How could Laguz (and other strike units) work?

[Jotari]

9 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Her battle sprite in Heroes is obviously based on her battle sprite in Book 1 of Mystery of the Emblem.

I didn't dispute that. I dispute the fact that she uses her OG dragon design means she's a fire dragon. I said that the sprite she has in the first game is the generic dragon sprite. It's not a recolour of the Fire Dragon because it's also used by mage dragons and divine dragons. It's simply the (non Medeus) dragon sprite in the game. It even uses the coloration of her Divine Dragon palette.

9 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Myrrh doesn't come with Flametongue PLUS as her final default weapon.

No, she comes with Great Flame as he Prf weapon.

9 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

And while Myrrh herself is no higher than Tiki herself, Myrrh's dragon form in Heroes is higher than Tiki's dragon form because Tiki is "just a Fire Dragon".

Tiki's color was determined more than a year before she got Breath of Fog as a weapon. Using Breath of Fog as an argument for what color Tiki should have been implemented as on release is wholly invalid.

So I already said I'd let you have that young Tiki is a fire dragon in Heroes, even though it's not true, but here's a question, why is Tiki "just a Fire Dragon"? Because she wasn't "Just a Fire Dragon" in FE1. Her Divine Drgaon sprite might have been no more special than a Fire Dragon or Mage Dragon, but she absolutely wasn't a Fire Dragon in the first game. She can't even use Bantu's Fire Stone, that seems to be a Shadow Dragon addition (I think, I'm testing it now but the items are untranslated for some reason). But the point is, why, when they came to design the three dragon categories, if you are correct, did they look at Tiki and say "She is a Divine Dragon, she is daughter of the most powerful Dragon ever, we're giving her the title Dragon Scion. We have three categories, High Dragon, Fire Dragon and Ice/Water/Lightning Dragon...Let's make her a Fire Dragon." Now I relent on the Breath of Fog thing, but looking at her original Sprite again, she does seem to be blowing fire. Albeit, blue fire. But I'm not arguing that Tiki shouldn't be a red unit, red unit's fine for her (I don't think she should be exclusively red or have exclusive access to red though), I'm saying that she's not a Fire Dragon. Because she's not. She might breath fire, but that doesn't make her a fire dragon. She has an always has been a divine dragon. And if there is a category of breath units known as "High" dragons, she should be in it. Hell her in game description even calls her a Divine Dragon.

Quote

A young Divine Dragon once put into a timeless sleep to keep her dragon impulses in check. Now longs for human company.

Young Tiki may use her original sprite (her original, divine dragon sprite, she doesn't even have the colouration of the Fire Dragons) and she may breath Fire, but she is not a lowly Fire Dragon. If Fire and High dragons are both categories, then there's no reason Tiki, any incarnation of her, should be in Fire over High, nor why she should be the only one in Fire when other units like Myrrh have a specific focus on it.

9 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

I can only assume that the developers decided that Tiki should just be red when she's not in her Book 2 Divine Dragon form. If we ever get a Tiki that actually transforms into a Book 2 Divine Dragon, I'm willing to bet she will be green or colorless.

 

Uses the exact same dragon sprite as regular Tiki. Vomits fish.

So,  Tiki is a Divine Dragon in Awakening and even breaths lightning, but she's still in the Fire Dragon category. That makes her an exception to the rule. Likewise Young Tiki doesn't breath fire (outside of the transitional weapons that all dragons have, granted SUmmer Tiki also does have Flametongue) and instead breaths Fish, so she's an exception to the rule. This means that the number of Fire Dragons in the Fire Dragon Category is a total of 1. And the number of exceptions total are four (Adult Tiki, Summer Tiki, Kana and Female!Grima). We currently have 12 breath units, that means 25% of the dragons in the game are exceptions to the categories they're in.

Edited September 5, 2018 by Jotari

[Ice Dragon]

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

No, she comes with Great Flame as he Prf weapon.

In Japanese, which is the only language that matters for these things, her weapon is 神炎のブレス, "Breath of Divine Flame".

 

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

I didn't dispute that. I dispute the fact that she uses her OG dragon design means she's a fire dragon. I said that the sprite she has in the first game is the generic dragon sprite. It's not a recolour of the Fire Dragon because it's also used by mage dragons and divine dragons. It's simply the (non Medeus) dragon sprite in the game. It even uses the coloration of her Divine Dragon palette.

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

So I already said I'd let you have that young Tiki is a fire dragon in Heroes, even though it's not true, but here's a question, why is Tiki "just a Fire Dragon"? Because she wasn't "Just a Fire Dragon" in FE1. Her Divine Drgaon sprite might have been no more special than a Fire Dragon or Mage Dragon, but she absolutely wasn't a Fire Dragon in the first game. She can't even use Bantu's Fire Stone, that seems to be a Shadow Dragon addition (I think, I'm testing it now but the items are untranslated for some reason). But the point is, why, when they came to design the three dragon categories, if you are correct, did they look at Tiki and say "She is a Divine Dragon, she is daughter of the most powerful Dragon ever, we're giving her the title Dragon Scion. We have three categories, High Dragon, Fire Dragon and Ice/Water/Lightning Dragon...Let's make her a Fire Dragon." Now I relent on the Breath of Fog thing, but looking at her original Sprite again, she does seem to be blowing fire. Albeit, blue fire. But I'm not arguing that Tiki shouldn't be a red unit, red unit's fine for her (I don't think she should be exclusively red or have exclusive access to red though), I'm saying that she's not a Fire Dragon. Because she's not. She might breath fire, but that doesn't make her a fire dragon. She has an always has been a divine dragon. And if there is a category of breath units known as "High" dragons, she should be in it. Hell her in game description even calls her a Divine Dragon.

Tiki is clearly based off of her appearance in FE3 Book 1, not FE1. There's zero reason to continue bringing FE1 back into the picture.

In FE3, Tiki has access to all obtainable dragonstones, including Bantu's Fire Dragonstone (and the several other dragonstones that I believe are available in a Secret Shop in Book 2) and when transformed into a fire dragon, takes on all of the properties of fire dragons, e.g. being weak to Ice Breath, being equipped with Fire Breath.

Because Tiki's properties change based on the type of dragon that she transforms into, those properties should be more important in determining her color than who she is. If she transforms into a fire dragon, she should take on the properties of a fire dragon. If she transforms into an ice dragon, she should take on the properties of an ice dragon. If she transforms into a magic dragon or divine dragon, she should take on the properties of a magic dragon or divine dragon.

I'm not saying that Tiki, the character herself, is a fire dragon. I'm saying she is transformed using a Fire Dragonstone and therefore has taken on the transformed form of a fire dragon and therefore should have the properties of a fire dragon. This is no different than Raven picking up and using an axe and therefore having the properties of axes instead of swords.

 

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

Likewise Young Tiki doesn't breath fire (outside of the transitional weapons that all dragons have, granted SUmmer Tiki also does have Flametongue) and instead breaths Fish, so she's an exception to the rule.

She uses the exact same transformed dragon sprite as normal Tiki. A fire dragon with an upset stomach is still a fire dragon.

