Hayashi: In terms of the development period, the project began at a time when the Nintendo Switch had not been revealed, Fire Emblem Heroes wasn’t released and Fire Emblem Fates had recently come out.
There’s a lot more dialogue and animations that we need to create. Usuda: It’s not so simple to make a playable character even if they already exist as a NPC in the main game. Hayashi: While we were trying to add all the characters we needed, we couldn’t find an opportunity to add Darios. Usuda: When we were writing the game’s main story, we were planning for Darios to be rescued via DLC… Originally, we considered removing a character from the main game to add Darios. On why Darios wasn’t made a playable character… There are many fans who are really enamoured with Owain. After that… when we ran out of animations, we started putting them in Bond Conversations (laughs). Besides that, we thought of “Shadow Light Sword” to reference Shadow Dragon and the dual blade style “White Night Sword” and “Black Night Sword” that’s based off Fates. In his victory movie, there’s “Blazing Fire Sword” and “Blue Flame Sword” from the original games, but there are many new special moves that we created like “Goddess of Dawn Blade”. Usuda: Owain has many special move names, so we tried to include as many of them as possible. On what makes Owain special amidst all the sword-wielding characters… Because it was a class newly added via DLC! Hayashi: In the end, we decided to release two dancers, Olivia and Azura, as DLC, but I felt like it was a good choice. Then we talked about Olivia and whether or not to let her dance. We looked within the pool of female characters and we already added Azura in the 1st DLC Pack (Fates), so we thought it would be interesting to have a character that had similar dancing abilities. So we were debating what to do with two sword users. Usuda: We already added Navarre in the 2nd DLC Pack (Shadow Dragon), so if we added Lon’qu, another sword user, in the 3rd DLC Pack (Awakening), well… (painful grin) Besides, Owain was introduced as a NPC, so we couldn’t not add him. Hayashi: Because he was conceptually similar to Navarre… Likewise with Saizo and Kaze from Fates, daggers had just come out and we had already established the weapon triangle, so since it would change the game mechanics, we decided not to add daggers. Gaius wielded daggers and daggers were a new weapon type then. Usuda: The other candidates were… Gaius and Lon’qu, but the main reason they were removed as candidates was because of their weapons. Hayashi: Olivia’s inclusion was decided right towards the end. I suppose Tharja has a pretty unique personality (laughs).
The staff who worked from the early stages of development were saying how they were amazed that the characters with really strong and unique personalities were so positively received. Before this, we met with everyone from the Fire Emblem Cipher development team and Yusuke Kozaki, who worked on her design, and they talked about not expecting Tharja to be as popular as she is now. Actually, we almost nearly added her to the main game, but we had to make some adjustments. Hayashi: When it came to creating the DLC, from the very beginning we absolutely wanted her to be in. Also, now that the DLC is over, I feel like there’s finally a great variety of weapons. Hayashi: I’m very grateful for all the fans who praised the game and affirmed our expectations. In addition, we progressed onto the DLC, where we enjoyed communicating with fans, while thinking of what to do next. We received opinions via Twitter and enjoyed reading fans’ reactions after the release. Roughly half a year has passed since the game’s launch and we’ve created many DLC characters for everyone to use. At the very beginning, we were working with the 3DS version of Hyrule Warriors as a base, and we had Link running around in this very early, rough version. Usuda: “It’s over that was long” is what I’m honestly thinking. On how all of the DLC has finally wrapped up…
#Fire emblem warriors characters dlc trailer plus
They also weighed in on the end of DLC, why Darios isn’t playable, and showed some interest in making a sequel.įind some excerpts from the interview below plus some concept art. Director Hiroya Usuda and producer Yosuke Hayashi stopped by to primarily discuss the Awakening DLC Pack. In this month’s issue of Nintendo Dream, the Japanese magazine posted its final interview with a couple of the Fire Emblem Warriors developers.