Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Review

While it does not justify its gargantuan length, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is an engaging strategy game with great depths both mechanically and narratively.

I say the following statement with all the love and respect for all the developers at Nintendo who made Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave possible: the people who made this game are absolute lunatics. It has been a very long time since I have played a game that had both playtime length, gameplay complexities, and weaving narrative of this scale. I'd like to think of this game as the world's largest pool. It is long and deep. perhaps too long and too deep, some might argue. But when it came time to fill it with water, Nintendo didn't fill it halfway or fill it in sections. They filled that whole pool. But at the end of the day, you have to swim to the other side, and you might be exhausted by the time you reach it.

The four (or technically five) protagonists each have their own unique story

Fortune’s Weave is the newest entry into the Fire Emblem series of tactical strategy games. If you like squares moving around a grid to defeat other squares, this is the game for you. However, unlike most other Fire Emblem games, this is narratively linked to another game in the series, Three Houses, as takes place in the same universe but just on a different continent. While it doesn't have of direct narrative ties, it does take a lot in the kind of narrative this is. Three Houses was written more like a political thriller with different factions and groups vying for control, while the previous game, Engage, felt like you were playing a Saturday morning cartoon. Fortune’s Weave is very much back to being a political thriller; however, instead of houses and families, it's nations and people.

Sothis is the one character connecting Three Houses and Fortune's Weave together

Another thing Fortune’s Weave takes from Three Houses is its structure. Instead of playing through one linear campaign, you play through the paths of four different protagonists: Cai, the optimistic country boy; Leda, a revenge-fueled bard; Theodora, leader of the country of Saramis; and Dietrich, a battle-thirsty warrior. Each has their own complete narrative, allies, and battles, but all of them have the same goal: to compete and win the Heroic Games (think of it as the Olympics crossed with the Colosseum). The winner of said Games is granted a single wish. Unlike Three Houses, where each route feels like the same narrative through different perspectives, Fortune’s Weave’s routes all feel like their own contained thing. While you are going through a route, the other protagonists are still doing their own thing in the background. The dev team uses this simultaneous narrative to create intrigue and curiosity. One day one of the protagonists might start looking different or completely disappear. It also does a great job showing different sides and perspectives of the overall plot. A minor ally in one route might end up being the main antagonist in another route. A character's actions in one route might be contextualised in another. A major revelation in one route might be a bit of throwaway dialogue in another. Fortune’s Weave does a really good job dropping these little breadcrumbs of plot throughout each route, and only by going through them all will they start coming together.

Not all the protagonists are going to get along

However, this intricately woven narrative unfortunately does fall apart during the last few bits of each route and begins to deviate. As the player, you are required to win, which unfortunately leads to paradoxes in other routes. During each route, at some point you'll have to face the other protagonists in the Heroic Games, and you cannot all win, so the game just has its cake and eats it as well. The game sort of handwaves it all away, saying it's time-travel shenanigans making all routes both canon and non-canon, which can be a bit confusing. I can't really blame the developers. It would be a bit jarring to have the player win a non-canon battle and just have them lose in the cutscenes. Still, it was sad to see such an intricately interwoven narrative fall apart like that.

To get where its needs to go, Fortune's Weave does mess with the timeline to its detriment

One part of the narrative that I thoroughly enjoyed but wish there was more of is the supports. The more two characters get closer on and off the battlefield, the higher the support level goes. While this does have gameplay benefits like stat boosts, the most important part is the support scenes. Each pair gets between one to three support scenes with each other. These support scenes can range from hilarious and goofy to tense and tragic. While almost all of the overall narrative progresses during the main battles, the character development often happens here and usually is where the best scenes and writing occur. A lot of them are great entertainment, whether it's Dante and Jester workshopping threats together or Tialla and Peter going through a conflict. The problem is not the quality but the quantity. Not every character pair gets a support scene—or any at all. In fact, there is at least one character with exactly one support scene with one person. I'm not saying that every pairing needs to have three support scenes, but there were several pairings in Fortune’s Weave that I would have loved to have seen support scenes for, but they just weren't there.

