Fire Emblem: Fates launches in Japan this week as Fire Emblem: If. As has become tradition, there’s also a new (and unsurprisingly fascinating) Q&A with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.
The whole thing is worth a read, but I’ve pulled some highlights.
This isn’t news, but apparently Fire Emblem: Awakening was planned to be the final game in the Fire Emblem series, since sales were down.
The development staff made “Reset? Bring it on!” t-shirts to reflect the “reset” mentality that comes with the Fire Emblem series, as players fear they have made a mistake a killed a character.
A big focus for Fates was beefing up the storyline, which most agreed didn’t really go anywhere in Awakening. While Awakening was an excellent game to play, I can’t tell you what happened.
The story was penned by famed manga writer Shin Kibayashi, who had planned to turn down the project, due to his schedule. Unfortunately for him, his daughter started playing the game.
The team also revealed why the game was originally dubbed “if”:
And finally, even though Fire Emblem introduced an easier “casual mode” a few games back, Fates takes this a step further and allows you to revive characters after a turn is over. Nintendo wants players who aren’t interested in strategy games to actually finish it this time around.
I can’t believe Fates isn’t coming here until 2016…
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5 responses to “Iwata’s Fire Emblem Interview Is Fascinating”
My biggest take-aways from the Iwata Asks were:
Yamagami – But even though we asked Kibayashi-san to write the scenario, I could tell it was going to be a lot of work. For example, in a battle, you could make it so you could use the same map, have the A army come from this side, and the B army come from the opposite side, you could just flip the map around, and we could economize that way. But in the end, we didn’t recycle much of anything.
Iwata – You just went and made a new map for each one.
Maeda – Right. And we couldn’t recycle any of the scenario.
Kibayashi – Right. The story is full of betrayal and the unexpected, so I want them to play through until the end, and I would be really happy if they played through several times. The deeper you dig, the more you will find. And there are parts that you come to realize were foreshadowing.
… This is making me feel a little bit more confident in relation to the fact it will (most likely) be releasing in two versions, and whether there will be enough different content in the two versions to warrant buying both.
There’s actually apparently three scenarios. Third one is DLC, coming in a month or two and apparently similar sized to Awakening on its own.
There’s also actually three physical editions of the game. They released a ‘special edition’ that comes with both scenarios, plus a code for the extra scenario. Seems like if that version comes out in English it’d be the version to get.
If you just bought one of them, you can get the other version’s scenario as DLC, don’t actually need to buy physical copies of both sides. Personally I suspect I probably will though, if only to continue to send Nintendo the signal that they need to keep making Fire Emblem.
I was actually aware of all of this, I’m just not terribly coherent most of the time.
What I meant to say, is that I won’t have a problem with buying the second scenario at all (even physically, which I suspect I will) if it so different to be basically a second game. Certainly no problem with the third scenario, where you don’t pick either side.
I know NA will not be getting the ‘special edition’ so I’m thinking it’s unlikely we will, but who knows?
Yeah, I thought so, just wanted anyone else reading to realize that too.
If each scenario is similar size to Awakening then the game must be enormous. Definitely have no issues with them breaking it into three parts like that. The extra scenarios are apparently 2000 yen each in Japan, which is about $25 AUD which seems like a fairly reasonable price for that level of content.
The game’s a long way out anyway, heaps of time for them to announce a special edition.
My anticipation for this game just went up a lot after reading this, sounds like it’ll have a Game of Thrones kind of storyline. The option of aligning with neither nation sounds very interesting.