As the curtains fall on 2020, here’s a look back at the key Fire Emblem happenings this year.
Disclaimer: This isn’t meant to be an objective review of the year, but the author’s personal take on things.
Before we dive into things, overall, 2020 has been an unprecedented year. For many, I imagine it was a challenging year. The impact of coronavirus across the world cannot be understated–and it’s possible it’ll have a lasting influence for years to come.
There’s a small part of me that wanted to skip this year’s retrospective, but despite everything, there have been some good things–and I don’t want to pretend nothing happened.
For better or worse, Fire Emblem first made the headlines in 2020 with the announcement of Byleth as the 5th DLC fighter for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The reveal was made during a presentation on 16th January; Byleth him/herself would be available from 29th January. Since I don’t play Smash, I didn’t really pay attention to the comments at the time, but I could still imagine them…
Given the success of Three Houses and Sakurai’s admiration of the Fire Emblem series, it was almost a given that Smash would eventually get a Three Houses rep. Personally, I would’ve been more excited if it was somebody like Edelgard, to avoid yet another sword-wielder. But presumably Nintendo didn’t want to favour one particular house over another–and hence we got the neutral Byleth with all their relics.
Following that, concrete details for Three Houses’s final wave of DLC were unveiled. This was the moment we officially became acquainted with the members of the Ashen Wolves, whose story would be told in “Cindered Shadows” (previously, we knew some details via data-mining). The final DLC arrived on 13th February and thus concluded the tale of Three Houses.
On 17th January, the Switch port of Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE was released. The original game was developed for the Wii U back in 2015, as part of the Fire Emblem x Shin Megami Tensei project. Back then, a lot of people were put off from trying the game and the Wii U’s lack of popularity didn’t help matters either. So this was a good chance for a new generation to discover and appreciate it.