If your characters, in their “present era”, have the capability to have children in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber- I mean Babyrealm- I mean Outrealm, and leave the kids behind with foster parents so the kid will quickly leave the Babyrealm as a fully grown adult…
That means all of these characters fighting a war have the capability to produce as many children as they want, and the only thing stopping them from having a normal number of children is personal preference. Putting aside the ethics of abandoning your children and relying on foster parents, and the ethics of paying couples to spend who knows how many years alone with a kid in a parallel universe where time flows differently, logically speaking Corrin’s army should be producing child soldiers faster than Sonic The Hedgehog breeds Chao and a Pokemon player breeds for Shinies combined. Sure, after a few decades of making kids they’d end up too old to fight, but there’s no way Corrin would be a better fighter than 20 of his/her kids combined. Giving these characters in the story the capability to make child soldiers near instantly and not giving the player playing the game a Make Child button breaks gameplay immersion.
They really should have just done a Future Trunks again. Lucina did it, Silver The Hedgehog did it, both of the Terminator films did it. And here’s how they could have put a fresh new spin on it. Lucina couldn’t reasonably be upset with her parents for trying their best and failing. Each of the children came from the same place, they were united by the same theme, the same goal. But what if in the bad future timeline Fates children all came from, their respective countries were ruined by the consequences of a war Anankos used to take over and ruin multiple countries and the world as a whole? Or if you don’t want to do a giant evil dragon so soon after the last one, a secret cult of rich evil politicians could be behind it all, perhaps with plans to sacrifice countless lives to summon the obligatory final boss giant monster once the world has been made sufficiently awful.
One kid could resent his parents for buying into wartime era propaganda hook line and sinker. One kid could resent his parents for giving all they had to terrible rulers only to become physically and mentally broken war veterans abandoned by their country while leaving him with nothing but debt and bad memories. One kid could be too naive and innocent to know anything adult about the war. One kid could have been lied to by his future parents about what the war was like. One kid could resent his parents for the part they played in a military operation that later turned out to be a war crime that cost countless innocent civilians their lives. One future kid could have had a relationship with someone from another country that broke apart when the parents met and the war criminal parents were recognized. One kid could resent his parents for always moving about to evade the law and anyone who knows what they did during the war. Peri’s kid could call Peri cringe. These kids wouldn’t just be going back in time to help morally upright heroes stop an objectively evil dark magic dragon that goes mwahaha, they’d be going back in time to help stop the folly of their forefathers and the ruination of their futures.
Then again, Fire Emblem Fates is a very Engage-like game when it came to the writing and characterization. Hard to write a “War is hell” story when the story wants a 100% morally justified war against cartoonishly evil villains knowingly or unknowingly serving dragon satan. Expecting something so mature from it would be like expecting a dark political tale from Peppa Pig. There was a character whose personality trait was his love of pickles! It didn’t have to be this way, but darkening the singular future Fates children came from would have drastically changed the tone of the story away from the… How can I put this positively and politely? Is campy the right word for Fates’s… Fates-ness? I know some people call it “too anime” but that always felt unfair when so many animes are “less anime-ish” than this.
Tell me, what do you think of this topic? Should the way the Babyrealms were handled be reflected in the gameplay? In a game with infinite generic recruitments, is infinite generic recruitable kids really any different? Or do you wish the second gen was handled in another way?