Genei Ibun Roku #FE staff on the Mirage designs
Towards the very end of August, the Genei Ibun Roku #FE website was updated with two new staff blogs. Art director Fumitaka Yano and Hideo Minaba from CyDesignation both discussed the designs of Mirages. While battling, the main characters merge themselves with Mirages, who take the appearance of characters from the Fire Emblem series.
We now have complete translations of the two blog posts. You’ll find them after the break.
With Minaba-san and Mirages – Yano
Here is my late-summer greeting card.
I’m meeting you for the first time. I’m Fumitaka Yano, and I work as an art director at Atlus.
This time I’m going to discuss things that are related to art.
Nintendo and Atlus are developing #FE together. Also everything isn’t done in-house, as many people are cooperating on the project.
On the art side, prominent people are participating, like toi8-san with character designs and Minaba-san leading the people of CyDesignation with Mirage designs.
As toi8-san has talked about things like the character outlines in a previous blog, this time I’d like to introduce Minaba-san, who is responsible for designing Mirages that are like buddies for the main characters.
I got an order from director Hirata when creating the world of #FE, ‘I want to make a story in which the player is living in present-day Japan and meets by chance people that have completely different principles’, and I racked my brains in order to find a person who could express this kind of a world.
In the middle of that, a discussion came up how Minaba-san of CyDesignation is known for combining fantasy and science and how that would be just fitting for Mirage design.
Minaba-san is well-known from certain epic RPGs and he is a very busy person on top of that, so I was nervous whether he would accept to talk, but when I visited his office with a #FE project summary in my hands, he was interested and we gladly accepted to cooperate.
Now I’m going to tell you about an impressive episode of encountering Minaba-san.
I think it was on December 2013, when we had the first meeting with Minaba-san at Atlus.
Just when things related to this game’s world, protagonists and Mirages were explained, Minaba-san, who had been silent up to this point, suddenly took out a brush and created a character in a moment! It was that cool-looking Chrom. With speed that was like magic, he overwhelmed everyone who happened to be there. No – he wanted to show everyone!
Although image documents for creating 3D models were drawn again later, that influential silhouette and essence that was drawn during the meeting was entirely fixed at that early phase.
There are still Mirages that haven’t been shown to everyone, and all of them have a wonderful design, so please look forward to it.
Of course we at Atlus don’t lose to people who are cooperating with us when it comes to working hard every day. In order to show visually that characters are an active part of the show business, we elaborated a plan to produce many different stages and gorgeous costumes. If you’re a fan of Atlus, you might recognize some familiar outfits… (haha, please look forward to those, too)
The project is currently entering debugging, and all of the developers are going all out on the challenge every day. I hope you will like it.
Also many people have helped us, like Tomomi Ozaki and Hokekyo Tashiro, and I’d like discuss it in detail, but the developers’ turn is coming to an end and I’d like to return to the frontlines.
Thank you for reading until the end.
[On the greeting card/art:] It isn’t just about females, hello from the male side! Toma is a really cool guy! -Yano
About the design of Mirages – Minaba
Hello.
I’m [Hideo] Minaba from CyDesignation, and I was responsible of designing Mirages.
I wanted to write an article that has something to do with designing Mirages, but I pondered what I’d write and I thought to discuss ‘identity’.
As you know, Genei Ibun Roku #FE is designed as a collaboration of Fire Emblem and Atlus. I’m following that concept plan also in the Mirage design.
…But that is difficult!
I’m originally ‘Jack of all trades and master of none’ type of person, so I think that putting a thread through a needle hole like this is my strong point, but early Fire Emblem games that I respect and love have character designs that are just impossible! Straightly put, they have their unique design.
And it is wonderful how each of the series tends to reflect their own era. In addition to this, Atlus works on both Shin Megami Tensei and Persona! (It goes without saying!) … I remember starting designing while thinking it was an impossible mission.
While Mirage Chrom is named Chrom and the design represents successive lord lineage, it has sharpness and darkness that is a characteristic of Atlus games. And you can’t have him taking the spotlight from the main character, but then again you can’t lower his presence too much, either.
It is the same for Caeda. Whether a red or blue outfit would be better was already a cause of trouble. (During a play she wears red, but usually Fire Emblem series shows allies with blue costumes and enemies with red costumes in-game)
At those times I remembered the words of Takada-san from Atlus.
‘In order to pile up two cultures on top of another, we too had discussions repeatedly at first, we did trial and error over and over again, but finally it is something that has the identity of the creator.’
Please enjoy the fruits of struggling to find an identity like that.
