Fire Emblem Heroes devs talk creation of the game, adding new characters/stories

The following info comes from a Famitsu interview with Fire Emblem Heroes devs Kouhei Maeda and Shingo Matsushita, as translated by NE.

- when Nintendo decided to begin developing for smartphones, one of the candidates was Fire Emblem
- the team has been thinking about making something that allows many people to try Fire Emblem
- Intelligent Systems had also been wanting to release a Fire Emblem title for smartphones
- they were thinking about developing it along the lines of “making the newest title in the series”
- there wasn’t any consideration to make Fire Emblem Heroes a game that you purchase
- they wanted it to be experienced by many people, including those who never gave the series a shot before
- the important aspect is to “know about it first”, so it was made free-to-start from the beginning.
- there are nearly 800 characters in the whole series, and that’s just counting the important ones
- fans have a tendency to have different favorite characters, so to appease as many people as possible, many were included
- Matsushita didn’t think there would be too many people who played every single title in the series
- from the start, they wanted to bring in a random factor on recruiting characters
- Matsushita hopes players will get to know characters they were previously unfamiliar with
- he also hopes they become interested in their related games
- making it easy to play was a big factor
- being able to play a map in around five or ten minutes and being able to play with one hand were important elements
- they also retained features that makes Fire Emblem interesting as well as from a strategy standpoint
- map size was determined to fit the screen to make it easy to play
- with 8x6, developers could make maps with both simplicity and strategy
- the latter maps (stages) also basically can be cleared in five to ten minutes, but the enemies are stronger
- going forward, the game will be updated with more stories
- you can imagine it as the ending to season 1, and to please wait for season 2
- roughly 100 characters were planned for release
- they didn’t include characters from every title because characters were picked that are appropriate for the game scenario
- there’s interest in adding more characters in the future
- there are titles that weren’t featured at launch, but that doesn’t mean they were forgotten
- some characters will be added via main stories, and some other will be through paralogues
- when new characters arrive, stories and maps related to them will be distributed as well
- when a new Fire Emblem game comes out, like Echoes, they’d like to add things that are related to them
- Heroes does depict some parts from the original titles, but ultimately the parameters should not have an extreme gap
- when you got a 4-star Marth, if you raise him well he can grow to an equivalent of 5-stars
- the game wasn’t made so that non-5-stars never get strong in the end