Today, Fire Emblem World–the official Japanese hub site for the Fire Emblem series–received a makeover. During E3 of this year, the website was already revamped, but the finishing touches were yet to be complete.

The first iteration of the website was launched in 2006, to tie in with the upcoming release of Radiant Dawn. Since then, it added various features like showcases for each game, popularity polls for Awakening and Fates, etc.

However, the general functionality remained basically unchanged over the years. Now that the series is really hitting its strides–and in anticipation for the latest release, Three Houses, the Fire Emblem World team have opted for a more modern-looking design.

Right now, there’s not a great deal of content, but the team promises to slowly add more over time. The sections currently available are: About Fire Emblem, History, Characters and Blog.

At this point in time, the “Characters” section focuses on characters that feature prominently in Smash Bros. Similarly, the front page showcases the Smash fighters. Eventually, new characters will be added to the front page daily and new music will be added each week.

Of note, you can find some rare official artwork and character portraits in decent resolution–especially for the really old games. Also, in the “About Fire Emblem” section, there are videos of all the opening scenes, including HD ones for Radiant Dawn and above.

Artwork

Portraits

Illustrations

Slightly more trivial, it’s interesting that the website explicitly writes the Japanese titles for Binding Blade and Blazing Blade as “Fuuin no Tsurugi” and “Rekka no Ken“. That’s nothing new, but it doesn’t bother making a distinction for Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light.

Unfortunately, many of the older pages appear to be inaccessible. Admittedly, a lot of them were fluff, but it’s a shame to lose things like the character popularity polls and the pages with interesting lore information. That said, you can try visiting the Wayback Machine.