Until we get her FE3 Book 2 divine dragon sprite in the game, you won't be able to convince me that the form she has taken is not a fire dragon.

 

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

Female!Grima

Female Grima can be argued to be of legendary status and therefore transcend the weapon triangle. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I would not be opposed to Kurthnaga and Dheginhansea also being colorless for the same reason.

 

As for Awakening Tiki, I can't say I know what the designers were thinking, but chances are they decided to lump her in with Mystery Tiki because she's Tiki and the Awakening dragons, to my knowledge having never gotten far in Awakening, are not a well-defined dragon type. Nowi being definitely-not-Tiki got to be blue to match her Lightning Breath, and Tiki being Tiki ended up being red.

Which still only leaves female Kana as an exception.

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

In Japanese, which is the only language that matters for these things, her weapon is 神炎のブレス, "Breath of Divine Flame".

So it's still Fire Based.

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

Tiki is clearly based off of her appearance in FE3 Book 1, not FE1. There's zero reason to continue bringing FE1 back into the picture.

In FE3, Tiki has access to all obtainable dragonstones, including Bantu's Fire Dragonstone (and the several other dragonstones that I believe are available in a Secret Shop in Book 2) and when transformed into a fire dragon, takes on all of the properties of fire dragons, e.g. being weak to Ice Breath, being equipped with Fire Breath.

Because Tiki's properties change based on the type of dragon that she transforms into, those properties should be more important in determining her color than who she is. If she transforms into a fire dragon, she should take on the properties of a fire dragon. If she transforms into an ice dragon, she should take on the properties of an ice dragon. If she transforms into a magic dragon or divine dragon, she should take on the properties of a magic dragon or divine dragon.

I'm not saying that Tiki, the character herself, is a fire dragon. I'm saying she is transformed using a Fire Dragonstone and therefore has taken on the transformed form of a fire dragon and therefore should have the properties of a fire dragon. This is no different than Raven picking up and using an axe and therefore having the properties of axes instead of swords.

 

She uses the exact same transformed dragon sprite as normal Tiki. A fire dragon with an upset stomach is still a fire dragon.

Until we get her FE3 Book 2 divine dragon sprite in the game, you won't be able to convince me that the form she has taken is not a fire dragon.

 

Female Grima can be argued to be of legendary status and therefore transcend the weapon triangle. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I would not be opposed to Kurthnaga and Dheginhansea also being colorless for the same reason.

 

As for Awakening Tiki, I can't say I know what the designers were thinking, but chances are they decided to lump her in with Mystery Tiki because she's Tiki and the Awakening dragons, to my knowledge having never gotten far in Awakening, are not a well-defined dragon type. Nowi being definitely-not-Tiki got to be blue to match her Lightning Breath, and Tiki being Tiki ended up being red.

Which still only leaves female Kana as an exception.

Alright, I see your argument a bit better now. Not sure why I though you were talking about FE1 the whole time. Still, I think you're wrong though, because if you look at Tiki, you'll see she's definitely not using a Fire Stone. Strap in, this won't be brief.

Spoiler

 

Fire Stone sprites in all the games its featured.

And Cipher

Befitting a Fire Dragon, the Fire Stone is always red. 

 

Tiki's official artwork. Although, I know a lot of characters have weapons they don't use in battle in their official artwork, so let's look at her sprite.

It's also featured prominently in her summoning sequence

Now, let's look at every incarnation of the Divine Stone.

In all incarnations it is white with orbiting rings, the exception being Binding Blade, where it's angular and blue, exactly like it's presented by Tiki in Heroes. Of course Tiki isn't in Binding Blade, so let's look at Fae's Artwork

Same colour, same shade, same shape.

Now, the next rebuttal might be, all dragons use the same stone and the answer is, kind of. They all unilaterally use blue stones, but they aren't quite the same shade. Kana in particular uses a darker shade of blue.

 

And that sprite I showed earlier with the blue stone, that when she has Flame Tongue equipped. If you give her Breath of Fog then she has a more greenish stone. So they're not above making small edits like that. If they really wanted us to believe Tiki was a Divine Dragon using a Fire Dragon's stone, then they would have given her a Red Stone. For completion's sake, let's look at her warriors artwork, it was designed by a different team, but they had the basic information as the Heroes team when making it.

The blue stone consistent with her heroes appearance. And yet in her alternate costume, red stone

So it's not like it's inconceivable that Tiki can be shown holding a red stone. If they wanted us to believe Tiki was a fire dragon, this would have been an extremely easy edit to make. And in case that image is a bit vague, here's the icon for dragon stones in general in that game which you'll notice is the same design as her Hero's stone

Lastly, let's look at the sprite you keep referring back to.

Yep, that's definitely the sprite they used as inspiration for her, but, just like when I thought we were talking FE1 sprites, it's her Diviner Dragon sprite they took inspiration from. Just like the stone idea, if they wanted us to think Tiki was acting as a fire dragon, why did they give her the same palette as her Divine Dragon sprite? Sure, it might not be her more yellow divine dragon palette from book 2 (I question why they even gave her two sprites in that game), but it's still the appearance she takes upon using a divine stone.

Let's sum up the evidence.

Evidence she's a Fire Dragon

-She breaths fire

Evidence she's not a Fire Dragon

-She's called a Divine Dragon

-She's looks more like a (Fe3Book1)!Divine Dragon than a (Fe3Book1)!Fire Dragon.

-She doesn't use what can be recognized as a Fire Stone

-The stone she does use, she also uses in another games where her class is Divine Dragon (not made by the same team, but the fact that the design is identical means they either shared inspiration from somewhere I haven't found, or they did trade at least some basic info)

-She has the Divine Dragon weapon that is effective against Manaketes (not on release as you've pointed out, but it's telling they gave it to her retroactively instead of making a FE3 Alt just to introduce the weapon, and that her Summer Alt kept the effective against dragons ability).

 

 

 

 

Edited September 5, 2018 by Jotari

[Ice Dragon]

11 minutes ago, Jotari said:

So it's still Fire Based.

And the lightning flashes at the beginning of the Thunderhead and Naglfar spell animations mean they should be thunder tomes. Got it.

 

12 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Not sure why I though you were talking about FE1 the whole time. Still, I think you're wrong though, because if you look at Tiki, you'll see she's definitely not using a Fire Stone.

Every single inheritable breath weapon (including the Iron- and Steel-equivalent Fire Breath and Fire Breath+) uses the exact same dragonstone sprite, actually, so that's hardly an argument.

I already mentioned that she's using her Divine Dragon sprite from Book 1, but due to the fact that it's a simple recolor of the Fire Dragon sprite as opposed to the canonical Divine Dragon design used in Book 2, the TCG, Cipher, and Warriors (it looks like FE11 and FE12 use a mane-less version of the design similar to the unpromoted Warriors design), it can be interpreted that the Heroes rendition of Mystery Tiki's dragon form is a fire dragon where her divineness seeped in to its coloration, similar to how Ena is a red dragon in terms of her powers, but her white dragon blood changes her coloration to pink (I want to know what color Ena's kid's dragon form is).

[Jotari]

3 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

And the lightning flashes at the beginning of the Thunderhead and Naglfar spell animations mean they should be thunder tomes. Got it.

