one piece of dialogue in the entire game (two if you have him get married but we'll get onto why that's a mistake), and they can't kill enemies for shit.
Noishe is a Cavalier unit, which is what has given him the claim of being a "good" unit because FE4's maps being so large accentuates the usage of horse units, but in my honest opinion he is worse than most of the infantry units.
He doesn't have the Follow-Up Skill by default, which in FE4 means he cannot double at all, and to make it worse, he has an abysmal starting speed stat of 8, and a growth rate of 20%, meaning that even if you give him the Pursuit Ring that you can find in Chapter 2, he will still not kill units half the time.
While he does start with the Critical skill, which for some would be a good reason to have him marry one of the female units, it's borderline pointless because of how weapon kills work in this game. If you have a weapon that has killed 50 or more units, that weapon comes with the Critical skill inherent to itself.
The only way to make Noishe be up to par is to give him both the Pursuit Ring and the Brave Sword which you can get in Chapter 3 (which is actually 4 Chapters into the game, and only 2 Chapters from the end of Gen 1), but at the same time that requires him to compete with multiple other units who could use those weapons. Personally why would I have Noishe keep the Pursuit Ring when I can give it to the already extremely powerful Lewyn so he can quadruple damage thanks to having the Adept skill (which itself allows Lewyn to strike twice consecutively, that and Lewyn also comes with Critical himself. He can crit and double attack by default already making him leagues better than Noishe), or giving the Brave Sword to someone like Lachesis so she can kill enemies faster and attain that all powerful Master Knight class even sooner? Why should I give power to a mediocre unit when I can have more powerful units be even more powerful?
Hell, Fire Emblem Wiki where I am sourcing the information from says, and I quote "Naoise requires adequate equipment to surpass mediocrity." To that I say, if that is the case... why bother using him at all?
In my first run of FE4 I did everything I could to make this unit work because all of the people I asked said "Noishe is a good unit", but time and time again Noishe would simply not perform, even with things like the Pursuit Ring. He simply had terrible fucking growths.
Even after promoting him to a Paladin, the only use I had for Noishe was letting him be the only unit I didn't reset for. Letting him die to the Mjolnir tome in Chapter 5 so that Sigurd could get the kill.
Ever since I finished FE4 my hatred for Noishe continued to burn. Whenever I played other FEs and saw how the Red Cavalier units in those games were performing far better than he ever did, I just remembered my sheer disappointment and disgust I had with him. He made me feel ashamed of liking the color Red.
And so I finally reached a conclusion. After joking about it for a good chunk of the year, I decided to do the one thing with Noishe that could bring me joy and happiness...
I would speedrun his death.
Yes, what I spent most of today doing was trying to find the fastest, most efficient way to get Noishe killed in the Prologue of Genealogy of the Holy War.
It was adrenaline pumping, figuring out a strategy that required me to sell Sigurd's Iron Lance so Noishe could buy it on Turn 2, allowing for him to attack an ax unit so that he would get two shot on enemy phase and die.
The process took several hours, first I did a 1:35.4 Minute Run where I paused during the cutscene and started at turn one. My buddy Simon told me that wasn't legitimate, so then I moved on to trying to do it legit the fastest way possible.
As the first person to attempt the Noishe Death% Speedrun, I learned a lot about the optimal strategy. It requires skills not tied to Fire Emblem, if anything I'd say it's more akin to Mario Party.
Step 1.
Mash as much as humanly possible.
Mashing the start button is the only way to skip dialogue, and if you do it fast enough, you won't even see portraits of speech bubbles. The scene will simply fade in and out instantaneously.
This is the ideal scenario as given the map movement cutscenes are entirely unskippable, being able to fully skip dialogue scenes is imperative to saving time on the run.
Step 2:
Put everyone except Arden into the castle on Turn 1, while also changing your options as quickly as possible.
In FE4, you cannot change options in the main menu, and are required to do so once you are in play. This requires precision so as to not slip up and accidentally waste time.
The menuing is required simply because removing animations as well as raising enemy speed reduces the amount of time enemy phase takes, allowing for a better time.
Putting all of the units into the castle on Turn 1 prevents enemies from targeting your other units, that way they won't be killed when you send Noishe out on Turn 2 in order to finish the run.
It also allows you to fulfill the requirements for successful completion of the run on Enemy Turn 2 by allowing Sigurd to sell his Iron Lance for Noishe to buy, giving him a disadvantage to the enemy Axe units whom he otherwise would have a high avoid rate against.
That's not Noishe being good but rather Axes' being shit against Swords. Giving Noishe the Iron Lance also gives the enemies as 100% hit rate against him, guaranteeing death in three attacks.
Step 3:
Mash even harder.
This is the second hardest part because after turn one, there is an entire 25-45 second scene where you have no control while characters move on the map and have multiple lines of dialogue. There is even a fight which is animated, even if you have animations off.
Simply mash as fast as you can to skip dialogue so that the movement goes faster, allowing for enemy phase to actually start, which should go smoothly if you successfully menued to make enemy movement faster on Turn 1.
Step 4.
Menu the Iron Lance as fast as humanly possible.
This is the absolute hardest part and requires exact precision. Any mispress and you will doom the run here. You need to go into the castle, sell the Iron Lance with Sigurd, exit out of that menu, and press down to select Noishe.
Then immediately after go and buy the Iron Lance for Noishe, exit that menu and send him out to attack.
Step 5.
Attack the Axe unit closest to the castle.
By attacking this unit with the Iron Lance, you are guaranteed to take 11 damage, which is more than enough for Noishe to get two shot on enemy phase. After the attack, move Noishe to the left close to the next axe unit to deliver the coup de grace.
Step 6.
Watch him die.
At this point, you just watch as Noishe dies painfully to two slashes of the axe, ending your run.
By doing this you will have successfully completed your Noishe Death% run, killing the whitest unit in the army with more effort than it takes to actually beat the prologue of this game.
And I know what you're probably thinking: "Wow, this is such an extremely petty thing to do over a video game character from one game in a franchise of 17 mainline games and multiple spinoffs," and to you I say, yes. Yes it is petty. But it was so worth it.
You can call it petty, you can call it a joke in bad taste, call me a shit eating bastard who is not worthy of the ground upon which he stands or the games of which he plays but that will never make me feel ashamed of the absolute pop-off I had when I got a Sub 3 Minute Run.
Pettiness results in some pretty special moments.