The next FE Lord: What would you want him or her to be like?

[BrightBow]

I think people put too much on the Avatar in Awakening. The writing itself is just shoddy. The super awesome infallible avatar is just a result of that. If the entire script was altered to not include the Avatar then the story would be just as bad.

I don't think the Player Avatar is that much connected to the quality of the writing. Fire Emblem's Player Avatar's were consistently awful during all their appearances over the years and I would argue that Robin is no worse then Kris and Mark. It's just that the two of them were somewhat handicapped by circumstances, with both being added into someone else's story.

Back in the day I defended My Unit, believing them merely to be an opportunity for the player to learn more about the actual characters by giving them someone to speak to. Kinda like in Samurai Warriors Chronicles or similar. But upon reading the translation I noticed that more often then not he will get the spotlight for seemingly no other reason but to create an opportunity for the game to shamelessly kiss the player's ass.

As for Mark, the tactician is is only more bearable in FE7 because the script during the main story is written without taking them into account and therefore it only occasionally acknowledges him. But Mark is pretty much just as bad during Lyn's story. By the end of the first chapter Lyn has already cried in the player's arms and begs them to train her despite Mark not only being an apprentice but also not even being a fighter in any way.

Edited August 4, 2014 by BrightBow

[Ownagepuffs]

What if the next lord was designed by Yoshitaka Amano? Just a random thought.

[MeteoSage]

As far as lord characteristics go, Ephraim has always been one of my favorites. However, it's been a little while since we've seen a lord/main character that is fundamentally flawed. Micaiah was my favorite characterwise because she made several underhanded choices and faced a lot of doubt and regret for her decisions.

It would be fantastic if the two could collide. I've always envisioned someone (we'll call him Philip for sake of not saying someone) who gets involved in a conflict against a smaller group, like some nomads perhaps. Philip thinks these nomads are terrorizing a neighbor nation and is recruited to quell them, but finds that it's a planned genocide and uncovers corruption with the nation that recruited him. Naturally, he uncovers their scheme and what not and works to stop them.

I just feel like most of the main characters are too perfect, and there needs to be more character growth, and I loved having lances or magic as opposed to swords for difference sake. However, if they keep rolling out the sword type but are usable like Chrom and Ike, then I'll still have no qualms using them.

[Robert Stewart]

As far as lord characteristics go, Ephraim has always been one of my favorites. However, it's been a little while since we've seen a lord/main character that is fundamentally flawed. Micaiah was my favorite characterwise because she made several underhanded choices and faced a lot of doubt and regret for her decisions.

It would be fantastic if the two could collide. I've always envisioned someone (we'll call him Philip for sake of not saying someone) who gets involved in a conflict against a smaller group, like some nomads perhaps. Philip thinks these nomads are terrorizing a neighbor nation and is recruited to quell them, but finds that it's a planned genocide and uncovers corruption with the nation that recruited him. Naturally, he uncovers their scheme and what not and works to stop them.

Uh

Isn't that pretty much the plot of FE6's Western Isles arc? Roy gets sent there to squash bandits, but finds ou that Etruria is being really oppressive. It's also more or less the plot of the first few chapters of FE3 Book 2.

[Topazd]

What if the next lord was designed by Yoshitaka Amano? Just a random thought.

I'd be completely up for that, though for granted I have massive Amano bias. I just hope that they won't go for any ero artists (I did like much of the FE13 DLC artwork, but I don't think it's a safe bet to have ero artists do the primary artwork).

[MeteoSage]

Uh

Isn't that pretty much the plot of FE6's Western Isles arc? Roy gets sent there to squash bandits, but finds ou that Etruria is being really oppressive. It's also more or less the plot of the first few chapters of FE3 Book 2.

Oh yeah, it's been several years since I've done FE6, and I didn't pay much attention in the Western Isles arc.

Well, I suppose it's true that everything has been done before... I don't recall FE3 very well, I've never gotten a chance to play Mystery of the Emblem. I've only seen the remake on an LP. Genocide just sounds more weighty I suppose.

[Havoc_Wreaker]

they need to change it up a bit

maybe an older man/woman then a younger person

that wields either lances or axes, would break the trend a bit

[Jotari]

Lances and Axes are still weapons. If they really wanted to break the trend they should make Captain Falcon the next Fire Emblem lord.

[Ownagepuffs]

I'd be completely up for that, though for granted I have massive Amano bias. I just hope that they won't go for any ero artists (I did like much of the FE13 DLC artwork, but I don't think it's a safe bet to have ero artists do the primary artwork).

