New Fire Emblem for Nintendo Switch 2 teased on LinkedIn claim fans
With any luck, rumours of a new Nintendo Direct dropping by the end of the month will prove true and hopefully include announcements for new first party Nintendo Switch 2 games.
Nintendo has plenty in the pipeline already, such as Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, Pokémon Legends Z-A, and a new Splatoon spin-off, but fans can't help but yearn for more. Especially when there's no sign of a new Animal Crossing or 3D Mario game.
While such projects can safely be assumed to be in development somewhere within Nintendo, fans think they've found evidence that work has already begun on an equally inevitable new Fire Emblem game.
This comes from the LinkedIn profile of Takeshi Maruyama, a freelance 3D character modeler with credits across multiple Japanese studios, including Square Enix and Sega.
Most recently, Maruyama served as a contractor for Nintendo earlier this year, from January to April, at its Tokyo branch, where he worked on what he describes as 'the sequel of Nintendo's SRPG (tactical role-playing game) on Switch 2.'
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It being a sequel immediately rules it out as a new IP, so the most obvious assumption is that Maruyama is referring to Fire Emblem, as it's the most prominent tactical role-player Nintendo has.
The last entry was Fire Emblem Engage, at the beginning of 2023 and new titles have been releasing pretty consistently every two to three years.
There's not been any leaks of a brand new title but there have been longstanding rumours of Nintendo planning a remake of Fire Emblem: Genealogy Of The Holy War.
Maruyama's choice of the word 'sequel' has created some dispute as to whether he's referencing Fire Emblem, with some fans arguing that most Fire Emblem games are standalone stories, so it wouldn't be accurate to call a new one a sequel (especially if the next one's a remake). More Trending
This seems more like splitting hairs though, and even if it wasn't, it's not as if the series hasn't had direct sequels before. For example, 2007's Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn is set in the same world as 2005's Path Of Radiance and features several of the same characters.
Another argument for why it can't be Fire Emblem is that Maruyama worked in Tokyo, but Fire Emblem studio Intelligent Systems is based in Kyoto. However, as one fan points out, remote work is a thing and Nintendo EPD (which has locations in Tokyo and Kyoto) has assisted on the series before.
One fan posits that since Maruyama only worked on this project for four months, it could be a Switch 2 upgrade of a Switch 1 game (so either Engage or Fire Emblem: Three Houses) along the lines of the Switch 2 Editions for The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and its sequel – which is plausible.
There are other theories, such as the game being a new Pokémon Conquest or Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE but this seem very unlikely, especially as none of them were made in-house at a Nintendo studio.
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MORE: Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes review – Musou on fire
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It was horribly difficult but shared similarities with Midwinter and Carrier Command, in that all three games were decades ahead of their time, in terms of sandbox gameplay, and made by British developers that are now all but forgotten by the wider industry. Although Street Fighter 2 didn't appear until 1991 (there were several versions on the Amiga but none of them were very good), one-on-one fighting games weren't an entirely unknown concept before that, not least because the original Street Fighter came out in 1987. That very same year, the sequel to International Karate, by Jimmy White's 'Whirlwind' Snooker creator Archer Maclean, appeared and it's fascinating how different a concept it is, not least because there's actually three people fighting at a time. It'll forever be most famous for the cheat code that lets you drop the fighters' trousers but that doesn't negate the fact that this is probably the best pre-Street Fighter 2 fighting game on any format. 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It features a relatively realistic, physics-based control system and surprisingly involved story missions, obviously inspired by the previous year's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Developer Glyn Williams went on to make the Independence War games, which acted as spiritual sequels, but sadly they're almost completely forgotten too. In some ways it's a shame that Sensible Soccer was so successful, because it meant Sensible Software never got around to making other more experimental titles, like Cannon Fodder and Wizkid. An evolution of earlier game MicroProse Soccer, this was a direct rival to the otherwise popular Kick Off series and was very much the EA Sports FC of its day, except with a sense of humour and played from a top-down perspective. It has a spiritual sequel today, in Sociable Soccer by original creator John Hare, that's seen some success, but nothing like Sensi in its heyday. Although the Amiga rarely got the same games released on contemporary consoles, it did get lots of arcade conversations and PC ports. The PC didn't really come into its own as a games format until the mid 90s but there were notable titles before that time, including the original Civilization in 1991. A franchise so successful the most recent sequel came out just this year. The Amiga version was a bit slower, because of the limited processing power, but it worked very well and so did seminal real-time strategy game Dune 2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown – what would later become known as X-COM. Its predecessor Laser Squad was also a cracking turn-based game, even if it still looked like a ZX Spectrum game. Unsurprisingly, top-down racing games are not something you see much of nowadays, even from indie developers, but there were lots on the Amiga, including arcade conversion Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road and the excellent Skidmarks series. Super Cars 2 is most people's favourite though, not because it does anything particularly original but simply because it does it very well. The inclusion of weapons is relatively unusual though and ensures multiplayer matches are always glorious chaos. It was also essentially a sister series to the equally popular Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge games. This list of games isn't in any particular order but the two frontrunners for our favourite Amiga games of all-time are Rainbow Islands and this: the best game the Bitmap Brothers ever made and still the definitive example of a future sports game. It's basically a hyper violent version of handball crossed with hockey, where you aim to get the ball into the goal by any means necessary, including punching your opponents to the floor and creating score multipliers by throwing it at devices at the side of the arena. A follow-up has been attempted multiple times, with a new one currently in early access from Rebellion but nothing has matched the elegant simplicity of the original… or its amazing theme tune. As much as his reputation has been tarnished nowadays, Peter Molyneux was on fire during the Amiga era, doing all his best work while at now defunct developer Bullfrog, with titles such as Flood and Syndicate. Populous was his most famous game at the time and along with SimCity (which was also available on the Amiga) helped create the now largely abandoned god game genre. It's arguable how much real strategy was involved in the gameplay, but at the time Populus' open-ended nature and isometric graphics were a revelation. The sequel never added any real depth to the concept though and the franchise has been mothballed for almost two decades now. We've already discussed many of the Amiga's most innovative 3D games but arguably the most impressive is Starglider 2. 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Exile is one such game, having first appeared on the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. That means nobody outside the UK has ever heard of it and yet it's a fantastically ambitious action adventure, with completely open-ended gameplay, a realistic physics engine, and clever artificial intelligence. Perhaps if it had had modern style signposting, and a lower difficulty, it might be better known today but the unfortunate truth is that if a game isn't popular in the US or Japan it's rarely ever seen again. Lucasfilm Games were a loyal supporter of the Amiga and while their later point 'n' click adventures had increasing trouble running on the format the original Monkey Island worked perfectly and thanks to the Amiga's excellent sound chip was arguably the definitive version at the time. Still one of the funniest games ever made – which says just as much about its level of competition as it does the game itself – this is both a charming screwball comedy and a graphic adventure whose puzzles are perfectly pitched as difficult but not impossibly illogical. As a bonus, the series is still going today, thanks to the 2022 soft reboot. If this were a list of most underrated Amiga games, The Sentinel would comfortably sit at the top since, even at the time it came out, very few people had ever heard of it. And that's despite it having been released previously on various 8-bit formats. The Sentinel is a remarkably unique stealth game, where you control an immobile robot and must avoid the glare of the titular Sentinel by teleporting from one spot to the other across an abstract 3D landscape. It was the creation of SIr Geoff Crammond, but as good as Stunt Car Racer and Formula One Grand Prix were, it's The Sentinel which stands as his greatest achievement. 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