
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 primarily 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, even sometimes adding a "Kill My Units" ruleset, allowing viewers during his livestreams to donate money to force him to kill certain allied units. 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.
- Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon
- Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem
- Fire Emblem: The Blazing Bladenote
- Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stonesnote
- Fire Emblem: Awakening
- Advance Wars: Days of Ruin
- Fire Emblem Fatesnote
- Vestaria Saganote
- Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawnnote
- Fire Emblem: Three Housesnote
- Fire Emblem Engagenote
- Fire Emblem: Thracia 776
- Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
- Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance
Excelblem provides examples of the following tropes:
- 420, Blaze It: After asking for suggestions on what to set Edelgard's KMU price to, Excelblem eventually settles on $420. In the recaps, however, rather than acknowledge its association with cannabis, he claims it was chosen as it's the anniversary of three major events with tragic consequences: the Columbine school shooting, the birth of Adolf Hitler, and worst of all, the release date of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light.
- 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. - Anti-Climax: In his Revelations run, disappointed by the fact that he wasn't able to kill off all non-critical characters, he decides to risk it all by letting his underleveled Corrin try to deal the finishing blow to the Final Boss, knowing full well that if her 63% accuracy attack misses it will One-Hit Kill her. It does, and the run abruptly ends as he decides to start a KMU for the route instead.
- Bookends: Both the first and last chapters of his Shadow Dragon ironman feature Gordin repeatedly shooting the boss from outside their range.
- Breakable Weapons: This Fire Emblem staple is taken to its logical extreme in his second The Sacred Stones playthrough, which modifies every weapon and staff in the game to have only 1 durability, making them instantly shatter after being used once.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Inverted. Runs with "Kill My Units" rulesets allow viewers to donate to Excelblem during livestreams to make him kill off certain characters, with prices varying depending on unit importance.
- 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.
- Didn't See That Coming: He's completely blindsided in his Sacred Stones 0 Strength ironman when Fomortiis summons a second wave of monsters.Excelblem: "That wasn't in the wiki!"
- 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:
- During the 0 Strength run of Sacred Stones, his Chapter 9 info card for Amelia contains a long rant about how it's perfectly fine to use her even if she's underpowered, because playing with weaker units can be fun and it's dumb to bag on other people for not playing in the way you think is optimal. A few minutes later, his Chapter 13 info card for Amelia states that she's total garbage, trying to make her worthwhile is a waste of your limited time in this life, and anyone who hates her is objectively correct.
- 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.
- Mithril: Excelblem has an analysis video on the Silver weapons of Fire Emblem where he posits that the stronger and lighter weapons may have been originally inspired by mithril, but the designers chose to name it after a more mundane metal to keep the game accessible as The Lord of the Rings may not have been as well known in Japan in 1990 (and possibly to avoid legal issues). He's quite happy to see his theory seemingly validated upon finding out that the art book The Art of Fire Emblem: Awakening does, in fact, describe Silver weapons as "made of a silver much like mythril silver".
- Oh, Crap!: Has had more than a few unexpected enemy crits or misjudged enemy ranges which prompted this reaction.
- 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 often the characters lament that everything would've turned out fine if Corrin had chosen a different route, i.e. if the player had paid twenty dollars for the Revelation route and its Golden Ending, and this is eventually accompanied by a huge "$20" appearing on screen each time. It gets a brief reversal in his Revelation playthrough when Excel notes that Izana, who dies only in that route, could've been saved if only he didn't pay twenty dollars.
- If a run has additional modifications to the game, expect Excelblem to repeatedly remind viewers of that modification, accompanied by the "Vine boom" Stock Sound Effect, such as 0 Strength runs of The Sacred Stones and Conquest introducing characters as "<name>, who has zero Strength (or Magic, when appropriate)", or his Birthright 100 Crit run repeatedly mentioning that enemies have 100 crit. His The Sacred Stones 1 Durability run not only introduces characters with "<name>, who has a one durability <weapon>", his stream has a "death counter" filled with broken weapons instead of killed units, and summary videos often mention how much money was spent on the weapons used that chapter.
- His Three Houses playthrough almost always flips the video upside down whenever Claude is on screen, only forgetting to do so once.
- Save Scumming: In order to make his The Sacred Stones 1 Durability run even remotely possible, Excelblem uses save states in his emulator to make sure Seth quickly caps his Strength and sometimes even rigs critical hits as needed, since killing key enemies in as few hits as possible to preserve weapons is paramount to success.
- 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.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Since Ashera will resurrect to full health if Ike is not the one to deal the finishing blow, Excelblem decides to take it upon himself to abuse Triangle Attacks to kill her 1000 times over the course of an eight-hour stream, allowing her to repeatedly resurrect until he's satisfied and Ike is brought in for the 1000th kill.
- 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.
