Gen 2 Female Oifey keeps the mustache. No ifs, ands, or buts.
I'm willing to compromise and say it's an accessory that most characters have to buy but is free and automatically equipped as an example for Oifey.
Either they're customizable but already have a personality and dialogue that the player can't define (Awakening, Fates) or they get dialogue choices but the player can't customize their appearance (Three Houses).
I always thought the difference was due to cutscene use. The faces of Robin and Corrin are never shown in cutscenes, as Robin is always hooded and Corrin's features are either in first-person or shown from the shoulder down. Byleth, Shez, and Alear, don't have that luxury, so they instead make them...something else. I could be completely wrong though!
Interestingly enough, there was a Reddit post a week or two ago claiming that most of the Avatars aren't really Avatars. I think there's validity to that, and us treating them like that actually hurts their own character. For example, would Byleth be more accepted if they were treated as simply the main character and not an Avatar? Would Ike still be as loved if in a remake we could choose between Male Ike and Female Ike? These are silly questions I don't have the answer to...nor do I care to answer TBH.
(Although as a side-note, if we take the definition of Avatar as "an incarnation in human form," only Robin, Byleth, and Shez meet the criteria, to varying degrees depending on the story and original intent of their creators, for lack of a better word.)
I don’t see anything mechanically or game design wise or art wise that can be carried over in an FE4 Remake and the characters are so shallow that they would all require massive expansion. There isn’t a skeleton here, there’s like three bones.
I've played roughly five minutes of FE 4 before having to "nope" out due to the age of the game, but I've read a lot of the Oosawa manga and have seen enough gameplay to know that your first sentence is very wrong to the minds of most people who have even a
shred experience with FE 4. There's a LOT game design-wise that could carry over! FE 4 is one of the most unique FE games and experiences out there. Huge maps that deploy your
entire army, having to buy/sell weapons to trade them, each unit having their own amount of gold, all of these things that are unique to FE 4. One of those is a big change, but the lot of them together? That's a MASSIVE carryover that makes the game still stand out 30 years later. The marriage mechanic alone is a big enough bone. If you liked the child mechanics in Awakening and Fates, or even the Engage mechanic in Engage, those all came from Genealogy.*
Art is a different beast, although I still think you're wrong. Genealogy's artwork was strong enough and detailed enough for characters to come wholesale from
the game 30 years ago, to F
ire Emblem's first TCG looking pretty much the same,
to coming to Cipher looking the same,
to coming to Heroes looking the same (
and with the same artist from Cipher at times),
to looking the same in Engage. Even characters who are not yet in Heroes but were in Cipher like Edain have
kept their looks from
30 years ago. (Well, closer to 20 years when her card came out, but the point still stands!)
The only game I can think of where the art design hasn't carried over into a remake was Echoes. Alm in
Gaiden,
Awakening, and then
Echoes are three VERY different art directions! (And the Alm from Awakening is MASSIVELY underappreciated!)
As for calling FE 4's characters shallow...in my - again, VERY LIMITED - experience, there's a nugget of truth in there, but you're exaggerating it to another level. The replacement characters are indeed a tad shallower from what I've seen, but that's due to the nature of being a replacement character. They don't have the space or inherent story importance to be as nuanced as some of the other Gen 2 characters, like Ares or Seliph or Lief. But the Gen 1 characters have quite a bit of depth as far as Fire Emblem games with limited supports per playthrough and conversations go. Could Gen 2 be fleshed out a bit more? Absolutely! But that doesn't mean that there's nothing already there.
If you want a dark story like FE4… Just write another dark story?
OR - and hear me out - we remake our dark story that not a lot of people played, so while they're waiting on our new dark story, they can enjoy this old one that they haven't experienced because it wasn't widely accessible! And then, after the team that finishes remaking this old dark story, they can move onto making a new light story, so we don't just have one type of story!
*Yes, even the Engage mechanic. The
director and producer of Engage explicitly site Genealogy as the origin point for that idea.
Nakanishi:
The idea of the Emblems came up when we were discussing the core gameplay of this title. During those discussions, the marriage systems in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Fire Emblem Awakening, and Fire Emblem Fates were brought up. In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the marriage system allows the characters to get married and have children who inherit the abilities of the parent characters. Players can come up with their own pairs and develop those child characters. However, you had to play through the game to a certain point first before you could get married and have children, so it took a very long time until players could see the outcome of the pair they chose.
Yokota:
Even if you think later, “Actually, pairing these two together instead might be better”, you pretty much have to go back to the beginning and start over.
Nakanishi:
So, to let players enjoy this "pairing" gameplay more casually, we came up with this idea of "Emblems".