Really what are you trying to argue here? Are you saying that the weapon called Great Flame that has a large fire animation is not fire based? I mean sure, it might be divine based too, but it's absolutely still a fire attack.

13 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Every single inheritable breath weapon (including the Iron- and Steel-equivalent Fire Breath and Fire Breath+) uses the exact same dragonstone sprite, actually, so that's hardly an argument.

So why didn't they give her a red stone in her artwork, or make flametongue a red stone? They have a different model for each individual sword, you think it would have been vastly beyond their capabilities to make the flametongue red? If they really wanted us to look at Tiki and believe she was a fire dragon, they would have done that.

12 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

And the lightning flashes at the beginning of the Thunderhead and Naglfar spell animations mean they should be thunder tomes. Got it.

 

Every single inheritable breath weapon (including the Iron- and Steel-equivalent Fire Breath and Fire Breath+) uses the exact same dragonstone sprite, actually, so that's hardly an argument.

I already mentioned that she's using her Divine Dragon sprite from Book 1, but due to the fact that it's a simple recolor of the Fire Dragon sprite as opposed to the canonical Divine Dragon design used in Book 2, the TCG, Cipher, and Warriors (it looks like FE11 and FE12 use a mane-less version of the design similar to the unpromoted Warriors design), it can be interpreted that the Heroes rendition of Mystery Tiki's dragon form is a fire dragon where her divineness seeped in to its coloration, similar to how Ena is a red dragon in terms of her powers, but her white dragon blood changes her coloration to pink (I want to know what color Ena's kid's dragon form is).

That's baseless conjecture. What it comes down to is that this,

Resembles the design on the right more so than the one on the left.

Now we might eventually get an alt that looks like the dragon in my profile pic, but that doesn't stop the fact that the grey form of Tiki with a double spiked tail and vaguely iguana head feather things is a Divine Dragon. It's perplexing why they gave her two designs in Mystery of the Emblem, but they did, and the first one is just as canon as the second one, Book 1 and FE1 are still canon games, otherwise Draug and Shiida wouldn't use swords. If you want to argue that it's non canon because there's been later Divine Dragon designs, then it can just as easily be argued that the Fire Dragon design is non canon because we've more recently had this

and this

For what ever reason they choose to represent child Tiki using her classic dragon design (although they lack the same pose, her Book 1 Design is the same general design as in Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light), but the classic design they used was her classic Divine Dragon design. Saying that it's a fire dragon with divine dragon elements is completely baseless, as in the remakes where she can transform into a Fire Dragon, she doesn't turn into a grey fire dragon, she just turns into this

[Othin]

32 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

(I want to know what color Ena's kid's dragon form is).

Good question. Maybe some sort of burgundy?

[Ice Dragon]

8 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Really what are you trying to argue here? Are you saying that the weapon called Great Flame that has a large fire animation is not fire based? I mean sure, it might be divine based too, but it's absolutely still a fire attack.

Its divine-ness makes it green. Divineness of breath is more important than fireness of breath.

 

9 minutes ago, Jotari said:

So why didn't they give her a red stone in her artwork, or make flametongue a red stone? They have a different model for each individual sword, you think it would have been vastly beyond their capabilities to make the flametongue red? If they really wanted us to look at Tiki and believe she was a fire dragon, they would have done that.

Don't ask me why they chose to make every single inheritable dragonstone and tome use the same weapon sprite at launch (for example, Thunder, Elthunder, Thoron(+), Blarraven(+), Blarblade(+), and Blarwolf(+) all have the same sprite).

 

15 minutes ago, Jotari said:

That's baseless conjecture.

It's based in part on the fact that she has Flametongue+ as her default weapon skill despite the fact that Book 1 Divine Dragons used Ice Breath instead of Fire Breath.

Furthermore, in Awakening, Tiki has a white recolored version of Nowi's dragon form, so it is not unreasonable that they would use the white divine recolor of the Fire Dragon sprite for a fire dragon Mystery Tiki. The notes on the Awakening concept art for the transformed dragons indicates that TIki's coloration is the indication of her person's divinity, so one could assume that young Tiki in a post-Awakening appearance could reasonably have a permanently white coloration in any dragon form (and Heroes coincidentally has young Tiki in a post-Awakening game).

It can also be noted that the only main-series games where they ever bothered to customize the appearance of dragons at all based on character were the ones that were in full 3D. It should be no surprise that Fire Dragon Tiki in FE3, 11, and 12 have no visible difference from other Fire Dragons from the same game.

 

If they really intended Tiki to be a Divine Dragon from the start, they would have given her a different default weapon (Mist Breath or maybe Light Breath+ even, but most certainly not Flametongue+), a different weapon color, and used her more conventional divine dragon design. The fact that the only thing that points to her dragon form in Heroes being a Divine Dragon being the color of her sprite is far weaker justification than the evidence pointing against it being a Divine Dragon, especially when Awakening's concept art notes can be used to discount it entirely.

[Othin]

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

If they really intended Tiki to be a Divine Dragon from the start, they would have given her a different default weapon (Mist Breath or maybe Light Breath+ even, but most certainly not Flametongue+), a different weapon color, and used her more conventional divine dragon design. The fact that the only thing that points to her dragon form in Heroes being a Divine Dragon being the color of her sprite is far weaker justification than the evidence pointing against it being a Divine Dragon, especially when Awakening's concept art notes can be used to discount it entirely.

Wait, isn't the purpose of all this substantiating your claim that breath color must be linked to dragon type in the first place? This sounds like circular logic.

As for weapons, Lightning Breath and Summer Breath certainly don't seem like weapons I'd expect a fire dragon to use. And looking particularly at Adult Tiki: in Awakening, she and Nowi use the same dragonstones, have the same recolored dragon model, and breathe ice. In Heroes, she and Nowi have the same recolored dragon sprite and breathe lightning.

The reason Adult Tiki is a different color from Nowi is the same reason Female Kana is a different color from Male Kana: IS wanted to have a dragon be a different color from the typical one for its type, and they care more about getting the colors they want than about upholding a rigid classification system.

[Ice Dragon]

8 minutes ago, Othin said:

Wait, isn't the purpose of all this substantiating your claim that breath color must be linked to dragon type in the first place? This sounds like circular logic.

I'm not seeing any circular logic at all.

If Tiki were designed to transform into a Fire Dragon, it would follow that she would have the Fire Dragon sprite, a fire-based breath weapon, and a red weapon color.

If Tiki were designed to transform into a Divine Dragon, it would follow that she would have the Divine Dragon sprite, a non-fire-based breath weapon, and most likely a green or colorless weapon color.

The fact that all of the first set of statements match what we got and all of the second set of statements do not match what we got shows that the first is the more probable case.

The only anomalous element is the fact that her sprite is colored to match her Book 1 Divine Dragon sprite instead of being the standard red color of the generic Fire Dragon sprite. However, this can be explained by the design notes on Tiki's dragon form in Awakening that indicate that her color is different from Nowi's due to her divinity.

 

58 minutes ago, Othin said:

As for weapons, Lightning Breath and Summer Breath certainly don't seem like weapons I'd expect a fire dragon to use.

