#bsfe

[xbuster]

It's really cool how they use the illustrations from the Satellaview broadcast that aren't in the BS-X ROMs.

I wanted to try the BS Fire Emblem GBA remake to see how it improves upon the original Satellaview game (and so I could actually see some dialogue since the broadcasted voice overs can’t be emulated meaning there’s no story saved to the Satellaview ROM). The music used for the chapter select is the Wind Waker intro music??? The Sacred Echoes GBA hack used the Dragon Quest VII overworld theme. Why do these FE remake hacks keep doing this lol.

[sukimas]

(The reason I don't count Hopes as an extra game is the same reason why I don't put in BSFE and the Kaga Sagas- would artificially inflate game numbers.)

[dt75artblog]

Commission for @Neenscrame of Roberto and Reiden!

[nint3ndraw]

Screenshots from a high-effort cinematic I’m making for the relevant events in BSFE and New Mystery. aka Camus being a badass (for half the shots).

[prettydragon]

YESSSSSSS chat if u haven’t seen my panel the vod is on emblemcon’s twitch channel!!

Also check out the BSFE dub bc idk a pretty pretty princess sounds familiar…

My favorite moment from prettydragon's panel at Emblemcon 💙

[endsofthearth]

BSFE sprite redraws

[princessarchanea]

Uncaged Bird [Camus & Nyna]

@gradiivus I got the idea for this drabble/starter last night and couldn’t resist.

Three months.

Three months had passed since the war ended and the Holy Palace fell into the claws of Dolhr. Three months since they’d shattered her army and scattered the pieces to the four winds. Three months since her father’s body was buried headless in a shallow grave instead of the royal cairn where her mother lay.

Three months had passed since Nyna had been imprisoned in the depths of her own home, and she refused to suffer through any more of this.

The interim occupation general, her kingdom’s ‘caretaker’, was insufferable. No sooner had he arrived than he’d banished Nyna to the dungeons, to be seen by no one except the guards who gave her bread and water. Occasionally he sent sycophants, spineless things who took pleasure in seeing their enemy’s princess wearing the tattered remnants of her dress, subsisting on scraps like a common dog. There was some truth in their jeering—she reeked like one, and sometimes failed to bite off an undignified growl—and that knowledge only made her angrier. It wasn’t long before she was snapping even at one of her former soldiers, who’d managed to cajole her guards into delivering her food, and also news of the world beyond.

Medeus had been bold, he told her, through scanty words and cleverly-disguised letters. He’d used an army of Khadeni mages to warp an outsized chunk of his army straight to the heart of her kingdom—a force large enough to maintain its siege upon Pales and fend off the halfhearted attacks of her supposed allies in the marches. It was clever in its unexpectedness, and cost the royal family their lives while sparing those of his loyal men.

And though her own life had been spared by the intervention of one man, Nyna refused to give him the satisfaction of ruling her. He’d claimed to feel sympathy for her plight and that of her people; but in this cruel interim his words were but lies on the wind. General Camus would be no different than General Blackguard, he who was slowly crushing the life out of her and her people. Archanea was suffering. Her people needed something to propel them to act, and though she was no warrior-general, she could still provide them that spark.

Princess Nyna of Archanea had no doubt that she would die before the year or even the month was out—but she would die on her own terms rather than her captors’.

And she wanted Camus to see her defiance, to see that even imprisoned, her wings bleeding, she would not bow before his unholy masters. She would become a martyr, fall upon the blade as her father’s men had done; and in her wake a thousand men would rise to avenge her name, to obliterate the scourge that was the unholy Empire of Dolhr.

Three months had passed since she made that promise. The day was fast approaching when he would arrive to take over the stranglehold on Archanea. Soon, she would meet him, and she would show him the depths of her hatred.

Her fingers closed over the shaft of her blade—a glassy thing that would break apart, leaving its other end buried irretrievably in her breast—and her brows tightened into a glare.Three months she’d waited. Her moment was nigh.

…

Come morning, they dragged her out of the dungeons and into her chambers to be made ‘presentable’ for the occupying general. She was so thin and weak from being confined that she stumbled and fell on her guards like a newborn fawn, so abandoned to the darkness that the mere feeling of light and warmth on her body pained her. But at least they did not search her, and she still kept her improvised obsidian blade. 

