– or whatever it’s going to be called. Would it be heretical to say that I think “Genealogy of the Holy War” is a clunky subtitle and wouldn’t miss it if it got axed?

I’ve not been prompted in any way, but reading the thoughts of others on FE remakes and (re)playing through some of the older games recently has gotten me pondering the subject of how my favorite Kaga era game might best turn out when it inevitably gets remade. Truth be told I don’t have many opinions on potential remakes for FE5 and FE6 other than that their mechanics get a little cleaned-up and diversified, their worldbuilding tied better into the other games of their respective settings, and their casts made noticeably gayer. I do however have quite a number of thoughts where FE4 is concerned, so here’s some self-indulgent rambling on the subject. Needless to say this is an Avatar-free contemplation.

This got extremely long.

Those Weird Mechanics

Shadows of Valentia provides a useful model for gauging just how many mechanical changes we might expect in any upcoming remakes. I imagine most of FE4′s gameplay quirks will be left intact, with any changes made with the intention of speeding up gameplay and making it feel less archaic.

• The giant maps – I can’t properly envision how these could be broken up into more typically-sized maps especially with regards to how that would impact story presentation, so just keep the save feature FE4 already has and it’s good to go. In the likely event of Classic and Casual modes I could see the original save version going to Casual and a suspend-style save (ironically) going to Classic. Incidentally, although this game has Valkyria which doesn’t mesh well with Casual mode as a concept that didn’t stop them from keeping resurrection fountains in FE15.
• The bad map designs – FE15 also preserved the ships, deserts, and swamps of the original much to everyone’s annoyance, so I’m not expecting much difference here. Really aside from the deserts of Chapter 5 and 7 though I don’t see too much wrong with any of the maps, though I do always leave a second group of units behind in Chapters 2 and 4 to charge into the second halves of those maps and make speedy backtracking less essential. Maybe suggest that strategy in dialogue at some point, especially if infantry users get singled out as good candidates to partially counteract the effects of the original Horse Emblem. The game already does that with Arden in the Prologue….
• The lack of sharing – Both inventory and money, that is. Remove some of the clunkiness in the system by allowing thieves and lovers to give out specific amounts of money rather than dumping their entire bank accounts at once. Some of the inherent silliness in item management in this game might be alleviated by allowing lovers and possibly also siblings to freely trade on the battlefield or at least be able to take items from each other’s supplies back at the base castle. Ditto other characters who can support, but I’ll get to those later.
• The weapons – Aside from doing something to make tome types less blatantly unbalanced and something to make non-brave axe axes suck less I can’t think of much. Forging and combat arts in Shadows of Valentia were fairly interesting and would add additional layers to weapon inheritance here, so that’d be something to think about. It’d be interesting if some of FE5′s changes to the class mechanics were retroactively applied here, ex. if heroes got axes on promotion to make them not objectively inferior to swordmasters, or if high priests (but can we call them saints, or bishops if the enemy class gets renamed? I hate “high priest”) got light magic instead of anima. Granted the latter would require that light tomes other than Deirdre’s Aura be available in Gen 1 – I fully approve – and it would kill Forseti!Coirpre unless he got to be a special case…but does anyone actually care about Forseti!Coirpre?
• The poorly balanced/implemented skills (not Pursuit) – I’m dubious about the overall value of Charge (a.k.a. Accost), as there are already two other skills that allow a unit to make a second attack and this one also suffers from an overly complicated activation and the potential to do more harm than good on squishier units. I could see Miracle being converted to the version from Tellius and beyond, which would be less broken in the arena and less desirable in general (sorry, Finn). I really want to see Nihil also get updated to its Tellius version and negate all enemy skills – would be quite welcome against several lategame bosses in Gen 2. Finally, the remake should borrow from FE5 and allow Sol, Luna, and Astra to be used by anyone, to give Dew and Chulainn more reason to pass on their genes.
• Pursuit – It’s as centralizing to the baby-making as Galeforce is in Awakening, only ridiculous since it’s a standard gameplay mechanic everywhere else in the series. I approve of what one of the fanmade hacks did with the skill: units can double at a certain Speed threshold normally, and Pursuit reduces that threshold. To still have it be an attractive skill for inheritance the difference between the two could be pretty large, say Fates’s 5 AS above the enemy without vs. the original game’s 1 AS above with.
• The accidental lovers – As FE15 added C-A supports where once there were none at all it wouldn’t surprise me to see them show up in a remake of FE4. Perhaps love growth will work about the same as it does in the original, but the player is required to trigger three (or four – S supports do actually make sense here) conversations available at certain point levels in order to pair up units. No longer will Silvia have to be sent off to die because she got cozy with someone when the player wasn’t looking. Also, with how chapters work in this game I don’t see much point in restricting support conversations to one per chapter, though they could do like Shadows of Valentia and restrict some of the later ones to only trigger past a certain chapter (or castle seize in some cases, like Lachesis mid-Chapter 3) which would allow them to better follow the story. 
• The wasted inheritances – Ah, breeding meta. The only really bad thing about FE4′s take on the baby making is that so many elements of Gen 1 characters get squandered on the arbitrary limitations of what their kids can and cannot inherit. I’ve got several ideas for workarounds here, some more radical than others. One would be to allow the kids to inherit anything they’d be capable of using even if they have to wait to promote to do so, so Azelle!Lana could get Rescue from Edain, Arthur could get swords from his father, and Ulster could get axes from Lex if they go with my earlier suggestion of giving heroes axes. A wilder idea would be to vary some of the sons’ base classes depending on some of their fathers: Finn!Diarmuid as a lance knight, Azelle!Lester as a mage -> mage knight, Lex!Ulster as a fighter, Claud!Arthur as anything that can use staves, etc. Febail would always be an archer of course, it’s hard to envision Ced changing to anything else, and I don’t think Patty could be changed because of her unique utility, but aside from that I prefer this approach to any kind of reclassing.
• The substitutes – I should start by saying that I don’t really care for  how the original game treats the subs; they feel disconnected from the story compared to the characters they replace, and they’ve only got a few distinguishing scenes that are mostly quirky and/or lacking in impact. I therefore propose a radical change: make the subs not subs. Instead, have “generic” version of the Gen 2 kids if you don’t pair or kill off their mothers, making only vague references to their unidentified fathers (not so different from the original game or Awakening, really) and having them inherit solely from their mothers à la Maiden!Lucina. Perhaps they could get some of the skills the subs have in the original game to make them marginally less terrible, ex. Pursuit for Lester and Paragon for Tine and Coirpre. Even so there’d still be a strong incentive to pair up units in Gen 1, especially if the inheritances were less wasted as noted above, but it wouldn’t require throwing in awkward replacement units if you don’t. The former subs should be differentiated from their counterparts and made characters in their own right, with some having different classes, skills, and looks (esp. the replacements for Ayra’s kids) and all having new recruitment scenarios and new backstories where appropriate. They wouldn’t all have to be recruitable in one playthrough – I assume Iuchar and Iucharba will still be mutually exclusive, so something like that – as that would balloon the Gen 2 roster to a potential 38 units…but on the other hand if they compensated for that with increased enemy density in lategame I wouldn’t complain. It would heighten the feeling of an epic clash against a massive empire and make better use of those large maps while creatively dealing with the sub issue. Lene and Laylea might be a problem, but there are enough examples of workarounds to the problem of multiple dancers at this point in the series that I’m sure they could come up with something. 