Summer Tiki is still using the same dragon form sprite has her normal version, so it makes sense to leave her as red. Again, a Fire Dragon vomiting fish and rainbows is still a Fire Dragon. Probably even more so than a Fire Dragon vomiting Force Lightning.

 

59 minutes ago, Othin said:

The reason Adult Tiki is a different color from Nowi is the same reason Female Kana is a different color from Male Kana: IS wanted to have a dragon be a different color from the typical one for its type, and they care more about getting the colors they want than about upholding a rigid classification system.

I will admit that Awakening Tiki has the weakest argument among the original five dragons, but there are other possible alternative explanations that are just as plausible as "we wanted her to be different from Nowi".

First, the dragon forms of the Awakening mamkutes are apparently ambiguous with their typing. I haven't played that far in the game, so all I have to go off of is what I hear from other people and what information I can get off of the materials I have to work with.

Second, from what I know, neither Tiki nor Nowi in Awakening use electricity as their weapon, so the two of them are just going to be weird regardless. Nowi was likely assigned to be blue at least in part to match Lightning Breath+. And if you say their breath weapon appeared to be ice-based, maybe that, too.

As for Tiki, my theory is that due to the ambiguity of the typing of the dragons in Awakening, they decided to simply group Tiki with her Akaneian version. This had the benefits of additionally solving three issues with game play that would have arisen if she were instead assigned to blue: (1) too many blue dragons since Corrin was guaranteed to be blue, (2) the lack of weapon diversity prior to Skill Inheritance with two blue units having the same weapon, and (3) the fact that the only red dragon would be 5-star exclusive. So grouping Tiki with Tiki because Tiki was the natural solution. Note that putting Tiki with Fae in green would have resulted in (3) still being an issue, though it would have arguably been a more sensible choice.

Kana, on the other hand, has literally no excuse other than "we wanted her to be different from Kana and Corrin". She's the only one with zero justification other than for game play purposes. Tiki at least has other explanations for her color.

[Othin]

40 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

I will admit that Awakening Tiki has the weakest argument among the original five dragons, but there are other possible alternative explanations that are just as plausible as "we wanted her to be different from Nowi".

First, the dragon forms of the Awakening mamkutes are apparently ambiguous with their typing. I haven't played that far in the game, so all I have to go off of is what I hear from other people and what information I can get off of the materials I have to work with.

Second, from what I know, neither Tiki nor Nowi in Awakening use electricity as their weapon, so the two of them are just going to be weird regardless. Nowi was likely assigned to be blue at least in part to match Lightning Breath+. And if you say their breath weapon appeared to be ice-based, maybe that, too.

As for Tiki, my theory is that due to the ambiguity of the typing of the dragons in Awakening, they decided to simply group Tiki with her Akaneian version. This had the benefits of additionally solving three issues with game play that would have arisen if she were instead assigned to blue: (1) too many blue dragons since Corrin was guaranteed to be blue, (2) the lack of weapon diversity prior to Skill Inheritance with two blue units having the same weapon, and (3) the fact that the only red dragon would be 5-star exclusive. So grouping Tiki with Tiki because Tiki was the natural solution. Note that putting Tiki with Fae in green would have resulted in (3) still being an issue, though it would have arguably been a more sensible choice.

Kana, on the other hand, has literally no excuse other than "we wanted her to be different from Kana and Corrin". She's the only one with zero justification other than for game play purposes. Tiki at least has other explanations for her color.

I don't think the non-gameplay reasoning is so much an explanation for their decision as a justification for the decision they made for gameplay reasons. Like, if Bantu were in the base game alongside the other five, I think it's a pretty safe bet that Adult Tiki would not have been red.

I agree that there's some ambiguity about the typing of Awakening dragons, but it's ice vs. divine. They're very much not fire dragons. I think they look most like divine dragons, and divine dragons do have some history of using ice breath.

So based on dragon typing, Nowi and Adult Tiki would belong in blue and/or green. If not for a shortage of red dragons, they probably would have been in those colors, and could even have split Lightning Breath between the two. But what seems to have happened is: based on whatever factors (probably a mix of wanting Young Tiki to be 5* exclusive and having Myrrh planned down the road as another green dragon) they concluded that they should override the dragon typing guidelines and stick another starting dragon into red. They picked Adult Tiki because they already had a Tiki in red, so it felt more natural, but they left Adult Tiki as a divine/ice/whatever dragon rather than a fire one.

With Female Kana, they did a similar pattern break for similar gameplay reasons, but just didn't have a way to justify the break from pattern. But they did it anyway, because they didn't consider it necessary.

[Ice Dragon]

@Othin As I did say, 

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

Note that putting Tiki with Fae in green would have resulted in (3) still being an issue, though it would have arguably been a more sensible choice.

 

3 minutes ago, Othin said:

They picked Adult Tiki because they already had a Tiki in red, so it felt more natural, but they left Adult Tiki as a divine/ice/whatever dragon rather than a fire one.

They didn't "leave" Awakening Tiki in her Awakening dragon form. Awakening only has one dragon type.

Akaneia's Tiki is unique in the series in that she has access to more than one dragon form depending on the type of dragonstone she uses. All other dragons have exactly one dragon form.

[Baldrick]

A logical dragon elemental system would have been:

Red: Fire, Earth, Dark/Shadow

Blue: Ice, Water

Green: Divine

Colourless breath only exists as a gimmick anyway.

[Othin]

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

@Othin As I did say, 

 

They didn't "leave" Awakening Tiki in her Awakening dragon form. Awakening only has one dragon type.

Akaneia's Tiki is unique in the series in that she has access to more than one dragon form depending on the type of dragonstone she uses. All other dragons have exactly one dragon form.

Fair enough.

It sounds like we've found some points of agreement about the past, so let's look back towards the future. Do you think we'll continue to get exceptions like f!Kana, dragons breaking from the typical color assignments for no apparent reason other than gameplay?

Personally, I think we will. For example, I could see them making a Fae alt that's a blue breath flier, just to cover that unit type. I could also see Nils being introduced as a green breath dancer just to differentiate him from Ninian.

[Ice Dragon]

1 minute ago, Othin said:

Fair enough.

It sounds like we've found some points of agreement about the past, so let's look back towards the future. Do you think we'll continue to get exceptions like f!Kana, dragons breaking from the typical color assignments for no apparent reason other than gameplay?

Personally, I think we will. For example, I could see them making a Fae alt that's a blue breath flier, just to cover that unit type. I could also see Nils being introduced as a green breath dancer just to differentiate him from Ninian.

Ice is already in the weird limbo state of being wind in the main series and blue in Heroes, except for Blizzard, which gets to be green for being more wind-like than Valaskjalf. Back before Ninian was released, I was already thinking she could either be blue or green depending on the interpretation of ice.

I don't think being off-color will be the norm, but we'll probably get a few weird ones here or there because Kana fucked everything up.

Idenn, Jahn, and Bantu are pretty much locked for red. I'd expect Nagi and Naga to both go green. If I recall correctly, neither Mila nor Duma are divine, which means both could be whatever they want to be. Nah might be blue like Nowi. Nils I still expect to be blue, but green is a possibility.

