Speaking with a Spanish games magazine in April, producer Hitoshi Yamagami said that if Fire Emblem: Awakening hadn't reached sales targets, it would have been the final game in the beloved series.
When asked about the opportunity to continue developing Fire Emblem games after so many years, Yamagami told Hobby Consolas "Truth be told, sales are dropping."
The sales manage of Nintendo, Mr. Hatano, told us that htis could be the last Fire Emblem. Due to this progressive descent in 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 in. That's how this new project was born.
Having played upwards of 100 hours of Awakening since its release, Fire Emblem's possible demise seems abhorrent to me. Awakening added elements that serve not only to draw the player further into the narrative but also to develop much deeper relationships with each character. Certainly the fan art for Tharja (slightly NSFW link) speaks volumes about the level of dedication people have to the frail little digital soldiers on 3DS.
Sales of Fire Emblem: Awakening hit twice as much as was required by Nintendo in Japan and have even come close to satisfying that goal in America alone. What a relief! I haven't always been a huge fan of Fire Emblem, but with the announcement that Nintendo and Atlus would be teaming up on the next entry in the series shows tacticians everywhere have a lot to look forward to.