Yeah I was playing Final Fantasy 4 again and realized the aesthetic sorta made me think of Fire Emblem. I kept thinking of Ceodore and Celice. I don't know what Amano's take on FE would be but I do know the characters would look fantastic.

[RJWalker]

Uh

Isn't that pretty much the plot of FE6's Western Isles arc? Roy gets sent there to squash bandits, but finds ou that Etruria is being really oppressive. It's also more or less the plot of the first few chapters of FE3 Book 2.

Yep. Although I prefer FE6's version since the oppresions is implied to have been going on for years in secret from Etruria's King.

[Rehab]

Lord with blue hair, who slays dragon. His company are old, but wise advisor, two cavaliers and pegasus knight gf.

Well, I don't give crap about story in FE games anymore. Only gameplay is matter to me now. Make it unique and enjoyable. I just want something other than standard copypasta FE game (in terms of gameplay).

IMO people who play FE games for story are doing it wrong.

Please, go read books.

But not some shit. Read good one. Like Brave New World.

Not for me. Do it for yourselves.

This is just a wishlist thread, man. Feel free to not give a shit what anybody else would like to see in the series, but have the courtesy to do it more quietly and somewhere else.

I don't think the Player Avatar is that much connected to the quality of the writing. Fire Emblem's Player Avatar's were consistently awful during all their appearances over the years and I would argue that Robin is no worse then Kris and Mark. It's just that the two of them were somewhat handicapped by circumstances, with both being added into someone else's story.

Back in the day I defended My Unit, believing them merely to be an opportunity for the player to learn more about the actual characters by giving them someone to speak to. Kinda like in Samurai Warriors Chronicles or similar. But upon reading the translation I noticed that more often then not he will get the spotlight for seemingly no other reason but to create an opportunity for the game to shamelessly kiss the player's ass.

As for Mark, the tactician is is only more bearable in FE7 because the script during the main story is written without taking them into account and therefore it only occasionally acknowledges him. But Mark is pretty much just as bad during Lyn's story. By the end of the first chapter Lyn has already cried in the player's arms and begs them to train her despite Mark not only being an apprentice but also not even being a fighter in any way.

These are problems with execution, not with any basic concept.

When people say they'd like an avatar in another game, I think it's generally safe to assume they mean "one done well." The whole topic is about "what you'd like to see," not "what you think would be perfectly grounded to hope for in an upcoming fire emblem game given the track record of the people who make the series."

I think what the avatar is most blatantly an opportunity for is role-playing. There's no physical obligation for them to be a self-insert, that's just how the games have tended to handle them. Just as much as they can be a player stand-in (which I think is a bad idea for a number of reasons), they can be a vehicle for the player to steer the story in a way they'd like to see it go and influence what sort of person it follows, given actual chances for characterization that distinguish one protagonist from any other, and actual points where the player is given more than one path for the rest of the story/game to go down to take. A customized PC doesn't have to be the character around which the game world effectively revolves, they can also be just a character over whom the player has some direction.

[ChefGuevara]

The further we get from awakening the better as far as I'm concerned.

[electricwolf]

Advance warning: wall of text approaching. If you don't like reading then the tl;dr version is: Things are the way they are for a reason, but asking for a new-ish looking character isn't bad.

The point of self insert characters is to make the player feel good about themselves.

Self-insert or avatar characters are more often than not used to get you to feel involved and immersed in the game. They are typically more popular in western RPGs (Skyrim, Mass Effect etc.) where your choices as a character are, unless you are role-playing as some entity other than yourself, representative of what you would do in certain situations. These decisions subsequently lead to consequences which form a large part of the story.

While some games will be very good at making meaningful decision points where choice A leads you down path A and choice B leads you down path B, there is a tendency to make choice A and choice B give you path C but with altered dialog depending on your choice. This is almost undoubtedly because it is half the work of the first situation. Considering the amount of work that goes into the current generation of games, I imagine that creating a branching storyline is not exactly the main priority.

Quite a number of people seem to be under the impression that certain decisions have been made in developmental cycles to deliberately lower the quality of story. I'd argue that certain decisions have been made in the developmental cycle to improve gameplay, save time and keep costs down, with the unfortunate side-effect of making successive iterations of the Fire Emblem series similar in terms of storyline.

Common complaints and the likely reasons they still exist:

All Main Characters are Nobles - Nobles are entirely more likely to be able to command an army, have the diplomacy skills necessary to succeed when others might fail and have generally a good education that allows them to effectively do an exposition without the player cottoning on to said fact. Characters that are not noble would generally be poor and in a society seemingly modeled on the Medieval period, would have a low standard of education. They would lack the knowledge of courtly situations, how to deal with diplomats and may not know the correct etiquette not to get their head chopped off.

