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alexissara · 6 months ago

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Why An FE4 Remake Cannot Happen

The Fire Emblem community has collectively decided because leaks have happened since the 3DS that Fire Emblem: Gemology of the Holy War is surly the next Fire Emblem Video Game and since then Genology Of The Holy War has surly been the next Fire Emblem video game we've had Three Houses, Three Hopes, and Fire Emblem Engage. However, I am here to say that I am sure that this is not the case and we will likely never see a remake of Fire Emblem 4.

The leaker on reddit who said FE Remake was coming along with other information about Engage said Gust worked on Fire Emblem Engage which was untrue, in fact no one from Koei worked on Engage. It is to say that outside of having screen shots from the Chinese localization and clearly some knowledge of the actual game that they likely simply talked to someone working in QA about they probably knew nothing else about the game for a fact. So we are simply going to disregard the rumors in this post and this is as far as I am willing to take it and instead focus on the reality and going over each reason why I do not believe a remake will happen.

Money

Fire Emblem Remakes do not make a lot of money. Shadow Dragon and New Mystery Of The Emblem were such big flops they almost killed the franchise and Echoes simply did not sell particularly well. The had a trajectory that was number go up then they did echoes and numbers went down that shot right back up for Three Houses higher than ever before before shooting way back down just above echoes with Engage.

It is likely that Echoes however was not a big failure for the series because it was in the same engine as Awakening/Fates and the development costs for a 3Ds game were pretty low. However, developing a game on switch is significantly higher especially when you consider the modern standards of Fire Emblem they would need to meet on a remake. Full Voice acting is extremely expensive for this game that would require full voice acting for Gen 1, gen 2 and gen 2's replacement characters all with supports and more. The amount of models and everything that would have to be put into the game is pretty big and making sure these massive maps look good is not going to be cheap either. The game is fundamentally not a cheap game to make in the current standards of quality that IS is holding the series too.

That is before anything new they add too which could add even higher costs to development with new writing, new characters, etc since it is unlikely to be the exact same script or the exact same gameplay. All of this on the backdrop of Engage objectively underperforming for recent series trends means that this game is a big money risk at a time where money resources are likely lower than normal or at least will be if this failed.

Audience

Who is the audience for FE4? Nostalgic Japanese players and the most hard core nerds everywhere else. However, that simply will not result in the sales needed so we need to think of what the current FE Audience wants and expects from their Video Games. If we just gauge fire emblem fans we know that Fire Emblem Heroes player base declines every year and so the small amount of players are typically dedicated Fire Emblem fans and even inside the small niche of dedicated FE fans banners based on Fire Emblem Holy War Adventures preform among the worst of a year. They almost never reach even the middle of the pact. We see this further represented in Chose Your Legends where Holy War characters even with a focused effort over multiple years have struggled to make it even near the top.

There was a time where maybe in a Game Of Thrones world where people would have devoured genealogy but that audience has died down from a cultural phenome to a dedicated fan base and casual, well a new season of house of dragons is something fantasy to watch crowd. I don't think this is going to court new players and while some FE fans who currently don't care for it might give it a shot if presented with a remake will it be enough to justify making the game? As it stands it seems like it could justify a 3Ds scale game maybe with reused assets but there simply isn't the same kind of infostructure of the switch with Houses and Engage being build in different engines entirely. So this game would need to find who it is for and then market it and marketing a remake is extra hard.

Story

The plot of FE4 is a massive hurdle of FE4 one so big I have a second section to cover it more but we'll cover it in broad strokes here. I am not a big fan of FE4 so forgive me for any inaccuracies but I intend to be broad and brief. FE4 starts as fairly typical fire emblem fair blue hair lord fights some baddies but we get into the death of most of your main party, not in some alternative future like in awakening but their on screen deaths. During which time our main lords love interest is brainwashed and made the bride of the villain who kills her husband and father of her previous child, she will go on to have sex with him under mind control multiple times producing multiple children. All the while many children are sacrificed to a dark god in child hunts. You fight back against this in a second generation of units embodied with holy blood of nobles with differing levels of how holy and important their blood is.

So you know, it's a lot, we'll touch on it more later, just ya know let that one cook while I write the rest of the stuff in between.

The Series Position

Fire Emblem is currently in a very delicate position of being a series on decline. With Engage selling worse than Awakening despite the switch having a much bigger install base and not having great word of mouth it is very unlikely the game will surpass Awakening let alone Fates or Three Houses. At current it is looking competitive with Three Hopes a spinoff game built in the same engine as houses that was a strange midquel and a warriors game. Fire Emblem Heroes player count is seemingly going down if we look at CYL voting year over year. So Fire Emblem as a brand, as a thing that makes money needs a big boost right now. The reality is a sales flop could tank the franchise. It was not that long ago that the series was on life support and Awakening was going to be the final FE game. At the moment Heroes is a massive money maker and they want to keep that money going they need new characters to get people hype about. The advent of Echoes did not provide a long term boost to the popularity of FE2 characters and those banners are not particularly high performers as made clear by their insistence on running the same few characters over and over. It is highly unlikely that FE4 remake would provide any kind of boost to heroes ability to take cash from people to gamble on JPEGs or make a ton of money for the franchise.

