Mobile spin-off of Fire Emblem brand launched on February 2, 2017 and still maintains the fire of passion to this day while many other mobile projects of Nintendo has withered. The game has built a massive legacy with more total revenue than any other game in the history of the Fire Emblem series. To the present time, Fire Emblem Heroes helped Nintendo pocket more than 1 billion USD.
Fire Emblem has found a comfortable place on mobile devices, surpassing even the world-famous Mario IP (Dr Mario World has closed, while Super Mario Run and Mario Kart Tour has stopped updating new content). Fire Emblem Heroes has maintained a bi-weekly update schedule for the past seven years and shows no signs of changing. The game continues to monetize its relatively small player base with continually evolving mechanics and various incentives to keep players open.
Back in 2017, Fire Emblem Heroes aimed to be the place to unite characters from the Fire Emblem series into four-person squads to overcome a fairly limited amount of PvE content. This mobile game inherits the core gameplay formula from the main series with highlights such as leveling up characters, unlocking new skills combined with turn-based battles to complete simple goals of destruction. all enemies off the map.
In terms of microtransactions, players initially mainly spent money around Heroes’ gacha mechanics. But it wasn’t long before the developers came up with a game-changing solution in the form of a new mechanic: skill inheritance, which allows players to give one character’s skills to another. This clever twist remains the game’s central mechanic seven years later, encouraging players to continue collecting new characters.
And by 2024, Fire Emblem Heroes has pushed the boundaries of the strategy RPG genre. While maintaining the core Fire Emblem formula across multiple modes, Heroes also develops plenty of side content, taking full advantage of popular mobile mechanics and genres, including a rhythm game mode introduced in 2018, raid mode in 2019 or auto battle mode in 2020. Heroes also has afk (idle) mode, farm game simulation mode, cooking as well as rotating competition modes around the community, etc. Fire Emblem Heroes now offers every game genre wrapped in one game, giving everyone a reason to experience it.
In short, Heroes is a success story. It is Nintendo’s highest-grossing Fire Emblem game and most profitable mobile game. The game has certainly surpassed what Nintendo expected in 2017 – when the Japanese game manufacturer first entered the phone game market.