Those pairings

I have no objection to how Gen 1 handles shacking up its characters and no stake in any of the various shipping debates stirred up by them. Lewyn/Erinys being made hard canon would only matter to me mechanically, and unless they give Lachesis a unique mechanic that allows her to pair off with two different men the remake couldn’t fully reconcile itself with FE5 canon anyway. When it comes to the decision to either add conversations for all potential pairings or limit pairings only to the “predestined” ones that already have content written for them I tend to side with adding more if only for the sake of gameplay variety. I would of course like to see supports that don’t involve making babies, whether they be platonic, familial, or subtextually homoerotic (textual would be better of course, but for Gen 1 I’m not seeing it). Examples of those are already in the original game: Azelle/Lex, Quan/Finn, Ethlyn/Deirdre, Dew/Jamke, and so on. Make some good C-A conversations (possibly with gifted items or stat boosts because that’s how FE4 rolls) and, er, “companion” crits and Gen 1 should be good to go on the support front.

Gen 2, on the other hand, would seriously benefit from getting its diverse freak on. Similar to how I’ve side-eyed FE2 Leon described by translators as Valbar’s “sworn brother” and wondered based on his fabulous remake self who was sidestepping that subject, there’s material to go off already there. Diarmuid and by extension Tristan have no lover conversations or boosted love growth which implies a lack of interest in women, and though I’ve never seen it talked about the current translation patch implies that Fee is bisexual in the conversation she has with her pegasus (not that I have a save of Chapter 8 in front of me to check, but it definitely raised an eyebrow). On top of that, wouldn’t it fit the message of the narration’s rumination on the descendants of the Crusaders fighting each other to be just a bit less concerned about biological inheritance? Though I doubt they’d ever seriously take that angle especially given how FE15 dealt with (or didn’t) the misogyny of its setting, there are a bunch of Gen 2 women and a handful of Gen 2 men (to say nothing of the subs) who often have nothing to inherit and nothing to do but be dutiful wives or sisters or tag along with their senior male relatives. Same-sex S supports for anyone not an Avatar may still be a pipe dream, but at least there’s no mechanical reason for Gen 2 to stick to superficially tidy heterosexuality.

The inevitable DLC

Thracia content is best kept to a Thracia remake, so the clear pick for a DLC/postgame campaign is undoubtedly the reconquest of Agustria that’s already written into the epilogue. It’d be a good characterization opportunity for Ares, who along with his father currently has the short end of the stick of both generations’ lord trio development-wise, plus whoever comes along with him: Nanna, Diarmuid, Lene, their subs, and possibly Leif and Finn and others. Depending on the roster they might also get to expand upon what’s been going in Verdane and Silesse as well, and even if it’s one FE4-size map where you’re thrown against some forgettable bureaucrats or something there’d be plenty of good character moments to make it worthwhile. Shadows of Valentia made its new postgame story have actual content, so it wouldn’t be out of the question to ask for it here. Will Ares make a decent king? Who will Nanna choose between her surrogate brother and her first cousin who looks exactly like her mother’s incestuous crush? Will Diarmuid come out of the closet? Will we finally learn what happened to Lachesis (while still keeping it ambiguous as to whom she did and did not canonically sleep with)? Will there be a callback joke about the mysterious Light of Zwei around the Tower of Blaggi? I want it.

(I don’t know how they’d pull off the traditional grinding DLC maps with no monsters. Arena map free-for-alls? Not that this game needs EXP grinding unless they throw in overclasses again or something.)

And all the rest

I’ve not much else to add that I’d like to see aside from general polish, added characterization, and the return of full voice acting provided it’s of the same quality as FE15. Gen 2′s story beats may deserve a second pass in some places and Miletos in particular needs to be…anything…but all in all as long as Agustria gets some closure I’ve no major complaints. Here’s to hoping at least some of all this becomes a reality