So what's left for FE4 to do is simply to damage the franchises reputation. If someone is a 1st time FE fan from buying Three Houses and they didn't like Engage which is just a fact that many people who bought Three Houses did not like Engage it is at the point where the FE subreddit banned talking shit about Engage [which is ridiculous] and the next game with the Fire Emblem game is likely make or break for the FE fans who loved Three Houses on if this series is for them or if it was a one time great game in a series that is otherwise not for them. Would FE4 appeal to a fan of Three Houses you need to consider that with your heart and soul, if the majority of people who loved Three Houses are excited for big maps with a lot of cavs, no avatar, tons of unit death, mustache twirling evil, etc. Right now the series needs to establish it's reputation and decide what it is that people should think when they think Fire Emblem.

Of course even if we think outside of Three Houses fans does it sound like something that awakening fans or fates fans might want and I don't really think that sounds right. The series is moving away from permadeath as a whole and having narrative permadeath is well a pretty big jump in the other direction for the game. Perhaps it's possible to do a smaller scale remake but that isn't what IS is known for doing given their schedule for game releases and the scale they like to release games at.

Controversy

I've touched on this in other sections but it bares repeating that this is probably the biggest factor of them all. Monster 3 is a very fan demanded game that has a full English translation at Nintendo they can use if people are to be believed but has not and will not ever be released in English. Why is this despite the fact that it would literally just be free money and press? Well it's because Nintendo does not want to be caught up in a controversy. The one element of the plot, one set of characters that are kinda racist and kinda transphobic are by themselves enough to hold back a full games release in the west. And the thing is that if they wrote them as intended the people who hate "woke" people would hate the same set of characters by calling them woke too and then their in a double hated situation and well it's a full fucking thing.

So then why then would they want to publish a game that is so loaded with potential controversies especially one that would need a bigger budget, one that would automatically have a smaller audience, and that would take IS's resources? Can you picture it now "New Nintendo game has beloved party member sexually assaulted and made to give birth to two children." It's like the Arieth sword scene for sickos. Not to mention all the child murder and everything potential other thing for negative press. It would be a really shaky ground to be working on even if it was locked in to make fates level sales, they were sure of it, it might not be worth the press they will get for it.

Then there is the controversy of what the game lacks. The series has a big queer fan base, that's just reality, and these people want to be reflected, it's clear because each FE game since awakening has increased the amount of queerness in it even the SoV remake. The game as it stands has no queerness, it's a eugenics simulator in act 1 where you are trying to build the most holy blood so you simply cannot do adoption unless you make the replacement units their adoptive kids but then do you just make gay people have an objectively harder time? Now you could say they have kids visa via magic if their gay or simply have gen 1 be straight but gen 2 be really queer since they don't need to have kids but these all require changes, additional work, and potentially more controversy. Once again put in a situation where queer fans might be upset and also the raging bigots will be mad. Now clearly the bigots don't really matter, they literally get mad about every video game they would say idk it's woke to ride a horse or something but it does put Nintendo into a position where the romantic elements are this massive pressure point.

Conclusion

If you love Fire Emblem Genealogy of The Holy War then the best you can hope for is that they release an offical translation one day maybe paired with 776 and it's a nice port. I want that for the games of these games but I do not think they can release a remake for all of the reasons above and I think it would actively be the worst decision for the future health of Intelligent Systems.

While this game is beloved by many and those fans deserve a way to play it officially in their native language, I simply do not see a future where it is a game that is remade. I personally wouldn't buy it so maybe I am biased in some way shape or form because I hate FE4 but in the end I don't think it would be so hard to simply translate FE4 and release it on switch online or something so people can enjoy it.

That said, you should give up hope for this, it is nothing but cope, it simply is not going to happen, I feel confident enough to make this post and I've thought about this for many many years because we've had rumors it was going to happen since Echoes came out [hence that first image from around the time FE4 remake on 3Ds leaks started]. It's simply not going to happen and what you can hope for instead is another game that brings the same things that you love about FE4 to happen be that in the indie space or from the Fire Emblem series. Talk about what you love about FE4 a lot and share how they are awesome and could help the FE series as a whole and SRPGs because that is the most likely juice to really get the sparks of someone's heart going into development.

And if your a hater like me we can simply sit back and enjoy the show, see what Fire Emblem brings us next be that a remake of some other game or a brand new Fire Emblem game. Maybe it will suck, maybe it'll be great, but I look forward to the future of the series even if hesitantly after Engage.

#FE #Fire Emblem #FE4 #fire emblem: genealogy of the holy war #Fire Emblem Remake #Fire Emblem Switch #Nintendo Direct

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