How Nintendo's flagship strategy RPG series was considered too Japanese for export until a dying protagonist changed the calculation
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (1990) was a tactical RPG with permadeath — units who died in battle were gone permanently — developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo. It sold 400,000 copies in Japan and generated six sequels through the 1990s. Nintendo of America did not localise any of them. The stated reason, repeated in contemporary interviews, was that Nintendo of America's market research indicated that tactical RPGs were a niche genre in North America and that the permadeath mechanic would frustrate players conditioned by JRPGs where death was reversible.
The calculation was difficult to dispute with available data: Western tactical RPG sales were modest through the 1990s. What Nintendo's market research could not measure was the potential demand among players who would have purchased the games had they been available — demand that existed in the absence of products to purchase and therefore generated no sales signal.
Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) included Marth and Roy as playable characters — protagonists from Fire Emblem games that had never been localised. North American players who encountered the characters had no context for them: they were recognisably sword-wielding anime-style protagonists in a game where every other character was from a franchise familiar to Western players. The internet discussion that followed — identifying the characters, finding the Japanese Fire Emblem games they came from, documenting the series' history — demonstrated to Nintendo a level of existing interest that its market research had not detected.
Nintendo localised Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (the seventh mainline game) for the Game Boy Advance in 2003, thirteen years after the series' Japanese debut. The game was released internationally without a number in its title — simply as "Fire Emblem" — to avoid communicating to Western audiences that they were beginning a series partway through. The localisation was a commercial success; the series has been continuously released in Western markets since, including entries in the Nintendo DS, 3DS, and Switch eras. Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) sold over 3 million copies outside Japan.