She regained some semblance of her former strength in time, only to have it whisked away from her in the ensuing whirlwind of activity. In her chambers, one maid stripped her bare; another scrubbed roughly at her stains; another yanked the dress down over her head and haphazardly pinned her hair. When they were done, she scarcely recognized the woman looking back at her from the mirror pane, all sunken eyes and bony limbs and scraggly hair. They hadn’t even bound it in the Archanean fashion; so save for the exquisite dress that no longer fit her wizened frame, no one would know that she was this kingdom’s princess. 

When they brought her before General Blackguard, he only gave her the barest of once-overs before waving her away, as if she meant less to him than the meanest of his servants.

How cruel it was that she crossed paths with Boah while being shuttled down these desecrated halls, he who’d first suggested that she seek General Camus’s aid and protection in these dire times. Few were the things she’d seen that could unman him, but when the bishop’s eyes met hers and he beheld the shadow she’d become, he sank to his knees and remained there trembling. “My child,” he quavered. “What have they done to you?”

(Her heart went out to him in this moment, but she did not give it voice. Instead, she let it fester inside her, that he and his had done this to so noble a man.)

Before long, she was standing before the gates of Pales, flanked on the left by her captors and on her right by General Blackguard. She could see a line of horses riding towards them in the distance, flying above them the flag of the Sable Order, and forced her breaths to slow alongside her heart. Here was the man who would rule Archanea in her father’s and her stead—a man she wholly expected to be as cruel and heartless as his predecessor.

The entire formation came to a stop in the royal courtyard, countless hooves churning up dirt and crushing flowers. General Camus dismounted and advanced towards them alongside four of his knights, halting roughly a meter away from Nyna and her captors. She glared rigidly at him for a solid minute, not even twitching until General Blackguard thrust a heavy hand into her back, forcing her to stumble forth and almost fall straight into Camus’s hands.

“The enemy princess,” he said without preamble before folding his arms across his chest, waiting.

[pencilartiststudio]

Hi, everyone. Reilly Hendrix here.

I'm making a decision that will forever(?) change how I post my art. I would love to hear your take on it.

Blog Link:

http://arekayhen.blogspot.com/2024/10/a-different-approach.html

Form Link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1lvjrdqWkOoDTwyMfgkhB2O2j7gXywJ3D9iwVbBFJe5g/viewform

[xbuster]

Having played the BS Fire Emblem ROM, watched original broadcasts of playing it on Satellaview to see all the content that wasn't in the ROM (like the story cutscenes and music), and played the GBA fan remake that rebalanced the game and included an adaptation of the broadcasted story, it really isn't worth experiencing unless you're a really big fan of the Archanea games. And even then I wouldn't recommend the BS-X ROM because it's an unbalanced nightmare (Ridersbane doesn't even work on Horsemen making Est completely worthless in chapter 2). Watching an original broadcast would be the best way to experience it, but afaik the only translation is here and nobody's subtitled any of the broadcasts. The GBA remake would be the best way out of these three for English-speakers to play it and experience the story but even then it's not like it's particularly great (it is still working off the awful map design of the original after all).

But I will say this, it did make me love one of my favorite FE1 characters even more. Camus's story in BSFE is really good. In FE1, you know of his history and how he helped Nyna escape and reach Hardin, but the impact of that is even greater seeing how he would defy Dolhr over the course of these four chapters. In FE1 he was so devoted to Grust that he would completely obey the Dolhr Empire, so seeing how he managed smaller acts of rebellion that led to Dolhr completely breaking his spirit and forcing his loyalty makes him an even more respectable character. It's not hard to imagine how Dolhr threatened him into subservience. The GBA remake even added a bit about Jubello's life being used as a bargaining chip, which is the most reasonable thing Medeus would threaten Camus with.

I'll play New Mystery's remake of these chapters eventually.

[fireemblemtcg]

Cipher By The Numbers: A Statistical Look Back at the Game That Was

Eight months have now passed since the final Fire Emblem Cipher card series was released. Out of interest, let us quickly analyse the complete game and see how it breaks down. Who made it in? Who is still missing? Who got the most? Who got the least? Who drew the most? How does it stack up to the various other spinoffs and crossover events that Fire Emblem has been involved in in terms of sheer coverage? And other bits of mostly meaningless trivia.

This post is adapted from a twitter thread published in October 2020. Some of the presented numbers slightly differ compared to it, as I’ve since refined my methods somewhat.

More Fire Emblem Cipher translations!

