Why Fire Emblem Fates was Censored

i wouldn't be surprised if most people who watch my content or have at least played fates when it was released are familiar with the more controversial aspects of fire emblem fates's development leading to its critically acclaimed release but a story not often told is simply how intelligent systems went from awakening fire emblem's final swan song to fates in this video i'll tackle the development history behind many aspects fire emblem fates is widely known for such as the multiple roots who were involved its music new gameplay features the plot and even how it was changed outside of japan while yes i'll cover the localization changes there's lots of interesting stuff at least to me that revolves around not the typical skinship slash treehouse complaints that sometimes revolve around discourse with this game i also will be talking about a lot of developers in this video so just bear with me when i pronounce these names i'll do my best but i'm not promising anything great so please don't can me on the pronunciation of these names multiple roots since awakening had been received with critical acclaim and thus would no longer be the series as swansong as once thought intelligence systems began looking for ideas to base their next game on one in particular stuck and its genesis came from the very first game in the franchise the aspect of multiple routes in the first fire emblem game depending on which village you went to you could only choose either aaron or samson but no matter which character you chose the story didn't change when i said ah i wish it would change something my senior told me we can't due to limited memory capacity i remembered how futile it seemed back then and i said my wouldn't you want to play a game where you could see what would happen if you chose the other side i want to try this and then i thought if we packaged them separately people could have the fun of choosing which one they wanted a few days later maida came by and said i agree we should make two games but i also think you could choose not to ally with either this way the idea of choosing between two different kingdoms and thus two opposite sides of a war was born while also deciding early to include a third path where the player could choose neither side the root split also influenced many aspects of the game for one it's the reason fates is named the way it is due to how much corn's main choice impacts everything second it pushed the desire to make each side distinct from one another with hoshido being heavily influenced by japanese culture and nor being more western styled but with a twist of the grimmer atmosphere and third it allowed intelligent systems to focus on both veterans and newcomers in the series which is very noticeable when you compare birthright's grinding opportunities and simpler map objectives with conquest's more restrictive traditional and challenging experience overall work started on fates's concept right after awakening's japanese release april 2012 and it would have nearly every aspect of its framework set in stone just seven months later staff and roles compared to awakening those involved with faith were composed of both old and new talent if we get into specifics kohei maida and genki yokota reprised their roles as directors the producers this time were hitoshi yamagami like with awakening and masahiro higuchi yusuke kozaki and toshiyuki kusakihara returned as artists only nami komoro remained in the writing staff from the previous game and she would work alongside yokinora kirijima shin kibayashi and others the soundtrack involved the returning of hiroki marishta and ray kondo plus newcomers like takuru kanazaki yashi sebaba from the warioware series and masato kota from monster hunter lastly studio anima once again animated the game's cutscene while spooky graphic handled their storyboarding as for how the work was handled higuchi commented one team worked on face's core engine while different ones focused on the level design to economize work some content mostly a few maps would be reused in all three paths but given their own twist the game's main musical light motif comes from one song in particular if one's thoughts known as lost in thoughts all alone internationally it was written by hiroki morishta and its lyrics were written by maeda with some variations of the song being used for each of fates's roots the singer renka who would later become a pop singer and songwriter was chosen to sing it and to be azura's singing voice in the game with the song serving as her debut to the music industry for the english dub meanwhile reyna strober would take this role while also doing azera's normal and singing voices new features fate's development implemented many new features that contain an interesting story or purpose behind it number one my castle my castle was implemented with the intention of giving players activities unrelated to the main campaign where they could interact with others chat with some of the game's characters and even have battles per higuchi my castle ended up having so many features that the staff at intelligent systems ended up considering its own game when asked by iwata about why the feature was pushed despite giving more workload to the team kohei maida replied it was to ensure players would get familiar and endeared with faith's cast the feature was also initially conceived to work exclusively with 3ds's street pass feature as a means to connect with other players though due to kibayashi's request the option to visit others via internet connection was added later personal skills and dragon veins the idea of having units with unique personal skills as well as the mere concept of dragon veins was initially conceived during awakenings development but it never ended up being implemented since the idea was present from the very beginning with fates though the feature did make their way into the game phoenix mode just like casual mode and awakening phoenix mode a feature exclusive to normal mode that instantly revives fallen allies the next turn after being defeated was added to help newcomers finish the game without having to require developing one new difficulty setting below normal guidance styled weapons weapon durability and weight being removed similar to fire emblem gaiden and later on its remake came as a result of thinking how to make newcomers enjoy the game without stressing them out with saving important weapons for later maps which could lead them to never using them anyway to make up for removal of weight each weapon type was balanced in such a way so they all had respective pros and cons skinship finally skinchip was initially conceived as a side effect of implementing live 2d technology into the game when characters would hold conversations with one another which at the time was quite novel right after higuchi had approved its implementation he warned intelligence systems to not do anything weird given there were worries live 2d's impact would be a lesson due to overexposure maeda suggested it could be used to replace the confession