How to beat Fire Emblem 5 in the most deranged way possible

Summary

Challenge and Storyline

Excelblem plays Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 as an ironman: no resetting or reloading, permanent deaths, and a game over means restarting from the beginning.

The story follows Leaf, an exiled prince fighting the Empire to free Thracia. The campaign begins with the kidnapping of children from Fiana, including Finn’s daughter Nana and Eyvel’s adoptive daughter Mareeta. Leaf’s rescue attempt leads to his capture and escape from prison, followed by a long campaign alongside the resistance. The army eventually relieves besieged cities, fights through the Empire’s forces, and returns to rescue the petrified Eyvel before confronting the final boss, Veld.

Reckless decisions sharply alter the journey: optional chapters and recruits are missed, several allies die or become unavailable, and the army reaches the finale badly depleted. Despite the losses, the run is completed.

Gameplay Highlights and Strategies

• Capture and steal: Weaken or disarm enemies, then capture them to take their entire inventory. Constitution affects who can capture whom, and enemies can capture player units too.
• Exploit weapon durability: Missed attacks still use ammunition, and broken weapons remain as weak, heavy items. The player repeatedly uses broken weapons for low-risk experience grinding.
• Grind through enemy behavior: Forests and high avoid can make enemies miss repeatedly. Thieves can also steal and plant items for repeated experience, while unarmed or trapped enemies can provide safe training opportunities.
• Manage indoor maps: Mounted units must dismount indoors, losing stats and often access to their usual weapons. Lance users become particularly limited, making the few indoor-capable units valuable.
• Plan around fatigue: Frequently deployed units can become too tired for the next map. Benching them resets fatigue; stamina drinks can restore it immediately, but are scarce. Leaf is exempt from fatigue.
• Treat side objectives as consequential: Rescuing villagers and children can unlock chapters, items, and recruits. The player misses several of these, including a warp staff and multiple characters, through missed objectives or deaths.
• Use status staves and weapons carefully: Sleep, silence, berserk, and petrification can reshape a map. A Sleep Sword is especially useful for safely capturing enemies—and proves central to the difficult Xavier recruitment.
• Use map-specific tricks: On one siege map, an endless stream of allied green units can absorb attacks and exhaust ballista ammunition. Elsewhere, the player manipulates enemy warp behavior by staying out of range, preventing reinforcements from teleporting directly into combat.
• Prepare for the endgame: The final maps demand door keys, enough surviving units to activate six altars, and answers to dangerous status effects. In the last battle, berserked allies become threats, and the army must defeat six Deadlords before facing Veld.

Outcome and Retrospective

The ironman ends in victory after 6,429 turns, with 14 living units, 25 deaths, and an E rank.

Excelblem’s postmortem argues that Thracia 776’s unusual systems can be frustrating and opaque, but its demanding endgame gives long-term choices real consequences. Even heavily trained characters are not automatically safe, and a poorly prepared army can struggle to finish the game. The video closes with a tier list ranking the run’s character deaths by how funny they were.

Featured Gamer and Sources

• Gamer, player, and narrator: Excelblem
• Sources referenced: An online map lookup and the Fire Emblem WD map page.