Which FE has the best class design?

As in Visually, which FE has the coolest / unique / varied etc class design.
I’m gonna pin up Engage. I think one thing they did right with it is how cool the classes look, amazing battle anims certainly helps. My standout favorites are the wolf knight, the monks line, snipers and breserkers. They look hella cool and has this modernized but still classic adjacent look.

Example:
![image|20x21]

(Credit: pheonixmaster1)

But anyways what’s yall’s favorite Fe, class design wise

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This is a hot take, but Gaiden. NES era FE wasn’t afraid to have Final Fantasy esque sci-fi wackiness. There were the ballisticians being tanks in the first game, but the sequel took it to a whole new level. Snipers that look like Iron Man pulling out a foldable bow with a scope, Bow Knights having a bow mounted on the horse, electricity surging through the Gold Knight’s armor, etc. The third tier classes really do feel epic.

GBA does go into similar territory with the General but not much otherwise, the main appeal is in the motions, not the outfits of the classes.

I suppose I have to acknowledge Engage has its engaged forms, but those aren’t really classes, and are way too homogenous, making units the same white/black and gold hovering ultra instinct super saiyan, with way too minor differences. They could have been more distinct. Sigurd doesn’t give his engaged units a horse, etc.

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unsurprisingly for me, my favorite class designs are gaiden. it probably has the biggest “cool factor” out of any game. the t3 classes are sick with big armor and spikes. their animations are gbafe level on the famicom sans the crits and imo better than anything on the snes. the map sprites are also recognizable and cool looking
for specifics
-cane sages are awesome, i love their standing pose and nonchalant casting animation. unfortunately most male mages are temporary units so theyre a rare sight
-everything about dread fighters are sick. they leap into the air, their crouching levin sword anim is cool, their eyes in their map sprite is cool, their promotion that gives them endgame ready speed and 7 move and FIFTEEN RES WHEN NO OTHER PROMOTION GIVES A SINGLE POINT OF IT. probably my favorite promotion and class in the series. sadly it gets tainted during the lategame once a lot of the bosses become hard to kill dread fighters
-i love the unicorn horn on falcon knights why did we stop doing this
-gold knights have great animations with a perfect sense of weight
-barons have great map sprites, big armor and lances, and the long armor knight waddle is actually earned for a t3 class as opposed to for a t1 class like in fe1 or fe3. however like dread fighters i get sick of seeing them once the lategame devolves into baron/hiknight spam
-the final boss’s design wipes his echoes design and the shield drop is the perfect ending to the game
play gaiden btw

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Hot take, but I’ll go with Shadow Dragon. The sort of weight each animation has is honestly satisfying to me. Especially the Mercenary, Hero, Knight, and General. Also, I enjoy some of the animations have a second strike of they can strike twice.

I also enjoy the sort of “exaggerated” design of some of the classes, specifically the Knight and General once again. The exaggerated boots and over the top shoulders almost give it a kind of cartoon-y design That I really like.

Anyway, play Shadow Dragon. Knight_ 28Shadow_Dragon 29

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I’m kinda split on this one.

For infantry, I’d say Thracia in a heartbeat. Fighters, myrms, thieves, mages, and dismounted cavs have really fluid animations while still being fully pixel art. On top of that, most infantry classes have two different crit animations, with swordfighters having like four or five. My personal favorite is that one where your unit slides across the battlefield and then appears to have a seizure right in front of the enemy before flipping into the air and slashing them.

For mounted units, I think the GBA games are probably the best. Cavaliers, Nomads, Troubadours, and Valkyries are nothing special, but everything else is really nice. Paladins, falcoknights, wyvern lords, and rangers all have pretty good animations and are distinct from their unpromoted classes. Those that really shine are the great knight, wyvern knight, which I think are the nicest pixel art IS has ever blessed us with (outside of maybe assassins). Oh also nomad troopers have jumping horse : ).

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Tellius. Particularly 10. There’s a proper sense that you’re fighting a well-drilled, well-equipped military, cohesive designs but with clear different specialties. They also had the nice touch where you didn’t fight Daein/Begnion Soldiers as myrmidons or fighters; these irregular troops were only encountered as Mercenaries, with red (9) / grey (10) colour schemes to set them apart from the main force. And there’s plenty of room within the designs for every character, playables and bosses alike, to be clearly identifiable within their class while also still being unique and characterful.