scenes from the very end of korn's s-rank supports while the proposal was accepted maeda also thought the tech would be wasted if used only for that instance so he thought that allowing players to tap the character's 2d models every now and then could give it more use thinking people would like doing it at that point the feature would be used once per chapter nintendo requested to tone down the skinship by the time it was shown to them reportedly the version they saw allowed one to touch the characters literally anywhere which was too much and the icon shown during it being a hand didn't help either as a result the areas that could be touched were limited to the face and the quote-unquote rubbing icon was changed to a pen this incidentally led to a bit of a rivalry between debugging teams at intelligent systems known by the fan base as team a found the whole feature unpleasant and were the ones responsible for restricting it while the other team b wanted more or less the complete opposite in the end team a ended up having more of a last word on the matter maida also took haguchi's dissatisfaction with live 2d's implementation into account given everything that happened so he considers that the team overall ended up reaching a common ground the story those familiar with faith's story either directly or by word of mouth might be surprised to hear that is was very serious about the reception awakenings plot got for being lacking and predictable and very much intended to correct their mistakes with fates however it was deemed nearly impossible they would be able to write three stories in-house given everything they had given themselves to do so they began looking for someone whom they could outsource the story's concept to hopefully with prior experience writing scripts for stories the person they went with was shin kibayashi believing he was the main man for the job we got the hint that the story has to be simple and easy to understand from a lot of people who will be playing the game and that's sort of the idea that comes from the fact that he has been involved in a lot of stories or manga which is typically read by a lot of people maeda says so to address the big crowd it's sort of the idea that mr kibayashi brought to us and that has influenced us in working on the story for this game shin kibayashi is a manga story writer novelist and screenwriter he's a former editor for kodansha the weekly shonen magazine and has written multiple scripts for novels manga and tv shows under multiple pseudonyms with the help of kozaki maeda and higuchi managed to set up a meeting with him in a restaurant in it they talked about the project and provided him two copies of awakening to familiarize himself with the franchise which he later played alongside his daughter is initially asked hibayashi to write only 10 pages for each of the three roots with birthright only he used those to write only the introduction before getting carried away and ending up writing a 500 page document is was shocked by the sheer volume of the material and asked him to do the same for conquest and revelation in the end kibayashi admits that he wrote what might as well have been turned into two whole books now it needs to be cleared up the extent of his involvement with the game's story given the misinformation surrounding it because spoiler alert the reception fates as plot got was quite controversial at least outside of japan around face's japanese launch kibayashi commented the following on his twitter fire emblem fates is now ranked number one bestseller on amazonco.jp however there may be a slight misunderstanding though i wrote about 500 pages between all three versions it was just a draft since the final scenario was the result of being passed through various staff members i just want to let it be known that they too had a role in this kibayashi was commissioned to write the story's concept which was later taken tweaked and implemented into the games by different writers as the evidence suggests fatez's staff credits list shin kibayashi as the creator of the original story afterwards nami komorow is listed in charge of birthright and conquest's scenarios revelations meanwhile was handled by yukinori kitijima per his own admission on twitter he also along with his staff at cynthia's a company dedicated to writing scripts also wrote the support conversations and for the scenario of the whole game kohei maeda masayuki horukawa sokoto kurihara and are credited this begs the question how much of what's seen in the game was written by kibayashi while it's highly unlikely the full script will ever see the light of day the 25th anniversary book and the iwata asks interview do provide a few answers for starters hinoka did not exist in the original draft the story only considered four siblings from noor and three from hoshido most of the siblings's personalities and roles were kibayashi's work camilla and sakura's personalities were also initially different as camilla's way of talking would make a 180 degree change when she snaps and sakura used to be closer to elise in personality kibayashi was the one who came up with the general story and setting for revelation and by proxy vala's role in the plot as intelligent systems didn't exactly plan that far ahead for the third story when we first met him he said what if we made the third game world something like this i was really shocked at first it was about a war between two different nations and we had a good idea of what those countries would be like but we didn't have any ideas for a third game yet and then we talked to kibayashi song he asked well what about something like this kibayashi also provided multiple situations where the game's battles would take place something that maeda himself valued a ton as it allowed the devs to base the game's chapters around them there are several restrictions that you need to do when it comes to turning a story into a game for example in fire emblem each chapter you go to a different map and have a battle although kibayashi-san had never been so extensively involved in the making of video games before he considered all of those conventions when he wrote the story i was very grateful for that kibayashi's story had a clear focus to make the reader cry and corn would constantly be questioning their choices all the betrayals involved would also motivate the player to try all three stories and check their outcomes each route would also contain multiple instances of foreshadowing and their conclusion was meant to be unexpected to wrap this up the 25th anniversary book includes an early draft for birthright's chapter 15 which was translated by the people at serenaseforest.net while it's structurally similar to the final version it also contains many differences worth looking into what's the same the general plot as in corn and company are looking for a path to infiltrate nor without confronting the main army one ally proposes crossing a mountain a fight ensues against its inhabitants kaze sacrifices himself for corn and the chapter ends with everyone at the top of the mountain