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Booting up Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave had me feeling nostalgic. Fire Emblem as it is now would’ve been surreal to six-year-old me, who only knew “Marth and Roy from Smash.” Back then, Fire Emblem was still a niche series in the west and many of us had no idea who they were. Little did I know, these swordsmen would just be two of many Fire Emblem heroes to join the fighting game series, and Fire Emblem games would reach mainstream popularity.

I discovered Fire Emblem in the early 2000s when I first started playing Super Smash Bros. Melee on our clunky big-screen TV in the basement. It was my favorite game to play with my cousins outside of having them watch me play single-player games like Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. We played Melee for hours that summer of 2001, eventually unlocking Marth, the blue-haired prince from the 1990’s Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. After that, we unlocked Roy, the protagonist of 2002’s Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade. 

Marth and Roy do have voicelines, but they are all in Japanese. I mostly remember just the grunting sounds they would make from swinging around their swords, anyway. Maybe it’s because of that that the Smash fandom invented personalities for both fighters in fanfics and comics until their games were released in the west and set things straight. Link also showed up in many of these creations, maybe because he’s the only other Super Smash swordsman from that era. 

Most of the fan-made stories that I remember from that time came from Fanfiction.net and Deviantart. CallistoHime, the author of fanfics like Time Cannot Erase, admits that she filled in the blanks because she had little to go off of besides Marth’s Smash Bros. profile. One artist I followed back then, Katie Tiedrich, also made a comic about the gap between her interpretation of Marth and the real thing. These are just a few examples from what was a relatively small community in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Nintendo Magazine cites Marth and Roy’s inclusion in Smash Bros. as a driving reason to release the Fire Emblem games in the west, starting with Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, where Roy was the protagonist. In an Iwata Asks interview, Fire Emblem producer Tohru Narihiro even thanked Masahiro Sakurai for his work on Smash Bros. because of the fighting game franchise’s impact on the international popularity of the previously niche RPG series.

“Thanks to your work, the reputations of Marth and Ike have grown beyond our expectations,” he said (2008’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl had already come out when he made this comment, and 2005’s Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance protagonist Ike was included in the roster instead of Roy).

Since the addition of Marth and Roy in Melee, adding new Fire Emblem characters to Smash has become somewhat of a tradition for the fighting game series. As mentioned earlier, Ike joined the roster in Brawl. Then, 2014’s Smash 4 not only saw Roy return to the roster, but it also added Fire Emblem Awakening’s Lucina and Robin. 2018’s Ultimate really reflects how popular Fire Emblem was becoming, including all aforementioned characters and then also adding Awakening’s Chrom, Fates’ Corrin, and Three Houses’ Byleth. 

As Fire Emblem’s presence in the Smash roster has grown, so has the popularity (and quality!) of the games. The first Fire Emblem to be localized for international audiences, The Blazing Blade, released in 2003. Several years (and Fire Emblem releases) later, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon would come out in 2009, and the fanbase outside Japan finally got to see Marth’s backstory. Rather than the moody prince we imagined, Marth is a kindhearted leader who is looking for allies to assist him in taking back his kingdom from an evil dragon. 

At the time, I was less enthusiastic about learning about Marth and more locked into Shadow Dragon’s gameplay of training units and strategically placing them on the map during battle. Marth was the catalyst for me to pick up my first Fire Emblem game, but the gameplay itself is what I fell in love with. It still wasn’t good enough to rocket the series into critical acclaim, but thanks to the growing popularity of Fire Emblem, we steadily got more and more games in the series. 

Looking back, Shadow Dragon isn’t even what I would consider “one of the good ones” when it comes to Fire Emblem. The five Fire Emblem games that came out between Melee and Shadow Dragon–The Binding Blade, The Blazing Blade, The Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, and Radiant Dawn–didn’t garner much attention from the mainstream. The shift from niche to noteworthy happened when Fire Emblem: Awakening introduced a fully fleshed out support system and life-sim gameplay that hooked me on its characters. 

Then, Fire Emblem: Three Houses further improved this formula with a branching narrative that actually felt cohesive and morally complicated–so much so that players still fight about which of the titular three houses was “right” years later. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave refines this formula even farther, with a way to easily swap between the stories of its four protagonists. 

This isn’t to say that all of the games have been hits since Awakening. I wanted to love Fates, which also featured a branching narrative with DLC branches that you needed to buy, but the conflict was black and white without much room for moral interpretation and Corrin was pacifistic to a fault. FE3H was essentially everything I wanted from Fates but didn’t get.

However, at this point, Fire Emblem sells itself. In recent years, Fire Emblem: Three Houses was given the Player’s Voice Award at The Game Awards 2020. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is equally if not more ambitious, earning a 9/10 in GameSpot’s review and an 89 on Metacritic. It’s now common to find players who have discovered the series through the sheer push of its own popularity rather than piggybacking off the advertising of a popular fighting game. 

It’s been over 25 years since Marth and Roy debuted in Melee and, even now, watching how much Fire Emblem blew up over it is an overwhelming feeling.

