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Creating Fire Emblem: Awakening

Development

Fire Emblem: Awakening — Game Cover

Following the release of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, the series was seeing a decrease in overall sales across the globe. It was because of this that Nintendo gave notice that unless Fire Emblem: Awakening sold more than 250,000 units the series would come to a close; canceled. The ultimatum from Nintendo created a panic for the team as they clearly wanted to continue developing games for the series.

Once development did begin the team consisted of Kouehi Maeda and Genki Yokota as directors. Toru Narihiro and Hitoshi Yamagami as producers. Toshiyuki Kusakihara and Yūsuke Kozaki as artists. Kouhei Maeda, Nami Komuro, Masayuki Horikawa, Yuichi Kitaoka, Sou Mayumi and Shuntaro Ashida as the writers. Hiroki Morishita and Rei Kondoh were the music composers.

Two new team members were brought in for a specific purpose. Kusakihara was to bring a fresh perspective to the series and Kozaki was to create an art style that North America would enjoy. Whenever they met they had long meets concerning the various parts of the game, so long in fact that Kusakihara compared it to the legend of Urashima Taro.

Proposal first came after Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem was made for the Nintendo DS and development began for Awakening to be made developed for the Nintendo 3DS in 2010 after Yokota was finishing his work on Xenoblade Chronicles. The first year of development went slow because Yamagami was busy organizing the structure of the game. After he finished he gave the main production duties to Yokota.

In terms of priority the first thing to receive full attention was gameplay. First they needed to decide how the map would switch between 16x16 and 24x24 pixel characters depending on the camera’s overhead position. They decided to use hardware-scaling so that frame rates were kept consistent between the switch. The focus on maps were designed to keep it plot-driven and free for players to move. They also noted that since they also had to cater to the western audience they included a first-person view during battles also meant to show off the 3DS’ 3D effects.

Maeda being responsible for the original scenario created the rough outline for the events of each chapter in detail; the true identity of Marth was one of the first to be thought of which the other plot twists to be worked on later. Two story elements they felt they needed to keep was the love and bonds between characters. They accomplished this by creating special voice overs and visuals during confession sequences, personalizing character backstories and making sure they all had personalities that fit.

Book: The Art of Fire Emblem: Awakening

Character graphics on the map went from being generic; character equipment and class were similar, to the decision to make sure each character had individual characteristics. Included in the character design was unique expressions which gave characters a greater emotional range, especially during dramatic scenes.

Under supervision from Kamikaze Douga, Studio Anima worked on the cutscene animations taking inspiration from Taiga drama scenes to make the world come alive through grandeur and spectacle, especially during crucial plot moments.

Due to Awakening being developed for the 3DS which was still in it’s final stages of development the team knew they couldn’t plan precisely what ideas could be included. One example of not knowing what couldn’t be included was the number of bones that they could use per character. They intentionally removed the bones for the ankles and feet, but after leaning that the CPU was powerful enough to have included those bones. They decided to just keep it omitted since they could do it next time, if Awakening succeeded.

Concepts were tossed around with many wanting new elements added, one concept that was odd was to use Mars as a setting or use a modern setting. They eventually decided that they would focus on attracting players rather than alienating them with a completely new setting. This compromise led to the team taking elements from every single Fire Emblem game to date and culminating them into Awakening. Of course, this led to the problem of the difficulty of implementing each element while keeping them balanced with one another. Throughout development more ideas and concepts were being added and though the overall workload increased they continued to press ahead internally naming the game, Fire Emblem Fin: The Children from the Brink.

Though the team kept that positive attitude throughout development, they also had their own disagreements which led to debates. One debate was centered around the marriage system in which any character could be wed. Though some aspects were unanimously agreed upon others weren’t, one such aspect was Kusakihara’s suggestion that characters kiss at the end of each romance, this was vetoed and never made it into the game. Another was the cursor which originally had been triangular was suggested to be changed to a pointing hand. The most controversial for both developers and players was the introduction of the ‘casual mode’ which came from New Mystery of the Emblem. This was hotly debated as staff, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems didn’t want it in the game. Yamagami and others effectively defended it under the premise that modern gamers didn’t want to have to invest more time than necessary because a character they wanted alive, had died.

