A real Fire Emblem player is anyone who plays Fire Emblem. Not sure where your pompous authority comes from to declare that only people who follow your player defined challenge are "real FE players", and what's "lame" or not, because I'm pretty sure you're not a developer working for Intelligent Systems. You are wrong and your attempts at trolling by using words like 'hilarious' and 'what a load' fail. Didn't I have to teach you the exact same thing in the last Fire Emblem thread you ranted all over? From my SRPG 101 article..
In order for the score or result of a game to be legitimate, its rules must be standardized. There should be no way to reduce the amount of skill needed to score or pass the test without adversely affecting the score/result. The most common ways that a games rules become non-standardized are through pre-order/collectors edition in-game bonuses, DLC, optional stat grinding, and save/reload abuse. Any game that violates this rule is no longer a valid test of skill and should not be considered legitimate as a test of skill. There are two types of challenges in video games. Developer provided challenges, where the game reacts to the players actions such as rewarding a higher score or making the game more difficult, and player provided challenges, where the game does not react to the players actions either way. 'Choosing not to grind' in a game that doesn't punish grinding is a player defined challenge and thus isn't considered legitimate within the confines of the games rules. Stating "just don't use X" does not magically legitimize a games difficulty. A game doesn't need a scoring system for its challenge to be legitimate, as long as there's no way to reduce the amount of skill needed to complete it.
Legitimate developer provided challenges and scoring systems form the basis of organized competition. Many types of games would fail to function competitively if the legitimacy of difficulty or scoring system were removed. Player defined challenges can be a fun way to salvage an otherwise broken or easy game, and I've done plenty of them myself, but they aren't comparable to a challenge hard coded into each copy of the game set as the official set of rules.
What a mature response to my suggesting that you should just try playing these games straight instead of cheating your ass off all the time. But I guess meeting arbitrary goals for pats to your ego from developers is much more fulfilling than making your arbitrary goals to stroke your own back. But hey, its not like trying to play a game a different way is going to change how the game is played.
But then again you're such an authority on challenge that I concede defeat. You are the challenged master. No edoubts about that.
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