Notes:

I’m not exactly sure why I decided to make this. I’ve never really played too much of Fates, so I’m not particularly attached to the characters or anything. In fact, very early on I debated swapping it over to a Xenoblade themed one, with the Agnus characters (Sena, Mio, Miyabi) vs the Keves ones (Eunie, Ethel). But I decided to stick with my original idea and use the Fates characters instead.

I do think the story is pretty decent. It’s engaging, and the characters all do things. I’m not sure how accurately they act to their game, but I think I got the jist of each of them. At one point the story was supposed to be much shorter, and Corrin wasn’t supposed to show up. It just would have been the 3 Hoshidan girls shrinking, Camilla picking them up, then that’s it. I’m happy I decided to add Corrin’s sequence though.

Speaking of which, I do really like Corrin’s entrance. It feels dramatic, and the kick that she does feels pretty cool. Also the way that she catches each of the boxes looks super satisfying. The drop kick was originally inspired by Bowser’s Fowrard Smash, where he does the same kind of jumping drop kick with both feet. But I did take inspiration from Cal’s Crosssaber dash attack in Jedi Survivor, and one of Tifa’s attacks in Dead Fantasy II. I think it looks really good, especially the part where she backflips after landing the hit.

Azura’s outfit is probably the biggest oddity here. Everyone else gets their normal clothes while she’s stuck in her armor break. For some reason, I used her armor break outfit while animating, and when the time came for me to switch her back to her normal dress for rendering, I just decided to leave it since her normal dress would have a ton of clipping issues. I do like her armor break outfit too, I think it looks nice. Though it is a bit out of place here.

Overall though I’d say the animation itself is pretty simple here. There’s really not too much going on. The movements are all pretty basic, and they get the job done, but not a whole lot more.

The voices play a bigger part in this one than they did in the previous ones I’ve done with voices. The characters talk to each other significantly more because of the focus on story being told through dialogue. I do wish that I had actually listened to Azura’s clips before writing her lines though, since wow, she has the most calm delivery on every single line. Hinoka’s voice sounds pretty good, although I am disappointed that she has so few speaking parts. And I think that I did a good job with Sakura’s voice, but wow do I really dislike how she sounds. Like, it fits her character, but she’s just kind of annoying to listen to. Corrin’s voice isn’t great either, where I feel like her voice doesn’t really fit the character. Camilla’s is great though. Which is nice considering she has by far the most lines.

Since these are their actual JP voices from the game though, they have a couple lines where they say each other's' names and stuff. So I tried to incorporate that in as best as I could. Like when Azura says “Sakura, are you okay?” she actually says Sakura’s name, which is cool. The rest of the line is probably completely unrelated, but that part is cool. Also Corrin’s name in Japanese is Kamui, so I wasn’t able to get clips of them saying Corrin.

Not quite as many sound effects in this one as before. You’ve got some simpler stuff like the footsteps, or when Hinoka punches the glass, but there’s not nearly as much combat, so not as much of a need for SFX.

Conclusion: I’m happy with how this one came out. The increased focus on telling a story makes for a neat video, and I think the animation does have some good parts. I think I definitely prefer Duel or Shrink Batons, but this one is still pretty good. It’s really long too, clocking in at like 3.5 minutes, which is easily my longest animation now. So again, I’m pretty happy with this one.