Fire Emblem Heroes devs on risque art, overpowered teams, power creep, colorless units

Fire Emblem Heroes has been around for about half a year, and the game is starting up its Choose Your Legends bonus banner tomorrow. With that in mind, Polygon spoke with Intelligent Systems director Kouhei Maeda and Nintendo director Shingo Matsushita about the mobile game. Topics include some of the risque art created for Fire Emblem Heroes, overpowered teams, caution over power creep, and player frustration with colorless units.

Read Maeda and Matsushita comments about these points below. You can find the full interview on Polygon here.

On how some of the art seems risque for Nintendo…

Shingo Matsushita: If you look at the Fire Emblem series since Awakening, we’ve had DLC that involved characters in swimsuits. So this isn’t exactly a new concept. And, as you mentioned, Nintendo does have a family-friendly image. But within all of Nintendo’s franchises, Fire Emblem is generally played by people that are a little bit older. So when we make games for this series, we keep that in mind.

It’s not that we’re making heroes in swimsuits just to have swimsuits. Fire Emblem Heroes is a game with a lot of deep strategy and gameplay, but at the same time there are a lot of great characters, so we want to give back to the fans a little bit of fan service. This is something we’ve had a positive reaction to in the previous games. So when it came time for Fire Emblem Heroes, the development team really wanted to include that as well.

We’re also talking about the design. When we’re thinking about the design for these characters, we’re definitely trying to be very careful about it. One thing you could say [is], we’re trying to maintain the dignity of these characters that we love. If you think about Fire Emblem characters, a lot of times they can be very serious, a lot of times they’re fighting, but sometimes it’s very nice to let the characters hang loose a little bit and let their hair down.

On certain teams being powerful / overpowered…

Maeda: As the development team, what we really want to achieve is something where the players are using lots of different teams or lots of different characters. If we see a situation that appears to be unbalanced, we want to address that by looking at ways to make other heroes more appealing to use. Of course we gather data from the players and how they’re playing, and we’re able to analyze that.

You mentioned the parties using mounted-type heroes. We acknowledge that, yes, those can be very popular. There are fans out there that are very passionate about mounted parties. But when we look at the data we have, it only seems about 20 percent of the most passionate players are using teams like that. So we feel like it’s still a situation where there are lots of different teams you can use and lots of different characters. But we’ll continue to look at the data as we move forward.

On how gatchapon games are known for suffering from “power creep,” where newer units get increasingly more powerful as compared to units that were available at launch…

Matsushita: Of course power creep is something we’re concerned about. But we are taking action to prevent that from happening. I think you’ll see some of that in future updates. While I can’t go into what those future updates are at this time, I do want to let you know that we understand that people love Fire Emblem characters, and we do want to respect the feelings those fans have towards those characters.

People want to be able to keep using the characters they love. So I think going forward, of course you’ll see some characters that look really strong, but you’ll still be able to use the characters you have from the beginning that you really love. As a side note, I am a huge fan of Ephraim, and if I couldn’t use him anymore, I’d be really sad. That doesn’t go just for me, but the rest of our development team, who have characters they love. So it’s something we think about as well when we’re working on the game.

On the frustration of summoning colorless units…

Maeda: We do acknowledge that it seems that healers from the colorless heroes are not as popular as some others. We are thinking about some ways that we could address this.