“}]] [[{“value”:”Booting up Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave had me feeling nostalgic. Fire Emblem as it is now would’ve been surreal to six-year-old me, who only knew “Marth and Roy from Smash.” Back then, Fire Emblem was still a niche series in the west and many of us had no idea who they were. Little did I know, these swordsmen would just be two of many Fire Emblem heroes to join the fighting game series, and Fire Emblem games would reach mainstream popularity.

I discovered Fire Emblem in the early 2000s when I first started playing Super Smash Bros. Melee on our clunky big-screen TV in the basement. It was my favorite game to play with my cousins outside of having them watch me play single-player games like Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. We played Melee for hours that summer of 2001, eventually unlocking Marth, the blue-haired prince from the 1990’s Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. After that, we unlocked Roy, the protagonist of 2002’s Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade. 

Marth and Roy do have voicelines, but they are all in Japanese. I mostly remember just the grunting sounds they would make from swinging around their swords, anyway. Maybe it’s because of that that the Smash fandom invented personalities for both fighters in fanfics and comics until their games were released in the west and set things straight. Link also showed up in many of these creations, maybe because he’s the only other Super Smash swordsman from that era. 

Most of the fan-made stories that I remember from that time came from Fanfiction.net and Deviantart. CallistoHime, the author of fanfics like Time Cannot Erase, admits that she filled in the blanks because she had little to go off of besides Marth’s Smash Bros. profile. One artist I followed back then, Katie Tiedrich, also made a comic about the gap between her interpretation of Marth and the real thing. These are just a few examples from what was a relatively small community in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Nintendo Magazine cites Marth and Roy’s inclusion in Smash Bros. as a driving reason to release the Fire Emblem games in the west, starting with Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, where Roy was the protagonist. In an Iwata Asks interview, Fire Emblem producer Tohru Narihiro even thanked Masahiro Sakurai for his work on Smash Bros. because of the fighting game franchise’s impact on the international popularity of the previously niche RPG series.“Thanks to your work, the reputations of Marth and Ike have grown beyond our expectations,” he said (2008’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl had already come out when he made this comment, and 2005’s Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance protagonist Ike was included in the roster instead of Roy).

Since the addition of Marth and Roy in Melee, adding new Fire Emblem characters to Smash has become somewhat of a tradition for the fighting game series. As mentioned earlier, Ike joined the roster in Brawl. Then, 2014’s Smash 4 not only saw Roy return to the roster, but it also added Fire Emblem Awakening’s Lucina and Robin. 2018’s Ultimate really reflects how popular Fire Emblem was becoming, including all aforementioned characters and then also adding Awakening’s Chrom, Fates’ Corrin, and Three Houses’ Byleth. 

As Fire Emblem’s presence in the Smash roster has grown, so has the popularity (and quality!) of the games. The first Fire Emblem to be localized for international audiences, The Blazing Blade, released in 2003. Several years (and Fire Emblem releases) later, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon would come out in 2009, and the fanbase outside Japan finally got to see Marth’s backstory. Rather than the moody prince we imagined, Marth is a kindhearted leader who is looking for allies to assist him in taking back his kingdom from an evil dragon. 

At the time, I was less enthusiastic about learning about Marth and more locked into Shadow Dragon’s gameplay of training units and strategically placing them on the map during battle. Marth was the catalyst for me to pick up my first Fire Emblem game, but the gameplay itself is what I fell in love with. It still wasn’t good enough to rocket the series into critical acclaim, but thanks to the growing popularity of Fire Emblem, we steadily got more and more games in the series. 

Looking back, Shadow Dragon isn’t even what I would consider “one of the good ones” when it comes to Fire Emblem. The five Fire Emblem games that came out between Melee and Shadow Dragon–The Binding Blade, The Blazing Blade, The Sacred Stones, Path of Radiance, and Radiant Dawn–didn’t garner much attention from the mainstream. The shift from niche to noteworthy happened when Fire Emblem: Awakening introduced a fully fleshed out support system and life-sim gameplay that hooked me on its characters. 

Then, Fire Emblem: Three Houses further improved this formula with a branching narrative that actually felt cohesive and morally complicated–so much so that players still fight about which of the titular three houses was “right” years later. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave refines this formula even farther, with a way to easily swap between the stories of its four protagonists. 

This isn’t to say that all of the games have been hits since Awakening. I wanted to love Fates, which also featured a branching narrative with DLC branches that you needed to buy, but the conflict was black and white without much room for moral interpretation and Corrin was pacifistic to a fault. FE3H was essentially everything I wanted from Fates but didn’t get.

However, at this point, Fire Emblem sells itself. In recent years, Fire Emblem: Three Houses was given the Player’s Voice Award at The Game Awards 2020. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is equally if not more ambitious, earning a 9/10 in GameSpot’s review and an 89 on Metacritic. It’s now common to find players who have discovered the series through the sheer push of its own popularity rather than piggybacking off the advertising of a popular fighting game. 

It’s been over 25 years since Marth and Roy debuted in Melee and, even now, watching how much Fire Emblem blew up over it is an overwhelming feeling.”}]]  Read MoreGameSpot – All Content