[Jotari]

6 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Its divine-ness makes it green. Divineness of breath is more important than fireness of breath.

 

Don't ask me why they chose to make every single inheritable dragonstone and tome use the same weapon sprite at launch (for example, Thunder, Elthunder, Thoron(+), Blarraven(+), Blarblade(+), and Blarwolf(+) all have the same sprite).

 

It's based in part on the fact that she has Flametongue+ as her default weapon skill despite the fact that Book 1 Divine Dragons used Ice Breath instead of Fire Breath.

Furthermore, in Awakening, Tiki has a white recolored version of Nowi's dragon form, so it is not unreasonable that they would use the white divine recolor of the Fire Dragon sprite for a fire dragon Mystery Tiki. The notes on the Awakening concept art for the transformed dragons indicates that TIki's coloration is the indication of her person's divinity, so one could assume that young Tiki in a post-Awakening appearance could reasonably have a permanently white coloration in any dragon form (and Heroes coincidentally has young Tiki in a post-Awakening game).

It can also be noted that the only main-series games where they ever bothered to customize the appearance of dragons at all based on character were the ones that were in full 3D. It should be no surprise that Fire Dragon Tiki in FE3, 11, and 12 have no visible difference from other Fire Dragons from the same game.

 

If they really intended Tiki to be a Divine Dragon from the start, they would have given her a different default weapon (Mist Breath or maybe Light Breath+ even, but most certainly not Flametongue+), a different weapon color, and used her more conventional divine dragon design. The fact that the only thing that points to her dragon form in Heroes being a Divine Dragon being the color of her sprite is far weaker justification than the evidence pointing against it being a Divine Dragon, especially when Awakening's concept art notes can be used to discount it entirely.

So if they were dead set on depicting Tiki as a Fire Dragon, then why did they eventually give her Breath of Fog? That makes no sense, Fire Dragons don't have an attack that deals effective damage against manaketes. Divine Dragons do. If young Tiki was firmly viewed as a Fire Dragon in IS's mind, then they wouldn't have given her Breath of Fog, they would have left it only on adult Tiki or introduced a yellow dragon Tiki. I think the only reason she even has flametongue is because she was one of the first dragons introduced and they wanted an inheritable equivalent of a Silver Weapon (and she may predate inheritance, but I think IS was always planning on implementing it).

Her colouration is not a dismissable fact. If she never appeared as a Divine Dragon using that design and only Fire Dragons did, then yeah, that would be a tenuous link. But you're outright ignoring the fact that a grayish dragon resembling a Fire Dragon with the explicit title of Divine Dragon appears in two games. The fact that there have been other designs don't retroactively make that design not a Divine Dragon. You bring up the Awakening design, but did you notice that the Awakening Design isn't the same one as the FE3 design either?

She doesn't have the chest hair and isn't yellow. Nowi's Dragon From is more yellowish resembles the Book 3 design than Tiki's own model (which might indicate the different designs are just based down to level of physical maturity).

Now let's have a look at how she is in Shadow Dragon.

She's grey, not of yellow. Missing the double spike on her tail, but she's also missing the chest hair. Now let's look at Warriors.

Yep, that's definitely the Book 2 design. But that's also her promoted model.

That's her tier 1 model. It still has the hair because it'a a simple palette swap, but it's clearly based on the OG design.

So it's not like the grey design is something that never existed after book 1. The remakes used it over the yellow design. Nowi has had three designs for her Divine Dragon form, a grey one (featured in FE1, FE3 Book 1, Shadow Dragon and New Mystery), a yellow one (Featured only in FE3 Book 2) and a greenish sea horse one (featured only in Awakening). What you're essentially doing is saying one of those designs don't count because other characters also have that design recoloured, despite the fact that it's been consistently reused, more so than the yellow one (at least in main series games, the yellow design has been used in cipher as you mentioned and is also used in Tokyo Mirage Sessions. The Naga tome also uses the gold coloration).

Besides, as far as canon goes, the ability of Tiki to use other dragon stones is like purely gameplay, like Dragonstones having durability. In lore, dragonstones are consistently depicted as personal items that seal away that individual dragon's power. Gotoh or Xane can't just take Tiki or Bantu's dragon stone and transform because they threw away their personal divine stone.

[Interdimensional Observer]

5 minutes ago, Jotari said:

Besides, as far as canon goes, the ability of Tiki to use other dragon stones is like purely gameplay, like Dragonstones having durability. In lore, dragonstones are consistently depicted as personal items that seal away that individual dragon's power.

Which is supported by FE1 having infinite use Dragonstones. However, Myrrh says this in Chapter 16 SS:

Myrrh:
“I-I will fight with you. Now that Selena has returned my dragonstone to me… I’ll do what I can until its power runs out. Let’s take back your home.”

Although whether she is addressing something of lore, or just giving the player an indirect heads up not to carelessly spam her, we can't be sure.

[Jotari]

36 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Ice is already in the weird limbo state of being wind in the main series and blue in Heroes, except for Blizzard, which gets to be green for being more wind-like than Valaskjalf. Back before Ninian was released, I was already thinking she could either be blue or green depending on the interpretation of ice.

I don't think being off-color will be the norm, but we'll probably get a few weird ones here or there because Kana fucked everything up.

Idenn, Jahn, and Bantu are pretty much locked for red. I'd expect Nagi and Naga to both go green. If I recall correctly, neither Mila nor Duma are divine, which means both could be whatever they want to be. Nah might be blue like Nowi. Nils I still expect to be blue, but green is a possibility.

Mila and Duma are Divine Dragons. Incredibly powerful Divine Dragons worshiped as gods too. On the divinity scale they're second only to Naga.

2 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Which is supported by FE1 having infinite use Dragonstones. However, Myrrh says this in Chapter 16 SS:

Myrrh:
“I-I will fight with you. Now that Selena has returned my dragonstone to me… I’ll do what I can until its power runs out. Let’s take back your home.”

Although whether she is addressing something of lore, or just giving the player an indirect heads up not to carelessly spam her, we can't be sure.

In FE1 Tiki couldn't use Bantu's dragonstone either (as far as I can recall). I don't mind that they gave her the ability to use other dragonstones in mystery, because it's cool. But it's not a decision backed up by the actual lore of Arkaneia.

It's possible FE8 works under different rules, or, more likely, the Dragonstone has a recharge period (maybe in the order of years). I think Myrrh would be a little ore concerned if overusing her Dragonstone meant she could never transform into a dragon again.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Jotari

[Ice Dragon]

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

So if they were dead set on depicting Tiki as a Fire Dragon, then why did they eventually give her Breath of Fog?

It took them over a year to change their mind, and it seems like they figured that finally giving them Breath of Fog was preferable to having to make an alt character. Because making an alt character costs much more time and money.

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Her colouration is not a dismissable fact.

Her Awakening dragon design features her as silver, not yellow, and in a form that is different from her standard Divine Dragon form and the same as Nowi, who is not a divine dragon.