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idk about “best” (cause I haven’t played the entire fe series), but I agree with this sentiment.

I do think the aesthetic strengths of those two games are kinda watered down by the graphics looking like shite though.

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Fates
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Sad, but great because that means I can be the first to talk about it!

For me it’s 100% the Fates games! Because I love how it approaches class design and the uniqueness it presents both in gameplay and in worldbuilding!

In Nohr you have the majority of the classic, it’s where you have the cavalry, the armor knights, the fighters, the thieves, the troubadour, the wyvern and other legacy classes of Fire Emblem, as Conquest’s goal was always to cater to the veteran audience that’s looking for a challenge.

Meanwhile in Hoshido, you also have some classic classes like the archer and the pegasus knight, but also more unique and reimagined classes fitting of the eastern culture, like Mages and Sages being turned into Diviners and Onmyoujis! The jump from myrmidon to samurai is specially creative in my opinion, and helps distinguish the sword-locked class from mercenary, another foot sword-locked class from the rival nation of Nohr! And, as I said, having unique and creative takes on other classes like their thief counterpart being the ninja and the Oni Chieftains, Merchants and Master-of-Arms being innovative classes to add variety and charm that fits the new region.

In summary, I think Fates games has the best class design because of all the nuance that went into it, splitting classes into different kingdoms and waging war against each other is brilliant to me, and part of the charm that makes those games so near-and-dear to me :slight_smile: !

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Fates 100%. It meets the perfect balance of the fire emblem classics like cavs, fighters, and knights with all new classes like kinshi, master of arms, and ninja!
The designs are also just immaculate, while a lot of the female designs do have rough patches overall they just have so much character to them!
The swordmaster kicking with a crit is absolutely amazing!

Imo no other game comes close to the level of class design that Fates has

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FE10 designs were peak and no one can convince me otherwise, mercenaries wearing non-uniform colors was the cherry on top for me. Though I do miss the occasional all green armors that some of the Crimeans had in FE9.

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Doesn’t Fates have a tank?

Can you afford to pick anything else when literal tanks can be used?

GBA, i like the cartoony pixel look

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Spoony Bard LLewyn hard carries FE4 for me to put it in top 3, with Barons and their imposingly goofy design shoulder a portion of the burden, but Overall best? I like Three Houses designs most consistently. The Gremory is a gorgeous end game mage class for female units, all three lords have visually solid and interesting classes (Dimitiri being peak Great Lord and what Ephraim should have aspired to in a 3D FE game, and everyone’s favorite problematic bi-sexual with her padded plates Looking like a Dommie Tank short-queen). Bonus points for being able to give each character their “personal flair” version if you think its a better fit (Swordmaster Felix comes to mind as a hand-in-glove design, same with Lysythea and any dark/anima mage classes)

I think It’s FE10. I just like the design! I like it how every character has a personal model attached to them. Something I would like to do with GBA one day.

The Tellius games have that grounded, realistic but still distinctly Fire Emblem look to them that I adore, so those games win for me.

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I adore Fates’s generic class designs, for the most part. Aside from the fact that the two countries get their own class lines - which is an amazing detail and I wish they’d kept doing that going forward - the designs just look so good and full of personality. They didn’t need personality, they’re literal generics, and yet they do.

I mean, look at these people. (In spoilers to avoid cluttering the thread)


These people eat the game’s regular playables for lunch. And they’re just a few examples - I didn’t even go for the low-hanging fruit and post the generic Fates witch!

When it comes to class designs applied to playable characters, they suffer a bit from Fates’s bad habits (looking at you, female cavalier and knight), but the generics? Absolute chef’s kiss.

