Thyra: The Talon - Character Journey Through a Decade
I’m writing this post on Chinese New Years. Fittingly for the subject matter, but also ironically, as we’re leaving Year of the Dragon behind. Perhaps I should’ve written this yesterday as the send off to the Year of the Dragon, but it is what it is.
As my last post would indicate, I did significant work on Dream of Five’s visuals, both with taking full visual control in the Definitive Edition, and as a major contributing artist in the original 2010s version. Outside of visuals, however, I don’t have much input in how the characters are written–except four characters. Of the four, Kolbane is still mostly Parr’s, but I’ve had a number of inputs to his characterization in dev and draw him a lot, so I guess we split custody on that front. Annelise wasn’t originally mine, but was made closely with my characters as a set, and I’ve mostly taken to managing her direction these days. Volund is fully mine and I’ve done a fair bit of work on him, but he was made as Thyra’s supporting cast from the onset.
So that leaves Thyra herself.
Thyra is hard to miss if you’ve played through a good portion of Dream of Five. Notably intricate portrait, custom class, custom animation with extremely over-the-top crits, a shitload of stats, two personal weapons. And you can call that dev favoritism and you’d be damn right, because I didn’t draw 21 CGs and make 5 animation sets and I lost track of how many portraits for the character I put a decade’s worth of effort into developing to be lackluster. Especially since that would be poor character-gameplay integration, so I’m letting myself have this.
But she wasn’t always like that.
2010-2015 Era
A Brief History of Dream of Five
Dream of Five (2010-2015, FE7) has its origins as a forum community hack, in a similar vein to TLP. While many people submitted characters, eventually it came down to a small core group of people that included me, Parr, Astra, and a few others. Between us we wrangled the community submissions into something coherent, though ultimately as we graduated high school, and entered college, and grad school, it was clear that our free time was not enough for the ambition of our scope, and thus, Dream of Five (FE7) stopped development in 2015.
Thyra was my original contribution from all the way back in 2010.
A Little Background About Myself, For Context
I was born in China and grew up on stories like Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Period Costume Dramas that involve martial arts. As a preteen, I got into Wuxia novels through watching the Heavenly Sword Dragon Sabre (2003) TV drama, and subsequently read the novel it’s based on, and that got me into the Wuxia genre as a whole. I was always drawn toward characters who are strong fighters. I loved swords for as long as I could remember.
But they never let the girl be the strongest.
In 2009 I got into Fire Emblem. Sometime soon after, I played FE4. Ayra’s introduction left a heavy impression on me. Many fighty female characters often had spirit, but not enough steel behind the fire. Ayra was different–her threat to Kinbois was plenty impactful as words, but she absolutely could back it up, given that she could kill most of your army one-on-one. She didn’t have a lot of dialogue–though she did have above curve for a FE4 character–but anything she did have, she made it count.
She was genuinely, insanely, cool, and to this day, she’s my favorite Fire Emblem Character. It’s been 15 years.
Dream of Once Again
So, of course, when I submitted a character to Dream of Five, I based her off Ayra.
I didn’t name her Thyra then, the character’s gone through a few renames, but those don’t matter too much. Just important to note that I named her that after a newly released FE character took the name I had given her and at that point her writing has diverged, I’m not that on the nose with my inspirations.
But, she did originally start off, as a level 4 Myrmidon.
original 2010 era design, spliced version on the left, my first full custom attempt ever on the right–Astra then made a cleaner version, and VampireElf after that. Vamp’s version was her first iteration in the rom.
I was 16 at the time when I made this. As you can tell, the outfit bears a lot of similarity to some of Ayra’s TCG looks, though I always was one for pants. There was an attempt at musculature, but this was early on in my 4-year anatomy grind, so my skill wasn’t there yet, but there was an attempt.
The early pitch of her character was also a princess in the guise of a mercenary, displaced for some reason I no longer remember. She joined where Driscoll does today, and Driscoll didn’t exist then. Her personality was very different at the time as well, as a 16 year old I had a more surface-level understanding of characters. I thought that because I wanted a strong woman she should also be hotheaded and swore a lot, even though when looking at her base inspiration, Ayra wasn’t really either of that–but maybe 16 year old me saw the Kinbois threat and just synthesized that out of many other fictional examples?
Bonus: T1-T2-T3 progression sketches, circa 2011, with a bonus halfbody sprite. This was never going into the game, I just liked designing. Some things haven’t changed.
Come 2012, through testing and user feedback, it was noted that earlygame player composition was too sword-heavy. After much discussion we decided to add Driscoll (who given the circumstances of this addition was not given a lot of thought in design, and was one of my earliest redesigns in 2023 as I was never truly happy with his 2012 portrait), and move Thyra to a later slot, changed to a prepromote.
So of course, I had to make a new portrait that fits her new role better.
