Considering how close the series was to disappearing not even a decade ago, it's hard to believe how big Fire Emblem has become. Once a niche strategy franchise that was planned to end with 2012's Awakening due to poor performance, that game's success propelled the series forward on the 3DS, eventually resulting in the massively successful Fire Emblem: Three Houses on Nintendo Switch.
Last year's surprise announcement that, after 30 years, the original Fire Emblem game, Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light would finally be translated and released in the West proved Nintendo noticed the series' popularity and revived hopes that the rest of the Japan-exclusive games would also be localized. While there are four games that still need to be translated and ported, at the top of the list should be 1996's Genealogy of the Holy War, a game that has influenced subsequent Fire Emblem games and directly inspired Three Houses.
According to Intelligent Systems director Toshiyuki Kusakihara, Three Houses' concept of students attending school together before becoming embroiled in a major conflict comes less from Harry Potter or Persona as some have speculated, but rather from Genealogy of the Holy War. Kusakihara has said that the two games share the same basic premise; both star three characters who get to know each other while studying at an academy before having to fight on different sides of a war years later.
Genealogy of the Holy War follows Sigurd, a noble who befriended Quan and Eldigan while attending the Royal Academy of Belhalla before the events of the game. While they start out as close friends who swear their loyalties to one another, the conflicts between the continent of Jugdral's warring nations pits them against each other. Eventually, the conflict takes the lives of all three, and the second half of the game sees their children taking up arms years later, avenging their fathers and ending the war once and for all.
Three Houses basically takes the untold story of Sigurd, Quan and Eldigan's school days and turns them into the first half of the game. While house leaders Edelgard, Dimitri and Claude are not close friends like Genealogy's trio, they are depicted as cordial to each other throughout most of the Academy Phase, getting to know each other as classmates before having to battle one another as enemies on the battlefield.
Also notable is how both games incorporate mechanics based on particular characters' lineages though Three Houses' Crests and Genealogy's Holy Blood. Both are essentially inherited blessings with Major and Minor variants that impact stats and certain weapons a character can wield.
Genealogy has also had a major impact on other Fire Emblem titles. This is the game that introduced the weapons triangle, a mechanic that was a series mainstay until it was removed in Three Houses. It also included a romance system and a second generation of characters related to the game's original units. Child characters would return in Awakening and, more controversially, in Fates, though this time these characters were able to fight alongside their parents.
Despite the game's age and the series' subsequent growth, Genealogy of the Holy War remains massively popular in Japan. Just last year, the game won Weekly Famitsu's popularity poll of Fire Emblem games, beating out both Three Houses and Awakening. This is even more impressive when taking into account that the game has never been remastered or remade, its only releases have been for the Wii, Wii U and New Nintendo 3DS' Virtual Consoles, and its representation in Super Smash Bros. is limited to a couple of music tracks and a handful of Spirits.
With that in mind, Intelligent Systems should absolutely remake Genealogy of the Holy War for the Nintendo Switch. Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia already proved that the series' older and previously Japan-only titles can find success on new hardware, that that was before Three Houses expanded the fanbase like never before. Plus, with the game turning 25 in May, there's no better time to finally give Western fans the chance to experience Japan's favorite Fire Emblem game