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The War Room, Part 1 (What Is Max Ranking About?)
Yeah, about time I talked about this. Can't very well get invested in a "Max Rank" run if you don't even know what that looks like, right? So then, when you play all the way through to the end of the game, there's going to be a scoreboard where the game basically tells you how well it thinks you did based on these four items...
Survival: This one is pretty simple. Get every single playable character (not everyone is gotten automatically like Sigurd and his gang are), and then have every single one of them alive by the end of the game. Do that, and you'll get an A Rank, the highest rank you can get! Otherwise, if 1 dies, it's a B Rank. If 2 die, it's a C Rank, and etc. etc.
Tactics: So remember how I said that you and the A.I. take turns attacking each other? Well this judges you on just how many turns you took to beat the entire game. So if it took you 399 Turns or less to beat it, great! You get an A Rank! But if you took 400-549 turns, then you get a B Rank, and if you took even more than that...well, you get the idea.
Honestly, this is a really easy category to do well in, because even the A Rank requirement is pretty lenient. It's so lenient in fact, that I've even seen people exceed it by more than 120 turns!
I watched a nicovideo playthrough where someone exceeded the requirement by 239 turns (but with A LOT of rng abuse.) Needless to say, this is pretty lenient.
Indeed. The next one however...
Experience: Now here's where it starts to get tricky. This ranking judges you based on how many Level Ups you got by the end of the game for all the different characters. If you got 1000 or more level ups, you get an A Rank.
The problem with that though is that you actually don't really have that many levels available to gain to begin with. In fact, between all of the characters in the game, they only have 1165 total levels. Not unreasonable at all, certainly, but it still doesn't leave that much wiggle room for being lazy, even if it means...*gulp*...training Noish 
...
That there is one of the biggest challenges in a Maxed Rank run. I don't have to use absolutely everyone...but I do have to use many of the worst characters in the game, so I have to somehow find ways to make them usable despite all their problems.
Eww we have to train Arden?
And then there's a second problem. This is getting into slight spoiler territory, but this game is actually divided into two distinct halves in terms of plot. Right now we're in the first half, with Sigurd and friends, but after Chapter 5, there's going to be a time skip of about 17 years. So at the start of Chapter 6, we're going to have a whole new cast of characters. And the only Generation 1 character who's actually going to join the Generation 2 cast is a guy called Fin. So if you don't get at least 487 non-Fin levels by the end of Chapter 5, you'll have already failed the Exp. rank, even if you get everyone in Generation 2 to Level 30.
And actually, for all intents and purposes, the cut-off point for a good Exp. Rank is Chapter 2, because there's a LOT of important stuff that happens there, like getting a ton of optional items you won't get anywhere else, getting tons of Gold, and even leveling up a character that's only fully usable for that one chapter. So you really CAN'T just take a "learn-as-you-go" approach to Max Ranking this game. No, you have to have things fully figured out by the time you get to Chapter 2, otherwise you're at a real risk of never recovering from a disastrous Chapter 2 run.
That said, there is some good news. If you DO get past Chapter 5 with all the levels you need, and in a decent amount of turns, you're already going to be in a pretty great position to A Rank Exp. Because for reasons I won't get into just yet, the Gen 2 cast are WAY stronger than the Gen 1 cast! Plus, you have a lot of valuable, overpowered items at the start that you don't have right now, and enemies are much more numerous, and much higher leveled! So it's not like the Exp. Rank is that grueling, you just have to be careful, that's all.
Combat: Oh boy...here's the most jerkish rank of them all. So, the Exp. Rank is tough but manageable. But this is just unfair. Basically, you can't have more than three deaths by the end of the playthrough.
At first that sounds redundant since there's already a Survival rank, but there's more to it than that. Suppose you saved your game (you can save at the beginning of every Turn in this game), and one of your units die. "No big deal' you may think. 'I'll just reset the game, and then my character won't be dead! Problem solved!" Except no, that's not the case. Because in this game, each character has their own personal score for how often they've "won" a fight (meaning they killed someone) and how often they've "lost" (how often they've been killed). And even if you reset the game, the game will still remember that your character lost, and will keep penalizing you for that until you restart the Chapter itself.