It can be hypothesized from this and the notes on her concept art that when Tiki transforms into other dragon forms that are not her Divine Dragon form, her coloration then becomes silver. As such, she can believably take on a silver Fire Dragon form that simply isn't displayed in-game in the games prior to Awakening. (After all, battle sprites not matching the coloration or design of the character is not anything new, but the fully 3D games choose to make all characters faithful to their designs.)

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Besides, as far as canon goes, the ability of Tiki to use other dragon stones is like purely gameplay,

Proof? If they had wanted Tiki to only be able to use her own dragonstone, they would have made each of them restricted to their own class and would not have included a Secret Shop where you could buy the other types of dragonstones for Tiki to use.

They could easily have made all of the dragonstones except the Divine Dragonstone only usable by the male Mamkute class because Bantu is the only recruitable male Mamkute and the lack of the Secret Shop would prevent you from obtaining the other dragonstones, forcing Tiki to only use her own dragonstone and Bantu to only use his own dragonstone. But they didn't and instead allowed Tiki to use any obtainable dragonstone.

The other games had no problem locking you to a single Dragonstone item to restrict the number of times the unit can be used in combat, and if they really wanted Tiki to not be able to use other dragonstones, there wouldn't have been a problem simply giving her the one and expecting it to last long enough for the player to make use of it.

 

Furthermore, there is the issue of Tiki having a completely different canonical dragon form in Awakening than she did in the other games and additionally shares this form with a non-divine dragon, suggesting that she can, in fact, transform into other dragon forms.

I mean, perhaps dragons just start sprouting leaves when they get old, but that hardly sounds plausible. Tiki's Book 2 dragon form looks suspiciously like an older version of Fae's dragon form and is incredibly similar to Naga from Genealogy if you take off Tiki's beard and mane. One can assume that Tiki's Book 2 dragon form or Genealogy's Naga is the fully grown version of the Divine Dragon, not the leaf dragon that Tiki becomes in Awakening.

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Mila and Duma are Divine Dragons. Incredibly powerful Divine Dragons worshiped as gods too. On the divinity scale they're second only to Naga.

Ah, I found where it says they are divine dragons.

 

The gods of Jugdral are almost definitely not all divine dragons, though, so being a god does not require you to be a divine dragon.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Jotari]

13 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

It took them over a year to change their mind, and it seems like they figured that finally giving them Breath of Fog was preferable to having to make an alt character. Because making an alt character costs much more time and money.

Well you can say it costs much more time and money because adding a weapon costs basically nothing, but we're still talking extremely cheap overheads here, Heroes is not an expensive game.

13 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Her Awakening dragon design features her as silver, not yellow, and in a form that is different from her standard Divine Dragon form and the same as Nowi, who is not a divine dragon.

If Nowi is not a divine dragon, then what is she? And why would Tiki lose her Divine Dragon Stone and start carrying around a Seahorse Dragon stone? She doesn't get a dragonstone from Nowi or anything. She starts with one in her inventory.

13 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Proof? If they had wanted Tiki to only be able to use her own dragonstone, they would have made each of them restricted to their own class and would not have included a Secret Shop where you could buy the other types of dragonstones for Tiki to use.

They could easily have made all of the dragonstones except the Divine Dragonstone only usable by the male Mamkute class because Bantu is the only recruitable male Mamkute and the lack of the Secret Shop would prevent you from obtaining the other dragonstones, forcing Tiki to only use her own dragonstone and Bantu to only use his own dragonstone. But they didn't and instead allowed Tiki to use any obtainable dragonstone.

The other games had no problem locking you to a single Dragonstone item to restrict the number of times the unit can be used in combat, and if they really wanted Tiki to not be able to use other dragonstones, there wouldn't have been a problem simply giving her the one and expecting it to last long enough for the player to make use of it.

Like every single reference to dragonstones in the series refers to them in singular.

Quote

Fire dragon Banutu
After sealing his dragonstone he left for whereabouts unknown.

Quote

My precious Fire Dragonstone was stolen by thieves. If you can recover it for me, I will help you as best as I can. Thank you, Prince Marth.

Quote

When the Divine Dragons fought the Earth Dragons they over-exhausted their dragonstones, and so practically became extinct. Aside from Narga, only Gato, me and the just born Chiki survived. However, after the war we discarded our dragonstones, so we could no longer become dragons again

Plural, but it's clear that they can't just borrow some other dragonstone to turn into a dragon. In fact, Xane even says in a conversation with Tiki that he can't turn into a Dragon in Shadow Dragon.

Quote

Xane (returns to normal):
“It’s not like I can transform into a dragon like you, so just- Oh, would you come back?”

The most damning piece of info actually comes from Awakening though.

Quote

Nowi: I can do it! Even a snake that size is no problem for a mighty dragon. Now I just have to transform and... Oh, no! Where's my dragonstone?! Robin(M): Er, you didn't just use it to knock out that snake, did you? Nowi: Oh, gosh. I think I did! *Sniff* Wh-what am I going to do?! I can't ever turn into a dragon again, and no one will get to eat snaaaaaake! WAAAAAAAAAH!

Granted, there are some references to dragonstone plurals in Awakening (probably due to it having multiple writers), but they mostly come from the non manakete characters. But the lore of a dragonstone is that they're sealing their power in their specific dragonstone. Xane and Gotoh aren't refusing to turn into dragonstones on an ethical basis (although that is why they discarded them in the first place), they literally can't as Xane says in Shadow Dragon (and I think in terms of characterization, Gotoh absolutely would have turned into a drgaon to combat Medeus if he could). It's gameplay story segregation.

13 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Furthermore, there is the issue of Tiki having a completely different canonical dragon form in Awakening than she did in the other games and additionally shares this form with a non-divine dragon, suggesting that she can, in fact, transform into other dragon forms.

I mean, perhaps dragons just start sprouting leaves when they get old, but that hardly sounds plausible. Tiki's Book 2 dragon form looks suspiciously like an older version of Fae's dragon form and is incredibly similar to Naga from Genealogy if you take off Tiki's beard and mane. One can assume that Tiki's Book 2 dragon form or Genealogy's Naga is the fully grown version of the Divine Dragon, not the leaf dragon that Tiki becomes in Awakening.

It's a different design, that doesn't mean it's not a divine dragon. That's like saying Deen didn't appear in Gaiden because his design wasn't featured in it. And you're ignoring the most blatant obvious I presented, the fact that the grey design wasn't even abandoned. It was used in the remake of Mystery of the Emblem over the yellow design. This is how Tiki appears in her most recent game to use an item labelled Divine Dragonstone.

This

Appears closer to this

than it does this

or this

Ergo, Tiki's design is that of a Divine Dragon, a design that's been used in three and a half main series games vs the golden design which has appeared in half of a game (and a cameo in one). Why are you raising the Gold design as the only example of a Divine Dragon when it's used less? Because it's used in noncanon materials? Well the grey design is too.

13 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Ah, I found where it says they are divine dragons.

 

The gods of Jugdral are almost definitely not all divine dragons, though, so being a god does not require you to be a divine dragon.

True, being referred to as a god does not make one a Divine Dragon. And I suppose maybe the characters in Shadows of Valentia are only referring to them as godly when they call them Divine Dragons, but their power sets are certainly of Divine Dragon proportions.

