How did this go from a series that nobody cares about to one of Nintendo's pillar franchises?

How did this go from a series that nobody cares about to one of Nintendo's pillar franchises?

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A correlation in the growth of weabs.

Waifus user. Waifus

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It appealed to the ironic weeb. It was on it's dying breath till it morphed itself into a full on dating sim and marketed itself towards horny 14 year olds, slap on some good old Sakurai Smash shilling and you sold 2M.
Fates picked up on the fact that no one actually played FE because it's an SRPG and went full pandering, this is why characters like Elise and Big Tiddy Onee-san exist, they aren't characters as much as they're just a jumble of marketable tropes made to pander to people who buy games with their dicks.

I think FE would be well on it's way to being a core Nintendo franchise if it weren't for the fact that it really needs waifubux to live. Echoes sold like ass and FE:W broke even before falling off the charts forever, the mobile game is doing good, but is barely even top 15 mobage anymore.
You have to wonder if Nintendo putting all their chips in on FE was the right call, Fates sold 2 million, which is good for a niche franchise, but as a core Nintendo series? That's pathetic, not to mention Fates was split into 3 different games to pad sales, so I'd like to see how FE: Switch does as 1 game.

Either way FE is doing "decent" but the fact that Splatoon has been crushing it 6 ways to Sunday in literally ever category imaginable makes me believe the age of Waifu Emblem is over and the day of the Squid is upon us.

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shit waifubait

3ds had no gaems, then a FE game out so they pretended it was a notable release

Echoes sold like ass because it's a shallow remake of a shitty game.

smash

People really enjoy NOA's quality localization skills.

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The only pure fapbait charters are Tharja and Camilla. The series didn't change THAT much. It's not like there was no shipping before. The only major difference are self insert (who isn't really a self insert) and the children characters, the children made sense in Awakening but were pretty much forced in Fates. I don't think the franchise would be truly hurt if they got removed from the next entry.
T B H I think the Awakening's success actually came down to modernized anime artstyle.

>The only pure fapbait charters are Tharja and Camilla
C'mon now user. Literally female character in Awakening was desinged to pander to some demographic with only maybe the bookish witch lady who's name escapes me. Look at Nowi, Lucina, Oliva and Severa and tell me they weren't produced on a generic waifubait character assembly line.

>a series that nobody cares about
It was one of the go-to GBA games from the moment the first game was localized.

I'll give you Nowi (due to her being dressed like a whore), but the potential waifu factor of others is just a side effect. Do not kid yourself, Fire Emblem characters werewalking anime tropes from the get go, Awakening is just in line with more modern anime (which makes it worse arguably).
I do not recall Lucina in particular being really sexualized in the game itself though.

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The real answer is they made the games more appealing by adding things like casual mode and by making the artstyle pleasant to look at for normies.

because of best girl

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People who think waifu fagging and shipping wasn't a thing since forever really couldn't be further off the mark.
The very reason they stopped doing canonical pairings for the games was because the shipping fanaticism among the Japanese fans simply got out of hand. So they resorted to leaving things vague for future games instead.

Jesus, fuck NOA with a rusty pike. I hate it when they add "lol so randum XD" humor instead of faithfully translating it. You're not paid to write, you're paid to translate fuckers.

This and they put some effort into marketing Awakening.

Because awakening did so much right

Outside of the whatever main story, the gameplay was pretty solid, custom character was fresh and exciting, the characters were charming and you even got to marry the one you liked the most which was quite novel

It's these just ignore all the other retarded answers.

Wow, fuck treehouse so hard, i hate them so goddamn much

Ive translated shit, it's not fucking hard, how come they have to fuck this up

>"One of Nintendo's pillar franchises"
>has barely sold 10 million units across 16 games in 30 years
>probably the biggest thing it has going for it right now is mobage
It's a successful franchise, recently, but it's not even close to top-tier. It's much more "popular" as a recognizable IP than as a product people actually buy because of Smash.

The series has a huge problem right now of the quality of the different aspects of the games being all over the place and not knowing what audience it's trying to appeal to.
FE16 will be huge for the future direction of the series, hopefully they'll finally unveil it by E3, ideally beforehand so it doesn't get drowned out by Smash and Pokémon and who knows what else.

Laslow is better

You all missed the REAL answer:
No competition
Even Nintendo releases games less and less often in the (current year). A series that's different and keeps releasing games is naturally going to gain prominence

>E3 happens
>FE 16 announced
>Pokemon announced
>Smash gameplay shown off
>Yoshi and Metroid probably also shown off
>FE absolutely drowns because it's so low tier compared to other actual Nintendo franchises
If they announce a new AC in E3 then it's literally over for FE, mark my words.

read the posts you quoted if you're going to reply to them