Having a character from a poor background display amazing diplomatic skill, commanding and army and good education would reek of Mary Su/Gary Stu.

Boring, Generic Lords (also no support lords) - You are meant to follow the story of lords and relate to their characters in some way. This is easiest if they make obvious decisions, are not too dissimilar to the expected 'norm' and rarely tread on new ground. As fun/different/unique as it would be following a 75-year old bald lesbian's psycopathic, psychic, siamese cat in his bid for world domination, would people relate?

Swords are commonly seen as heroic weapons due to mythology or something. I don't actually know why but they are. In terms of gameplay they offer new players a chance to get to grips with the weapon triangle (which is pretty important), miss fairly rarely on even matchups (and even on bad matchups hit a decent amount of time) and allow the player to get the Rapier, which is fairly important in the first few chapters of most of these games because there's a fair few knight bosses.

Support lords wielding staves might never be a thing because the gameplay element of Fire Emblem constantly emphasizes the fact that you're fighting and usually you're fighting in a war. Most people that lead armies generally don't do it with staves, exception being Gandalf who a) "doesn't even go here" and b) would probably be a Seth character anyway.

Young Characters in general - Who is the intended target audience for most of the FE series? I'm not saying that anyone who isn't the target audience isn't or shouldn't be playing but pandering to your target audience is how you keep a series alive for multiple games. If an established series suddenly changes audiences then it has the potential to go really badly. With the ever-increasing cost of creating, marketing and supporting top quality games

, suddenly targeting an older audience, which may very well be a smaller audience, does not make any business sense, especially at the rate that it takes for IS to make one game.

Young characters also haven't had too much happen to them already which leaves their future more open to be affected by events in-game. If you have a character that has already had a child or children and/or has been married then that'll impact on support options, especially in the romance sector if they are still married. And I'm fairly sure that supports and romantic supports in particular have become very popular within the existing fanbase. I'm not saying older characters or people have nothing left to do by any means but with younger characters I guess the writers have a blanker slate to work with in terms of characterization.

Female Protagonist - I don't have any demographics for who bought the most recent Fire Emblem but I'd bet on the split favoring males over females. People are also used to white male protagonists through other forms of media. If you went checking through Hollywood films based in America you'd probably find that there's a disproportionate number of white male heroes compared to the general population of America.

If the writing team is male then they may also have issues with properly writing a female character that is more in depth than some of the more archetype-y females we see each Fire Emblem.

Complex Storyline/Diplomatic shenanigans storyline - Mo' storyline, mo' development time/cost/effort. In games development you'll always be trying to minimize the time and money going into a project while maximizing the money out of a project. You'll also be severely affected by games reviewers, so releasing a 5-hour game with 12 different routes might not go down as well as a 30 hour game with one false decision-point where the ending is always the same with some post-game gameplay added on.

You also have to remember that the fairly young demographic that is likely to be the bulk purchaser of the game may be put off by a story so complex that you have to consult a wiki to constantly remember whose dead grandfathers dark magic tome is the key item that you've killed half a continent for.

Stalked by Jeigan - Jeigans usually make Lunatic mode doable for starters. They also explain most gameplay mechanics to new players (which is something unlikely to go away as putting of new players is a great way to lose profits through an ever diminishing fanbase) and allow for exposition which is usually necessary for FE games.

Dragon/Monster endgame enemies - Ok, so you've fought off legions worth of enemy soldiers who have slowly been increasing in skill and rank until you defeated their fairly powerful controlling power. Unless a newer, somehow more elite army just decides to turn up you're going to have to resort to some kind of otherworldly powers to give the players some kind of challenge. Dragons are a typical example because you can just turn their stats to "Really Quite High" and monsters come in so many different varieties that you can spam them out at different skill levels and explain their stats with "A Wizard did it" or something of that ilk.

Sure, I'd love a protagonist or multiple protagonists that really break the mould but wanting IS to change half the game too is a bit unrealistic. If you are looking for a complex plot or really well developed characters then books probably are the best bet for you. I'm not saying that IS shouldn't try and improve but this thread is rife with expectations that I believe cannot be fulfilled.

[Jotari]

Female Protagonist - I don't have any demographics for who bought the most recent Fire Emblem but I'd bet on the split favoring males over females. People are also used to white male protagonists through other forms of media. If you went checking through Hollywood films based in America you'd probably find that there's a disproportionate number of white male heroes compared to the general population of America.

If the writing team is male then they may also have issues with properly writing a female character that is more in depth than some of the more archetype-y females we see each Fire Emblem.