Part 1: The Standings by Symbol

The Most Common Symbol(s)

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that generally speaking, the more Fire Emblem games a symbol affiliation needed to represent, the more cards there are in that symbol. The most common symbol is Purple (Legendary Weapons), which covers three games and a smattering of manga characters; Red (Blade of Light), covering the casts of Archanea and Valentia plus a handful of Tokyo Mirage Sessions characters, is the runner-up.

One thing stands out, though. Unlike other Fire Emblem games, which each get just one symbol that is usually shared with another game, Fates is in the unique position of having three different, closely related symbol configurations dedicated exclusively to that single game: White (Hoshido), Black (Nohr), and the dual White/Black configuration. Individually these three are nothing to write home about in terms of frequency, but if taken together...

...Then they immediately become the most common by a very substantial margin. This is a major recurring trend with Fates content in Cipher: through a combination of Cipher effectively debuting as part of a merchandising blitz around the time of Fates’ release, and Fates’ status as the only mainline game to have a) more than one symbol to itself, b) an entire booster series to itself, and c) multiple starter decks to itself, Fates casts a massive shadow over the card game that will come up again and again in this analysis.

The Least Common Symbol(s)

The least common single “symbol”, appropriately enough, is the absence thereof: No Symbol. Despite seeing dedicated use for multiple games (Heroes and Warriors), plus various other occasional uses (Tokyo Mirage Sessions, the Cipher mascots, various Series 17 and 22 cards), it’s a substantial way behind the next least common symbol, Brown (Crest of the Goddess).

However, the least common symbol configuration of any kind is dual Red/Blue, which is limited to appearing on only two Tokyo Mirage Sessions cards in Series 22.

Part 2: The Standings by Game

The Game with the Most Cards

It’s not even a contest: once again, Fates is overwhelmingly the most represented single game, beating the closest competition (Awakening) by a factor of 200+. Both Three Houses (4th) and Genealogy of the Holy War (3rd) put up surprisingly good showings, too; you can probably attribute Genealogy's high position to it constantly stealing Thracia 776's lunch money in Yellow waves, as these two games have by far the most uneven skew of mainline game representation within the same symbol.

Even if you merge games with heavily overlapping casts (see appendix) together, Fates is still handily the winner, although the Tellius games now beat Awakening for second place.

(For details on how cards for characters who appear in multiple games have been counted as belonging to one over the other, see the appendix.)

The Game with the Fewest Cards

Another no-brainer: it’s BS Fire Emblem: Archanea Saga, which never received any active, proclaimed representation in any Cipher series and therefore has zero dedicated cards. Only one character who originated in BSFE, Malice, ever received a card, and even then that one card instead belonged to a New Mystery of the Emblem set. (Things get a bit less awful for the game if your standard is “any cards belonging to anyone present in that game, regardless of what game they were originally billed for”, but that’s another can of worms.)

That said, the game that was explicitly stated as being subject to representation in Cipher that received the fewest dedicated cards was Gaiden. While its remake, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, received a very healthy number of cards, Gaiden itself only received three: cards for Mycen, Celica, and Silque depicting them in outfits/art styles from the original. The only series which claim to represent Gaiden are Series 17 and 22, as part of their push to feature every game, “featuring” it alongside Shadows of Valentia.

(By contrast, the original two Archanea games and their two remakes each received one billed, dedicated wave: Series 1 for Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light, Series 4 for Mystery of the Emblem, Series 13 for Shadow Dragon, and Series 15 for New Mystery of the Emblem. Granted, while Series 1 and 4 are billed as targeting the original games, the art style and character models are very much rooted in the remakes.)

If the Gaiden/Shadows of Valentia distinction is too hair-splitty for your tastes and you think the Gaiden cards should just count as Shadows of Valentia, the next lowest are:

Overall: Sword of the Champion (17)

Game: Warriors (28)

Mainline game: Mystery of the Emblem (35)

Mainline game with a distinct cast: Thracia 776 (70)

Part 3: The Standings by Characters and Cards

How Many Cards Are There?

2586 distinct cards were produced, across a total of 3177 card printings (as reported by the Cipher official site's card database). See the appendix for details on what was and wasn't counted as a "distinct card" for the purposes of the former figure.