If someone took me out for a nice meal and paid, I'd probably join their gladiator group

On the battlefield, it is tried-and-true Fire Emblem: move units around a field and engage with enemies using a variety of weapons, special abilities, and classes to determine hit rate, damage, and other factors. It's a well-worn formula they haven't messed around with. They have added things like chariots and elephant classes. Massive units that can deal damage not just with their weapons but stampede through enemies like the Kool-Aid Man. In terms of on the battlefield, they've stuck to the formula.

You like squares? Fortune's Weave has got squares

 

Where they have made the most changes in terms of gameplay is the stuff around the combat. Gone are the central locations you occasionally leave to go on missions. Now you must traverse a massive world map. While most of the main missions occur in the central capital city of Dagsion, most of the side stuff occurs out in the world. This can be gathering rare materials to upgrade your weapons, defeating roaming groups of enemies, or acquiring rare items through the multiple vendors spread across the land. This might sound like a glorified menu option, but they really have put in quite a lot of depth and thought into this. In your travels, you might find secret pathways leading to shortcuts or hidden towns, or perhaps a farming node with rare materials, you might even find super secret areas that reveal important lore, or the other big addition to Fire Emblem: dungeons.

Where, when and how you get there is extremely important. Don't wanna miss anything important!

Yes, JRPG-styled dungeons have been added to Fire Emblem, and they're kind of whatever. Essentially, you're plopped into a cave, ruin, or forest with a half-dozen enemies and a few chests to find. It's sort of similar to Persona, where there's one wandering enemy that, when hit, triggers the actual fight. However, unlike the rest of the game, it doesn't go into the traditional tactical battle, but instead a sort of streamlined version where it's basically all of the units versus all of the units in one big blob. They all share a health and magic pool and just take turns hitting each other. I guess they added this mechanic to diversify the game a bit, but this is the one part of Fortune’s Weave that felt tacked on. Its saving grace is that the auto-battle makes it completely viable to skip the whole thing. While doing the dungeons is worth it for the materials and EXP, the battles are not, so you can just auto-battle everything and rip through a dungeon in a few minutes. After the first few dungeons, I skipped literally every dungeon battle and was not worse for wear.

The dungeons are the weakest part of Fortune's Weave, by far

Fortune’s Weave’s graphics are interesting because they tried to hit a middle ground between the outlandishly garish of Engage and the more subdued palette of Three Houses. Yes, there are a couple of characters whose colour palette and hair look closer to a VTuber than an actual person, but overall the character designs are flashy and colourful without being too much. The music continues the great tradition of Fire Emblem by having great battle songs intermixed with wonderful character themes; it unfortunately doesn't reach Three Houses’ excellent OST.

Everyone looks colourful and stylish without overdoing it like Fire Emblem: Engage

Now it's finally time to talk about the war elephant in the room: this game is too long. My playthrough, which skipped practically all nonessential sections and did not come close to 100% completion, came in at a ludicrous 126 hours. Now, it has the quality and quantity to back that length up, but if there were ever a game that embodied the phrase “too much of a good thing,” it is Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. That play length doesn't even include the upcoming DLC, which will probably add another 20 to 30 hours, so all in all, if you want a complete experience, this is going to be a 150 to 200-hour game. This unfortunately is going to lead to two situations: either you're insane like me and blast through this game in two weeks doing nothing but playing it, or be sensible and play it bit by bit until you finish it late next year. None of those scenarios are good. It is simply too much game.

You'll be looking at hit chances and damage outputs for a long, long time

Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is four great games stuck together end to end. Sure, if you look at this game, you can see they are expertly crafted games with wonderful stories, a delightful cast of characters, and addictive strategy gameplay. But so were the last two games at about one-third of the length. If this game were 60 hours long, I'd recommend it to anybody, but at 120 hours and with the count potentially increasing, I can really only recommend it to JRPG sickos, the unemployed, or the incredibly patient.