The thing that bugs me most about the female protagonist is that we have seen multiple, relatively interesting female protagonists throughout the series. It just so happens that every single time there is a female character with as much focus as a lord, without fail they've paired them up with a male lead too. This has been happening since the second game in the series. I believe they are fully capable of making a female lead who can carry the story without giving half of it over to a man, or even another character period. And if people don't buy that game because it doesn't have a Caucasian male on the cover then that's a problem with society that we need to change by making stories that are more varied. Not that IS cares for social inequalities of course. They're a company so money has to be their top priority, something I can live with. But I'd still love to see it happen even once, even if it fails, just so the attempt was made.

[Lord Glenn]

*snip*

[spoiler=Reply]While this is all fair (and you note as such) for a company that has finances and such, this is kind of just a wishful thinking thread, knowing full-well that the odds aren't exactly in our favor... I mean, Game Freak is basically tied to Nintendo just like Intelligent Systems and Game Freak is arguably worse when it comes to this stuff since IS has at least varied things a bit. (Though, it doesn't mean that something would never happen...)

That said, I do feel that a few of the things you mentioned (skipping female protagonists since the poster above covered that counterpoint) could be argued...

@"self-insert" - With no real decision-making and branching text trees, is placing a character in the game just to act as a dedicated player unit to attack things really giving players more immersion? If anything, it almost feels the opposite to me, since your only "role-playing" choices are what weapons to attack with and who to attack - "you" are still a static character, just with a user-generated appearance. And Stu-level plot importance.

@nobles - Honestly, your reasoning for why a commoner couldn't be a main character sounds like a pretty well-set way to actually write that kind of character for a lead setting... Have them encounter those kinds of situations (minus the beheading part) and have them react like they should instead of in a way that's out of character. Seems pretty easy to me.

@sword lords - Considering that the games seem to be veering into the "let's throw tons of tutorials into the game and make them available to the player", I don't think that the weapon triangle is a viable reason any longer. That being said, history does seem to have a fascination with swords as a status symbol of nobility (or for knights/rich enough mercenaries or thieves), so that's valid. However, that doesn't mean you couldn't craft a story where a (bastard) noble is secretly left in the care of the church as an orphan and is trained as a priest and later learns his/her heritage and commands an army. (Or commands an army for the church as a holy warrior of sorts...) Plus, there have been cases if nobility in Fire Emblem that don't use swords... they're just not usually the first noble you play as or even the main character. (Also, why is the Rapier even a special weapon, anyway? It's just a generic type if sword...)

EDIT 12:32 AM - See: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_(archbishop_of_York) (Was on the topic of English royalty with someone when it was mentioned that Richard and John had at least one other brother who had joined the clergy and beyond that, turned out to be illegitimate too. Talk about funny, huh?)

@Age - maybe it's just me, but I can honestly say that I care more about Pent as a character than, say, Erk. And Pent already having Louise tied to him actually helps in that regard. Granted, the entire cast need not be older, but I think more variance is fair to ask for. Plus, tropes aside, it's not like two sixteen year olds need to be paired together all of the time. In medieval times, I imagine this was far from ordinary.

@Dragons - Doesn't that sound, well, kinda lazy for a development standpoint? I mean, take Path of Radiance as an example of a case if Intelligent Systems already doing this one "right". Heck, you might even be able to throw Thracia in here too, though "a wizard did it" isn't too far off...

-----

Nitpicks/arguments aside, I guess my big wish would be really tied to the storyline - not every game needs to be about some huge war/conflict. Yes, you need some kind of conflict - that's a standard tenet of writing a story, otherwise, what is going to drive events forward? - but it doesn't always need to be on the scale of saving your home country or the whole continent or even the whole world! And, because of that, I just want a character that isn't a noble or a mercenary (even though the only mercenary case only lasts for a handful of chapters before they get dragged into the world of the nobility).

What about a crew of pirates serving no one but themselves (and thus aren't completely mercenaries)? If you want to go the arguably 'lazy' route of having evil monsters/creatures, what about a clergy-based sect out to eradicate evil, that doesn't focus on a big war but on a smaller group of individuals?

Just give me something unique and different enough for a change - male/female doesn't matter, though I won't object to being able to follow the journey of a female main character. I don't have the requisite free time anymore to spend 2 hours a weekday plus more on weekends to game, so it's a big deal to me that my experiences aren't largely the same from game-to-game, though I will make exceptions (see Pokemon, though the sameness is definitely starting to wear on me to the point that I'm considering stopping again...). That just ends up being wasted time to me.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Lord Glenn

[Rehab]

Again, a ton of this thread is about asking what people want to see, not necessarily to make a substantial argument for why it would be a better/easier business/design decision than the things we see so often in Fire Emblem. Besides, how many of those are you really sure are both truly indisputably the best things for the games, and actually are the explanations that the developers would give themselves? Almost the whole thread is hypotheticals and guesswork, and admittedly so. Let's not pretend the reasons given for the status quo aren't basically the same, there.

