The full interview, translated by the gang at SerenesForest, contains a lot more information how the game's characters and other DLC came together. ND: Perhaps a rescued Darios could be a main character in the next game? While we had a story for him being saved, we had to omit him to make other characters. We left Darios’s fate open-ended, so that his storyline could potentially continue. When the Chaos Dragon was revived, Darios fell into a void in space-time, but we intentionally made it unclear if he actually died. Usuda: At some point in time, we were thinking of having, say, a free History Map where Darios could be saved. With Fire Emblem Warriors, I feel like given the nature of the crossovers, they should have included. Hayashi: We also need to create Bond Conversations as well. Fire Emblem Warriors did feel a little too similar to other Musou games like Hyrule Warriors a few areas with little else different gameplay-wise to show for it, so hopefully game-specific. Fire Emblem Warriors is not just a great Warriors game. There’s a lot more dialogue and animations that we need to create. Usuda: It’s not so simple to make a playable character even if they already exist as a NPC in the main game. Hayashi: While we were trying to add all the characters we needed, we couldn’t find an opportunity to add Darios. Usuda: When we were writing the game’s main story, we were planning for Darios to be rescued via DLC… Originally, we considered removing a character from the main game to add Darios. ND: Why did you not make Darios a playable character? In one snippet, we also get to learn why Darios made an appearance, but wasn't playable.
Hiroya Usuda and Yosuke Hayshi discuss a number of things about various DLC, including character designs and costume inclusions. Nintendo Dream magazine has been interviewing the Fire Emblem Warriors dev team for a few issues now, and they've just wrapped up their interview series concerning the latest round of DLC for the game.