Philosophically, legally and ethically, what makes Fire Emblem Fire Emblem?

[Jotari]

Fire Emblem is a turn based strategy game played on a grid. If you would describe it to someone who has no idea what it is, you will very likely compare it to chess first and foremost. But...Fire Emblem also isn't even remotely like chess in how it's played despite both being turn based strategy games played on a grid. If I make a chess video game I am very much not going to get sued by IS or Nintendo. But I've been thinking, how close can something be to Fire Emblem without legally infringing on the IP? Or, in a less litigious sense, without being a blatant copy cat. What elements of Fire Emblem make it Fire Emblem. If I make a grid based game where HP is a factor then it's definitely still not Fire Emblem. But, what if all units counter attack? That feels a lot closer, but not quite there. What if units with higher speed can do a follow-up attack? Again, we feel very close, but still that's probably a mechanic other games do to. As is Perma Death. Weapon triangle? Now that feels like we're solidly in Fire Emblem territory...at least if its specifically lance-sword-axe, since obviously rock paper scissors dynamics have existed since forever ago. Dragons in the story? Very much a Fire Emblem thing, but also very obviously not exclusively so as loads of stories have dragons. So, it feels like nothing that we could classically call Fire Emblem is unique to it, but if you throw all of these stuff together then you most certainly have Fire Emblem. But dropping one or two, is that still Fire Emblem?

Of course, we have a case study for this with Kaga's Tearring Saga which did end up having him get sued...only Nintendo didn't win. They reached a settlement and the game was allowed to be released and even got sequels which distanced themselves further. Of course, Tearring Saga obvoiusly was Fire Emblem. It was created by the dude who made Fire Emblem and he was even going to call it Emblem Saga!...But...if Tearring Saga had been made by an indie developer and not the guy who literally invented Fire Emblem, would Nintendo have been able to sue? If feel...probably? But it's murky enough that they couldn't even outright win and shut down the game even when it was the series founder making it.

I guess the question I'm really wondering at, is what is the dividing line between a property and a genre. There are a bunch of different racing games that play very similarly to each other but are considered distinctly different, because obviously they play similar because the genre lends itself to the whole concept of racing. If someone made something mechanically identical to Fire Emblem but aesthetically different by replacing swords with chain saws and bows with guns, honestly, they probably could get away with it, I feel. Though, of course, the question of whether they should be allowed to get away with it in a moral sense and whether they can get away with it in a legal sense are different questions.

[lenticular]

I'd actually been thinking about making a similar thread to this, but focused more on the idea of "just what is the core identity of Fire Emblem?" since that's something that seems to get brought up and argued over in every permadeath discussion.

Legally speaking, I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that an awful lot of Fire Emblem's identity isn't protected. It's a pretty well established principle that you can't copyright game mechanics. If I wanted to make a game that has turn based tactical combat on a grid with a player phase and an enemy phase, where damage is strength + weapon might - defense and you get to hit twice if your speed is 4 points higher than the enemy, etc. etc. then I probably could. And a lot of the names of mechanical elements are too generic to have any chance of legal protection. I'm thinking things like "strength" or "steel sword".

(There is some history of patent trolling within the games industry to try to get around the non-copyrightability of game mechanics, but to the best of my knowledge, none of them have ever gone to court, and IS and Nintendo haven't tried to take out any patents regarding Fire Emblem anyway, so it's something of a moot point.)

The big and obvious legal protection would be trademarks, especially for the name of the series and the games. If I make a new game series and call it Emblem of Flames, with entries like Umbral Dragon, Path of Luminosity, and Holy Stones, then I am absolutely getting a letter from Nintendo's lawyers. Likewise, I suspect some of their characters are protected. If my game stars Marp, prince of Aldea then that's probably not going to fly (unless it's a parody).

A lot of elements of individual games would be protected by copyright, but they are typically not stuff that relates to series identity. You obvious can't just directly copy maps, dialogue, art, code, etc. but most of those things are completely new from one Fire Emblem game to the next anyway.