It was noted that the team made mention that throughout the history of Fire Emblem which was known for it’s sometimes absurd difficulty (Gaiden), this was the first Fire Emblem to conform to the overall image Nintendo presented itself as, ‘easy to play and user-friendly’.

Reception

Nintendo Prepaid Card Illustration Yusuke Kozaki — The Art of Fire Emblem Awakening

Prior to it’s release the development team made sure that the multiple aesthetics and gameplay elements would not only appeal to the Japanese market, but also to their western audience. They had independent video game localization company 8–4 and Nintendo of America handle localization. The western release had both English and Japanese voice tracks. Awakening was bundled with the 3DS for North America and Europe, with the European version also receiving the Nintendo 3DS XL model as part of the bundle. All of this work plus the work done by the development team in making this the ultimate Fire Emblem led to the astonishingly worldwide acclaim upon release.

Awakening sold amazingly well, especially the Japanese version with it being the fastest selling entry in the series since detailed weekly tallies began. It’s initial stock sold through 81.63% causing some stores to run out of copies with Japanese sales tracker Media Create attributing the initial high sales to Nintendo’s promotional campaign and five year wait between releases. The demand for Awakening in Japan was so high that Nintendo’s pre-order website crashed due to the overwhelming volume of people trying to buy it. Because of this and Japanese law prohibiting the game as a product other than a limited edition would have been unlawful, Nintendo was forced to suspend reopening pre-orders after the initial sales period, with fans complaining vocally.

The western market was equally lucrative as the first sales month had 180,000 units being sold along with 63,000 units of sales being eShop downloads. This made it the best ever first month sales for the Fire Emblem series in North America. The sales numbers continued to rise through the next few months increasing sales for units to 240,000 in April and 20,000 for eShop sales.

As of December 2014, Awakening became the best selling Fire Emblem title in the west selling 1.9 million copies worldwide and being noted by players as being their benchmark for Fire Emblem quality.

Artwork of Robin and Grima from Awakening

IGN’s Audrey Drake declared Awakening “the most fluid and stunning strategy RPG experience available on a portable, and features the best storytelling and production value of any 3DS game to date”.

Electronic Gaming Monthly’s Ray Carsillo while sharing Parish’s opinion on the lack of a restart option, called Awakening “ probably the best Fire Emblem to come to the States yet”.

Eurogamer’s Rich Stanton, giving the game a perfect score, called it “a special game”, praising its story themes and how it made him care about his characters.

GameTrailers decided that the game has “[taken] positive strides forward with new additions like enhancements to the social system and battle mechanics and the series’ established formula is all the better for it”.

GameSpot’s Heidi Kemps was mixed about the interface and multiplayer functions but still naming it the best in the series .

Polygon’s Alexa Ray Corriea noted that the development team “added just enough to the time-tested Fire Emblem formula to bolster its challenges without cutting away its roots”.

Received an aggregated score of 92/100 on Metacritic, GameSpot listing it on the best games on the 3DS reaching 2nd place on GameTrailers, IGN adding it to number 2 on their top 25 Nintendo 3ds games and 21 on their top 125 Nintendo games of all time and Slant magazine staff rating it the 11th best video game of 2013.

From it’s release, it received many awards.

Spike Video Game Awards 2013 Best RPG category.

IGN’s Best of 2013 for the best 3DS Strategy and Story categories.

It also received nominations for Destructoids 2013 Game of the Year, Best Role-Playing Game, Best Story and Best Soundtracks awards.

GameSpots’ Game of the Year 2013 for the Nintendo 3DS category.

Game Developers Choice Awards 2014 for Best Handheld/Mobile Game category.

Overall the game was praised as the best of the series even though there were some criticisms they were still minor criticisms that related more to how an individual may feel about the matter.

This article is part of the Fire Emblem: Development and Reception series

If you’re looking for more articles like this check out my publication: @Gaminglinkmedia or @ryanvelasco.

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Twitter: @ryanavelasco
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References

Gaming
Gamelink
Fire Emblem
Nintendo
Game Design

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I love gaming especially old-school jRPGs, I love them to this day. Now I’ve come to love automating everything and placing things into databases. Super fun.

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