New Fire Emblem 2015 Announced for 3DS

Fire Emblem 2015, the follow-up to Fire Emblem: Awakening, has been announced exclusively for Nintendo 3DS. It was revealed in the newest Nintendo Direct broadcast.

Watch the first Fire Emblem 2015 trailer here:

Untitled, although temporarily named “Fire Emblem If” in Japan, the game will be an all-new entry in the beloved Strategy RPG series that stretches all the way back to the NES/Famicom; but which saw a surge of popularity and brisk sales for Fire Emblem: Awakening (2013), the previous game in the series, including the best sales the long-running Fire Emblem series had ever seen in North America & Europe.

Fire Emblem 2015 3DS Blue Haired Girl GIF Animation

And sales are likely to only increase with the next game, as Nintendo has done much to promote it by including even more Fire Emblem characters in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U & 3DS than were included in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Ensuring that plenty more people know about the franchise who hadn’t heard of it before compared to when FE: Awakening was released just last year.

Details on the new game, however, are slim.

Here’s the Fire Emblem 2015 3DS image gallery.
Click on any of these image thumbnails to see the full-size photos:


We do know that Fire Emblem 2015 will be developed by the same team that created the series at Intelligence Systems, the Nintendo 2nd Party that also brought us the last game, Fire Emblem: Awakening, and the masterminds behind Nintendo’s other Strategy Series, Advance Wars, as well as the Paper Mario series of RPGs & the Fire Emblem franchise. Having Intelligent Systems back to work on the latest game ensures that it will live up to the very high quality bar that Awakening set.

Fire Emblem: Awakening character designer Yusuke Kozaki will return, ensuring the character designs will remain consistent across Fire Emblem: Awakening & this new title. A new addition to the development team has also been added with Japanese comic writer Shin Kibayashi, who Nintendo President Satoru Iwata promises will bring a “unique atmosphere” to this new 2015 title.

Fire Emblem 2015 Bridge Battle Gameplay Screenshot 3DS

Player choice, which effects how the game progresses & determines who lives, who dies, and how relationships develop; has always been at the core of the Fire Emblem franchise (characters can even get married, fall in love & have children that you play as); and Nintendo promises an even bigger impact on the game world due to player choice in this new title. It will also feature “new challenges” that haven’t been seen in any previous game before; although Nintendo didn’t say what they mean by that.

Fire Emblem 2015 Movie Scene CG 3DS Screenshot Battle

New gameplay of this untitled Fire Emblem was also shown, although it looks exactly the same to an untrained eye.

The biggest change seems to come from new graphic details in the switch between the side-scrolling battle animations, and the overworld map where you move your units into position.

Fire Emblem 2015 New Character Artwork 3DS 2

The game transitions differently now, allowing you to see the placement of characters on the map in the background during the 2D fight sequences.

We also get a glimpse of some slick new computer-generated footage from the title, and new characters and anime-style scenes were also shown.

Fire Emblem If 2015 Falling Girl GIF Animation

If you haven’t played Fire Emblem: Awakening yet, definitely do that. You won’t be disappointed. However it’s worth noting that each Fire Emblem game is essentially self-contained, and no knowledge of previous games is needed (most of the series remains exclusive to Japan anyway, as an English Fire Emblem release didn’t come until 2003 on the Game Boy Advance).

I’m VERY happy to see a new Fire Emblem game get announced, even if it looked exactly the same without a shred of anything new…

I loved the heck out of Fire Emblem: Awakening though, so I’m excited to see the series getting more love from Nintendo.

But why the heck they haven’t Nintendo translated all the previous Fire Emblem entries into English & released them on the eShop so fans can digitally purchase them at their own leisure… and then put them all in a Chronology Box Set and release them for Wii U & 3DS in hardcopy form?

Why Nintendo continues to sit on this kind of thing is beyond me.

Either way, are you excited about Fire Emblem 2015?