In summary: stuff like names and characters are probably protected; stuff like game mechanics probably aren't.

And I think that, morally and ethically, the law is pretty much right here. I think people should be able to copy and iterate on game mechanics as much as they want. Because, ultimately, the core ideas aren't what makes the game. The game is about map design, multiple balance passes, character design, combat animations, dialogue, ui, and so on and so forth. If someone else wants to make a Fire Emblem style game, is willing to put in all the work to do all that stuff, and isn't trying to pass themselves off as actually being Fire Emblem, then they absolutely should be able to do so.

[Jotari]

55 minutes ago, lenticular said:

A lot of elements of individual games would be protected by copyright, but they are typically not stuff that relates to series identity. You obvious can't just directly copy maps, dialogue, art, code, etc. but most of those things are completely new from one Fire Emblem game to the next anyway.

That's what makes Fire Emblem pretty weird in this regard. Like, I've played games like Zelda that use more or less the same mechanics as Zelda, but obviously aren't Zelda because they don't have Link and Ganon and the Triforce and stuff. But because Fire Emblem changes everything about its setting, just being medieval with the mechanics is enough to make something seem like Fire Emblem. What specific copyright did something like Tear Ring Saga actually break?

[lenticular]

12 minutes ago, Jotari said:

What specific copyright did something like Tear Ring Saga actually break?

Based on the way the case went (and on my lay understanding of the law), not very much. If anything. I can easily see that the original name could have been a trademark infringement, being just about similar enough that I can imagine a confused grandparent accidentally buying Emblem Sage as a gift for their grandchild who had asked for Fire Emblem for their birthday. But, as far as I'm aware, that name was just about the only thing that Nintendo/IS successfully managed to get Kaga to change.

[link16hit]

What makes Fire Emblem Fire Emblem?

let see, it's a SRPG in a fantasy/medieval world with sword & magic. Also don't forget war. always war, some exception like FE7 (prevent) or Engage (less war content) . It is a game IS made from the WARS series, but with a more serious tone than the wars series
But what makes it unique to other SRPG?
- Permadeath mechanic. When a character reaches 0, he cannot be back. Excepting older games with revival mechanic and casual mode.
- Big cast of characters ( with personality ). Added later in later games. Older games didn't have support.
- Stats are small number with simple calculation.
- Different Growth Rates to each character, even in the same class.
- Each games have a different main artist.
- Player phase/ Enemy phase/ Ally phase and repeat. Mechanic from the WARS series.

[Armchair General]

Honestly, the only thing that's extremely likely to be unique to FE is the fact that there's occasionally a  god who will eventually grow senile and omnicidal mostly from being alive for too long. And, of course, the "Fire Emblem," which is usually the implied means of killing an divine being. The weapon triangle isn't exactly unique, since it occasionally pops up in other genres. Plus, the bit about an young prince getting accustomed to the realities of wars sounds like something that wouldn't be out of place from medieval fantasy.

[Jotari]

57 minutes ago, Armchair General said:

Honestly, the only thing that's extremely likely to be unique to FE is the fact that there's occasionally a  god who will eventually grow senile and omnicidal mostly from being alive for too long. And, of course, the "Fire Emblem," which is usually the implied means of killing an divine being. The weapon triangle isn't exactly unique, since it occasionally pops up in other genres. Plus, the bit about an young prince getting accustomed to the realities of wars sounds like something that wouldn't be out of place from medieval fantasy.

