Of all the defining features in modern video games, the New Game+ (NG+) mode stands as a particularly compelling one. It offers a reward that extends beyond the final credits: the chance to replay the entire experience, not from a place of reset, but from a position of accumulated power and knowledge. This concept, while now common across genres, finds a uniquely resonant home in the Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG), a genre built on progression, character building, and intricate systems. When examining the hallmarks of the JRPG genre, the Fire Emblem series by Intelligent Systems and Nintendo presents a fascinating case study. While deeply rooted in JRPG traditions, its relationship with the New Game+ mechanic is not a simple binary but a complex evolution, reflecting the series' own journey from a niche tactical experience to a mainstream titan. To ask "Is Fire Emblem a JRPG with a New Game+ mode?" is to explore how the series has selectively adopted, adapted, and sometimes rejected this feature, ultimately using it as a tool to refine its core identity.
First, it is essential to establish Fire Emblem's JRPG credentials. The series is, at its heart, a quintessential JRPG. It features sprawling narratives of war, destiny, and camaraderie, set in high-fantasy or pseudo-European continents. Its character-driven stories are a hallmark of the genre; players don't just command generic units but individual lords, mages, and knights, each with their own backstories, personalities, and often, intricate support conversations that build relationships. The core loop of exploration, strategic combat, and character progression through experience points and class promotions aligns perfectly with JRPG conventions. While its grid-based, tactical combat distinguishes it from the turn-based or active-time battles of series like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, this is a sub-genre distinction (the Strategy RPG or SRPG) within the broader JRPG umbrella, much like how a first-person shooter is a sub-genre of action games. Therefore, the question is not if it's a JRPG, but how it has chosen to implement a modern JRPG staple.
The early history of Fire Emblem is notably devoid of any New Game+ functionality. Titles like The Blazing Blade (simply "Fire Emblem" in the West) or The Sacred Stones on the Game Boy Advance were strictly linear, single-playthrough experiences. Beating the game unlocked higher difficulty settings, a common practice, but the player started these new runs with a fresh roster and zero carried-over resources. This design philosophy emphasized consequence and permanence. The iconic "permadeath" mechanic, where fallen units are lost forever, created a high-stakes environment where every decision carried weight. A true NG+ mode, which often trivializes challenges by allowing overpowered characters to steamroll early content, would have fundamentally undermined this core tension. The reward for mastery was not a powered-up second run, but the satisfaction of having navigated the perils of the narrative with your chosen army intact.
The shift began with the series' embrace of more pronounced social simulation elements, culminating in the game that saved the franchise: Fire Emblem Awakening on the Nintendo 3DS. While Awakening did not feature a full NG+ in the traditional sense, it introduced systems that served a similar purpose and laid the groundwork for its future. Most importantly, it made the permadeath-alternative "Casual" mode the default for many new players. This, combined with the ability to build relationships between units (Support Conversations) and produce children characters with inherited skills, created a powerful incentive for replayability. Players were encouraged to replay the game to see different support chains, experiment with new character pairings, and create optimally skilled offspring. The game also featured "SpotPass" and "Bonus Box" teams, allowing players to recruit legacy characters, blurring the lines between a single playthrough and a continuous meta-game. This was a conceptual precursor to NG+: the focus shifted from surviving a single, tense campaign to optimizing and experimenting across multiple runs.
It was with Fire Emblem Fates (2015) that a more formal, though still unconventional, New Game+ system emerged. Instead of carrying over levels, weapons, or gold, Fates' NG+ allowed players to re-buy support levels and previously mastered skills from their previous save file using a new currency, "Renown." This was a brilliantly tailored solution for the series. It respected the tactical balance of the early game by not allowing a level 20 unit to trivialize the first chapters, but it granted a significant qualitative advantage. Players could strategically invest their Renown to immediately access powerful skills or fast-track key support relationships, enabling new team compositions and strategies from the outset. This system acknowledged the player's past efforts without breaking the game's strategic core, a perfect compromise for a tactics-heavy JRPG.
The apex of Fire Emblem's experimentation with NG+ arrived with Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019). Here, the system was more robust and integrated directly into the game's core loop through the "New Game+" option at the start menu. Using "Renown" earned from the previous playthrough, players could repurchase their professor level, weapon skill ranks, support levels, and even previously unlocked battalions and statue bonuses. This dramatically altered the replay experience. A high professor level from the start granted more activity points, allowing for more tutoring, exploration, and recruitment. High skill ranks from the outset meant characters could be steered into advanced classes far earlier. This NG+ mode was less about tactical challenge and more about narrative and mechanical freedom. It turned the notoriously time-consuming first half of the game, the Academy Phase, into a sandbox. Players could recruit almost every character quickly, explore every narrative branch of the story with ease, and focus on experiencing the rich character interactions and lore they might have missed the first time. In Three Houses, NG+ became a tool for comprehensive completionism, perfectly suited for a game with four distinct main story paths.
However, this evolutionary path is not strictly linear. The most recent mainline entry, Fire Emblem Engage (2023), notably scaled back its NG+ features. While it allows players to carry over a currency (Bond Fragments) and retain unlocked support conversations in the logbook, it does not permit the carryover of character levels, skills, or class proficiencies in a way that impacts gameplay. This decision was likely a deliberate re-centering of the series' tactical challenge. By removing the power-fantasy element of NG+, Engage forces each playthrough to be a self-contained strategic puzzle, harkening back to the series' roots where resource management within a single campaign was paramount. This demonstrates that for Fire Emblem, NG+ is not an obligatory feature but a modular tool. The developers deploy it when it serves the specific design goals of a title—enhancing narrative exploration in Three Houses—and omit or reduce it when the focus is on pure, balanced tactical combat, as in Engage.
In conclusion, Fire Emblem is unequivocally a JRPG, but its relationship with the New Game+ mode is one of thoughtful adaptation rather than wholesale adoption. It has never simply copied the model of carrying over raw stats and equipment, recognizing that doing so would clash with its strategic DNA. Instead, the series has innovated, creating NG+ systems that are uniquely its own. From the replayability-driven systems of Awakening, to the skill-and-support-focused model of Fates, to the narrative-freedom tool of Three Houses, and finally to the scaled-back approach of Engage, Fire Emblem uses the concept of NG+ as a dial to adjust the balance between tactical rigor and player-powered convenience. It proves that a JRPG's identity is not defined by checking a list of features, but by how it tailors those features to serve its fundamental gameplay philosophy. For Fire Emblem, New Game+ is not a standard inclusion; it is a design lever, pulled to create the specific experience each installment aims to deliver.