The Most Cards

Marth is the most frequently appearing unit name, boasting a respectable 29 unique cards; the runners-up are Chrom, Lucina, and female Corrin, with 26 each. The rest of the top 20(ish) is as follows:

However, if characters who appear in multiple incarnations/genders under different unit names are taken together, Corrin dethrones Marth and takes the top spot by an absolutely massive margin, at 51 unique cards across three different unit names (male, female, Kingdom of Valla). The rest of the top 20(ish) standings are somewhat impacted by this modification, looking like this:

The top lists, especially the combined one, are noticeably dominated by Fates and Three Houses. Once again, the impact of the immense amount of focus that Fates received in Cipher is made evident; and the rapid rise of Three Houses’ protagonists in the standings is especially remarkable, given how late in Cipher’s life cycle the game came along.

Conversely, Jugdral characters don’t even figure into the top ~20 standings; the character with the most Yellow cards, Sigurd, is tied for 27th (uncombined)/28th (combined) with Caeda, Hinoka, the combined Kanas, Shade, and Yuzu.

The Fewest Cards

A total of 171 unit names only ever appeared on one card; taking into account characters who appear under multiple unit names, 159 characters have only a single card to any of their names. Such one-hit wonders most commonly occur in Purple (48) and Red (41), while Blue had the fewest such characters at just 3 (Naga, Validar, and Excellus).

Of particular interest is the small club of seven characters who never appeared in any of the retail starter decks or booster packs, instead receiving their one and only card in the Promotional Card Packs: Matthis (Red), Bantu (Red), Shannam (Yellow), Merlinus (Purple), Athos (Purple), Gromell (Green), and the gatekeeper (Brown). As you can see, the overall trend with these characters (only Athos and Bantu fall outside of it) leans toward the somewhat... comical.

Additionally, there is one character whose one and only card was a starter deck exclusive: Erk (Purple).

Also of note are the small selection of characters who have only one card, but whose only card is of a high rarity.

Three characters have the... well, super rare distinction of having their one and only Cipher card be a Super Rare: Nyna (Red), Nils (Purple), and Seteth (Brown). If you count distinct unit names, this number expands to five to include Camus (Red) and the gender-neutral-ish “Kingdom of Valla” version of Corrin (White/Black; unlike the others, the latter also has an SR+ alternate print), but both of these characters have other cards under multiple other unit names (respectively Sirius and Ezekiel, and the male and female versions of Corrin).

There is only one distinct unit name whose sole card is a Hero Rare: Seiros (Brown). However, the character as a whole does have other cards under multiple other unit names (Rhea, Immaculate One).

There are six characters whose only card is a Rare, but said card has an R+ alternative printing: Michalis (Red), Mila (Red), Eyvel (Yellow, although she has four more cards under her Brigid identity, including another Rare), Idunn (Purple), the Medallion (Green, although there are two more cards featuring the released Yune), and Naga (Blue).

Characters whose only card is a Rare without having an R+ variant include Phina (Red), Medeus (Red), Silvia (Yellow), Lene (Yellow), Saias (Yellow), Lara (Yellow), Larum (Purple), Ursula (Purple), Sonia (Purple), Tethys (Purple), Valter (Purple), Caineghis (Green), Validar (Blue), Jeralt (Brown), and Kronya (Brown). This “category” is heavily populated by dancers, who frequently received only one card.

The Most Higher-Rarity Cards

Of the 171 unit names who received Super Rare (SR) cards, Ike tops the list as the single unit name with the most, at 6, with runner-ups Chrom, Marth and male Corrin close behind at 5. Once again, though, if one were to tally all the different unit names covering the same character together, Corrin leapfrogs ahead by a massive margin, clocking in at 10 across their three unit names, while Robin now also ties with Chrom and Marth at 5.

Similarly, there were 136 SR+ alternate prints of SR cards spread across 91 unit names, and of these, Marth received the most, at 5, followed by Ike and Azura. While Corrin, among others, does once again leap significantly up the rankings if one combines different unit names for the same character, for once they don’t outright win, but instead tie with Marth.

Part 4: Character Representation

How Many Characters Are In Cipher?

A grand total of 651 characters, spread across 674 distinct unit names (alternate identities, gender variants, etc.) were featured in Cipher.

The Most Complete Games

Five games comprise the “perfect attendance” crew, wherein every single one of their playable characters has at least one card: the mainline games Awakening, Fates, Echoes: Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses, as well as the spinoff Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Naturally, all of these games were released in the 2010s. Granted, Tokyo Mirage Sessions only has a principal playable cast of fourteen, so that one is less of an achievement.

