Why was Fire Emblem: Awakening almost the last Fire Emblem game?

The warning is on the record, in producer Hitoshi Yamagami's own words, given to the Spanish magazine Hobby Consolas in 2013 and reported worldwide that May. "Truth be told, [series] sales are dropping," Yamagami said. "The sales manager of Nintendo, Mr. Hatano, told us that this could be the last Fire Emblem. Due to this progressive descend on sales, they told us that if the sales of this episode stayed below 250,000 copies, we'd stop working on the saga." His memory of carrying the news back is just as direct: "I remember when I came back from the meeting and told the team 'my God, what are we gonna do?! The end has come!'"

The slide behind the warning is measurable. The series had been declining through the Wii and DS years, and the game immediately before Awakening, Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem (Nintendo DS, 2010), sold 274,000 copies in Japan, barely above the line the next game would be judged against, and it never received a Western release at all. A series that had run since 1990 was one modest launch away from being shelved.

The team's reaction, again in Yamagami's telling, was clear: "if this was going to be the last Fire Emblem, we had to put [in] everything we always wanted to include." The wild ideas came first, including a modern day setting and a setting on the planet Mars, and were set aside because they would alienate the series' own players. What the team built instead was a culmination: systems gathered from across the whole series, marriages and children, a traversable world map, and Casual Mode carried over from New Mystery. Internally the game was known as Fire Emblem Fin: The Children from the Brink. Even the final title came out of the same idea: Yamagami casually suggested "Awakening" for the ultimate Fire Emblem, and director Genki Yokota kept it.