But if you'd like to go that route, it's not like games haven't ever been made that have had some of these things, and in Fire Emblem's genre. Tactics Ogre and Der Langrisser on branching paths, for example. I mean, a ton of that other stuff listed could just be done some other way, or just doesn't really sound that important. Like, Fire Emblem is the only series I know that really reliably has something resembling a Jeigan archetype, even among srpgs, so I'd rather doubt whatever they give the games is so important as to be irreplaceable by whatever other possible gameplay and story elements one could come up with. It just all sounds like apologism for how similar common elements in the games have been. I'm sorry, but generic, boring lords are easier to follow? Is that explanation, justification, or what? Even as a kid I would've thought that sounded incredibly lame, and I can't say the evidence in the idea's favor is very clear to me anyway. And please don't get us started on demographics, for pity's sake I beg you

If the developers actually toyed with the idea of putting FE13 on freakin Mars at some point, I doubt they're really all that joined at the hip to the idea of Fire Emblem as "main character is a young nobleman with a purely reactive personality wielding plain old sword, joined by a mentor/overseer figure who etc."

And it's not like the games have never shaken things up at all. The likes of Ike and a lot of the key elements in his games aren't exactly unprecedented in anime/games/particularly Japanese games, but he and the Tellius entries in general shook up or played with a lot of the things listed as far as the series goes. And for the things it did messily and maybe wrong, Awakening at least tried things that you couldn't really paste from the plot of another game in the series. I honestly don't think asking for more shaking up is all that big a deal, but "just how justifiable and/or likely-to-come-about is messing with all these things in ways we'd like to see" isn't even really a matter for this thread anyway.

[electricwolf]

Just to reiterate: I would like to see something different in future main characters but I think expecting too much change is a bit of a pipe-dream. I don't oppose the purpose of this thread, merely some of the sentiments that have been expressed without much thought as for their feasibility.

*snip*

I know this thread is wishful thinking but I do get the distinct feeling that whatever IS does, someone in this thread will still be disappointed and have something to whine about. If the protagonist is a female then what about the older demographic? If the protagonist is an older male, what about the female demographic? The character is an old female? If they're white you can be sure someone here will be typing complaints about racism until they release the next game.

@self-insert: I imagine if you asked everyone that bought Awakening what their characters was called, the majority of people will have named it the same as what they themselves are called. (I'd also like to point out for the person talking about demographics, I have no data here whatsoever but I'd be willing to eat a sock if I was wrong on that last point)

Apart from the stuff you mentioned there is also the support side, which is a large part of the game. In my first Awakening playthrough my Avatar ended up paired with who I thought was the best character, regardless of the fact that they probably aren't the best from a min/max-ing point of view.

While an Avatar character with meaningful options would surely be highly immersive, I think you may underestimate the power of just giving someone a slightly customisable unit who they'll name after themselves.

@nobles: It would actually leave quite a lot of room for development if they weren't a noble but how would they learn some of the skills they would have to use if it weren't for a Jeigan? I just don't think players would believe that a non-noble would be able to learn on-the-fly diplomacy by themselves in high pressure situations that could go disastrously wrong very quickly.

@swords: even if the player gets tutorials about the weapon triangle they will still have to put it into practice. Most games would not go out of their way to teach you something and then decide not to use that information. In FE:7 even after you get two cavaliers you're still facing units that at worst are even matchups with Lyns sword. This continues until Chapter 6 in which you *gasp* face three underleveled soldiers (quite possibly the worst class statwise) that are far enough apart that you can fight them one-on-one and heal if you took damage. Only in Chapter 8 do you start to come across bad matchups in a high enough concentration that using just Lyn becomes a liability.

Again, it would be easier for them to follow the games they have already made and go for a sword lord but it isn't unfeasible that a person could be mainly trained in another weapon.

(Rapiers are also mainly used for unarmored combat revolving around thrusts. They were never designed to beat any kind of armored unit. It would make more sense for it to be an Estoc, which were typically heavier and actually designed to beat plate armor: http://www.thearma.org/Youth/rapieroutline.htm )

@age: Pent is just an all round badass, but I'm not entirely sure if he proves the rule or is the exception to it. Out of the older characters that exist, some of them have been fairly uninteresting (Dorcas, Oswin, Gilliam, Moulder), and while I'm sure that's an argument for more representation of everyone over 20 it's also a bit of a bad omen. I'm sure everyone would be annoyed if the older characters were as boring as they have been in past games and IS has a history of doing the same thing with fairly small changes.

