Okay, let me tell you about this little project I did recently, trying to figure out the birthdays for Fire Emblem characters.
It kinda started randomly. I was playing one of the games, I forget which one exactly, maybe Three Houses, maybe an older one, and just got curious. You know, you get attached to these characters, and I thought it’d be neat to know when their supposed birthdays are. Like, maybe make a little personal calendar or something just for fun.
So, the first thing I did was just hop online. Typed stuff like “fire emblem character birthdays” into a search engine. Simple enough, right? Well, sorta.
I got a bunch of results pretty quick. Lots of fan sites, wikis mostly. That seemed like the main place people were gathering this info. But here’s the thing, Fire Emblem has been around for ages, right? So many games, so many characters.
Finding the Info
Digging through those wikis was the next step. Some were really well organized. They’d have character pages, and sometimes the birthday was listed right there in the info box. Easy peasy for those ones. I started jotting them down in a notepad file on my computer. Just the character name and the date.
But then, things got a bit messy.
- Which Game? Sometimes the same character appears in multiple games, maybe with slight differences. I had to be kinda careful to note which game the birthday was tied to, if it mattered.
- Missing Info: A lot of characters, especially from the older games, just didn’t seem to have official birthdays listed anywhere. I guess the creators didn’t think of it back then, or it just wasn’t published. So, my list started having gaps.
- Consistency Check: I tried to cross-reference between a couple of different fan wikis if I could. Sometimes you see slightly different info, though for birthdays it seemed mostly consistent if it was listed at all. You just gotta pick the one that looks most reliable or is cited more often.
Putting It Together
After spending a good chunk of time clicking through character pages and copying dates, my notepad file was getting pretty long. It was just a big raw list. Not super useful yet.
I decided the best way to organize it was probably by date. So, I opened up a simple spreadsheet program. Made two columns: one for the date (like Month Day) and one for the character name(s). Then I started transferring the info from my notepad, sorting it as I went.
Sorting was key. Putting them in calendar order made it much easier to see who had birthdays coming up. January 1st, then Jan 2nd, and so on. It took a while to manually sort them or use the spreadsheet’s sort function, making sure the dates were formatted right so the computer could understand the order.
I ended up with a decent list. Not totally complete, because like I said, lots of characters just don’t have known birthdays. And I mostly focused on the games I was most familiar with, didn’t try to be absolutely exhaustive for every single game ever released.
So yeah, that was basically it. Started with a simple question, did some online digging mainly through fan wikis, dealt with some missing info, and finally organized it into a sorted list. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, just a little personal project to satisfy my curiosity. The final list sits on my computer, kind of a fun little reference I made myself.
