Today in Japan, the “Making of Fire Emblem” book is officially on sale.

While we wait for Japanese fans to furiously poke inside (or anxiously sit outside our doorstep waiting for the postman to come), Amazon has provided a few samples of the 351-page book to whet our appetite.

The first sample page shows how the box art for Binding Blade developed into its final form.

The most obvious changes are to main characters Roy and Lilina’s poses and position, with the bottom-left image resembling the final product the most.

Curiously, the text on the drafts suggest the game was meant to be 1~2 players, rather than 1~4 players in the final version. In addition, the game was billed as a “Fantasy RPG” rather than Strategy RPG.

Next, we have part of an interview with Nami Komuro, the character planner and scenario writer, about her role in Fire Emblem Fates, explaining the process behind developing the characters and whatnot.

On the left-hand side is a fact sheet for Jakob, which presumably the writers have access to. Annoyingly, Jakob’s age and height information is censored with solid black bars.

Even back during the Tellius days, the developers had a strong policy of hiding age and height information from fans, for reasons I’ll leave to your imagination.

Finally we have part of an interview with Kouhei Maeda and Masahiro Higuchi about the turbulent times leading up to Awakening.

As many of you should know, Awakening was intended to be the last Fire Emblem due to the series’s dwindling software series, a fact Nintendo recently doesn’t mind admitting.

What we didn’t know was that on 11th November 2010, when Intelligent Systems approached Nintendo with the design proposal for Awakening, the game was internally known as “Fire Emblem Fin: The Children from the Brink“.

In a sense, (Awakening spoilers) the bleak, apocalyptic future where the protagonist’s children herald from is a direct parallel to the future of the franchise.

Before this, Intelligent Systems also considered other alternatives for Awakening, such as the infamous “Fire Emblem on Mars” described in the Iwata Asks for Awakening.

It appears some of these ideas transferred to #FE, a Fire Emblem set in modern times. At least before Atlus re-evaluated the concept and turned it into Genei Ibun Roku #FE, a RPG with Fire Emblem elements instead.

Anyway, that’s a lot to gleam from just three pages and, good heavens, the book itself is pretty darn thick!