Histories of the Emblem
by Cassandra Ramos and Joshua Carpenter
The Fire Emblem series has witnessed a radical reversal in fortune over the course of the past generation. At the beginning of the 3DS era, things looked bleak for the series as the two DS remakes that constituted Intelligent System’s most recent efforts were met with limited interest. Fast forward six years and now Fire Emblem is one of Nintendo’s crown jewels; garnering big media pushes and spawning mobile games and spinoffs. With the main series poised to make a return to a television-compatible platform for the first time in over a decade, it seems like an appropriate time to take stock of where the series is at and speculate a little about the future of Fire Emblem on the Switch.
We start by looking back at the last time Fire Emblem graced television screens, Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. After exploring those inexorably-linked games, we take a tour through the 3DS Fire Emblem catalog: Awakening, Fates, and Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. With this extensive grounding in the current state of the series, we look forward to where Fire Emblem is headed in the future on the Switch. Now, let’s return to the GameCube and Wii era, the last time a mainline Fire Emblem graced a home console.
It’s sort of odd that I really enjoy fire emblem, and many of the games you two discuss I haven’t played. I’ve played 3 games in the series, and so many more are waiting for me.
I really hope the Tellius games get some sort of rerelease on the Switch, those two are my absolute favorites in the series. Love the story and characters and it has such an interesting mix of different types of maps. It would be great to be able to play those without putting down so much money for a used copy.
I’m hoping they’re added with a virtual console, or even a port/remake of them combined for the Switch. They’re really hard to get otherwise, and it sucks that it’s this way.
My memory is that I dropped $50 for one of the Tellius games and $75 for the other (don’t remember which was which) and don’t regret it. They weren’t perfect, but they were still some of the better games I’ve played in the past few years.
Some sort of Virtual Console/rerelease would be faster. It’ll take many years for them to get to Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn at the rate they’re going with remakes.
And at the expense of sounding selfish, I’d rather they remake the games that weren’t localized first.
I’m with you there. I’d kill for a remake of Genealogy of the Holy War or Thracia 776.
Enjoyable read. Thanks to the team for sharing your insights and opinions. I pretty much bought a Game Cube for Fire Emblem, but I never got into the DS titles. I am looking forward to seeing the Switch version.