Fire Emblem Warriors First Details from Famitsu

UPDATE: The article has been updated with more details of the original characters and the background story.

We are very excited to learn about new information on Fire Emblem Warriors, and this week's Weekly Famitsu finally have the first information batch for the collaboration game between Nintendo's Fire Emblem series and Koei Tecmo's Warriors series.

Background Story

Fire Emblem Warriors takes place in the Kingdom of Aitriss, where the story starts with the kingdom getting suddenly attacked by monsters. The protagonist twin siblings Shion and Lian became separated from their mother Queen Yuana. Prince Darios of Guston, who happened to visit Aitriss during the attack, found Shion and Lian, calmed them down, and protected them as they escape from the castle. And thus, Shion and Lian's battle to take back their homeland and rescue their mother begins.

Characters

Fire Emblem Warriors will feature new characters original to the game. The original characters introduced are as follows:

• Shion (voiced by Yuuma Uchida) - The legitimate child of the royal Aitriss family. He aspires to be a knight fighting in the frontlines rather than a king, so he wants to push his twin elder sister Lian to become the crown princess.
• Lian (voiced by Maaya Uchida) - Shion's twin elder sister. She's a wise person and understands her own weakness, so she's reluctant to be the successor to the throne, and wants to push Shion to become the crown prince.
• Darios (voiced by Takuya Sato) - Prince of the Kingdom of Guston. He taught swordsmanship to Shion and academics to Lian, so he's like an elder brother to both of them.
• Yuana (voiced by Yuka Nagayoshi) - Queen of the Kingdom of Aitriss and mother of Shion and Lian. Her husband the King has already passed away, and although she's troubled with neither of her children wanting to inherit the throne, she kindly watches over them growing up.

Legacy Fire Emblem characters from certain series will also make their appearances here, summoned by the Fire Shield in the Warriors world. The first two confirmed so far are Marth from Shadow Dragon and Chrom from Awakening. Other than these two, Fire Emblem Fates will complete the basic series roster list. Corrin, Ryoma and Xander have been hinted when their weapons were shown in the teaser trailer posted in January.

When asked why they limited the legacy series roster, the developer team said that if they were to go with a total crossover encompassing every protagonists, too many of the character roster would be wielding swords, so they instead opted for a character roster with more variation of weapons such as including more Archers and Mages. The playable roster number for Fire Emblem Warriors is said to be more than that of past first games of Koei Tecmo's collaboration Warriors series.

For a comparison to the previous point, the first One Piece: Pirate Warriors had 13 characters, Arslan: The Warriors of Legend had 15, and Dynasty Warriors: Gundam had 18 playable mobile suits.

Gameplay Features

The Fire Emblem Warriors project had started and ongoing ever before Famitsu held a poll in November 2015 on which new collaboration Warriors games readers want to see, in which Fire Emblem won 3rd place (The 1st & 2nd places went to Touken Ranbu & Type-Moon respectively). The developers have decided to make a Warriors game that can be enjoyed by Fire Emblem fans.

This game will have staple Fire Emblem features like weapon triangle and unit classes. Archers will deal more damage on Pegasus Knights, and mounted units like Cavaliers will be always mounted (unlike in mainline Warriors series where characters could mount and unmount). There is also a character switch feature -presumably like in Warriors Orochi or Samurai Warriors 4-, so the developers hope players will get to use various classes and weapons.

Intelligent Systems also helped supervise things like character settings on Fire Emblem Warriors, which will be fully voiced and have an enormous amount of quotes. Support Conversations, one of Fire Emblem's staple features, are appearing in this game under a new name Bond Conversations. There are a variety of conversations from serious to funny ones, however there are no romance or marriage features as characters only build friendships in Bond Conversations.

Fire Emblem Warriors will be released for Nintendo Switch and New Nintendo 3DS in Fall 2017 for Japan, North America, and Europe. The exact release dates have not been announced yet. As of this article, the development of the game is 70% done.