"Ok, that sounds annoying...' you think in response to this. 'But hey, I have a clever idea! How about, every time I save, I keep using a different file each time! That way, if someone gets killed on Turn 11, on File 3, I'll just switch to File 2, where I saved on Turn 10! That oughtta work, right?" Well, let's see how that works...
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........
Yes, that's right. The game designers were so cruel, that they actually made the game track deaths that you suffered on other files!! Or at least, other files you saved on within the same Chapter. So the only way you can erase those Losses is by restarting the entire chapter, no getting around it.
At this point, you're probably getting desperate...you're just SO angry at this requirement, that then you have one more hare-brained idea. "Suppose I get into combat with someone who will kill me...but I reset, BEFORE that person actually lands the finishing blow? Like, if I redid that fight between Noish and that flying thing, but then reset the game right at...'
'...this point here. Might that work?" Again, the answer is no. Because apparently, all of the battle calculations and all that are done BEFORE any of the animations ever play, so the only way to avoid a "loss" is to avoid that fight altogether.
Trust me. When the game tells you "do not ever die"...it REALLY means, "do not ever die"! And that's part of why I created this specific route to make getting the maximum ranks as easy and efficient as possible. This route isn't going to involve many of the fancy tricks found in all the other completed AAAA Rank runs, but it WILL be easily replicable AND quick!
So that's our first little "War Room" session over. But of course, there will be more, as these will be the segments where I explain how to more effectively play the game, just like in Melth's Max Rank runs! So back to the game...
Playing Through
If you press the A button on any space with no unit on it, you'll get these menus. Most of these aren't too important, but you'll note the "Save" option. As I alluded to earlier, you can save your game at the beginning of your turn as long as you don't actually move any of your units. Once that happens, you have to wait until your next turn to save again.
Then here's the Configuration menu. Message speed decides how fast text boxes go, Enemy Speed determines how quickly the A.I. moves it's own units when it's turn comes (so don't worry, the enemies themselves don't get any stronger), and then Auto Cursor makes it so that the cursor starts on Sigurd every time your turn begins. Otherwise, it just starts at whatever spot it was at when you ended your previous turn.
As for Auto-Save, this is pretty important. Turning this on means that at the beginning of every turn, you'll get a prompt that asks if you want to save on the specified file (in this case, File 4). As you're going through this game, you're always going to want to be saving every turn, that way if you slip up, or decide you want to redo something, you can just load up your turn, and try it again. But at the same time, you don't want to mess yourself up by not giving yourself a chance to go back to an earlier turn as well. So here's what I do...
Basically, I keep a save at the very beginning of the chapter. Then every time I conquer a castle before the end of the map, I create a save point at that specific spot. And then File 4 is the one I'm saving on every turn. This system here will allow you to reset if you incur a "Loss" while still giving you some flexibility to fix whatever mistakes you made without having to restart the chapter.
As for Normal vs. Hard A.I., Hard A.I. Is a setting that you unlock after beating the game at least once. It's supposed to make the game more challenging...but really, all it does is make the enemy more predictable. To give you an example, suppose you're fighting 8 enemies, and all of your units are at full health, except for Alec. On Normal Mode, the enemies will choose who they attack more or less at random, with some guys attacking Sigurd, some guys attacking Noish, and etc. But on Hard Mode, every one of those guys will immediately dog pile on Alec until he's dead. Sounds bad...
Except, you really shouldn't be risking low health units like that anyway, especially on a Max Ranked playthrough. So because of stuff like that (there are other A.I. changes), all that happens is that the enemies become easier to manipulate, because now you know exactly who they're going to attack, rather than having to guess at it. Because of that, I actually think Normal mode is the harder mode, at least for me. So that's what I'm sticking with.