We have had another developers interview from Nintendo Dream that the great people at Nintendo Everything managed to translate.

The interview goes over several points; I will highlight some in quotes.

ND: I see. But it must be hectic to choose characters based on their relationships with each other. You might even end up having too many characters that couldn’t be removed. For example if you were to add Chrom, then how about Lucina?

Hayashi: But actually, we used to stray away regarding Lucina.

ND: And what do you mean by that?

Hayashi: At first there were talks in the development team of, “Should we remove Lucina?” However, after we talked with Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, we reconsidered that, thinking “That’s just not possible after all” (laughs).

ND: Why did you want to remove her?

Hayashi: It’s an obvious thing; it’s not because we hated her or something, but the reasons are because there are already too many sword characters, and because she’s of the children generation.

Usuda: Which means, when we were contemplating on whether to add people from the children generation, if Lucina wasn’t added, then we would’ve come to a conclusion that we wouldn’t add anyone from the children generation.

So Lucina was originally on the chopping block, which may shock quite a number of fans. However later on they stated that characters that shared the same class became more of a concern due to Lucina’s inclusion.

Usuda: […] it was really difficult for us to select characters. First of all, staff members in our company who like Fire Emblem made a table split by weapon types and ranks from A to C. A is for characters that are popular and important to story. B is for those that are strong or have fond memories. C is for those that would be okay if added. However, eventually for some reason a mysterious S rank got added there.

(Everybody laughs)

Usuda: That rank is for people who would make the game strange if not added. As a result, a lot got put into the S rank (laughs).

Hayashi: Too many characters are in S and A ranks, and a lot more characters are added than usual, so we could no longer add characters from the B rank. That’s why most of the characters had fallen in the battle.

ND: Including the previously announced characters, so far there are no characters that can be removed. I think Frederick is also part of the Shepherds after all.

Usuda: That’s correct. Frederick is not in the S rank, but he was projected to be added in the end. After all, when we are to choose important characters from Awakening, when including relations between characters into consideration, first of all it would have to start from the Shepherds. And the weapon type is also a big factor. When we lined up the character candidates, we didn’t have enough axe characters.

As expected, character relationships, popularity and other aspects are all considered when choosing characters for the roster. Earlier, it was mentioned how Lissa ended up using an axe and they briefly touched on the choice of Agatha in Hyrule Warriors.

We do have Cordelia for “popularity” over “relevance” as well so I think its safe to assume there will be a balance. There’s also the detail that they want to recreate as many scenes as possible from all three games that they can.

The developers also noted that the build they showed at E3 was only 20% done in terms of content. Whether this means characters, like some seem to be thinking…

Now the other new details we got are from a pair of first impression reports from 4Gamer and Famitsu. These are entirely in Japanese so Torii once again stepped in to aid us.

• You choose between Rowan and Lianna as the main character for story mode. The one not chosen becomes an NPC on stages (you might be able to play as the other on some stages though)
• At least for as much as they played (just the beginning parts), which character they chose didn’t seem to have a huge effect on the game
• They said their playstyles are different, and that Lianna seemed lighter/slightly quicker than Rowan
• You can change from Classic to Casual, but you can’t change back from Casual to Classic
• There will be three difficulty modes to choose from (not Casual and Classic)
• The early parts of the game feature the twins, Chrom, Frederick, Robin, Lissa, and Cordelia
• The story and animations are supposedly very interesting and good, and they said “the battles might not even be the best part of the story mode”
• The weapon triangle might not be too noticeable in the beginning, but later on you might find that “man, this enemy is tough!” Better use of the weapon triangle later on is key
• They tested how weak fliers are to arrows, because they thought surely fliers can’t be as weak as in mainstream FE Games.
  • They were wrong haha, one arrow to Cordelia brought her close to death, and another took her out (said resemblance to original FE games is scary)
• Frederick can dash at high speeds and mow down enemies while moving
• Quotes and such from the main series will be in (like how Frederick doesn’t like bear meat and as we already saw the pebble talk)
• When two characters do a dual special attack, they may say quotes. For example if Lissa and Frederick do one together, Frederick will say “I will protect you, Lady Lissa”
• Thieves with keys will appear on the battlefield sometimes and loot treasure chests like in original FEs

So like Dragon Quest Heroes, we have a choice off the bat in who our main character is, along with the fact that they seem to be touting this is like a traditional Fire Emblem with permadeath and such.

I’m going to make the prediction that story mode will have multiple save files just like your standard FE game.

The information reconfirms that while Lianna and Rowan share a little bit of a base with their movesets, they differ in terms of gameplay (and from my observations, it’s much more than their speed).

Like recent Fire Emblems you can change from Classic to Casual but not the other way round mid playthrough. The 3 difficulty modes will likely be Normal, Hard and Lunatic, if they’re following recent conventions.

Early game focusing on Awakening doesn’t surprise me in the least. The cutscenes and dialogue apparently being so good it may eclipse the gameplay itself sounds interesting to say the least.

Archers being able to two shot Cordelia reminds me of old school Dynasty Warriors games such as 3 where if you were caught by a group of archers and didn’t block you’d just straight up die.

Frederick mowing down enemies sounds right, although we also saw he has some powerful slow swings from the brief gameplay we saw of him versus a Lissa player.

We also have confirmation of monsters appearing in Warriors, they don’t look like any sort of creatures we’ve seen in previous games such as The Sacred Stones, Awakening, Fates and Echoes.

Some have jokingly made a connection to the Iblis monsters in the maligned Sonic 06. Either way, they look like bizarre wolverine monsters, which I wonder if this will tie into anything regarding the evil dragon we will be fighting in this game.

There is also an interesting looking city shown in a few screens, which I can only assume is the twins’ homeland that they have to fight their way out of. You can see street lamps in the background, which are fairly modern by Fire Emblem standards.

Last, but not least, the official Twitter account teased a few pieces of concept artwork from the artbook including in the Japanese special editions.

The second image provides our first full look at the Anna that appears in Warriors. Of course, we’ve already seen her face in the Twitter account’s profile image, as well as in-game when providing mission updates, etc.