It has been a week since Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave landed on Nintendo Switch 2, and fans are in paradise. Head over to the Fire Emblem subreddit, and you’ll find miles of fan art from a community that’s just happy to hang out with a whole new cast of characters. The vibes are strong, but there’s one problem that has fans annoyed: save files — or rather, the lack of them.
A post titled “Single save file is one of the worst design decisions made in an otherwise very fun game” has been stirring up conversation on Reddit over the last few days. It has over 450 comments, the bulk of which are in agreement that the RPG’s approach to saving is its clear Achilles heel.
Saving in Fortune’s Weave is fairly straightforward: You have one file. It may sound like a nitpick, but there’s a good reason it’s bugging fans. You can manually save, but there’s also an aggressive autosave system that overwrites your manual saves. With no separation between those two functions, players are finding it hard to undo mistakes or unwanted changes in a game that can take well over 100 hours to beat.
The worst example of that comes in chapters that have hard failure conditions. Occasionally in Fortune’s Weave, you’ll be asked to reach a certain part of the world map by a certain day. If you don’t do that, whether it’s because you lost track of time or miscounted how many steps you’d need to get there, you’ll fail and have to restart the chapter from the beginning. If you’re the kind of person who is playing meticulously — using every single turn wisely — that setback can cost you several hours of tedium.
“The real villain is the autosave system,” one commenter wrote.
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Developer Intelligent Systems knew this would be a problem ahead of the game’s launch. In an Ask the Developer interview posted by Nintendo, Kenta Nakanishi, a member of the team’s Entertainment Planning and Developing Department, explained that a single save system was necessary due to the particularly complicated nature of its multi-hero story.
“Of course, I’m sure there are players who prefer to keep multiple save files, and I’m actually one of those players myself,” Nakanishi said. “But because the game system of Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave is built around multiple paths, having separate save files would create system-related complications.”
While fans on Reddit seem receptive to the reasoning, there are still debates raging about the right way to implement saves with that in mind. The common request from fans is for Intelligent Systems to separate autosaves and manual saves into their own slots. That way, players at least would have one save file they could revert to if an autosave screwed up their plans.
Personally, I side with the community on this one. Especially with how complicated and system-heavy Fortune’s Weave is, it’s very easy to misunderstand how the game works early on and make a dumb mistake. I’ve wasted tons of map turns in my playthrough, including long stretches where I zipped off to one end of a map only to find I couldn’t actually reach the location I was trying to get to yet. Usually, I’d argue that mistakes are part of the game. Sometimes you have to live with your errors and use that as fuel to be more careful going forward. But in a game as demanding as Fortune’s Weave, every tiny bit of grace helps. There is no world in which I am going to replay this game in my lifetime, so it has one chance to win me over.