Fire Emblem devs on bringing the franchise West, permadeath and more

The following info comes from a Game Informer interview with Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami and Intelligent Systems director Kouhei Maeda...

- Yamagami had the idea of bringing the franchise west
- he approached Intelligent Systems about his plan
- Intelligent Systems was worried at first about whether it’d sell or not
- Yamagami feels the move was the right decision due to the audience expansion
- Maeda thinks many players first learned of Fire Emblem through Smash Bros., then went to see what the series was about
- Awakening's success paved the way for the franchise to continue, which may not have happened without that success
- the decision to include permadeath as an option instead of the only option helped bring in new players
- Yamagami felt bad putting 'modern gamers with busy lives' into a spot where they would build up a character, only to have them die
- the decision to sell two versions of Fates was because the devs wanted players to have to deal with the play style of making agonizing decisions before they even purchased the game