Fire Emblem: Awakening could have been series’ last entry if sales were poor
Prior to Fire Emblem: Awakening, you could say that the series was in decline. Sales of the previous games had been decreasing, and Nintendo didn’t even bother localizing the final DS title.
So had Awakening not been a success, the franchise could have been put on hold. Nintendo’s sale manager had actually told the team that the 3DS release could be the last Fire Emblem if it saw poor sales.
Producer Hitoshi Yamagami told Hobby Consola in an interview:
“No doubt. Truth be told, sales are dropping. 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. I remember when I came back from the meeting and told the team ‘My God, what are we gonna do?! The end has come!’. Our reaction was clear: if this was going to be the last Fire Emblem, we had to put everything we always wanted to include. That’s how this new project was born!”