That said, their inroads into their non-playable casts are generally less comprehensive. Awakening and Fates more or less hit all their major ones, with the most “important” missing characters from each respectively being Phila and Anthony, while Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses are far more spotty. Tokyo Mirage Sessions also has only three members of its supporting cast covered.

The Most Incomplete Games

The game with the most missing playable characters is, predictably, the perennially neglected Thracia 776. 20 of its playable characters are missing: Dagdar, Marty, Callion, Glade, Keane, Alba, Robert, Xavier, Conomor, Brighton, Hicks, Dahlson, Amalda (the only missing playable woman from the game), Ilios, Schroff, Troude, Salem, Homeros, Ralph and Galzus.

Thracia 776 also has the most incomplete selection of non-playable characters, as only one villain (Reinhardt, again predictably) and one NPC (August) ever received cards. This also makes Thracia 776 one of only two games to be missing their main antagonist, Raydrik (the other is arguably Shadows of Valentia, depending on how one views it: Jedah is in, but Duma and Rudolf are not).

The next least complete is more of a surprise. The Archanea games (taken together) are missing 17 playable characters. This breaks down into 9 who originated in Shadow Dragon & the Blade of Light (Boah, Dolph, Macellan, Tomas, Beck, Lorenz, Roger, Caesar and Radd), two from Mystery of the Emblem (Cecil and Warren), one from Shadow Dragon (Ymir), and all of the BS Fire Emblem originals except Malice. The absence of Cecil also makes Mystery of the Emblem Book 2 and New Mystery of the Emblem the only mainline games who are missing any members of their starting party in Cipher.

For the record, the remaining games’ playable character absence break down as follows:

Genealogy of the Holy War: 5 (Creidne, Rodrubán, Deimne, Mana, Hawke) All of Genealogy's absences are just substitute units, so one could argue that Genealogy is technically complete depending on how one feels about the substitutes.

The Binding Blade: 5 (Treck, Yoder, Garret, Geese, Zeiss)

The Blazing Blade: 4 (Isadora, Harken, Dart, Geitz)

The Sacred Stones: 2 (Moulder, Duessel)

Path of Radiance: 1 (Giffca)

Radiant Dawn: 3 (Renning*, Giffca, Nealuchi) Renning has one card as his Bertram identity from Path of Radiance, but not as himself; whether you want to count him is a matter of opinion.

The Game with the Most Enemies

Cipher always heavily prioritized playable characters and generally chose to keep enemies to an occasional dripfeed. One major exception arose halfway through its lifespan, and appropriately enough, it was Genealogy of the Holy War, a game which already boasts one of the largest casts of major antagonists in the entire series. A record thirteen of its non-playable bosses/villains/enemies received cards: Arvis, Travant, Lombard, Eldigan, Díthorba, Pamela, Manfroy, Julius, Arion, Ishtar, Banba, Fótla, and Ériu. It also has the highest number of such enemies who received Super Rare cards, with four (Arvis, Eldigan, Julius, and Ishtar).

Admittedly, this figure is somewhat padded out by the rather unusual decision to include the Díthorba/Pamela pair and the Banba/Fótla/Ériu trio despite them all being relatively unimportant palette swaps of each other.

It also says a lot that despite all of this, there were still many major Genealogy villains who never made it into Cipher! Among the most noticeable absences are Reptor, Blume, Chagall, Hilda, and Jamke’s two brothers.

The Game with the Most Cutscene-only Non-Playable Characters

Likewise, the Tellius games have an above average number of cards featuring NPCs who are never encountered as units in gameplay, with a total of eight: Elena, Rajaion, Almedha, Altina, Soan, Ashunera, Yune, and - most uniquely - Lehran’s Medallion, which received the only card in all of Cipher whose subject is an inanimate object and (technically) not a character. Notably, a substantial proportion of these characters are historical figures who are long dead by the time of the games’ events, another occurrence that is virtually unique to Cipher’s coverage of Tellius.

Given that the Tellius games also have a very healthy selection of general non-playable units (bosses and NPCs alike) who got cards (Greil/Gawain, Ashnard, Petrine, Bryce, Gromell, Izuka, Dheginsea, Ashera, and the Disciple of Order), they also overall have the highest number of non-playable characters, clocking in at 18 (this figure can expand to 19 if you’re willing to count Zelgius as non-playable). Adding bosses puts them well ahead of Genealogy, which only gains two additional NPCs (Annand and young Aoife - as with Zelgius, your mileage may vary on whether the latter should count) on top of all of the bosses with cards.

