Fire Emblem Awakening is a great game, certainly one of the best this generation, but according to a recent interview with developer Intelligent Systems by Spanish magazine “Hobby Consolas”, Awakening could have been the last title in the long running series.
The interview was posted last month in April but popped up on SerenesForest (via OPRainfall). Talking about the sales of the series Fire Emblem Awakening co-producer Hitoshi Yamagami revealed that the series sales had been dropping and if the latest title didn’t do well the series could have been put to rest.
Question: Fire Emblem has had a long lifetime. Do you get the feeling it gets harder to release a new episode every time?
Yamagami: No doubt. Truth be told, sales are dropping. The sales manager of Nintendo, Mr. Hatano, told us that this could be the last Fire Emblem. Due to this progressive descend on sales, they told us that if the sales of this episode stayed below 250,000 copies, we’d stop working on the saga. I remember when I came back from the meeting and told the team “My God, what are we gonna do?! The end has come!”. Our reaction was clear: if this was going to be the last Fire Emblem, we had to put everything we always wanted to include. That’s how this new project was born!
Co-incidentally a similar statement was also made by Awakening’s director Kouhei Maeda in an interview with Nintendo Dream.
Maeda: Yes, we can say that now, but I have to admit there was a time during development when we thought “This might be the end of the FE series if Awakening doesn’t sell well”.
I’m currently playing Fire Emblem Awakening and am so glad that the game sold well, by well I mean over 500,000 both digitally and physically which is well over their 250,000 units minimum.The game could’ve sold even better if Nintendo bothered to promote it like their other titles like Mario or Zelda. Awakening is the best selling Fire Emblem title since Blazing Sword from 10 years ago which sold more than 600,000 units.
Fire Emblem Awakening is a 3DS exclusive SRPG title released on April 19, 2012 in Japan, February 4, 2013 in North America and April 19 in Europe. The game received rave reviews scoring 92/100 on Metacritic making it one of the highest rated games of the year.
Hopefully Nintendo now knows there is still a market for Fire Emblem and keep making more.
