This Week in Bad Pop Culture Ideas: Fire Emblem Warriors

With each new announcement, Fire Emblem Warriors looks to be worse and worse, idea-wise, and the franchise deserves better.

Judging things before they even come out is pretty easy to do. In this day and age, where trailers, spoilers and new interviews come out practically every single day, you know the fundamentals of most things before you ever spend the money. Sometimes, this is great. And sometimes, it is terrible. I made the point back during E3 that Fire Emblem Warriors direly needed some different characters.

Apparently, that wish was granted … just not in the way that we wanted. At the Tokyo Game Show, Koei Tecmo spilled a lot of details about the game, including confirmation that the DLC includes a wedding outfit for Lucina.

Fire Emblem Heroes‘ four wedding versions of popular female characters clearly wasn’t enough. Granted, that’s a smartphone game, but it applies here because Lucina was not one of the four ladies who got kitted out in fancy dresses. If she had been, that would make the fifth version of Lucina available, alongside basic Lucina, Masked Marth (not a spoiler, because her damaged animation shows her face), the Spring version and the Brave variant.

Are you getting the point that Lucina is fairly popular yet?

Anyway, Koei Tecmo has apparently seen this … grave injustice and decided to rectify it. You could give Lucina a fancy dress in her source game, Fire Emblem Awakening, by literally making her a Bride, but that wasn’t an option.

Before people take a moment to inform me that I can just ignore it, yes, you’re right. It’s not like the game will force you to put Lucina in the fancy dress and send her out to the battlefield. But really? How are we not past this weird recurring idea of brides in Fire Emblem?

Well, there’s an easy answer. Fire Emblem became far more popular with a game that allowed you to make your own character, have them be part of the plot (as in, a talking contributor to the plot), and get hitched to characters (and yes, your character can marry Lucina in Awakening). Reports had it that Nintendo prepared itself to kill the series after Awakening if it hadn’t sold as well as it did, and judging by Fates taking those ideas and running with them, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems thought that those additions were what caused the sales. Putting cute costumes in the game is not uncommon and a form of fanservice, either.

Really, the bride thing isn’t the main problem that yours truly has with this game. It’s not like Koei Tecmo hasn’t taken another well-known Nintendo property and made it a fun hack-and-slash. It’s that Koei Tecmo has taken a look at a franchise with, counting the two DS remakes and one 3DS remake, 15 games, and decided that picking three games is totally cool … even for the DLC, because that DLC doesn’t just include the costume that we’ve just discussed.

Oh, no, it is all about Fates, Awakening, and Shadow Dragon.

This concept had so much potential, and right now, it seems as though Koei Tecmo has taken the path of least resistance. I want to like Fire Emblem Warriors. I really do. But for now, it looks like Nintendo will just have to take this fan’s money when it comes to Super Mario Odyssey, which comes out a week later.

Yes, many a fan has noticed:

And the franchise deserves more than to be shuffled out with two brief nods to the other games in the forms of Lyn and Celica.

Next: Reviewing Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia

Funnily enough, Lyn did get a bridal form in Fire Emblem Heroes.

So really, it just all comes full circle.