GotW: Fire Emblem Gaiden aka FE Echoes-Shadows of Valentia

With all due respect to hardcore FE fanboy Imperial Khador, I must plainly state my intense opposition to the remake of Gaiden. The biggest reason why I despise the remake is because Nintendo really butchered the visual design a lot. Unlike the art direction of Shadow Dragon on the DS, which actually resembled how the main character (Marth) looked in Smash Brothers, I have absolutely no idea where the inspiration for the visual style of the 3DS remake of Gaiden came from. Obviously it was just a derivative of the art direction (i.e. character design) of FE Awakening, which is why I am questioning the inspiration of the visual design because the character designs/general art style in FE Awakening were almost universally derided by hardcore, longtime FE fans like myself for looking like a cheap, streamlined, colorless, generic otaku knock-off of the art style from Radiant Dawn & Path of Radiance. So why would Intelligent Systems settle for merely a less-awful visual style instead of doing something really special with the visual design by getting the guy(s) who designed the characters in the GC/Wii FE games or scouting for hot, fresh artistic talent entirely? WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF BEING SO UNAMBITIOUS WITH THE VISUAL STYLING OF A REMAKE TO SUCH A CULT GAME IN SUCH A LEGENDARY SERIES? That is a question I ask myself every day.

Let me show you how Alm and Celica originally looked:








THAT'S how Alm and Celica are supposed to look! This is one of the things that made FE so special back then: strong manga art direction in a time when video games had minimal effort put into the general visual design, including things like character designs and production artwork. By comparison, the LOZ series wouldn't even get this justice until OoT in 1998, so the Fire Emblem series was WAY ahead of its time in that regard. Shouzou Kaga did an outstanding job of recruiting artistic talent for his FE games compared to the recent attempts by Intelligent Systems. I don't even think this is a commentary on the modern day anime scene, I really do think Awakening, Fates, and Echoes look generic as hell. I hate modern day "otaku" oriented manga art, like that of Echoes. You can tell that their artists are well trained because they know how to pose human anatomy but they draw in such a condescending style, using a drab color scheme, streamlining the faces and putting little detail into the eyes, which is the defining hallmark of anime. Why get rid of that? This is of course just a sh*tty attempt to "westernize" the look for american players for the sake of profit, a financially motivated decision which I condemn. Going back to the characters in Echoes, I also hate how deflated the lips look and how unrefined the chins are, which combined makes the faces look too long. It almost makes them look like they suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome! There's nothing "beautiful" about the look of Echoes. The modern FE games (starting with Awakening) Don't do anything better in this regard. Even the advanced era FE games (i.e. Binding Blade-Radiant Dawn) all look MUCH better than the Awakening era FEs.

Anyway, art direction aside, I don't see why Nintendo didn't/couldn't just translate & localize the original version of FE Gaiden via E Shop like the eventually ended up doing with the very first Fire Emblem on Famicom. Yes, you can buy & play the first Fire Emblem here in America. So why didn't they do this for FE 2? It makes no sense to me. The original was better! Video game history needs to be preserved, even in the West! That's my 2 cents on FE 2.

Bonus Point: I found this fanart of Alm on Deviantart that looks more faithful to his design in/the visual style of FE 2 than the Echoes remake. Look:




This just proves that the visual botchery of Fire Emblem in the recent FE games is just a shameless attempt to "westernize" the look of FE. What a disgrace to art.