At that point, I’ve started to at least move her palette away from the Ayra special, and started to add in some more explicitly Chinese elements into her design. Not quite all in yet, at this point, though. One will also note that I’ve gotten better at anatomy.
This is also when I started working on a personal animation for her–if you wonder why Thyra’s modern sword crit uses Swordmaster afterimage type stuff, it’s because the animation was from this era when she was actually a Swordmaster-type. I made a draft for her animation, Yeti took an interest in my draft and helped adjust a bunch of frames to make more sense, and that’s where her sword animation ultimately comes from.
V1 of the Thyra animation, dated to 2012 in my files.
Old Do5 Dev happened pretty slowly, and we did try to do a lot of polishing on the existing script during 2013-2014. Rewrites and the such. I took the opportunity to start revising her character at that point–At this point, I have realized that the original pitch for her was a child’s rudimentary understanding of what I truly wanted.
I decided to keep the basic background of unconventional princess posing as a mercenary, but I needed a better reason than just The Sword or whatever I had then. And, true to my sources, I also had a better understanding of Ayra’s character then, and that even subconsciously, the reason she stuck with me is, precisely, that her confidence was founded and she wasn’t really flying off the handle at the lightest offense. Despite the sword and martial prowess being a big part of her, it also wasn’t her sole driving force, and her character had facets that were impressively conveyed in about 15-20 lines of text. While I wasn’t thinking directly about Ayra at that point—I wanted Thyra to stand on her own by 2013, I still wanted to make her into the kind of character I really wanted to see–undeniably powerful and unapologetically cool, but multifaceted and her strength may draw people in but it cannot be the only thing she has. I also can’t just throw a bunch of hodge podge at the wall and just pretend it’ll work, so I got to work on putting together something that all makes sense as a package.
Of course, 2013 is about when I started to hit my stride in drawing the human figure. In part, I thank Araki for this. I’ve also decided to properly build out Thyra’s homeland to better develop her character. This is about when I started really wanting to make the do5 country visuals consistent, in general. So I got back to the drawing board with design also.
I decided to tap into what I know best–my own culture, and created a country that uses many Chinese elements. Notably I decided to capitalize on the many innovations through Chinese history, and made XH an engineering-heavy country. This also make sense to give ‘making random shit’ to her as a hobby, and with that, I came up with the idea of the 1-2 retractable chain sword of her own creation that later became Tianlong Jian. She needed a reason to be around Talis at all, so I made the whole trip intended to be a diplomatic mission gone wrong at sea. I wanted to keep her more down-to-the-ground-palling-with-commoner aspects, so I tapped into a good ol CDrama plotpoint that nevertheless, purportedly have roots in chinese history with particular emperors Kangxi and Qianlong, of the concept of 微服私訪, or incognito surveys, where emperors would dress up as commoners (in the popular cdrama huan zhu gege, qianlong and his entourage dressed up as a merchant family) and check how the people are doing without officials trying to dress it up pretty for the emperor coming. There’s some extra backstory I wrote, but those aren’t too important here—but as of 2015, after several rewrites, I finally made a character that I was happy with, both in design and characterization, just in time for Dream of Five itself to die.
the right side design ended up being pretty much the final design. As I became more confident in my art skills, I was able to properly actualize Thyra to a degree I truly wanted her. In 2015 I’ve gotten a fair bit of pushback on her design–it was a different time and not everyone was on board was having female characters be so buff. Women don’t realistically look like that! They cried. And humans also don’t realistically win fistfights with bears, but plenty of just as unrealistically buff men in fiction do that, don’t they? I don’t care for double standards.
2015-2023
I often thought about using her in something else between 2015-2023—I’ve spent this long making a character, only for it to go nowhere. I still did a bunch of refinements to her among friends, and thought of making her own comic series, possibly, but at that point, I started work, life got busy. There was a few years where I put out one full polished piece per year. The commute was pretty brutal, especially, and often drained my energy enough to do my hobbies. Despite this I did think of her from time to time and add a few pieces of characterization in my head anyway.
Then came 2020.
The pandemic messed a lot of things up, including parts of my life, but it did also bring a boon–I was fortunate enough to work for a company that realized no return to office = saving money on renting 2 floors of a manhattan building, and permanently went remote work in 2021, regardless of pandemic status. This cut out my previously long commute, and I have time to be creative again. I started drawing more and this opened me up to–
2023-2024
Dream of Definitive Edition
Long story short, Parr and I decided to revive Dream of Five in '23, and by FEE3 '23, released 0.1.0 that contained modernized content that went up to end of route split–the same as the public patch available on Serenes Forest. This means that my girl’s time was finally here, a decade later. She was slated for chapter 17 ever since the Driscoll jointime shift, and that has not changed. What has changed is that I needed to get a hell lot of graphics done again. I do at least have her portrait done, but the animation made all the way back in 2012, and her design has changed a lot since then, so while I can largely reuse the motions themselves, I’d have to remake the whole animation.