Too high of an age gap would also decrease options for supports or make them more weird. While Oswin and Serra are 13 years apart and seem to develop a good relationship in their A support I think if you increase the age gap anymore it would start to alienate people unless you go the platonic relationship route. If you agree with that then it follows that you'll slowly start sorting characters by age so that the romantic supports can still go ahead.

I will admit that Awakening at least has better, older characters. Flavia and Basilio kick some serious Risen/Grimleal butt.

@Dragons: Yes, it is. Would we think it was as lazy if the game just kept increasing the level of soldiers it threw at us though? At least the undead or dragon enemies are some kind of variation on the hordes of human soldiers we're used to fighting.

@scale of events: One main thing that seems to happen in the Fire Emblem series is the escalation of events which usually ties into a plausible reason for stronger enemies. Whether those enemies are from a better trained army, people with supernatural powers or something else. FE7 goes from local bandits to a group of global assassins to a dragon, FE8 goes from one guy trying to save his father using dark magic to world domination to the Demon King, FE10 ends up with basically Judgement Day and Awakening starts with brigands and ends with fighting a dark god. With the hatred going around for early game bandit chapters, how small can you realistically start at to end up at a larger conflict with reasonable transition between them? Would people really enjoy a storyline that starts with an economic slump of turnip prices that forces a young farm girl to enlist in an army before experiencing disaster and somehow becoming the general of a new army that fights the old, corrupt one?

*snip*

In a thread where people are saying things along the lines of: "I would like to see X because of Y", I don't think I'm exactly unreasonable in saying "I'm not sure how likely X is because of Z". Regardless of any logic I raise, there's always going to be one person trying to shoot me down or to tell me to stop defending IS for making decisions that may or may not be tied to the fact that they'd all like to have jobs for a few more years at least.

Yes, things have been done in the gaming world that aren't Fire Emblem. Many of those things stay that way because they just "aren't Fire Emblem". As much as people might hope for a Pokemon game without the standard 8 gym storyline or a Fire Emblem game without some of the more common cliches it utilises in every iteration, they are probably going to wait a long time for it. Like it or not the non-indie video game industry is a tough environment that favours old intellectual property with an existing fanbase over higher risk new IP that may not generate the sales needed to keep a business afloat. If you are looking for more radical ideas than are currently found in Fire Emblem, you will find them by the barrel-full in the indie games industry.

Boring protagonists are used deliberately more often than you might think. Link from LoZ not talking is an example of this. People by now already have their own idea of what Link speaking normal words would sound like so even getting the worlds best voice actor in to speak his lines would still rub some people up the wrong way.

For more reasons why they are typically white and male: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LeadYouCanRelateTo

For more reasons why they are usually boring as hell: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VanillaProtagonist

While the last link is not specifically a trope, it has been used in a large amount of things.

Here's a worthwhile thing to read from the last page's example section:

"

• This is commonly a Enforced Trope in video games since the hero is often meant to represent the player. Thus, many games will give them a minimal personality (or none whatsoever) so the player can project themselves in their place, thus the supporting cast gets all the personality and most of the drama to themselves. It's especially prevalent in the case of a Heroic Mime. Many fans love having this in their games and will sometimes complain if the hero has a strong personality, though the reasons can vary from not being able to insert themselves into the role to the strong personality being one they find utterly abhorrent.

"

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeaturelessProtagonist is also a good read.

[Jotari]

The non lord protagonist has been done before (twice in fact if you count Alm) as has the non continent scale event and dragonless plot (okay so Genaology has dragons in the back story but the fact that they're dragons is only to tie it together thematically with the rest of the series). It seems reasonable to imagine such things could happen again.

[Ownagepuffs]

I don't mind nobility for protagonist, in fact I prefer it. I have a thing for nobility. I have played a lot of vidya and the FE series as a whole is a refresher. I guess that is why I am not so up in arms for a different main character.

[Rehab]

Regarding the games "being for kids," I think that deserves a more nuanced distinction. Is Fire Emblem really marketed at, like, early primary age children in a way comparable to how Pokemon is? Maybe it's just because FE7 was released around the time I was about 10, but I always got the feeling it was more directly marketed at the "pre-teen to teen" area.

