Creator / Excelblem

Excelblem is a YouTube content creator whose videos primarily center around the popular Fire Emblem series of video games. He has produced both heavily-edited comedy videos as well as livestreams that are edited down into short-form Let's Play videos that are a few minutes long at most, both of which have become popular in the fandom.

Excelblem's Let's Plays are primarily challenge runs of different games using the Ironman ruleset (no restarting for any reason, essentially Fire Emblem's equivalent to the Nuzlocke). However, he's noted for taking these runs to their logical extreme, going out of his way to kill as many of his allied units as he possibly can, simply because he can. He uses what few units he lets live to break the game in half, exploiting everything short of a glitch that he can to achieve victory in the most complicated ways possible.

Games Excelblem has Played

• Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon
• Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade^note Unlike the other runs, this playthrough focuses on getting as low of a tactician rank as possible.
• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones^note Because of its extremely low difficulty, all characters join at 0 Str/Mag and have 0% Str/Mag growths
• Fire Emblem: Awakening
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin
• Fire Emblem Fates^note The Birthright and Revelations playthroughs, thanks to those route's notoriously low difficulty compared to Conquest, had an extra "Kill My Units" challenge where viewers could pay money or vote in polls to kill off specific characters.
• Vestaria Saga^note A normal, livestreamed playthrough of the game, as opposed to one of his typical runs.
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn^note Excelblem eventually gave up on attempting to Ironman the game partway through due to the high difficulty.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses
• Fire Emblem Engage

Excelblem provides examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptational Villainy: Marth, reflective of Excelblem’s typical playstyle, is portrayed as a brutal warlord, willing to sacrifice his loyal allies for minimal gain. He also has a glock.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Names many of his videos for individual chapters using this theme.
  Revelation Step 5: Shovel snow to salvage statboosters by slaying surreptitiously submerged soldiers
  Revelation Step 8: Fight five false-flagging phantoms for a futile faith in familial friendship
• Author Appeal: He suggests this might be the reason the first five Fire Emblem games, made when Shouzou Kaga was lead designer, feature so many young women getting mind-controlled.
• Book Ends: Both the first and last chapters of his Shadow Dragon ironman feature Gordin repeatedly shooting the boss from outside their range.
• But Thou Must!: Lampshades and discusses in his Three Houses KMU the game's tendency to give you choices that actually don't matter.
  Excelblem: "It's baffling how often this game repeatedly pretends to give you a choice and it walks it back the moment you even try. I personally rather just not just have any options instead, if it means the game isn't constantly lying to me."
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: He does want to actually win the games he plays, so he'll hold off on killing specific characters if he has a plan for them or if they're needed to recruit other characters. Then he kills them.
• Challenge Run: His bread and butter.
• Cool Mask: An electronic one that covers his whole face and reacts to the sound of his voice.
• The Faceless: Is only ever seen with a mask and hooded jacket.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: His Days of Ruin run was initially an attempt to kill as few soldiers as he possibly could, in an inverse of his usual style. He gives up when he realizes just how difficult it is to keep people alive in this game and just resorts to playing normally (with cheese strats of course) for the remaining two thirds.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Marth becomes one under Excelblem, deliberately killing off all of his friends for minimal tactical benefit. Other protagonists could qualify as he plays their games the same way, but Excelblem treats Marth in particular as this.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: As many as expected from anyone who primarily plays a strategy game series. One example he Lampshaded in his Revelation KMU involves selling all of his axes because he is out of axe users and no story map past the halfway point allows you to capture enemy units for yourself, completely forgetting that he has access to Kana's paralogue with two capturable Berserkers.
• Hypocritical Humor: On the final map of Engage, he criticizes Sombron's outspoken You Have Outlived Your Usefulness attitude towards his subordinates, then immediately says that all of his allies have outlived their usefulness and that he plans to kill them off.
• Oh, Crap!: Has one in his The Sacred Stones 0 Strength ironman, when Fomortiis summons a second wave of monsters.
  Excelblem: "That wasn't in the wiki!"
  • Also, everytime he loses a good unit against his will or an enemy procs an unwanted critical hit.
• Precision F-Strike: Is quite prone to swear whenever things start going downhill for him or especially if he made a fatal mistake that he knows he could have avoided. Often escalates into a Cluster F-Bomb.
• Running Gag:
  • In his Conquest playthrough, he repeatedly mocks how the characters lament that everything would've turned out fine if Corrin had simply paid twenty dollars for the Revelation route, eventually accompanied by a huge "$20" appearing on screen each time. This is briefly reversed in his Revelation playthrough, where Excel notes that he could've saved Izana if only he didn't pay twenty dollars.
  • His The Sacred Stones 0 Strength run introduces every character as "<name>, who has zero Strength" or when appropriate "<name>, who has zero Magic".
• Stylistic Suck: Chapter 27 of his Revelation KMU replaces his usual narration with text-to-speech that mispronounces "Anankos", "HP", and "Dragonskin" poorly mixed with his live commentary. Since it took only about 45 seconds to beat the chapter, he decided to spend that much time editing the video.
• Too Awesome to Use: Discussed with regards to Myrrh in The Sacred Stones, who some players avoid using for this reason, since she can't fight after using up her singular Dragonstone. Excelblem compares this to conserving ammunition during a home invasion.
  Excelblem: "Three masked thugs break into your house, and you try to fight them off with a desk lamp? Who are you trying to save those bullets for? God?"
• We Have Reserves: Quick to exploit this in any game that gives you a whole bunch of units, especially Shadow Dragon which fills out your party every chapter with generics and actually scales them up to your party's average level, incentivizing Excel to continually send all of his weaker characters to their deaths.