I feared I’d be rusty with my pixel art, but I got back into the groove of things fast enough. Once I made a few frames of the new version of the animation, I thought, hey, this isn’t so bad, maybe I could make her punch something too! So I pitched the idea to Parr, he agreed to it, I pitched the inf use low mt secondary prf and he came up with the lancereaver aspect. Teamwork.
The Impact of Yakuza
In 2022 I got into Yakuza, and Kiryu and Majima quickly became some of my favorite characters in all fiction. In 2023 when I was organizing a bunch of my existing character notes for Thyra for the revival, I noticed that even long prior to playing Yakuza I ended up writing a character with a number of accidental similarities. A funny coincidence–but goes to show that I have achieved ‘write exactly the character I want to see’.
While any characterizing similarities is largely accidental, I did take some graphical inspiration from Yakuza, in the end. Yakuza Gaiden came out Nov 9, 2023, and prior to that I was on a month-long grind to finish Rena’s promotion animation so I can finish before the game comes out so I don’t have to think about that animation (ptsd inducing, still) while playing the game.
The second I finished Yakuza Gaiden steam platinum, I got back to work on Thyra immediately.
Turns out Kiryu is an animation goldmine.
Originally I wasn’t intending to reference Yakuza for the fist animation. Between my own knowledge of martial arts and a wide range of martial arts media to reference on, I had a few other plans that I’ve put aside so I could work on Rena nonstop, one of which was infeasible in the gba engine anyway—I originally wanted Thyra’s fist crit for her to just pick up the enemy wholesale and jump up and then skydunk them, until I realized that would involve enemy sprite interaction and that would be, difficult, but while spamming Essence of the Dragon God in Yakuza Gaiden and having a blast, I realized that’s exactly what I wanted. Kiryu’s fighting style matched what I wanted for her well–as I intended her to combine immense raw strength and the high technical skill of an experienced martial artist, rather than a pure brute force fighter.
And then for the style points I went all out with it. Heat action flare, shirt rip, tattoo flash, the text done in the same style as Yakuza 0 Total Domination, and even the return is referenced off of Majima’s breaker style. I did end up just coming up with my own movement for the regular, as I looked through the basic combos and they’d still be too long for a regular attack’s worth of speed, but I did look at a different majima animation (from mad dog this time) for the return flip as well.
The result is this.
I finished this full set of animation in about two and a half weeks. The power of motivation.
Gameplay
Soon, we started work on chapter 17, and with that, Thyra’s gameplay needed to be real. I made her growths, Parr made her bases. We started workshopping Tianlong Jian’s stats and came up with high mt baseline with a stat decrease at range to reduce 1-2 juggernauting but still keep the chain 1-2 aspect of the design and encourage thoughtful use of the 2range, but as we don’t use skillsys, a conditional stat change isn’t exactly straightforward to do.
But hey, my day job is programming.
With contro’s help, I set up mohka’s decomp on to my computer, as lyn.event outputs are pretty builder-insertible, and got to work. This also led to me making a bunch of other custom code for Do5 down the line with the system set up–swordmaster avo, custom exp formula, 100% silence, to name a few.
The first iteration of her bases actually ended up pretty underwhelming—they looked fine on paper, but Do5 enemies actually scale up pretty quickly, and with that I pushed for some buffs–I think gameplay-character integration is important, and if her dialogue indicates her strength, but gameplay doesn’t, there’s a disconnect. As she is a monosword class and not mounted, we figured giving her just overwhelmingly high stats wouldn’t break the game–but there’s still a balance to be struck. Due to story demands there was a number of bulky strong sword users that all join in quick succession, and there needed to be care taken to give the rest of them enough differentiating niches, so there was only so much room to push stats. Thyra also still needed to have some unit drawbacks—while there is a few units in Do5 that falls under “good at every stat that matters” they’re often early joiners that are susceptible to the whims of the RNG, while you get Thyra’s stats for free. Her speed’s kept at a middling level mostly for this reason, though her other major, and quite notable weakness, is another element of gameplay-story integration.
As mentioned earlier, I made Xuanhe into an engineering/tech focused country based on China’s historical innovations. On the flipside, and mentioned in Annelise/Rozelle, grasp of magic has largely eluded them. Both Thyra and Volund don’t have much res, and Annelise’s is quite a bit lower than Eilene’s, justified by the bulk of her res coming from the pegasus. Nuking Thyra’s res completely down to 0 to justify her other stats both serves as balancing and lore-compliant, as the leading representative of her country.
I’m happy with what we finalized her at in version [complete]. Feels like a decade of work paid off for real.
Takeaway:
- When you want things done right, do it yourself
- Sometimes yourself of 5 years ago won’t do it right either. It’s ok, the you of 5 years later will do it better.
- Thus follows that even if your project takes longer than you planned to finish, this can be a good thing.