‘Fire Emblem: Awakening’ Almost Took Place On Mars

Fire Emblem: Awakening has been through a lot of surprising developments, including almost taking place on Mars.

A recent interview with the developers of Fire Emblem has revealed some interesting bits of trivia about the RPG series.

Fire Emblem: Awakening was developed in the span of a year and a half. One of the earlier ideas was to have the entire game take place on Mars. In the end, they decided to take the best parts of all of the other titles and combine them. The game was designed with input from both beginners and veterans in order to ensure it would be accessible to anyone from the get-go.

During the development of Fire Emblem: Awakening, nearly everybody on the team was opposed to casual gaming. Somewhere along the way, the “permadeath” aspect they swore by was eliminated, and it changed the attitudes of the entire staff. Now they all consider themselves casual gamers.

Everybody’s favorite characters were different when asked, and eventually they all settled on Tharja, at which point Higuchi said he mentioned earlier that Tharja was his favorite character, and switched to Cherche just to be the odd man out.

Graph paper was involved in the design of the levels in the first step. One of the developers stated that they prefer maps that are structured kind of like puzzles. It just makes it easier to balance the game and set everything where it should be.

One question the team is often asked is where the characters’ feet are. “At the start of the project,” Kusakihara said, “we weren’t entirely sure how many bones and joints we’d be able to use in each character model.” In the end, they decided to go with the models sans feet, because it made the characters look more cute. The next Fire Emblem might use feet again, but it isn’t decided yet.

What do you think of these random bits of trivia about Fire Emblem: Awakening?