Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem, the great sequel to Marth's story the world never recieved

Fire Emblem New Mystery of the Emblem (FE12) is the last exclusive Fire Emblem Game not to be released outside of Japan. Like Shadow Dragon was a genuine remake of the very first game for the Famicom with new content, FE12 is a remake of the third game Mystery of the Emblem that was originally released for the Super Famicom with new content.

The general consensus from Nintendo is that the game wouldn’t sell well after a dismal commercial performance of 70,000 copies sold domestically.

While many players and major game review companies outside of Japan would consider Fire Emblem Awakening (FE13) to be the first game to introduce casual mode, a playable avatar, barracks chat, and DLC, that is absolutely false.

All of those features were all originally introduced in FE12.

Sure there was a customizable avatar in Fire Emblem Blazing Sword (FE7), but that character wasn’t a playable unit.

The story of the game picks up a few years after the events of Shadow Dragon (FE1/FE11), where Marth is now King of Altea. Things are going great in the reconstruction effort, but then go bad when a rebellion in Grust breaks out from how Hardin’s Generals are treating the populace.

When it is discovered that Hardin had gone mad on reviving Medeus through the powers of the Dark Orb, Marth embarks on a new quest to uncovering the Mystery of the Shield Emblem.

Instead of doing a complete copy and paste job of FE3 with better graphics, Intelligent Systems went back and retconned some of the story to fit with the new content. The first being the Avatar character and the other accounting for those that appeared in the Archanea Saga.

While FE3 threw you into action the moment a new game was started, FE12 starts with a series of prologue chapters to ease new players on how to play the game. Usually tutorials for Fire Emblem were it’s own separate thing as seen in FE6 and FE10. But for FE12 as they did with FE7, Intelligent Systems made it a part of the main story again in getting to know the Avatar.

Aside from the prologue chapters being the new addition, there are Gaiden Chapters. These chapters are part of a new subplot relating to the Avatar and the new character Katarina. The whole plot has to do mostly with the conspiracy party to assassinate King Marth by Katarina’s party. Upon completing these chapters, you gain Wrys and a FE11 exclusive character before ultimately gaining Katarina herself. Accessing them can be challenging as do all the other games that include them. But if you need the experience, the characters or want to be complete, then these chapters are what have to be completed.

Aside from the main game, the cart also contains a remake of the entire Archanea Saga.

For those not in the know, they were specifically made chapters that were part of the old Super Famicom broadcast service. The only thing that is missing from the remake is the voice acting and the timer to complete each of the chapters.

The saga is a prequel to the events of Shadow Dragon.

Each of the chapters can be played individually in any order you desire. Your score is determined by turns and forced retreats (your characters can’t die for story purposes). There are no special rewards for the main game for completing these chapters unlike recent releases. But these in turn laid down the ground work on how to tell side stories in Fire Emblem without shoehorning it into the main story. If you have played the 2^nd Wave DLC from FE14 or the Deliverance DLC from FE15, the ideas were originally developed here.

The FE12’s DLC, however, bridges the gap between the events of Shadow Dragon and New Mystery of the Emblem.

It’s three chapters long chronicling what some of the characters did to pass the time between games.

This content was available through the DS E-Shop until May 20^th, 2014 for when Nintendo decided to finally shutdown the servers for the DS.

If Nintendo decides to re-release FE12 in the far off future this shall have to be included in some sort of definitive edition.

If you want to play these chapters now, you’ll need to do it through emulation and flash hacks, until then.

In conclusion, I believe that FE12 would have been a smash hit outside of Japan.

The game improved off of what was introduced from Shadow Dragon’s engine, made it a bit more accessible to new players, and allowed people to wrap up rest of Marth’s story, while setting the stage for FE13. Intelligent Systems did go above and beyond with this game in figuring out in improving on how to retcon an older game, while staying true to the original source content. How they did it for this game was well executed without having any new addition feeling shoehorned in.

For being a remake of FE3, this was far better than the original. If this had been released outside of Japan the sale numbers would have been better than not. But being that it was released toward the end of the DS’s life cycle combined with poor sales in Japan, ultimately led to it not being released internationally.

All the lessons learned from this game would carry over into future titles with DLC stories and Shadows of Valentia (FE15).