Image: Nintendo / Kotaku
The mobile game Fire Emblem Heroes is ready to go where the main series will not. Yesterday, the official Twitter account announced new summer alternatives – that is, alternative designs – for the main lords of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Players are becoming especially Dimitri, whose lovingly painted abs leave very little to the imagination.
This is expected. Whenever summer arrives, almost every big gacha game will take the opportunity to throw summer “highs” for its most popular characters. Sexual appeal is an inextricable part of how gacha games make money, and summer is the perfect excuse to hook up the most popular characters with revealing swimsuits. Fire Emblem Heroes is no exception. In previous years, summer banners (convocation events) have also featured swimsuit versions of characters from Fates, Awakening, Blazing Sword, Sacred Stones, and Binding Blade.
Not all games have good taste in swimsuit designs for women, but I’m glad to say that Edelgard, Altina, and Micaiah look great as summer alternatives. As for the boys, Dimitri and Claude seem to have lost their shirt, and the cloak does not hide anything. The tall ones, however, have a hilarious detail: none of the men have nipples. This is the case since the summer Xander debuted a few years ago. I laughed and waited for the developers to learn. They didn’t.
Listen, I’m grateful that Intelligent Systems is committed to gender equality by also censoring male nipples. The problem is that all humans are born with nipples and it seems much weirder to have smooth skin where the nipples should be. The next time developers release a summer skin, they should at least use strategic drops or accessories conveniently placed to imply the existence of male nipples. Come on, female character designers had already discovered this years ago.
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Despite Nintendo’s relatively low levels of investment in mobile gaming (the publisher closed Dragalia Lost earlier this year), Fire Emblem Heroes remains the most downloaded Fire Emblem game of all time. Although Three Houses on the Switch is the best-selling main game of all time, Destructoid reported that the number of downloads of Heroes is at least several times.
Like other famous IP-linked gacha games, Heroes doesn’t really compete with single-player games for gamers. In any case, the gacha game has become a powerful marketing tool for Nintendo for the upcoming game New Hopes a Switch. The mobile game currently includes time-limited banners for 15 characters from Three Houses in anticipation of the release of its sequel in June.