Fire Emblem: Dark Dragon (FE1) Scrapped Sketches/Bosses – 25th Anniversary

From the Making of Fire Emblem: 25 Years of Development Secrets 25th Anniversary art book comes some sketches that depicted unused bosses and events. Some of these were translated with and by VincentASM of serenesforest.net, with some other parts translated by me. Look forward to VincentASM’s in-depth analysis coming soon!

These are found on Page 324 and 325. A follow up post will come later which shows some scrapped scenes and dialogue, as well as the game’s original plan/proposal.

You can find these scans and much more from this book on the compilation post here.

As you can imagine, the process of doing all this (scanning, editing, translating in some cases, etc) took a lot of time, and I am unemployed… so if you like what I did, then…

Please donate! It helps fund future projects!

Enjoy!

An old map of the continent. Note some familiar names, and others unfamiliar.

The game was going to feature two dragons with names from mythology. Gaia and Neptune (Earth and Sea). It seems they went with Light and Dark later on though.

Limitations cut out what would have been pretty powerful scenes, it sounds like. One can imagine what else there may have been beyond Jagen’s death.

Some old class sketches. Some of the scribbles are hard to make out, but it is interesting to see the rough sketches.

The bottom of this page also featured a staff explanation (which the boss sketches refer to), which we translated in full below:

Staff Explanation

There were plans for Dark Dragon to use extravagant graphics in order to compete with [other games of] the very popular simulation genre on the PC.

At the time, considering the maximum capacity of a Famicom (NES) cartridge was 2 Mbit, to produce battle scenes during phases, all the events that had been designed, left and right-facing sprites during battle scenes, it was necessary to use a special type of MMC3 cartridge.

However, during development we learned the maximum capacity of a MMC3 cartridge was 1 Mbit; from there, we started heavily compacting everything to accommodate the halved capacity. As a result, we cut down the 2 boss dragons we originally planned to 1 and got rid of the event scene graphics.