Mogisthelioma
Smash Master
First of all I love that new profile pic.Sales number of a franchise and its number of fighters in Smash don't necessarily have to coincide.
Second of all you're absolutely right. I don't remember a time when the sales of a game was directly proportional to how popular it was. Fates sold almost 2 million units but got mixed reviews whereas Awakening only sold 1.3 million but is considered by some to be the best ever FE game. So sales numbers don't even matter as much as people put them.
Moving on
Spoiler alert everyone: It's 2019. Smash is no longer going to limit itself to simply being a hall of fame. Otherwise we'd have less than half of the fighters we do.
On the topic of FE, I have to agree that people are inflating the series a little bit. It's undeniable that the series as blown up since Smash: Anyone who says otherwise is simply lying, period. But to compare it with some of Nintendo's more historical and iconic IP's requires an open mind. Not including the mobile game, which is a free download, FE has sold less than the Wario series. Don't get me wrong, Wario is certainly a Nintendo icon, but not many people will instantly think of Wario anymore when they hear about Nintendo. Today's major Nintendo top sellers ( have all broken at least 2 million sales on the Switch for example), are the icons that people will generally associate more with the company.
To put it simply, if Nintendo surveyed something like 100,000 random people around the world and asked them if they could recognize some of their characters, I'd bet all of my money that way more people will recognize characters like (Using the green tunic since it's been the Zelda poster outfit for decades) or even versus some Fire Emblem characters (more likely due to the fact that they don't stick around for a long time in the series and less likely if the series is simply niche in some areas [not implying that it is]).
So I think it's totally fair when people complain about how much FE content there is in Smash. People have a right to be annoyed by the fact that a series that has sold no more than 15 million copies is almost on par with Mario and Pokemon and even outclasses several major Nintendo franchises, including The Legend of Zelda, especially considering the series has never held as special of a place in a lot of people's hearts. It's impossible to deny that up until recently Fire Emblem has always been nice in the West and is only just beginning to form a decent audience and upbringing outside of Japan, and I really hope that Three Houses is successful so the series can actually expand to a decent amount into new territories.
Don't get me wrong: I don't dislike FE at all and I really want the series to be successful, but I'm forced to agree with the people who argue that the series is oversaturated in Smash. The inflated representation that the series has doesn't mirror how the majority of people view it.