[Ice Dragon]

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Well you can say it costs much more time and money because adding a weapon costs basically nothing, but we're still talking extremely cheap overheads here, Heroes is not an expensive game.

Commissioning art and hiring voice work is very expensive and time-consuming, though.

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

If Nowi is not a divine dragon, then what is she? And why would Tiki lose her Divine Dragon Stone and start carrying around a Seahorse Dragon stone? She doesn't get a dragonstone from Nowi or anything. She starts with one in her inventory.

No one knows what Nowi is. It is never mentioned in the game or in supplementary materials. In fact, it is mentioned in the game and supplementary materials that no one knows what she is. But whatever she is, Tiki can take on the same dragon form.

 

I was doing some more research on the Awakening dragons, and it appears that they are capable of using multiple types of breaths with the same form. Perhaps the dragon tribes in the past 2000 years were able to use magic to modify their form into an omni-dragon with Tiki being a divine omni-dragon.

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Like every single reference to dragonstones in the series refers to them in singular.

It's possible that due their their rarity, having more than one at your disposal is an extremely unusual circumstance.

As for why discarding or losing your dragonstone seals your ability to transform into a dragon, it's extremely simple. It can be conjectured that mamkutes of sufficient power to transform into multiple forms can transfer their power into other dragonstones, which allow them to utilize different dragon forms. As such, discarding or losing the dragonstone that contains their power still seals away their ability to transform completely despite their ability to use other dragonstones.

Furthermore, it is plausible that the death of a mamkute renders their dragonstone inert and incapable of being reused, which would explain why spare dragonstones would be so rare.

We don't know much about dragonstones and how they work, so you can't really say that something is impossible unless it is explicitly stated that it is impossible.

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

And you're ignoring the most blatant obvious I presented, the fact that the grey design wasn't even abandoned. It was used in the remake of Mystery of the Emblem over the yellow design. This is how Tiki appears in her most recent game to use an item labelled Divine Dragonstone.

Actually, the New Mystery design looks much closer to the Book 2 design than the Book 1 design. The only similarity is the color. The New Mystery design is almost exactly identical to the Book 2 design if you remove all of the hair, having the lanky body structure and shorter and spindly arms.

The Book 1 design, in contrast, has much larger and bulkier front arms, thicker hind legs, and a far shorter and thicker neck and face.

 

In contrast, the Heroes design is exactly identical to the Book 1 and Book 2 Fire Dragon design, but recolored to indicate her divine status. Bringing up the FE11 and FE12 Fire Dragon design and using that as an argument that she cannot possibly be a Fire Dragon is the same as bringing up Awakening's design of Armads and arguing that Hector's Armads in Heroes cannot possibly be Armads.

 

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Why are you raising the Gold design as the only example of a Divine Dragon when it's used less?

The gold design is used in FE3 Book 2, FE4 (as Naga, without the fur), FE6 (as Fa, with a lot of baby fat), FE11 (without the fur and white), FE12 (without the fur and white), the TCG, Cipher, and Warriors (white or gold depending on promotion). It is by far the most-used version with only minor variations, notably the presence of fur, the color, and Fa being a fat and fluffy version.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Vaximillian]

11 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

(I want to know what color Ena's kid's dragon form is)

Zebra dragon please.

11 hours ago, Jotari said:

So why didn't they give her a red stone in her artwork, or make flametongue a red stone? They have a different model for each individual sword, you think it would have been vastly beyond their capabilities to make the flametongue red?

They didn’t even care about making different sprites for generic tomes.

4 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Back before Ninian was released, I was already thinking she could either be blue or green depending on the interpretation of ice.

Ninian should have been green because Eliwood must be able to pierce her with his Durandal.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Vaximillian

[Jotari]

4 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Commissioning art and hiring voice work is very expensive and time-consuming, though.

Very is a misnomer. Moot point though. They have released dozens upon dozens of characters since Tiki's release and didn't feel the need to make a gold Tiki since they considered current Tiki sufficiently Divine Dragon enough to get the Divine Dragon weapon. Its not like they suddenly have the axe wielding Raven Regal Blade, which is the equivalent of what you're suggesting by saying they gave a fire dragon a divine dragon weapon.

4 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

No one knows what Nowi is. It is never mentioned in the game or in supplementary materials. In fact, it is mentioned in the game and supplementary materials that no one knows what she is. But whatever she is, Tiki can take on the same dragon form.

 

I was doing some more research on the Awakening dragons, and it appears that they are capable of using multiple types of breaths with the same form. Perhaps the dragon tribes in the past 2000 years were able to use magic to modify their form into an omni-dragon with Tiki being a divine omni-dragon.

Give me a link to that.

4 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

It's possible that due their their rarity, having more than one at your disposal is an extremely unusual circumstance.

As for why discarding or losing your dragonstone seals your ability to transform into a dragon, it's extremely simple. It can be conjectured that mamkutes of sufficient power to transform into multiple forms can transfer their power into other dragonstones, which allow them to utilize different dragon forms. As such, discarding or losing the dragonstone that contains their power still seals away their ability to transform completely despite their ability to use other dragonstones.

Furthermore, it is plausible that the death of a mamkute renders their dragonstone inert and incapable of being reused, which would explain why spare dragonstones would be so rare.

We don't know much about dragonstones and how they work, so you can't really say that something is impossible unless it is explicitly stated that it is impossible.

Well I can't argue that it's possible. Anything a possible.

4 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Actually, the New Mystery design looks much closer to the Book 2 design than the Book 1 design. The only similarity is the color. The New Mystery design is almost exactly identical to the Book 2 design if you remove all of the hair, having the lanky body structure and shorter and spindly arms.

The Book 1 design, in contrast, has much larger and bulkier front arms, thicker hind legs, and a far shorter and thicker neck and face.

 

In contrast, the Heroes design is exactly identical to the Book 1 and Book 2 Fire Dragon design, but recolored to indicate her divine status. Bringing up the FE11 and FE12 Fire Dragon design and using that as an argument that she cannot possibly be a Fire Dragon is the same as bringing up Awakening's design of Armads and arguing that Hector's Armads in Heroes cannot possibly be Armads.

 

The gold design is used in FE3 Book 2, FE4 (as Naga, without the fur), FE6 (as Fa, with a lot of baby fat), FE11 (without the fur and white), FE12 (without the fur and white), the TCG, Cipher, and Warriors (white or gold depending on promotion). It is by far the most-used version with only minor variations, notably the presence of fur, the color, and Fa being a fat and fluffy version.

The Shadow Dragon design lacks the hair and the colour, those are the two defining features of the design. If it lacks them, it's not the same design. Fae's body shape is completely different to the FE3 design, yet you say it's reusing the same design. I agree it's reusing the same design, because it's good and furry, that's what the design is. If they're changing literally every aspect of the design between multiple incarnations then you can't say it's the same desig. At best you can say the FE3 design influenced later designs, which I can agree with, the Shadow Dragon design lacks the double spiked tail of the Book 1 design. It also lacks the same fanning head spikes that both the book 1 and 2 designs had. If the Shadow Dragon sprite was meant to be based off the Book 2 design, then why did they change the colour and remove the fur?

