Fire Emblem Heroes Devs On The Game’s Risqué Artwork And The Concept Of “Power Creep”

Fire Emblem Heroes has been out for over 6 months, and Polygon recently conducted an interview with Intelligent Systems director Kouhei Maeda and Nintendo director Shingo Matsushita about the mobile game. Both Maeda and Matsushita tackled a variety of questions, including the topic of the game’s art being too risqué for Nintendo, as well as players’ concerns over “power creep.”

When asked about some of the game’s artwork being too risqué for a Nintendo game, Matsushita replied with the following:

“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.”

Next, the topic of “power creep” was brought up. Power creep is a frequent occurrence in many gatchapon games wherein newer units get increasingly more powerful as compared to units that were available at the game’s launch. In regards to this, Matsushita had this to say:

“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.”

To read the entire interview, you can go here.

Fire Emblem Heroes is available for iOS and Android devices.