Booting up Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave had me feeling nostalgic. Fire Emblem as it is now would’ve been surreal to six-year-old me, who only knew “Marth and Roy from Smash.” Back then, Fire Emblem was still a niche series in the west and many of us had no idea who they were. Little did I know, these swordsmen would just be two of many Fire Emblem heroes to join the fighting game series, and Fire Emblem games would reach mainstream popularity.
I discovered Fire Emblem in the early 2000s when I first started playing Super Smash Bros. Melee on our clunky big-screen TV in the basement. It was my favorite game to play with my cousins outside of having them watch me play single-player games like Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. We played Melee for hours that summer of 2001, eventually unlocking Marth, the blue-haired prince from the 1990’s Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. After that, we unlocked Roy, the protagonist of 2002’s Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade.
Marth and Roy do have voicelines, but they are all in Japanese. I mostly remember just the grunting sounds they would make from swinging around their swords, anyway. Maybe it’s because of that that the Smash fandom invented personalities for both fighters in fanfics and comics until their games were released in the west and set things straight. Link also showed up in many of these creations, maybe because he’s the only other Super Smash swordsman from that era.
Most of the fan-made stories that I remember from that time came from Fanfiction.net and Deviantart. CallistoHime, the author of fanfics like Time Cannot Erase, admits that she filled in the blanks because she had little to go off of besides Marth’s Smash Bros. profile. One artist I followed back then, Katie Tiedrich, also made a comic about the gap between her interpretation of Marth and the real thing. These are just a few examples from what was a relatively small community in the mid-to-late 2000s.
Nintendo Magazine cites Marth and Roy’s inclusion in Smash Bros. as a driving reason to release the Fire Emblem games in the west, starting with Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, where Roy was the protagonist. In an Iwata Asks interview, Fire Emblem producer Tohru Narihiro even thanked Masahiro Sakurai for his work on Smash Bros. because of the fighting game franchise’s impact on the international popularity of the previously niche RPG series.
“Thanks to your work, the reputations of Marth and Ike have grown beyond our expectations,” he said (2008’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl had already come out when he made this comment, and 2005’s Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance protagonist Ike was included in the roster instead of Roy).