There's a notable difference: pre-teens love to be told what they're taking part in "isn't for kids," imo. I know that at least when I was that age, even if it wasn't a huge difference in the scheme of things, it was a big honkin deal to me that the enemies I was fighting in Fire Emblem weren't just robots, or samey monsters or an unending horde of the same goons over and over, it was individuals who were presumably each as much people as who I was controlling. It was actually new and exciting, and even though the bad guys didn't really swear, it felt cool that they did something equivalent and made themselves out to be individuals with goals. I loved games that tried to make me feel smart by doing things different, or at the very least bothered to try and fool me into thinking they were.

And even at age 10-11, I was Team Hector to the bone. Probably even moreso than I am now- I don't think Eliwood's really a sop or a wimp anymore, and I don't begrudge Marth for wearing a tiara. When I first got the games, I wanted everybody to be Hector, and I loved Ike for being not-Eliwood in every way I could find. My favorite characters as a kid, even before preteen age, were way more towards the "loud, boisterous, kicks impossible to the curb" cliche than they were towards "most dialogue = '...'" one.

Man, tvtropes is an occasionally good reference site at best. Using it to back up an argument, especially for something maintaining a status quo? Can, I'm sorry, can we not even get into that. If you must, must say it would be better for them to keep the protagonist white and male and boring, could you at least use, like, statistics? Noted facts and testimony from the developers themselves? Numbers?

(here's where we begin to touch the issue that even the arguments for having male protags based on facts and numbers are riddled with double standards and superstition)

And that doesn't really answer for the ways Fire Emblem has been shaken up. Did you see that interview where the designers literally considered putting FE13 on Mars? And the Ike being a mercenary thing? Themes looking at racism becoming more prominent in the games than they were before? Having a player-customized protagonist, at all? Fire Emblem may be a series that has historically made a lot of safe bets, but I feel like if I took all of what you said for granted, every game in the series would be FE1, and yet this is clearly not the case.

If you're being shot down, you're being shot down for shooting other people down, and this is key, in a thread about dreaming. I'm sorry to be so curt about this, but IS doesn't need your defending, at all, in any scenario, and especially not right here, right now. They have enough money to make games, a notoriously expensive form of entertainment to make, and they make money doing it. "It's in their interest to keep some things the same to continue to make money?" Yeah, yeah. Again, I'm sorry if this is coming off as personal, but man, I think you could stand to lighten up.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Rehab

[electricwolf]

*snip*

I never said "for kids", I said the demographic was young. Please don't interpret 'young' as a certain age and then debate against an argument I didn't make.

The target audience is likely in the teens somewhere and this might go up or down slightly depending on the game but the series will always have tutorial chapters where they baby you through the mechanics of a game you've probably played at least once or twice before because it doesn't make business sense to have a high barrier of entry for a game.

I also never said that keeping the white male protagonist status quo was good for story purposes, merely for business purposes. Take the top grossing films in the world (available here: http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/ ).

First, let's start with the ethnicity of the main protagonist:

White (but blue sometimes), White, White, White, White, White, White (unless you count non-human, in which case Transformer voiced by a white guy), White, White, White, White, White (albeit a toy, voiced by a white guy), White, White, White, White, White, White, White, Lion (voiced by a white guy).

Sure, there are supporting cast members (Samuel L. Jackson makes numerous appearances) that are not white or voiced by white actors but damn that list of protagonists is so white I thought I was in Antarctica.

What about gender?

Male, Female/male, 5/6 male, male (but Hermione is badass), female, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, female, male, male, male, male.

Feel free to go into the pedantics here and force me to examine each case to prove that men are over-represented in the media.

I would say that the overall showing of 100% white, ~85+% male is a surprise to me, except for the fact that it is one of the things I seem to have said about three times in as many posts.

While the developers have not come out and said that "our games only make money by following the status quo", it's still a status quo that undeniably exists. If you think for one second that white male protagonists are not the norm, I will flat out tell you that you're wrong.

Sure, in recent times there has been a noticeable shift in what kind of protagonists we see in big movies but white male leads have sold in the past and until there is more evidence for profitable ventures with alternative leads, many companies will hesitate to do anything new.

Have you even read that interview properly? You keep telling me they "considered putting FE13 on Mars" but fail to add any of the other detail:

"We made proposals that were a complete departure from the medieval worldview so far — like Fire Emblem completely in the modern world or the one which has the sense of an fairy tale. But they were too far out, so we couldn't get started. (laughs)"

Scrambling for ideas the developer even came up with an elaborate plot that would see the Fire Emblem universe head to Mars. This idea didn't last too long as it was promptly shot down by producer Hitoshi Yamagami:

"I was like, "Is that even Fire Emblem?!" (laughs) In the end, such a drastic break didn't go very well."

So, essentially they considered it but decided it was too much of a departure from regular Fire Emblem.

