Fire Emblem Heroes devs talk risque character art, sacred coins info coming

A portion of a Polygon interview with Kouhei Maeda, director of Heroes at Intelligent Systems, and Shingo Matsushita, the director of the game at Nintendo...

P: Some of the character art, especially during the summer swimsuit events, has been pretty risque for Nintendo, which is traditionally known as being family-friendly. How do you decide what’s appropriate for the artwork in the game?

Shingo Matsushita: If you look at the Fire Emblem series since Awakening, we’ve had DLC that involved characters in swimsuits. So this isn’t exactly a new concept. And, as you mentioned, Nintendo does have a family-friendly image. But within all of Nintendo’s franchises, Fire Emblem is generally played by people that are a little bit older. So when we make games for this series, we keep that in mind.

It’s not that we’re making heroes in swimsuits just to have swimsuits. Fire Emblem Heroes is a game with a lot of deep strategy and gameplay, but at the same time there are a lot of great characters, so we want to give back to the fans a little bit of fan service. This is something we’ve had a positive reaction to in the previous games. So when it came time for Fire Emblem Heroes, the development team really wanted to include that as well.

We’re also talking about the design. When we’re thinking about the design for these characters, we’re definitely trying to be very careful about it. One thing you could say [is], we’re trying to maintain the dignity of these characters that we love. If you think about Fire Emblem characters, a lot of times they can be very serious, a lot of times they’re fighting, but sometimes it’s very nice to let the characters hang loose a little bit and let their hair down.

P: Sacred coins were introduced several weeks ago, but their purpose is still unknown. Could you shed some light on that?

Matsushita: I’ll ask you to wait until October, and you’ll find out then. But there’s no disadvantage to collecting them now, so keep at it!