Actually, it's sort of strange how this franchise collapsed in Japan. It was historically quite decent. The first installment that did poorly was Game Boy Wars III, which was released in the dying days of the Game Boy Color (after the GBA was already released)... and since then there's just been no Japanese interest.
Fire Emblem stills does quite well in Japan, so it's not even like you can say "the Japanese don't like turn-based strategy"... and for the same reason, the difficulty can't be to blame. The whole AW series has good production values.
It's probably for the best that Nintendo started releasing everything stateside, because I don't think that the Wars franchise would have been able to sustain itself if it wasn't for the 50%+ of sales it now gets from the US.
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Fire Emblem stills does quite well in Japan, so it's not even like you can say "the Japanese don't like turn-based strategy"... and for the same reason, the difficulty can't be to blame. The whole AW series has good production values.
It's probably for the best that Nintendo started releasing everything stateside, because I don't think that the Wars franchise would have been able to sustain itself if it wasn't for the 50%+ of sales it now gets from the US.