pitchfulprocessing
Smash Journeyman
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2024
- Messages
- 258
Incidentally, this is an old post, but in the wake of Game Informer's extremely unfortunate death, someone has uploaded all the issues properly to archive.org, so I can finally check this.Something I've thought about before is that I've never actually seen a source on this. There are multiple interviews stating it was Advance Wars which caused Nintendo to finally give Fire Emblem a full localisation, but I've looked into it and I can't find any primary source stating Melee was a factor. The closest is this section from the UK's Official Nintendo Magazine, but the writer, Thomas East, doesn't appear to have any citation or source for it and doesn't have a role in Nintendo that would let him know it, and the Official Nintendo Magazine isn't approved every word over by Nintendo, evidently lol.
The one thing I can see is that Wikipedia cites Game Informer issue 277 as having a section on Fire Emblem which mentions it, but that issue is out of print and no scans/screenshots of it are available online, so would need to order a used copy just to check what it actually says. The Melee story would make sense, so I don't doubt it could be true, but it would be good to have an actual source for it, I could just be missing something obvious.
![](https://i.imgur.com/2IJSKRF.png)
![](https://i.imgur.com/miJncN8.png)
So yes, it seems like the idea that Melee helped Fire Emblem get localised is a myth. It's never brought up as an actual reason for the games being translated, and Maeda only says that Smash helped people who were familiar with the characters from Melee get interested in Fire Emblem proper, which is definitely true.