I'm fairly light as it is, I just don't think the blind optimism shown in this thread is going to end well for people wishing for things that are fairly likely to happen. I'm also getting a tad sick of the whining and complaining without actually considering the origins of their ire and looking at it from a viewpoint different from their own.

tl;dr

Dreamers are fine by me. Whiners, not so much.

Edited August 7, 2014 by electricwolf

[Jotari]

Just want to chime in with some trivia and say the highest grossing movie adjusted for inflation had a female protagonist. Of course context is relevant. Gone With The Wind was such a huge success because it was released during the Second World War and really spoke to the women who were left at home during it. But the context of the modern day should be taken into account to. We, the people, are saying these are the sort of stories we want to hear about. The demography is (and should be) shifting away from stories were young heterosexual white males are the default state of a character. And if we don't make our opinions known then the only thing that will sell are white male protagonists because that's the only thing they're going to make. Unless we ask for it they have no reason to do otherwise.

That link you posted also doesn't work. It has an extra ). included in the URL that needs to be removed. Jack also isn't the sole protagonist of Titanic. At the very least they have equal importance but many, myself included would say Rose has the bigger role since the story is her flashback and entire thing basically revolves around her.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Jotari

[Cymbalina's Revenge]

[snip]

And that doesn't really answer for the ways Fire Emblem has been shaken up. Did you see that interview where the designers literally considered putting FE13 on Mars? And the Ike being a mercenary thing? Themes looking at racism becoming more prominent in the games than they were before? Having a player-customized protagonist, at all? Fire Emblem may be a series that has historically made a lot of safe bets, but I feel like if I took all of what you said for granted, every game in the series would be FE1, and yet this is clearly not the case.

[snip]

Yeah, a player-customized protagonist that breaks the fourth wall is a big big big departure from how the games were conceived in the NES/SNES era, where the player and the game hero were explicitly NOT supposed to be the same. Whether you view Kris and Robin as good, bad, or neutral, they are most definitely a shake-up.

And if they could be customized to have freak hair and pirate eyepatches, they sure as heck could've customized to have a less pasty skin tone-- especially Robin, given the non-white major characters in FE13. Even if the game-playing world is too racist to buy an FE game with a dark-skinned hero, it could've been an option for the player the same as it was in, say, DragonQuest IX.

[Jotari]

What I find hilarious about white Robin is that his father, Validar, is super tanned. Could just be tanned with evil but it's still a funny design choice given their relationship.

Edited August 7, 2014 by Jotari

[electricwolf]

We, the people, are saying these are the sort of stories we want to hear about. The demography is (and should be) shifting away from stories were young heterosexual white males are the default state of a character. And if we don't make our opinions known then the only thing that will sell are white male protagonists because that's the only thing they're going to make. Unless we ask for it they have no reason to do otherwise.

btw, thanks for your continued wisdom.

While some organisations have made noted moves towards diversifying their leading characters, there has been a large amount of anger from people who are resistant to change. While maybe not in the same context as Fire Emblem's often mostly unrelated game worlds, a female Thor, black Captain America and gay Ironman have caused considerable outrage. I'm guessing partly due to political correctness for the sake of it but also for other issues such as why they are suddenly changing gender/race/sexuality.

As all of us here are likely intelligent individuals with internet access, it stands to reason that we'll be more likely to have a non-racist, non-sexist view of the world. The world is not solely comprised of us though and there will be significant resistance to change:

http://www.gameskinny.com/pdqka/the-straight-white-guy-industry is an informative article and well worth the read.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122787-Prospective-Publishers-Wanted-a-Male-Centric-Remember-Me tells the story of game creators with a non-standard protagonist that had trouble finding a publisher, apparently due to their choice of protagonist.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/102593-Rumor-Activision-Doesnt-Think-Female-Leads-Can-Sell-Games tells about how one big publisher apparently thinks of female protagonists.

This is the most important one because it contains stats:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MonicaMcGill/20130604/193603/Examining_the_Pipeline_Demographics_of_Undergraduate_Students_Studying_Games.php

Basically, males are over-represented in game design education compared to the average population.

There is hope that Nintendo in particular may embrace change. After the PR disaster of Tomodachi Life's gay marriage 'bug', they have pledged to include it as a standard feature in the next installment of that series: http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700636/nintendo-apologizes-for-leaving-same-sex-marriage-out-of-tomodachi

Sorry for all the links btw. I really am all for changing the status quo but I'll probably continue being pessimistic until I see more evidence for it changing.

(not on the same topic as the above paragraph)

While I seem to have been banned from posting tvtropes links, the page for white male lead contains most of my points from previous posts: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhiteMaleLead