It seems as though the game was finished for a while — or at the very least being tested since 2021. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was completed early. This is probably one of the most concrete pieces of evidence that supports many people’s hunch that Nintendo sits on completed games for a while to space out title releases.
According to both the Aussie Classification Board and the USK in Germany, Fire Emblem Engage's year of production was 2021. Technically the German page says "test date". Could be that Nintendo sat on this one for a while or took a while to wrap up. pic.twitter.com/957cHobmho
— Daniel Vuckovic (@VOOK64) January 24, 2023
by Mean_March_4698
16 Comments
They made a good game and waited to release it on a proper window, nothing wrong with that. When Advance Wars finally drops on Switch it’ll be the most polish release in Nintendos company history.
When the game was leaked 7ish months ago this was in the leak:
“Originally intended as an anniversary game to celebrate FE’s 30th anniversary. **The game has been finished for over a year.**”
So yeah it checks out since most everything else in the leak ended up being 100% true(unsure on the FE4 Remake yet).
Its basically confirmed they sit on games by this point.
There’s always reasons we don’t know for something like that. Great game btw, I didn’t had this much fun since a long time in a FE game.
so basically thee hopes was developed around the same time?
I mean, the pandemic was still raging in 2021, it wouldn’t surprise me if they had to space out development longer than usual
I’m probably in a minority here, but with this, im still hoping for a remake, remaster or sequel for the Golden Sun games. 😅
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If they are holding back games could mean alot of their teams already made games for the current switch and are probably already working on games for the next console .
This is great news because it means we will get alot of games this year and if a new console comes next year it will already have games made for it
soooo if the games been done for awhile, can they speed up expansion pack releases?
Engage is a very unique case that doesn’t necessarily apply to Nintendo at large. First off, the COVID pandemic severely affected development and consequently affected the release windows for various games which led to a massive shuffling in schedule. Then Engage has to contend with Three Hopes which is a pseudo-sequel of Three Houses as a Warriors game. The unfortunate timing means Engage had to be pushed back to accommodate Three Hopes release last year. It would have been foolish to release Engage first followed by a return to Fodlan with Three Hopes as a Warriors game. The return to classic FE gameplay will also alienate fans that prefer Three Houses more. Giving those fans a Warriors game instead after ignoring Engage will lead to a huge backlash and probably bad sales.
Just good business.
Not surprised. Between this and Advance Wars. And the rumored Metroid port/remaster
I mean, I do prefer that over buying a completely unfinished game just because they wanted to release according to schedule. FE Engage feels like a very finished and sound game to me.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because there is extensive QA and testing afterwards, Nintendo games are almost always very well polished for how big and complex some of them are.
People have rightfully pointed out that it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense to release Engage too close to Three Hopes, but I think it could be argued that it was Nintendo’s overall line-up for 2022 that pushed Engage back to this year. There was at least one major release just about every month from June until November, so even if Engage had been released it would’ve been competing with the likes of Mario + Rabbids and Xenoblade. Waiting until 2023 was probably the right move, at least financially.