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As someone who hasn’t played every single mainline FE, I think every game is of equal merit :heart: I mean, it’s hard enough to make designs for these classes if you want to keep the medieval European aesthetic that’s so integral to the series (unless you want to dive into other cultures like Japanese for Hoshido). Okay, now try doing that every :clap: single :clap: time you hire a new character designer (or, in some cases, have an entirely different aesthetic between games with the same designer), on top of having to do so every time you jump to a new engine and have to learn how it works, especially if it’s an engine capable of three dimensions. That’s a lot of work, and it’s honestly kind of a miracle we even get to have this discussion in the first place :two_hearts:

However (and I might get stabbed with a pitchfork for saying this), I adore how the GBA ones are designed :sparkling_heart: Now, yes, they’re not the absolute best, and yes, it’s more about the motions than the designs themselves, but think about it: IntSys’s designers and animators had to make these on a tight-ass time crunch considering that the entire development cycle of FE6 went from the N64 to the Game Boy Advance pretty late into development, so it’s a miracle in itself they turned out so good, especially the ones often praised by the community like Paladin, Swordmaster, Berserker, etc. :heart_decoration: In terms of the actual designs, I love the feathered shoulder pads and stereotypical-Viking-caps of the Warrior cause they’re dumb, yes, but they work somehow, and they help that class stand out from the rest, Nomads are cool as hell considering we’ve never gotten something like it again (unless you want to count Bow Cavs but that’s not an actual answer); Heroes are simple yet effective (especially Raven’s alt like fuckkk that one’s so cool :weary:); and overall, they’re just so stylish and eye-catching across the board :heart_eyes_cat:

However, I have issues with these, as do many others in the community, mainly with some of the gendered alts, their palettes, and how they match a character’s portrait. Let’s start with the gendered alts since some of them suck ass. Some examples I can think of off the top: the female Paladin having a different emblem on the shield for no good reason, the female Myrmidon and Cavalier losing their ponytails upon a promotion for no good reason, and there not being a single female alt for classes like Mercenary and Fighter even though one of the playable characters in these games is doing that classic “use a female name on a male” thing that I hate so much (and who could have also given us a banger lesbian couple in 2003), and plenty of others I’m surely missing. They just could have done so much better when it comes to keeping cohesion between Tier 1 and Tier 2, yet they just didn’t out of presumed laziness or indifference. They also could have made female Mercenaries or Fighters, yet they didn’t. That’s not based or poggers, and it’s one of the things I hate most about GBA Emblem :triumph:

Next up: the palettes for said classes. Now, for the most part, they make sense in terms of how many colors take up each part of the design and where said colors are placed :two_hearts: However, stuff like the Cavaliers having a random fourth color in the folds between each armor plate that also shares the trim of the saddle makes no sense, as well as the Nomads being a complete clusterfuck colors-wise (both when trying to make palettes and even the palettes the devs made themselves with how washed-out and DS-y they feel), random classes having a white pixel in the face for no good reason so you can’t have dark-skinned characters in those classes (unless you whitewash them; looking at you Igrene :angry:), and other little oddities that feel sloppy and unfinished. I mean, hell, the Nomads are so bad that the repalettes we have in the Repo are essentially entirely new animations :rofl: In general, the original animations are so bad that it’s absolutely zero wonder why A.) we have so many repalettes in the Repo and B.) that they all pretty much kick the devs’ asses (that’s a good thing, by the way, cause now we can use them with little to no issues :333). Overall, the coloring could’ve used a lot more work. Not much else to say here :upside_down_face:

