In celebration of 10 years of FEE3, and our 10+ years of romhack history, I am curious to see who the community views as the most ‘iconic’ characters across Fire Emblem romhacks (and fangames).
To me, “iconic” is a question of being distinct, representative of the romhacking scene, and memorable. While “iconic” can be conflated with “favorite” in some contexts, I’m thinking of this poll more as a way to see which characters people remember and perceive as a staple of romhacking history.
The form linked above includes 5 blank questions. Please enter the title of the game and the character you are referring to (Ie. “Blazing Blade - Dorcas”) is sufficient. Your votes will not be counted if they include non romhack characters or don’t follow this format. You do not need to submit a top 5, but it is encouraged! Please only vote once. This is anonymous, so we are going by the honor system here. You may only vote for a single character once.
Points will be tallied based on rank and frequency. For example, if you rank Dorcas as #1, he gets 5 points when tallied the totals together, while the #5 slot character gets 1 point.
We’ll leave this poll open through the end of 2020, and I’ll share the results afterwards.
I think the TLP Lords (Kelik, Shon, Anakin and Siegfried) are easily the most iconic rom hack characters in FE, partially owing to their writing but also the length of exposure they’ve had in the community. I think Storch would be the fifth most iconic character due to VQ’s popularity.
We all know Kelik and the rest of the TLP lords will win, so I considered characters from other hacks.
Some characters that really stood out to me are:
Summary
Luigi and Nestor from the Justice and Pride games. The first one being a pretty fantastic meme/joke character and the second being a very strong wyvern rider in J&P1, while in J&P Gaiden he returned as a much more significant character for the story.
Void from Void’s Blitzarre Adventure. VBA is a very memorable hack, and it’s main character certainly is too.
Mikey from Sun God’s Wrath. Also a bit of a meme character, but Mikey brings it to a whole new level.
Kitozawa from Vision Quest. Imo the single most memorable antagonist in all romhacks.
Honorable mentions go to Vance from The Road to Ruin, as I feel like he is pretty iconic as a lord gameplay and story wise, and Budgie from Project Z and other old hacks. Budgie certainly isn’t popular now, but I remember him being everywhere back in the day.
If he necessarily counts, Gheb was also very “iconic” for a time, and I’d say it had more in part to due with GhebFE being one of the first complete proto-hacks as opposed to his own canon appearance.
I tried to think of characters from hacks. I could only think of Kelik, Faratrass, and characters from my hacks. With that in mind, only the former two are truly ‘iconic’ to me. I can think of plenty of hacks I’ve liked, but none of them had original characters or characters with names I could remember.