Major absences

Four final bosses, hailing from five games, are absent from Cipher: Duma (Gaiden/Shadows of Valentia), Veld (Thracia 776), the fire dragon (The Blazing Blade), and Aelfric/the Umbral Beast (Three Houses’ Cindered Shadows story). Naturally, no justification for their absence has ever emerged, but the fire dragon, at least, is understandable; however, Duma and Aelfric are very strange given the intense amounts of Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses content in Cipher.

Comparisons to other crossovers

By its nature, Cipher has by a massive margin more characters present than any other Fire Emblem crossover work, and this record is not likely to be beaten unless Intelligent Systems decides to produce another card game. Even so, its coverage was not comprehensive, and indeed, sometimes there are characters featured in other crossovers but not in Cipher, and vice versa. There is something to be said for comparing each game’s character selections, and considering their different priorities.

At the time that Cipher ended, there were eight crossover characters who were present in Heroes but who had never been featured in Cipher: Eremiya, Rudolf, Duma, Kempf, Geese (the only one of these characters who was playable in his game of origin), Bramimond, Jorge, and Mustafa. If you count OCs, the total figure expands to 17 with Gustav, Henriette, Gunnthrá, Laegjarn, Helbindi, Hríd, Ylgr, Hel, and Freyja. Naturally, this number has since increased and will only continue to do so as time goes on; notable subsequent crossover inclusions who never saw the light of day in Cipher include Duessel, Caellach, Veld, and Solon.

There are 60 characters who received cards in the original Fire Emblem Trading Card Game from the early 2000s, but not Cipher: 13 from Mystery, 23 from Genealogy, and 24 from Thracia 776. This is due to the former game’s decision to feature the complete playable casts (and in the case of Genealogy, virtually all villains of importance) of the few games which it featured. As a consequence, every playable Jugdrali and Archanean character (except Ymir, who didn’t exist at the time, and the remaining five BSFE originals) has at least one card of some kind, even if it’s not Cipher.

There are four characters who were present in Awakening’s Spotpass material but not Cipher: Dagdar, Salem, Raydrik, and Moulder. As you can see, that figure is weighted quite heavily toward Thracia 776; notably, despite his critical importance as the game’s primary villain, Awakening is the only crossover since the original TCG to include Raydrik at all!

Surprisingly, given its narrow scope, there are six characters who made it into Tokyo Mirage Sessions in some form who are not present in Cipher: Lorenz (Archanea), Dolph, Macellan, Garrick, Pheros, and Cervantes. The Archanean characters in question are all playable units (and armored!) in their original game, while the Awakening ones are all bosses. For most of them, it’s understandable why Cipher skipped them (although it seems reasonable that had Cipher continued, the Awakening ones might have made it in for the sake of new blood, given that Awakening already had all of its major characters in). However, Lorenz is arguably one of the most important characters left to have never been featured in Cipher, given his significance to the first act of Mystery of the Emblem.

Understandably, given its focus on superpopular characters, there are no characters who were featured in Warriors but not Cipher. Of Warriors’ cast of original characters, only Velezark, Yelena and Oskar never received cards in Cipher.

Part 5: Artists and Autographs

The single most prolific artist in Cipher was Mayo (@mayomoyo​​). A total of 126 cards feature distinct art from her! The character that she drew the most frequently was Randal, with 6 cards, followed by Caeda and Delthea (5 apiece).

In Cipher’s lifetime, there were 115 alternate prints of cards that featured autographs, usually from that character’s voice actor. The voice actors who signed the most cards were Yū Kobayashi and Satomi Satō, who signed four cards each - the former solely for Lucina cards, and the latter for cards for both female Corrin and female Kana. The runner-up is Nobunaga Shimazaki, who autographed three cards for male Corrin and male Kana.

There are three cards that were autographed by individuals who are not voice actors:

B04-018SR+ Marth: Hero-King of Light was autographed by Maki Hakoda, the card’s artist, instead of voice actor Hikaru Midorikawa (who had previously autographed a Marth card in Series 1, and would do so again in Series 17).

B05-048SR+ Narcian: Cunning Wyvern General was autographed by Kōtarō Yamada, the card’s artist. As this card predated Heroes, Narcian did not have a voice actor at the time.

B09-051SR+ Al: Blue Champion was autographed by both Hiroshi Izawa and Kōtarō Yamada, the author and illustrator of the Sword of the Champion manga; Yamada also illustrated this card. This card is the only card to have been autographed by more than one person. Al does not have a voice actor.

