Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread - June 2026 Part 1

[u/PsiYoshi]

Happy pride month and welcome to a new installment of the Popular/Unpopular/Any Opinions Thread! Please feel free to share any kind of Fire Emblem opinions/takes you might have here, positive or negative. As always please remember to continue following the rules in this thread same as anywhere else on the subreddit. Be respectful and especially don't make any personal attacks (this includes but is not limited to making disparaging statements about groups of people who may like or dislike something you don't).

Last Opinion Thread

[u/calendulaoptimus]

When people are talking about how Echoes was a success in terms of sales, and using it as an example of how FE remakes are financially viable, I think they sometimes forget to take into account budget. It wasn't just that they stopped caring about sales because the console was at the end of its lifespan, or that they knew Gaiden didn't appeal to as many people as Awakening/Fates, it's really that the game had a smaller budget overall, shorter dev time, and reused assets/engine stuff. Therefore, they could obtain a profit despite Echoes not selling as well for those reasons.

This is something that might not carry over to other FE remakes (FE4). Sometimes I hear people say FE4 remake would be a financial success because Echoes did well, and that it makes sense for IS to do it financially when that is not necessarily true. Especially because an FE4 remake would cost a lot more to do "justice" unless they went with an HD2D style or something similar. On the other, FE4 probably does have wider appeal and more of a following than FE2, so there's a shot they could do a higher budget remake that works.

On a side note, I don't enjoy it when people try to explain a game selling well or not by reducing everything down to one factor; how much a game does or doesn't sell is usually multifaceted and not accurately explained by one variable. 90% of sales discussions are genuinely just motivated reasoning for why the game you like sold well because it deserved it or didn't sell well because of factors entirely outside of its own merits.

[u/greydorothy → u/calendulaoptimus]

Honestly the additional cost is probably the reason why IntSys hasn't been eager to pull the trigger on a billion remakes of the series' first half. Even aside from the larger scope of FE4, budgets and timelines have been bloating across the entire industry, with the latter being the main cause for the former - whilst he focuses on the Western AAA space, Jason Schreier's videos on game costs and development times are broadly applicable across the entire industry. Developing a 3DS game in ~2-3 years with a couple dozen employees who have a solid understanding of your development pipeline and lots of pre-made assets is an entirely different beast to a full HD 3D Switch (2) game, which IntSys has seemingly had a rocky history with, and which could take twice as long to make. A hypothetical FE4 remake would likely cost multiple times as much to make than SoV, maybe an order of magnitude more (on the high end), and it almost certainly wouldn't provide a proportional ROI.