Have you ever wanted to make or edit a dancer map sprite, but are intimidated by this mess?
The dancing animation on the map used with animations off is part of the sprite sheet. There are two versions of the AP: the FE7 and FE6/8. Let’s start with the FE7 as it’s simpler.
In between the sideways and downwards walking frames are five frames of the dance animation.
Each frame bisects Ninian. It’s not hard to see how the halves assemble together. Feel free to download these images to use as a guide.
Simply reverse this process. Make your five frames, saw 'em in half and stick 'em in the sprite sheet.
Ninian’s animation is not that different than a bard, except rather than reusing the usual three frame animation, she has a different five frame animation.
The FE6/8 dancer is more complicated. The sprite is in many more sections, some walking frames among them. First let’s cover the walking-down frames.
These frames are just cut in half the other way this time, and can use the normal 32x32 area the other normal frames do. So far so good, but now comes the worst part. For some reason the dance animation tiles are all over the place, including parts of the landing frame under the walking animation. The disparate pieces come together to form a frame of the dancer jumping, with a separate shadow underneath that seems to dynamically stretch ingame, and a landing frame. The bottom of the ribbon in the dark red square is duplicated and mirrored on the left side. Both this mirrored piece and the legs in both frames are off the typical 8x8 grid.
There seems to be a blank 8x8 section that is empty in both Larum Tethys’s marginally different sprite sheets. It could be the case that it’s not actually stored in the ROM and just appears as a spacer when exporting. If not, I have no idea if anything in this little nook would display, and where. It’s weird they resorted to mirroring the bottom of the ribbon if they had this space left over.
This took me lots of detective work to figure out. I hope I haven’t made a mistake anywhere. The color-blocking approach was inspired by Knabepicer’s tutorial on Custom Triangle Attacks: A Guide.