Despite everything, despite there being a total of 115 autographed cards, there are four main protagonists who never received autographed cards at all: Sigurd, Seliph, Leif, and male Byleth. There are two likely reasons why the former three never got them:

At the time that their first cards were produced, none of them had voice actors. (Seliph debuted in Heroes with a voice actor, Yūma Uchida, a month before the launch of his first appearance in Cipher, Series 8, but Series 8 would have been in production well before that point.)

Cipher generally favored giving Jugdral characters alternate art that formed joined panoramas for their + card variants, something that (with the sole exception of Series 5) is mutually exclusive with having autographs.

Ultimately, the Yellow symbol and the Jugdral setting have the fewest autographed cards by far, only getting two - Deirdre and Lachesis (both released long after their respective Heroes debuts) - and is also the only setting/symbol to have absolutely none of its protagonists ever get an autographed card (although they each got their fair share of alternate art + cards).

The absence of an autographed male Byleth, however, is rather inexplicable; although he did get an un-autographed SR+ card, he is the only Brown/Three Houses protagonist not to receive an autographed one. Indeed, female Byleth received multiple autographed cards! (Even if one was from a starter deck rather than being a rare or super rare card.)

Appendix

This is the spreadsheet that was used in the writing of this article. It includes details on which games were attributed to which cards, an appendix laying out the criteria by which attribution was made, sorted lists of characters by card count (including the SR-specific lists), and the original versions of the article’s charts.

This spreadsheet that tracks appearances in Fire Emblem spinoffs and crossovers was also used to compare and contrast character representation across each. It has a series of filters that you can use to highlight which characters appear in which combinations of games (e.g. "Who appeared in the 2000s TCG, but not Cipher?")

The total number of cards identified for the "distinct cards" figure was the basis for all of the other statistical analyses (character card counts, symbol card counts). The standard for inclusion in this figure is having a unique card ID, and hence this figure takes the following cards into account:

Promotional cards that are reprints of starter or booster cards with alternate art are counted, as they have unique card IDs.

Alternate reprint variants of cards where the ID is not unique beyond an added or changed rarity suffix are not counted. This affects + and X higher-rarity prints, ST reprints of booster pack cards, and PRr reprints of promotional cards. An exception is made for B11-101+X(S04-003ST) Camilla: Bewitching Malig Knight, given its unique card ID and unusual circumstances of release: unlike other +X cards, it was produced long after the original card and features even more significant changes than usual for +X cards circa Series 9-12.

The five April Fools cards (prefix "USO-") are not counted, since they were never physically released and are not included in the official website's card database. (Previous versions of this analysis inadvertently included them in the statistics; the data has since been updated to remove them.)

[dt75artblog]

there's no more fire emblem discourse. only belf.

[nint3ndraw]

Preorders for the Invincible Camus/archetype fanzine ( @invinciblezine ) are done (at least for now) and we’ve been given the okay to share our pieces! I contributed a sticker and an artwork for my husbando Camus!! I drew and painted the full piece first and then used the techniques I developed on that to paint the sticker. :D

This was truly a work of love, and of testing my personal art limits. My abbreviated workflow and thought process below the cut (if anyone’s curious):

Full piece:

I knew instantly that I wanted to draw Camus with an angel motif because “rumor has it that [he comes back from near-death so much that he] is watched over by a guardian angel” (blame my days in FERP, RPing with @gradiivus​). Precisely how I wanted to display that idea changed a lot in the first days of this project--for instance, there was originally going to be an actual angel figure where the cape-wings are now (and that angel was going to be Nyna because Shadow Dragon was my first game, but rules were no shipping or implications of); and the pose was originally going to be front-view with very little thought to background design, let alone using background as composition element. Then I experimented with the pose, figures, and composition (because something just wasn’t sitting right with the first versions), and voila!

