Fire Emblem has slowly progressed with art style to match the modern day. Of course, back then there were limitations and certain aesthetics that are not clearly followed today. With a remake, how modern should this new style be? Or should they stick to something like Echoes, where they applied “Modern” aesthetics to fill the relatively void artstyle of gaiden.
Personally, I think some of the designs could really benefit from a modernized, stylized look that FE4 offers. Some bosses and characters share the “same face syndrome” and could really be expanded on without hurting the original overarching story of FE4.
Sigurd could benefit from getting the Alear hair treatment. But what are your thoughts for the modernization of FE4R?
Everyone could benefit from the Alear hair treatment. Assuming you mean the multicolored hair thing. The problem with it is that it plays very poorly with GBA palette limitations.
I think IS needs to be looking purely at Echoes for how to do modernization IF they were to do it.
However, when I look at that FE5 official art and see Shiva, Eyvel, and of course Finn, I realize how important aestetics are to a game to make it feel unique. FE4 felt a certain way and that is in part to its artistic style which is darker and more mature. It is a very grim story after all and its art, along side FE5’s art, fit it very well.
We are obviously looking at FE4 through a western lens. From a japanese perspective, FE4 is the most beloved title. Heck, its Sakurai’s favorite title. Its lauded and praised over there. Because of how loved it is, I think IS and Nintendo would want to be careful to not deviate to far away from how the game looked and felt.
Obviously the counter argument to this is Echoes. Echoes did not sell well. You can blame the aging 3DS or not having romance, or whatever. At the end of the day though, it did not sell. I fear IS would see this as a sign to continue to pursue art direction similar to 3H and Engage, which self admittedly, I really really dislike.
TLDR: I love FE4. I love FE4. I love FE4. I don’t want it to change. I want it to be its weird. unique, mature, dark self. If it isn’t, then it wouldn’t be FE4.
Personally, I like 3h’s art direction. I like it’s characters, I like it’s build variety, I like that Hanneman is actually viable as a war master for some ungodly reason if you do it right, things like that are hilarious to me, I just wish I could do the reverse with, for example, Alois.
Engage’s art direction, save Alear’s initial multicolored hair, which I will praise up and down, feels like a step too far. A lot of engage feels like a step too far. Triangle advantage denies counters? That’s too far. Rings holding the spirits of heroes which happen to be characters from previous games? Yeah that’s a couple steps too far. The weird cat thing with the uncatlike round face? That’s like seven steps too far, that is an unappealing theme park mascot and I don’t want it here, that belongs in Persona, get it away from me until Persona starts adding FeMCs again or using androgynous MC designs and letting me pick pronouns, which would probably just be significantly easier.
*cough* to circle back around to FE4, Sigurd deserves a hair color pattern that invokes fire. Keep it relatively darker in color, but there should be some lines that look like a flame.
Source? I’m pretty sure 3H is the most popular game in Japan as well as worldwide, but if “beloved” among the old games, it has to be FE3. It’s pretty much common knowledge that FE3 was the franchise’s big break and Archanea has the most influential legacy.
I have occasionally heard this claim from Jugdral fans, and have always wanted to ask about it. FEH has only 75 “Heroes” (i.e. versions of a character) from FE4 which is on the low end and they don’t have many high placements in CYL. With all of the evidence pointing to the contrary, such claims of FE4’s popularity seem like baseless projection.
Though FE4 is definitely more popular to make romhacks of in Japan, thought as far as I’m aware due to difficulty of hacking it compared to GBA it’s only a bunch of reskins.
All we have to go off of are random polls conducted by independent outlets. In 2020, Famitsu conducted a poll with FE4 winning and with 3H in second place, and Netlab conducted a more recent poll in 2023 with Genealogy in 2nd place behind 3H. Engage is also ranked very high. The netlab poll I found interesting as I think it paints a clearer picture. 3H is a modern game on the best selling console of all time with a very large user base while the snes sold less units than its predecessor. It makes sense for 3H to win because more people bought and played it. The fact that FE4 , a 28 year old game, is nipping at its heels is noteworthy.
It’s similar to Dark Souls vs Elden Ring. 35 million people played Elden Ring while less than 10 million played Dark Souls 1, but dark souls is cherished because it’s accomplishments and age.
I think getting FE4 in a drastically different artstyle would be cool (also for a few bosses it has a chance of removing some of their more… Poorly aged elements let’s just say)
The only thing I’ll really hope against changing is that I hope they don’t do the Echoes thing of making all the villains purple for some reason???
Mechanically I think it’s a no brainer that there should be some big changes.
Now, if I wanted to be mean, I could say that I want fe4 to play completely differently bc I don’t like FE4 but realistically I would rather them do something like the Front Mission 1 remake on Switch
Mostly the same game, with some balance changes to make things feel tighter, and a buuuunch of QoL. In Front Missions case it’s giving much better camera control (isometric FFT style grids my beloathed) for FE4 it could be a whole host of things tbh
Well, I’m going to take this seriously, but in a ideal world all remakes would have the original in them…
I think they should hire the same artist as Geanology’s original, the 90’sness of Geanology is it’s whole deal, imo.
To take FE Echoes, Gaiden had little to no art detailed art ingame or outside the game, the original art was also highly inconsistent so there’s no real unified version of what the characters “should” look like. FE Echoes forced some consistency on Gaiden.
However, Geanology had mostly consistent character art, so there’s a good feeling how those characters should look like, which would be messed with in a remake. Modernisation is inevitable in a remake, so the art will never be 1 to 1 with how it was envisioned in the development of Geanology in the 90’s, but i would like it to be as 90’s as it can be whilst still eliminating pallette swap bosses
TDLR: keep it as close aesthetically as possible
My worry with an FE4 remake is the potential of castles becoming hub areas, a la Garreg Mach or the Somniel. I know that the castles are like almost perfectly set up to become more “modern” hubs, but I really, really hope they don’t do that. The hubs were neat for a minute, but the novelty has kinda worn off by now.
My biggest hope with modernization is the chance of a new animation style. Fire Emblem has never had a consistent art direction, so there’s a good chance it will change - and no guarantee it will be the same as 3H or Engage. I don’t think this is realistic, but I would love having an art and animation style based on the old FE4 watercolor artwork. I really like watercolor, it’s really pretty. Plus, modern Fire Emblem often tries to invoke the spirit of the older games, and this just feels like Jugdral to me
I hope they change the frick out of the art style to spite the people who think Jugdral had such a unique art style (it’s the same art style as like 90% of manga of the period)
The gameplay should be changed too but in the most specific way possible (you can decorate your castles and go back to old maps to decorate your castles)
girl game
That would be interesting to see, if the fabled FE4 Remake does happen, how will they deal with “Zane Emblem”. If they’ll give each Zane a slight retouch so they actually look different.
Was also going to mention the short-hair female boss portraits (like Ishtar’s trio of Falcon Knights at the final chapter), but it just came to me that one of them, Díthorba, actually has official artwork from Heroes, so in this case there is a base to compare for a modern art style direction.
I want to it to be modernized and feel like its own unique thing, except arden he should just be the original sprite and dialogue regardless of what the art style ends up being.
