What made me think this is the fact that Roy’s unpromoted class is at the very top of the class list, while his promoted class is right towards the bottom. Whereas, all of the other classes have their unpromoted variant immediately followed by their promoted variant in the class list. This makes me think that perhaps Roy’s promotion was added as a last minute decision.
Also, in earlier releases, you supposedly weren’t supposed to get the binding blade until after defeating Zephiel. Prototype Information - Serenes Forest This leads me to believe that originally, you were only supposed to receive the apocalypse tome from ch21x, but the developers moved the binding blade to ch21x and also gave Roy a promotion in order to serve as a crutch in case the player struggled to defeat Zephiel.
Perhaps Roy was originally supposed to be like Marth, unable to promote but with much higher growths to compensate. After adding his promotion, perhaps the developers decided to decrease Roy’s growths. This may also explain why Roy is so weak for most of the game before receiving his promotion, he may have originally been balanced around higher growths.
Another thing to note is that Roy’s promoted class has stat caps of 25 across the board, no other class has such even stat caps. Maybe unpromoted Roy originally had stat caps of 25 to account for his lack of promotion, but afterwards gave those stat caps to his promoted variant and reduced his base class stat caps to the standard 20.
The only proof of this being the case is the location of the class in the game data and information on Serenes that is not even verifiable?
I don’t know about this one, seems kind of unlikely, although Roy having the same sprites in his promoted class except for his map anims is odd although I believe Lief did something similar in his game.
Although FE6 is a big callback to FE1 I don’t think the devs would go the Marth route and just not promote Roy at all.
Interesting therory. Although, I don’t think they could’ve made a non-promotable Roy work. because by default, level caps are at 20. I now levels higher than 20 weren’t a thing yet in Fire Emblem, but they could’ve probably made it work if they wanted to.
It’s an interesting theory, back then Lords promoting was still kinda of a new thing in the series, only Seliph and Leif could promote and Sigurd was more of a pre-promoted Lord, so I don’t think it’s far-fetched to imagine that Roy at some point was supposed to be
More like the Lords of the earlier games and not have a promotion.
I mean, stuff like the skill system was also absent from Binding Blade despite it being present in Genealogy and Thracia.
Edit:Thanks to Red for correcting me, apparently only Marth is not capable of promoting in the old games, so it’s less likely that Roy wouldn’t have a promotion. Binding Blade is still heavily inspired on FE1 though, so who knows.