And while we're on body shape, this is why adult Tiki looks like in Heroes.

You'll notice her body shape is nothing like the sleek design in Awakening. Does that mean Tiki isn't taking inspiration from her Awakening model? No, of course not, because she has the same colouration and the spines. That's the defining feature of the design. That's how we know it's the design.

And it's not like the Book 2 design is even all that lanky. Both book 1 and book 2 Tikis are bulky. If you want a more streamlined version, look at Naga in Fe4.

The way I see it, the Shadow Dragon design is based off her original NES sprite where she is less bulky (her Book 1 design was also based on this sprite). It goes 

Fe1 Sprite -> Shared between fire and mage dragons

Book 1 sprite -> Redesigned NES sprite.

Book 2 sprite -> Used Book 1 design as a model but original design.

Genealogy -> Used Book 2 as inspiration

Binding Blade -> Book 2 redesign.

Shadow Dragon -> NES sprite converted to model

Awakening -> Original design

Heroes Child -> Based on Book 1 design which is based on NES design.

Heroes Adult -> Based on Awakening design but used child sprite (or just the general dragon sprite npcs also share) as model.

 

4 hours ago, Vaximillian said:

Zebra dragon please.

They didn’t even care about making different sprites for generic tomes.

Ninian should have been green because Eliwood must be able to pierce her with his Durandal.

Point is they easily could have if they wanted us to believe Tiki is a fire dragon.

Edited September 6, 2018 by Jotari

[XRay]

7 hours ago, Jotari said:

Well you can say it costs much more time and money because adding a weapon costs basically nothing, but we're still talking extremely cheap overheads here, Heroes is not an expensive game.

I think there was an article or maybe a Reddit post interviewing one of the voice actors, but voice acting needed to be done way in advance, like 4+ months or more. Maybe the actual recording is not very time consuming, but the process as a whole from start to finish is definitely very time consuming, since you cannot just call them up and have them record one week prior to release.

They have not released any reports on how their expenses are allocated so we do not know if their overhead is cheap. And just because overhead might be cheap does not mean expenses overall are low. Nintendo would have boasted how they have made a killing with their profits, but they have not yet, so I assume their expenses are pretty high relative to revenue.

What makes a game expensive is not always about how much dollar amount is put in. Mobile games are absolutely expensive to develop if they fail to generate enough revenue to offset its cost, even it if it only costs 10% of regular console game. The funds that went into games that failed to generate enough revenue could have went elsewhere more profitable instead.

2 hours ago, Jotari said:

Very is a misnomer.

Until they state what their actual profits are, it is a quite reasonable to assume that it is not impressive, and that is the best case scenario. Nintendo is clearly not happy with the its mobile profits. Fire Emblem Heroes' "strong" net profits can mean anything from making a killing to being a normal sustainable project, and based on the lack of enthusiasm overall, I do not think Heroes is making a killing.

Games are very expensive to develop, no matter what the platform, and I think Nintendo has trouble with their market research, keeping costs down, and/or increasing revenue. While Fire Emblem appears to be the bright spot, it clearly is not bright enough. Assuming other mobile games break even, if Fire Emblem Heroes with its $400 million revenue is not enough to make its mobile profits satisfactory despite outselling the rest of the Fire Emblem series combined, its "strong" net profits should be taken with a grain of salt.

[Jotari]

14 minutes ago, XRay said:

I think there was an article or maybe a Reddit post interviewing one of the voice actors, but voice acting needed to be done way in advance, like 4+ months or more. Maybe the actual recording is not very time consuming, but the process as a whole from start to finish is definitely very time consuming, since you cannot just call them up and have them record one week prior to release.

They have not released any reports on how their expenses are allocated so we do not know if their overhead is cheap. And just because overhead might be cheap does not mean expenses overall are low. Nintendo would have boasted how they have made a killing with their profits, but they have not yet, so I assume their expenses are pretty high relative to revenue.

What makes a game expensive is not always about how much dollar amount is put in. Mobile games are absolutely expensive to develop if they fail to generate enough revenue to offset its cost, even it if it only costs 10% of regular console game. The funds that went into games that failed to generate enough revenue could have went elsewhere more profitable instead.

Until they state what their actual profits are, it is a quite reasonable to assume that it is not impressive, and that is the best case scenario. Nintendo is clearly not happy with the its mobile profits. Fire Emblem Heroes' "strong" net profits can mean anything from making a killing to being a normal sustainable project, and based on the lack of enthusiasm overall, I do not think Heroes is making a killing.

Games are very expensive to develop, no matter what the platform, and I think Nintendo has trouble with their market research, keeping costs down, and/or increasing revenue. While Fire Emblem appears to be the bright spot, it clearly is not bright enough. Assuming other mobile games break even, if Fire Emblem Heroes with its $400 million revenue is not enough to make its mobile profits satisfactory despite outselling the rest of the Fire Emblem series combined, its "strong" net profits should be taken with a grain of salt.

Well obviously it doesn't cost nothing, but compared to a traditional game, yeah, a mobile game is much cheaper. The voice acting and artwork needed for creating a character in Heroes as opposed to Fates is obviously much smaller. There's only a handful of lines and a handful of art assets. But, because of that, the number of characters they can afford to make is in the order of hundreds. As for how much Heroes as a whole makes, that's a different question entirely and one that can only really be answered by having a decent gauge of how many whales there are. I guess however that most of the funds do go into market research for this game, as I'm sure they must have professionals trying to predict trends and figure out how to schedule releases for maximum profit.

On the point of Tiki though, if they wanted to put her Book 2 incarnation in, then I'm sure they could have by now. She is a pretty popular character after all. And they might even some day, but it wasn't a pressing enough concern that they thought it inappropriate to put Breath of Fog on the incarnation(s) we already do have. What we have now is a unit who shares a design with a Divine Dragon (and the Book 1 design regardless of head canon was designed to be a Divine Dragon) and uses the Divine Dragon weapon. I think that alone is evidence enough that the team making heroes considered Dragon Scion Tiki Divine Dragon enough to get the Divine Dragon weapon. If she was conceived as a Fire Dragon, then they did a pisspoor job of conveying that message as she's not depicted ever holding a fire stone, doesn't have a hint of red on her sprite (even with the head canon that it's going the same way as Ena, there's no blend of red at all, she's just pure Divine Dragon colouring) and none of the dialogue refers to her as taking the form of a Fire Dragon, which I think they would do if it were the case (in the same vein as Celica mentioning she got the Royal Sword from Alm or Eirikia mentioning that Lyon taught her the fundamentals of magic).

Edited September 6, 2018 by Jotari

[XRay]

1 hour ago, Jotari said:

Well obviously it doesn't cost nothing, but compared to a traditional game, yeah, a mobile game is much cheaper.

Just because the upfront cost is cheap and the barrier of entry is low does not mean it is cheap relative to profit. If a "cheap" game can be developed for $10.00 but it it only generated $10.01 while a traditional game that costs $100.00 to develop generated  $101.00, that "cheap" game is expensive as hell to invest in for a measly 0.1% return, while a traditional game is cheaper for being able to bring in a 1% return.