here's what's different takumi's name is takuma scarlet is accompanied by a character named mathias instead of being confronted by wolfskins the lightning tribe folks wielding lightning powers ambushed the hoshidins instead they were reportedly replaced due to issues the devs ran into while implementing them during the battle a lightning bolt is launched towards takumi and because corn attempted to reflect with their sword they end up being pushed towards a cliff in the final game the explosion of one of yago's minds serve this role while kaze tries saving corn from falling lilith's pegasus shows up to help instead of hanoka the alternate outcome in which kaze can be saved under certain conditions is not present in this script localization changes finally it would be unfair to talk about fates's development process without addressing the elephant in the room that are the changes it received outside of japan soleil and male korin's support back when the game had just been released and the non-japanese fandom were translating pieces of it this support chain made quite a bit of noise on the internet in fact it became so infamous nintendo themselves went out of their way to announce that it would be altered so what happened exactly for those unfamiliar solei is laszlo inigo's daughter in fates she has a thing for flirting with other women yet she can only s rank male characters which is her quirk i guess during male corn and soleil's japanese support chain solei tells korn she's worried her weakness for cute women makes her faint coryn tries helping her overcome this by sneaking some magic powder in one of her drinks without her consent which makes soleil see people as their opposite gender solei is clearly taken aback by this which leads to this exchange huh so i can see you as a girl yes after what you said i wanted to resolve your concerns so i thought it over a little and it led me to a conclusion seeing me as a girl you can use me to overcome your issues from now on i'll get closer to you until you can tolerate being around me without fainting to summarize what comes next corrin and solay experiment with the powder's effects to overcome her issue but failing completely soleil appreciates corn's gesture and the a support ends with them both as friends besides corin's questionable choice there isn't much wrong with the conversation at first but this is where the s support comes in as it justifies the characters marrying by having soleil mentioned she fell for corinne from the moment she saw him as a girl start from the b support with the s support remove the context of the conversation and suddenly it can appear to some that corn had cured soleil by having her fall for him the controversy really came from an and this is an important detail a sarcastic tweet that was taken out of context by journalists who proceeded to misunderstand the translation according to the article covering this controversy on cantopia the site which is where a lot of the translations are sourced from for those wondering how the international version differs their script keeps the general idea of the support but replaces the magic powder with a blindfold plus there is consent this time skinship changes mace 2015 japanese nintendo direct showed the first footage of the skinship feature for the public and oh boy the overseas fan base didn't know what to make of it come the game's north american release many gaming news sites reported the feature would be cut outside of japan before clarifying later that only a small mini-game between the player and their s-ranked character would remain and to this day i am sure you can still find discussions on whether or not this was a good move for north america lastly while the game did have more changes outside of these two for the sake of brevity i will mention a few that stood out the most for me the voice banks available for corn were cut from five to three most of the game's swimsuits were left unused overseas leaving only the bath towel available many options to manipulate the camera in the hot springs were also removed two dlc missions featuring conversations between characters and some cgs were never localized most of hoshidin's bias and casual racism against the norians only exist internationally niles and rajat's s-rank supports with male and female corn respectively were tweaked to be the same regardless of gender while in japan they were more unique saizo and barika's entire c support was changed into an exchange of ellipses which honestly feels more of like a community meme than anything to me lastly excluding the special edition of the game only the korean version comes with both birthright and conquest included everyone else had to more or less buy the other paths at a discount and well that's all for today this video wanted to provide an objective look at the development history of fire emblem fates from who returned new features the game's story development and the changes specifically for the localization if you wanted to know what i found the most noteworthy aspect of its development i would honestly say it's the story based on what i find interesting to me it seems like sheen kibayashi was very passionate about his duty to conceptualize the story going as far as writing incredibly detailed to the point of maida himself being taken aback by the work he put in and for all that work to seemingly be mishandled by others feels a little bit sad to me of course i don't know anything more than what could be dissected from these interviews tweets and so on but yeah if you ask me that's what i find the most memorable out of all of this to wrap things up for this random fire emblem fates video if you did like it please show your support by liking and commenting down below your thoughts without getting into a slap fight over censorship what are your thoughts over the content discussed in this video the channel is less than 400 subscribers away from 85 000 if you're one of those watching who is unsubscribed please consider doing so you may not believe it but it really makes me happy i'm working towards the ultimate 100 000 subscriber goal for this channel and your simple contribution helps it get there i also want to thank my patrons barnholm melissa farmer jay bronx artorias and adelaide and especially my 40 patrons fur muzzle michael taylor prime fusion sleepy sky and steven rupp if you want to support me through patreon please check the link down below we're a small community but we like to have fun together thanks for watching deuces [Music] you

Channel: Faerghast

Views: 153,625

Keywords: fire emblem, fire emblem fates, fire emblem fates ost, fire emblem fates azuras song, fire emblem fates lost in thoughts all alone, fire emblem fates cutscenes, fire emblem fates revelation, fire emblem fates camilla, fire emblem fates trailer, fire emblem fates conquest, fire emblem fates final boss theme, fire emblem fates road taken, fire emblem fates gameplay, fire emblem fates support conversations, fire emblem fates birthright

Id: WJ4bAEqLb88

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021