Tsujiyoko, who would become a recurring composer for the series, became involved as she was the only composer then employed by Intelligent Systems. The initial development team was not very large, and several staff members undertook multiple tasks. Conceptual development for Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light began in 1987, three years prior to its release. The concept was first decided upon after the completion of Famicom Wars, as the team wanted to move away from the war-based setting of Famicom Wars and create a role-playing experience. The project was first proposed to Nintendo by Kaga with a design document. The document included all the basic elements, including the story, main character and gameplay mechanics. At this stage, the project was called "Battle Fantasy Fire Emblem". Kaga cites Kure Software's First Queen (1988) as an influence for the game. The staff never considered the game as a commercial product, being defined by Kaga as a dōjin project that was made on a whim. To make the game accessible to a wide audience, Kaga did his best to avoid emphasizing stats and other numerical data. The game's genre necessitated the extensive use of the Famicom cartridge's memory. Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light exceeded these limits, so Intelligent Systems used a portion of memory dedicated to saving games to get around this limitation. With Nintendo's help, they created a new chip for the cartridge that could process and display Japanese text. Kaga wanted to create a scenario where players would care about the characters in a similar way to a role-playing video game. According to Kaga, while role-playing games had strong stories but limited protagonists, tactical games had multiple characters but a weak story: Fire Emblem was his solution, combining the two to create a fun gameplay experience with relatable characters. This lack of emphasis on a single character was intentional, to the point that even Marth was not considered by Kaga to be the main character. The setting and characters drew inspiration from Classical mythology. During the early story draft, there were two dragons that acted as bosses: the Earth Dragon Gaia and the Water Dragon Neptune. While Neptune was scrapped due to hardware limitations, Gaia would evolve into the character of Medeus. The series' titular "Fire Emblem" appears in its first and most recognizable form as a shield with mystical power. The artifact's title made reference to