But now, finally, the main thing I despise about these designs is how they match the character’s portrait…or lack thereof :pouting_cat: Most times in all three games, the animations do not match the character’s design. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. Some do in places, but only in places and not the whole design. For example, take Dieck the Wounded Tiger. While he does have his shoulder pad on his right shoulder, we see him shirtless in-game yet wearing a shirt in his animation cause all Mercenaries do that. Then take Joshua, who does wear garb that isn’t too far off from what’s seen in battle yet who’s wearing a stylish-ass hat but isn’t in his animation. Then there’s someone like Geese. Dear God, I hate this one with a passion :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: See, he’s wearing a strikingly stylish jacket in-game, but he isn’t in his animation (and is also wearing a headband he just somehow created out of thin air), and that’s just inexcusable to me. Stuff like that is what boils my blood cause you can’t have stylish and unique designs and then sacrifice them in the name of not putting in effort. Maybe they should’ve, oh, I don’t know, told Eiji Kaneda not to do that :rage: Same issue with Sachiko Wada, where she gives someone like Forde an extremely cool shoulder pad and even a low ponytail, and yet they don’t exist in the animation. Hell, FE8 doesn’t even have a unit animation assignment system in place to help remedy this, so why bother making a character like that in the first place? Look, I know it may sound stupid to complain about this, but I am a massive supporter of that detail, where the character’s design matches the animation because, in my opinion, that’s what can turn a character from unmemorable to iconic and can help them stand out both in your mind and on the battlefield (this is why Storch’s design in VQ is at the bottom of the list in terms of original designs in the hacking community too, since he has armor in his animation, like come on :triumph:). Luckily, someone like Forde, Joshua, or Guy either already has their own animation sets with the latter or has animations now that match with the former, and even for characters like Dieck or Geese, people are already out here making some for them (even if they’re just stills at the moment, UltraFenix, my king :pray:), so clearly people want to see this too. In summary, the animations aren’t to blame for their inconsistency, but instead, the characters that are placed into those classes are at fault, and in general, IntSys’s designers and animators could’ve done so much better with a few of them (hell, they just straight-up remade the Mercenary entirely between FE6 and 7, and they even updated ones like Sniper, Sage, and Swordmaster to be higher in quality later on).

In conclusion, while I love these for both how iconic they’ve become over the decades and for how much of a strong foundation they laid for not just the series but for us hackers, they still have plenty of faults that I’ve now spent nearly fifteen hundred words complaining about (sorry about that by the way, talking’s fun and I don’t regret it in the slightest >:333). Again, I might get my arm chopped off by a sickle for this take, but that’s what opinions are for, eh? Plus, as long as we can discuss this on good terms and not be at each other’s throats, it should all be okay :two_hearts: However, if I had to pick a silver medal (and one that is objectively more cohesive and just better overall), Awakening would win that solely because not only do the character’s designs match the outfits (oh thank God), but some of these designs spank (toilet bowl cage-helm Cavalier notwithstanding). Stuff like the Mercenary having a shield on their shoulder as a pad is badass (so badass that Fates inherited it), the Hero’s generic being so damn done with his life, which I can relate to, and the Barbarian and Berserker having an awesome skull helm and stylish pointy armor, respectively, etc. are just cool as hell, and I will die on this hill :triumph: Anyways, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, I’ll be here forever if you want to talk about my choices, even after I die as a ghost and after the sun finally gives up as some weird spirit thingy in the blank dark void of nothingness long after it all disappears :333

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GBA hands down, pixel people go brrrrrrrr.

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I would have to say probably FE8. While I can see the value of personal animations for the newer titles, the neatness of the ds games, and the goofyness of fe11-12, I really think that FE8 has the most varied, and interesting animations, and while the map sprites aren’t all that much to look at, they still have wild amounts of personality. Standouts with the monsters, the demon king straight up deciding to whack you, great knights (Not a massive fan of these personally, oddly enough, but other people seem to love them.) Zerkers, Swordmasters, and my personal favorite, the Necromancer. Lyon got a really cool personal class lol. Then generals/armor knights, with the rigid, clunky yet powerful animations, they just look amazing.

Fates/Awakening had the best generics by far though. (Outside of the GBA “Generic with a mug” bosses. O’Neil comes to mind.)

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Ok … I hate fates … And i love Awakening and Echoes … But i must accept that the best visual classes are in Fates.
And I’m gonna give you my reasons Dat

One, kitsunes. I love bunnies but canines are my favorites.
Two, the variety of classes and the new refreshing classes from Japanese Culture.

Ninjas are so cool.

But what makes me feel like this is the best is the swordsman. In Fates there’s a sword that is a katana and heals you at the beginning of each turn. That katana is unique cause instead of just one, the swordmaster carriers with TWO katanas ! That’s unique in the whole franchise and the critic is so cool is like a dance with katanas! Without mentioning other skills like Astra. It’s just eye catching to me.
Please go and search for videos about that dual katana style with critical and astra animations <3

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