At first, I was torn between Camus’s FEH (favorite and the easiest to reference), FE:SD (nostalgia), and BSFE sprite (unique) designs. Not only did we have to choose different designs for multi-game characters, I also knew the white cape of his BSFE sprite would lend itself best to the wings effect I wanted. My only real reference was a tiny sprite, so I additionally based my design off Camus’s old fullbody BSFE art and some elegant (Baroque? just FEH-like?) designs pulled from memory. I had so much fun making beautiful bishie hair, beautiful clothing designs, and huge, elegant wings, despite the extra time it took to digi-line them. (Even though I‘m much better with my Wacom (Intuos) now, I still always start my drawings in pencil because sometimes I’m too AFK and poses are “easier” to fix on paper in my head.) Time flies when you’re having fun, right? But the real joy here was painting everything and pushing the limits of my painting skills. I learned several new techniques here, played with so many different brushes, and also got a reminder of how I need to use higher-contrast values orz. This and my FE Compendium piece are some of the only digital pieces I’ve ever done where I actually gave a damn about how the background looked (mainly due to lack of practice--I tend to do “studio” pieces with zero background more often), and I think it really paid off! The back- and foreground elements together really make this piece pop--I can’t believe I initially thought to go without them!

Altogether, this piece only took about... a week to finish? Definitely under 10 days. This is the fastest full piece I’ve ever finished, and I’m still so happy with it, it’s currently my phone wallpaper. If anyone ever starts a fanzine that involves Camus or Nyna, please hit me up, because (time pending) I am definitely in~

Sticker:

I knew instantly (again) that I wanted to make it chibi-style, and having come somewhat recently off the first Camus Revival GHB and having my initial sticker plans blown by posting my entire Camus bust ahead of schedule, I thought, “Why not make it Heroes-style”? Camus canonically wields swords and lances in Shadow Dragon and New Mystery and he already wields a the lance in Heroes, so I knew I had to go with the other weapon. Never mind that swords are the most overused weapon class in FE. Camus nearly never smiles in his (canon) depictions, but I figured a >:O face would be much cuter. And of course, since my full piece used my BSFE design, I decided to recycle the design onto the chibi. This piece only took me a day or two to finish, and it turned out super cute! Way better than the bust I was originally going to go with, even if this is a pain to cut precisely XD

[vonvestra]

Veteran!

Fire Emblem Skill asks | accepting

Veteran – Which FE games have you played and what was your favorite?

// I’ve played all of them (even the NES titles) at least once. Except FE12. I started it a couple of years ago and the prologue turned me off so I set it aside. I’ve even watched/read the BSFE chapters (for research, because I RP’d Camus for a time).

It’s easier for me to talk about my least favorites, which happen to be all of the GBA titles. I don’t DISLIKE them, but I don’t like them as much as all of the others. Valentia, Jugdral, and Tellius are the continents with special places in my heart though.

[maisonmarrakech]

My favourite spot in the world, missing you 💓. I may be fat now, but Marrakech is always close to my 💓. Keep you inspiration close to your heart, protect it always, as if carrying a delicate light ✨. Light is always stronger than darkness. Be the light ☀️regram @leriadyasmine , thank you, your Rida is so beautiful ✨ #bohostyle #bohodecor #marrakech #morocco #decor #travel #inspiration #happy #kaftan #moroccandesign #happiness #weekendvibes #positivevibes (at Marrakech) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsfe-Y9lIQ0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1xmma4dy3i46o

[coalcok3]

NEW INTRO (woahh)💥💥💥💥💥 (you should check this)

HELLO my name's Charcoal! but you can just call me Coal or Coke :3 A bit abt myself:

I use he/they/xe/🔥/💥/boom pronouns! Im omnisexual aroace and agender!! You can find all my labels at rentry.co/roundsharpgems !! Im also Spanish and my timezone is GMT+1

Im an artist !! i draw once every two solar eclipses /j

Im a minor, have it in mind !!! Im 14 and my bday is the 23rd of july, right when Leo season starts!!

Im autistic and have adhd!! Self diagnosed for now because diagnosis r too expensive,, Also i need tonetags, please use them around me! /nf

Also worth mentioning im not that active here, and only follow a few moots so if i always rb stuff of the same person thats why /silly. If u need to contact me for anything check my twitter! (@/coalflavorcoke)

funfact: you should DEFINITELY follow my bsfe !!!!!! (buns blog is heartl0ving !!)

More silly stuff (u can stop reading here if u want):

Im SO hyperfixated in object shows right now, specifically in certain characters and ships! (SHIELDY BOTO, cut gemstones both together and as separate characters, etc,,,)

I consider myself the #1 Shieldy fan :3

Most of my headcanons are projections, specially on Shieldy (ALL my shieldy hcs r projections) and Chainsaw (Love to make him suffer with my own problems /silly)

Basically anything else is at cutgemstones.carrd.co !!!!