I wouldn't say the Fire Emblem is classically the means of killing the senile god. Not only was it literally just a fancy lock pick in the original game, but in Tellius it was the outright prison for the good evil god.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

I'm content to leave these questions up to the developers, I'm just here to play the games. No one working on Fire Emblem now has been around since the beginning.  And that reinvention-by necessity is its own strength. A friend asked me the other day for ideas on a fire emblem themed logo he could draw for his stream. It was then that I noticed Fire Emblem lacks visual iconography. There's no equivalent to Mario's Mushroom, Zelda's Triforce, Metroid's Metroid, or Final Fantasy's Moogle. When asked to picture "Fire Emblem", the image in my head is one guy on the left, one guy on the right, and numbers for Dam, Hit, Crit. There's no central protagonist, central villain, or shared universe. I fear the day that I play Engage and they try to tell me "no actually it is all one world. THIS world. Here's where the Battle of Belhalla occurred last year. Here's the site of Greil's grave. Over there is where Chrom walked in on Robin bathing"

 

[Florete]

Faerghast actually did a video that covered the lawsuit against Emblem/Tearring Saga in depth:

Spoiler

 

The gist of it is that there were actually two lawsuits: in the first Nintendo sued over similarities in the contents of the game, and lost. In the second they sued over the fact that it was essentially being pushed as "Fire Emblem on Playstation," and won. Watch the video for full context, but imo, both cases went as they should have.

What we can learn from this is that it's perfectly safe to create a game that is essentially a clone of FE as long as it's not pretending to actually be FE.

Also keep in mind, SRPG is a pretty niche genre, to the point where there are very few series that come up when we think of it, but that doesn't make it any more protected. There are a million and one 2D platformers, but none of them are getting sued by Nintendo for being Mario clones...unless they try to tell people they actually are Mario.

[Jotari]

2 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

I'm content to leave these questions up to the developers, I'm just here to play the games. No one working on Fire Emblem now has been around since the beginning.  And that reinvention-by necessity is its own strength. A friend asked me the other day for ideas on a fire emblem themed logo he could draw for his stream. It was then that I noticed Fire Emblem lacks visual iconography. There's no equivalent to Mario's Mushroom, Zelda's Triforce, Metroid's Metroid, or Final Fantasy's Moogle. When asked to picture "Fire Emblem", the image in my head is one guy on the left, one guy on the right, and numbers for Dam, Hit, Crit. There's no central protagonist, central villain, or shared universe. I fear the day that I play Engage and they try to tell me "no actually it is all one world. THIS world. Here's where the Battle of Belhalla occurred last year. Here's the site of Greil's grave. Over there is where Chrom walked in on Robin bathing"

 

Awakening already did that ten years ago. Though, the Battle of Belhalla happens some 3,000 years before Chrom walks in on Robin. That being said, you're right, there's no central iconography. Smash uses the image of Falchion, though that's really for want of something better as Falchion isn't even consistent in how it looks in the games it appears. A bit funny for a series literally named Emblem to lack anything resembling its own Emblem though.

1 hour ago, Florete said:

Faerghast actually did a video that covered the lawsuit against Emblem/Tearring Saga in depth:

  Hide contents

 

The gist of it is that there were actually two lawsuits: in the first Nintendo sued over similarities in the contents of the game, and lost. In the second they sued over the fact that it was essentially being pushed as "Fire Emblem on Playstation," and won. Watch the video for full context, but imo, both cases went as they should have.

What we can learn from this is that it's perfectly safe to create a game that is essentially a clone of FE as long as it's not pretending to actually be FE.

Also keep in mind, SRPG is a pretty niche genre, to the point where there are very few series that come up when we think of it, but that doesn't make it any more protected. There are a million and one 2D platformers, but none of them are getting sued by Nintendo for being Mario clones...unless they try to tell people they actually are Mario.

Didn't know about that video. Definitely  going on the Watch Later list.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

So, I think there are two uses of the term here. There's Fire Emblem, the franchise. This includes mainline games, such as Radiant Dawn and Echoes, but also includes side games, such as "Tokyo Mirage Sessions" and "FE Warriors". Then there's Fire Emblem, the video game type. I see this as excluding the spinoffs, but including games like "Tear Ring Saga" and "Dark Deity". I would also say that fangames - such as "The Last Promise" - fall in the latter category, but not the former.

Perhaps there's a better name for games that are Fire Emblem, but not Fire Emblem? We could call them "Fire Emblish".

[AnonymousSpeed]

Putting the name on the box.